TechnoGov Over the years, we have seen various endeavours to integrate new technologies into both central and local government. Remember e-government and connected government? What with AI growing in both capability and accessibility, we are seeing an uptick in references to smart government. There are some references to artificially intelligent government, but fewer references to intelligent government. Generally these terms are referring to the use of technology in the public sector. We also hear of GovTech, which appears to be both a reference to technologies that support the work of government, think robots that collect the bins, and a new name for e-government. The underlying and recurring theme is that government success is largely a factor of how well technology has been woven into government practice. A better name might be ‘tech boosted old government’ or simply ‘efficient yet ineffective government’. Unfortunately, adding a ‘state of the art’ kitchen to a decrepit house won’t stop the rest of the house from collapsing. Power to the few The term decrepit might be too harsh to use in the context of government, not least because governments come in all shapes and sizes.  The World Bank’s Government Effectiveness Index , which ranks nations using a variety of measures, including the quality of public services and policy implementation, presents the full spectrum from Singapore at the top to Yemen as the least effective. Should the citizen care whether their government is authoritarian, democratic or plutocratic, if they receive good public services and are able to benefit from some of the crumbs that fall off the table? Nations appear to be a legally acceptable model for turning a blind eye to the atrocities that led up to the boundaries as they appear today on Google Maps. Nations are a consolidation of power or what remains when the powerful elsewhere acquired what they needed. Nations are generally optimised for the powerful, a very small percentage of the citizenry. To gloss over this power asymmetry, we often use the term ‘society’ as it has a more collective feel. Ideal ologies? So if you were tasked with building a government from scratch, what principles might it embrace? Examples include: Protect the powerful and maintain social stability. Create an environment where everyone can be hyper consumers. Ensure the citizens control the means of production. Protect ‘our’ values. Strive for zero enemies. Maximise citizen autonomy. Operate in harmony with the wider ecosphere. If, say, Haiti became the world authority on biological virus editing, it would eventually become a significant if not superpower in the way that many colonisers enjoyed first mover advantage associated with the development of, for example, weapons and shipbuilding. So why should it ignore the opportunity to reset itself socioeconomically, even if it comes at a cost to other nations? Perhaps we need some sort of international organisation that can both tame aggressive nations and address increasing quality of life disparities across the globe?! Genuinely intelligent An intelligent organisation is more focused on engaging with reality than being locked into an ideology. Perhaps an intelligent government is one that: Can coopt the powerful into reducing economic inequality and social disparity. Though the alcoholic drinks, ultra-processed food and content streaming barons might find this threatening. Keeps the citizens informed in order to earn and maintain trust. Recognises that not all nations are happy to rub along and so has invested suitably in the appropriate deterrents. Enlists the citizens in decision making as they are ultimately, in many cases, both the investors and the consumers of the associated services (a design thinking approach). So for example, criminals would have a say in the justice system. Recognises that disruption is on the increase and so is more adaptive in respect of policies and processes. It thus develops its environmental sensing capabilities. Takes a more entrepreneurial stance, ie if it is going to take on the risks that would otherwise fall to the private sector, it must also enjoy a greater share of the rewards. Similarly it should create an ecosystem that both enables the private sector to both thrive and to play an active role in enhancing the wellbeing of all citizens. Provide a base level of education to ensure everyone understands how to manage their finances and health. Develop a better educational balance between STEM and humanities / arts. Citizens are not just worker bees. Culture is an energy efficient way to take some of the survival encoding load from our DNA. A more nuanced understanding of culture is an essential element of their personal development. Ensure everyone understands their professional options and the associated paths. Ensure everyone has access to food and shelter. Without these there is no escape from poverty. Respect the biosphere on which we depend. All policies must show their relative impact in this respect. Ensure ministers are capable of both leadership in general and the specifics of their ministries before taking office. Ensure leaders have empathy. This is unlikely to be the case if they are all born into privilege and have no sense of the plight of the majority. Transitional government This is just a top-of-mind list. I am sure there are other characteristics of an intelligent government. My key point is that no amount of technology will fix a broken or slothful government. In terms of steps, I would recommend: Develop a quality standard in respect of leadership competence for every level of government. Develop the capability for the government to have a clear, real-time understanding of reality, both locally and globally. Develop a global reputation built on trustworthiness, fairness and toughness. Ensure all policy creation is conducted with people and the planet in mind. Rebuild society from the homeless upwards and structure this so the powerful can take credit where it has been earned. Engage effectively with the private sector in respect of risk and reward balance. The Govzilla problem There is of course the danger that an ‘intelligent’ government, like any other living organism, will prioritise its own survival above the other actors in the system, ie. foreign nations, citizens, business and academe. AI offers the possibility of governments harnessing artificial intelligence for their own ends. So perhaps a genuinely intelligent government recognises that all actors must win for it to remain in play.

You have a lot going on You are complex. No doubt those behaviour-triggering hormones swilling about within us have a role to play. We have multiple moving parts (for example, we contain trillions of energy producing mitochondria), so it is fair to say we are complex systems. The organisations we work with / for are similarly so. As is the environment in which organisations operate. Complex systems have certain characteristics, including: Many interacting components Emergent behaviour – ie behaviour that could not easily have been predicted. Non-linearity – A slight change in one part of the system could have a disproportionately substantial impact on other parts of the system. Bow before me Such nested complexity (people – organisations - society – planet – universe etc) makes predicting and thus navigating our environment exceedingly difficult. So it is no wonder that the industrial revolutionaries back in the day recognised that they needed to tame this complexity if their factory approach was going to work. They did an excellent job, in particular, they: Attempted to stabilise the planet economically by protecting trade routes. Created organisations that ran with the predictability of a cuckoo clock. Established stable societies that allowed workers to afford and utilize the products manufactured by the factories. Created a workplace where worker homogeneity ensured that people could be treated as fungible factory machine components. Enter the drudgocene Taming the weather and geology was a step too far. And even the mutual economic rewards of international trade did not always suppress the desire for war. On occasion it was cheaper to ‘acquire’ a nation than to trade with it for access to its natural resources. But at least as far as the ‘developed world’ was concerned efforts to maintain economic predictability were largely successful. This was great news if you were a factory owner. Less so if you had to spend a large part of your life as a dehumanised cog in a Taylorist nightmare. All hail Efficiency  Unfortunately, our desire for profit, turned us into worshippers of efficiency. Global supply chains and information technology advancements have both maximised efficiency and inadvertently revved up complexity at a global scale. Everything seems to be attached to everything and so everything impacts everything. The flap of a butterfly’s wing can impact your post-work ready meal options. These are just two of the manufactured macroenvironmental forces at play. Add geology, pandemics and meteorology to the mix and the world becomes essentially unknowable. Now the factory owners are having nightmares. It'll pass Some factory owners are responding by cost managing their way through what they believe is merely a disruptive blip. Others are sprinkling their organisation with tech ‘pixie dust’ in the hope that so called digital transformation will somehow or other future-proof the organisation. But this is not a blip and transformations generally require a ‘point B’ as the transformational goal. But unfortunately point B will not keep still. Leadership teams are now seeing the exceptional become the normal. Novel situations are a daily occurrence. You cannot throw existing processes at a novel situation. An innovative response is required. Failure is not an option Innovation requires experimentation and thus failure is a natural byproduct. But failure is anathema to efficiency, and this will be a problem for leaders schooled in ‘efficiency at all costs’. Consequently many of today’s leaders, both business and government, are ill-equipped for what lies ahead. One option is to focus on the development of the next wave of leaders and patiently wait for the old school to fall from grace. Another is to append new school business models, along with new school leaders, to the old school organisation. This will reduce the existential threat to the organisation of having only one source of cash. This is not easy to do but it is easier than trying to transform the existing business and thus put that one source of cash at risk. Business as unusual The way forward is to create a business that is a portfolio of business models and by that I mean the organisation comprises a myriad of assorted products and services, financial models and go to market approaches. It is less about transformation and more about adaptiveness. It is not complicated, it’s simply complex.

Cities were a natural consequence of the agricultural era. Living in larger groups enabled us to capitalise on food surpluses. Emergent cultures gave rise to centres of excellence in respect of the arts and learning. Often built along trading routes, they became economic hubs. Increasing populations densities led to: Decreased air quality. Sanitation challenges. Increased noise pollution. Ideal conditions for infectious diseases to spread. Business before pleasure With the arrival of the industrial era, cities were architected around the needs of the factory (owner). Transportation developed to delivery raw materials to the factories and finished goods to the market. Factories needed people to operate, and so housing policy evolved with this in mind. The mind-numbing nature of industrial work necessitated the creation of worker diversions (aka entertainment). Thus making cities an industrial hamster wheel were people where less citizen and more worker-consumers. Equality is not for everyone In fairness to the industrial era, many of us enjoyed upward social mobility (in some respects the trend towards downward social mobility is an end of era marker). But not everyone enjoyed this upward trajectory and so we saw an increase in economic inequality and social disparity. Anti-social behaviour, criminality and eventually organised crime works its way into the societal fabric. Thus city life has some degree of edginess with danger sometimes part of the mix. We are watching you The emergence of the notion of smart cities was met with great anticipation. But really a smart city is simply a more automated traditional city with totalitarian-grade surveillance. The socioeconomically isolated are now more manageable, so the more prosperous can go about their lives and deliver more prosperity to the ‘factory’ owners. The prosperous worker bees are perhaps unaware that they have traded freedom for security. They do not realise that they are not immune to the technology onslaught and are perilously close to joining the ranks of the underclass. Tech is not the answer Perhaps we should focus less on digitalisation and more on intelligence. Intelligence embraces the value that technology can deliver, the artificial kind, but it also recognises the (natural) intelligence of the citizens. Cities increasingly leech cognitive bandwidth from the urbanites. This manifests itself in narcissism and incivility. Whilst tension is good for stimulating creativity, chronic tension is a creativity dampener. Office designers for the likes of Apple and Google recognise that these brands are in the cognition management business and so need to create the conditions to maximise the cognitive bandwidth of their staff that is available to do innovative work. They see their people as cognitive athletes and their offices as cognitive gyms. Overthinking? It could be argued that modern society places too much emphasis on IQ and not enough on PQ (Physical Intelligence) and EQ (Emotional Intelligence). Though the consequence of low emotional intelligence is becoming increasingly apparent in many cities, and organisations, today. In any case, physical and emotional wellness are precursors for cognitive performance. That is why these organisations encourage movement and social engagement through innovative office design. We need to think about building cities that encourage us to stretch ourselves physically, emotionally and cognitively. Think: Open public spaces that encourage connection and not assault. Outdoor gyms. Housing where everyone has access to sunlight and amenities. Affordable housing to ensure families and communities can grow old together, rather than treating housing as a means for overseas oligarchs to distribute their wealth. Localised activities such as exercise classes, dances, quiz nights to encourage connection and neurological stimulation. Healthcare that is built around the citizen, rather than the private equity firms. Regions to be cheerful Remote working and a decreasing global population will have an impact on urbanisation. Though it is likely that we will see the emergence of more megacities before the decline becomes apparent. Remote working will likely lead to an uptick in rural headcount. Thus facilities normally associated with a city need to be distributed across the nation. Maybe it is time to think less about smart cities and more about intelligent regions?

Life-death balance An increasing number of societies today have deified efficiency. Efficiency makes sense. A fundamental driver of any living organisation is to do what is necessary with the minimum expenditure of energy. For most of our time on the planet, nutrition was not just a click away. Thus each day was a balancing act in finding food without emptying our energy reserves in the process. Greed is good? This has wired us to be both greedy (who knows when the next meal might show up) and lazy (how do we get the maximum return on a burnt calorie). In the developed world at least, we have tackled the first challenge to the point where we can not only predict when we will eat, but also where. The agricultural revolution made great strides in diminishing the extent to which these considerations were central to our existence. The industrial era model took this even further and applied the conservation or energy principle to the business model. The factory is thus perhaps a church built to glorify ‘Efficiency’. Where do we put them? Thus in recent years we have developed ceremonies to appease Efficiency that go by arcane names, including Total Quality Management, Business Process Engineering, Lean and Six Sigma. Maximising the returns on the factory inputs and the banishment of failure underpinned these ceremonies. As time passed, some churches became cathedrals and by necessity developed a creed-compatible society optimised for the cathedral’s business model. Waterways, roads and railways were constructed to support goods in and out. Humans were a regretful necessity to making the factory work. Unlike machines, they were often needy, prone to sickness and had a tendency to be curious and thus deviate from the operations manual. Thus urban planning needed to factor in housing the workers such that they could readily attend work. That’s entertainment The inhumane nature of the work necessitated need to provide diversions in the periods between working and sleeping. Thus the leisure and entertainment industry was created. This turned villages into cities and caused rural folk to up-sticks and head to the bright lights in search of their fortune. The burgeoning city population joined the factory owners, in their pursuit of efficiency. To some extent they had no choice. With only a few hours to call their own, they wanted to be as productive as possible. The convenience movement emerged to address the pursuit of efficiency. Thus today you can: Do your banking on the train to work. Buy a pre-digested meal on the way home that simply requires you to agitate it with electromagnetic radiation. Outsource walking your dog. Use no more than your thumb to find true love or its denatured equivalent. Keeping up with the Walking Dead In fact, many of these ‘mod cons’ have spirited away the essence of what it means to be alive. Paradoxically, many are choosing to use the associated ‘time gains’ to work for longer. Thus they are in a better position to afford more sophisticated convenience appliances. And on it goes. The challenge we face today is that our pursuit of efficiency has removed spontaneity and civility. It has dampened our connection with our environment and the people/living organisms that we share it with. We have become so preoccupied with efficiency that our ability to detect anything that is not on our overambitious ‘to do’ list is muted. This includes brewing tension in a crowded bar, significant relationship decay and being caught on the hop because the world has changed and you didn’t move with it. Don’t blame efficiency So am I suggesting that we pursue inefficiency? In some cases, yes. Walking through a park might be considered less of an exercise in getting to work faster and more of an opportunity to appreciate nature. Talking to strangers could be seen less as an exercise in establishing their utility and more an opportunity to connect. Preparing a meal from first principles, rather than gulping down some sludge that meets your dietary vitamin and BCAA intake. Efficiency is not the problem. And productivity is no bad thing. However efficiency is ultimately an exercise in failure elimination. Unfortunately failure is how we innovate and thus adapt to a changing landscape. Our pursuit of efficiency has left us vulnerable and dehumanised. It might require more than a wellness app and hybrid working to wake us up from this stupor. And what if we don’t wake up?

Quiz time Which of the following do you believe to bubiquitous-leadership-leaders-everywheree true in respect of business leaders? They are generally overpaid relative to the workforce. Leadership education is optimised for uncertainty. Leaders lead and managers manage. That’s right. None of them are true. Well at least for most organisations on the planet, ie those built upon industrial era factory principles. Let’s explore why. Not overpaid? Can it be right that the CEO of McDonalds makes an employee’s median annual salary every two hours? There is a perception by some that CEOs in particular are overvalued. McDonalds exemplifies the industrial era factory model applied to the service sector. It is literally a well-oiled machine. The only reason humans are part of the machine is because they are fungible technology placeholders. In time, the tech will mature sufficiently to take over every aspect of their role. Humans are a very marginal part of the McDonalds’ value proposition. But the CEO is the factory manager. He must ensure the factory runs smoothly and from time to time he has to ‘think’, which for the workforce is a potentially sackable offence (“Next time, just follow the operations manual!”). The CEO value-add is less so in the administration of the factory and more in the application of their cognition. Decisions around adding new items to the menu, entering new sectors and new geographies are high stakes in nature. Given the CEO is the only one allowed to use their brain, it is no wonder they are perceived as deserving of the big bucks. But this is less about the horsepower of the CEO’s cranium and more about the suppression / squandering of the cognitive potential of the workforce. This model is largely supported by the executive recruitment industry and the HR function. The former makes money out of promoting the exclusivity of the top talent and in continually recycling it. The HR function colludes by perpetuating this cognitive squandering. Ill-educated? The MBA is held in high regard. It is indeed an effective way for an aspiring leader to become familiar with the wider workings of the factory and its interactions with the environment. Whilst administration is important, one might question why leaders need to master it. The counter argument is that running a factory is an exercise in administration – reduce waste, keep the wheels turning and no surprises. The emphasis on administration suggests the factory operates in a largely predictable environment in respect of consumption and supply. Unfortunately, or fortunately, we have bidden farewell to certainty and are today operating in an increasingly unpredictable and volatile world. Thus organisations are facing an increasing number of novel situations for which there is not a detailed playbook. This requires a shift from administration to innovation. It is good to see the change of emphasis in some exec education programmes. But in most cases, this is a tactical ‘bolt-on’ to legacy / factory content. Leadership education today largely presumes certainty and thus the next generation of leaders are entering the market ill-equipped to deal with increasing disruption. Leaders don’t lead? Leadership in its truest sense means creating a common esprit de corp and galvanising action. The leader might propose the plan, but they need to sell it to the team. None of this is required in traditional business. The mission is to make a handful of shareholders even richer through executing a set of well-orchestrated processes. Thus people are resources not unlike wheat, cement and steel. They need to be of a sufficient standard and they need to be easily sourced, hence the emergence of job specifications. The person’s character is rarely of interest beyond their capacity to be compliant. People management, like resource management in general is based on supply and demand. This is reflected in remuneration. HR is merely an extension of the procurement function. There is no leadership required with this approach. The mission is not up for discussion and if you fail to make quota, you will be swapped out. Leaders are simply process managers. There is little interest in the employee beyond their capacity to follow the process manual. QED leaders are thus process managers. It’s not good So in this increasingly uncertain world, we find ourselves with people at the helm who are out of their depth. By virtue of their experience they are restricted to: Masquerading omnipotence in parallel with preparing their lifejacket / having frantic talks with the head-hunters. Accelerating the processes, hoping that faster is the solution. Manufacturing profitability by driving cost out of the processes. What can be done? As you read this, leaders are buckling under the weight of the unknown. Many are reaching for 2019, in respect of leadership behaviours, as a comfort blanket. They are in denial in respect of how the world has changed and will continue to change. We need to take the load from their shoulders by distributing the burden. In my view, we need to see leadership as less a role, the primary cog in the factory, and more a characteristic of the workforce. Imagine watching a football match where the captains continuously chase the ball around the pitch issuing instructions to their players closest to the ball. This is both exhausting and inefficient. It will lead to burnt out leaders and missed opportunities. Thankfully, that is not how they play football. The person closest to the action is the captain in that moment. This would be considered a radical idea in the business world. Though some sectors have taken this onboard, eg. luxury hotels. But even football is constrained by very clear rules. We are moving into a world where there is only one rule and that is to stay in the game. Again we will face a greater diversity of new scenarios and this in my view is the strongest case for diversity in the workforce and a more evenly spread leadership. I am loath to say this is just decentralised leadership because that still assumes a hierarchy of active cognition. I am pushing for ubiquitous leadership. The traditional centralised command and control model where all big decisions are made from a well-appointed room at a time to suit the leadership rather than the market, needs to be replaced by something more organic, more living. Your hand doesn’t seek the council of your brain when it inadvertently touches something hot. A ubiquitous leadership model enables the organisation to engage simultaneously on multiple fronts. The organisation of the future has multiple brains that gravitate to where the action is in a higher adaptive manner. You might say that anyone who has influence over someone else, by virtue of position, capability or influence is a leader. So the recent graduate tasked with overseeing the new intern is a leader, as is the procurement officer who is managing a supplier account. So returning to the quiz: With a more even cognitive distribution, it is only fair that the remuneration is equally distributed. This is better for workers and for society as a whole. Leadership education needs to be less elitist and more woven into primary and secondary education. With this model we need fewer managers and more leaders. In a rapidly changing world, the ability to self-configure into transient self-led taskforces is key. The leap required to operate in an increasingly disrupted world can feel threatening. Many workers will not want to take on leadership responsibilities. They are happy with taking orders and turning handles in exchange for disposable income. Many leaders will feel threatened by this redistribution of power and remuneration. Certainly, the head-hunters and business schools will not be in a rush to dismantle their cash cows. None of us has a choice. Disruption will see to that. The question is how many of us can adapt and thrive in this increasingly chaotic world. We can start the transformation process now or we can wait until things get really dystopian. I would encourage the business schools to take the lead on this.

Despite what the media is telling us, it is a mistake to think that sustainability, hybrid working, mental wellness and so on are our top priorities. We are unlikely to move the needle in any of these important spheres if we do not have capable leaders. The crisis we face is that very few leaders are equipped to handle these issues and the broader challenge of engaging effectively in an increasingly chaotic world. The business schools and academies tasked with developing the next generation of leaders are still largely using a legacy cookie cutter designed for more innocent times. Master administrator? Mastering administration was important when business success was based on a well-run factory. But it is the antithesis of what is needed in a highly unpredictable battlefield, where the organisation is focused on surviving today, rather than meeting its quarterly forecasts. I assert that we need to revisit leadership and thus propose the idea of intelligent leadership. Big thinker? By intelligent, I am not referring to the ability to solve cryptic crosswords or out logic your adversaries. Intelligent organisms are focused on survival and energy management. This requires the ability to sense one’s environment, assess it for threats and opportunities and to then commit to energy expenditure accordingly. In short, intelligence requires emotional intelligence (sense), intellectual intelligence (decide) and physical intelligence (act). On the ball? By leader, I am not referring to someone who sits from time to time with a handful of peers in a well-appointed room to make decisions on behalf of everyone in the organisation. Imagine a football team captain who spends their time endeavouring to keep up with the ball primarily to be in a position to tell their team members what they should do when they have the ball. This is exhausting, unsustainable and unintelligent. In top tier football, the person closest to the ball is the captain and so leadership is contextual. Leadership is not a role In broader terms, the hierarchical command and control model of the traditional business world leads to sclerotic business decisions, missed opportunities and fumbled management of threats. Thus again, leadership needs to be decentralised and contextual. It could be argued that anyone who influences anyone else is a leader. Thus in an increasingly chaotic world, ubiquitous leadership trumps the industrial era centralised model. AI + People Increasingly novel situations are a natural consequence of the hyper-uncertain world we are entering. A focus on process engineering and costs efficiency isn’t going to cut it. Innovation is the only response. People are key to this. More specifically people augmented with new technology are key. Intelligent leaders understand how to blend natural and artificial intelligence to create value and make a positive impact. Intelligent leaders build intelligent organisations, or more specifically intelligent organisms. Transformation is less about sprinkling your failing business model with tech pixie dust and more about developing a situationally aware organism that is smart enough to recognise opportunities and threats and to then act accordingly. Forever unintelligent? Implementing intelligent leadership will increase the likelihood of making a positive impact on the aforementioned issues, sustainability and so on. Unintelligent leadership will squander energy pursuing the wrong goals through inattention to the reality of the theatre in which they operate. Their cardinal mistake will be in underutilising the cognitive potential of their people. Leadership needs a reset.

Values minimisation It’s a sign of the time when leaders in some organisations earn over a thousand times more than the median company salary. Are they really that good? Or is the upper limit of employee value contribution limited by the focus on having most people in the organisation operating as process monkeys, slavishly adhering to the operations manual? In the public sector part of the core skillset appears to be avoiding getting caught. In the unlikely event that you are caught, the key skill is to brazen it out and hope that the public grows bored of hearing about it or gets distracted by media chaff countermeasures. Thus many modern leaders seem to be focused on self-interest, rather than some greater sense of purpose or even to adhering to a moral code. Future shock So role models are more the exception than the rule. And even the good leaders are really masters of administering a factory, which kind of worked for the last three hundred years. Unless of course you were an employee. The world is too disrupted for the steady state factory model, loved by both the public and private sector, to be effective. Thus we have very few inspiring and effective role models. The problem is compounded by Covid. Many young people have lost two years of social development. This will be costly for the individuals and society. The implications will be felt in due course. It will require direct intervention to attenuate the damage. Less is more? Older people would have been happy to attend a three-day residential negotiation course. Younger people are asking their learning function if there is something available that is closer to 10 minutes. This reductionist, ‘give me the list of 10 things to do’, perhaps overlooks the nuanced application of the list. The increase in addictive, dopamine generating content has created hyper-stimulated individuals who will lose interest if there isn’t a scene change or an explosion every 30 seconds. Our brains are not wired for TikTok level intensity. The pressure young people are under, thanks to social media, means that that bucket lists are no longer the preserve of the old. Consequently young people are tick boxing and selfie-ing their way through life. This might well result in a somewhat narcissistic individual who is too busy keeping up with their ‘friends’ on social media to consider the feelings of those who are more physically proximate. Thus confusion, loneliness and sadness become the background track to their lives. The increase in mental unwellness suggests that this is well underway. Resetting leadership Today MBA and exec education tends to major on how to administer a factory. Sadly this is a skillset for more innocent times. Some of the providers recognise this, so across their legacy syllabus they lavishly sprinkle buzzwords such as disruption, IoT, lean startup. This approach is akin to creating flavoursome sauces to mask the smell of the rotten meat. The generally low success rate when it comes to digital transformation suggests that something is not well understood by the MBA faculties. With decades invested in Taylorism, it is nigh on impossible to migrate a system-centric syllabus to one that is people / innovation-centric. Wait… Thus we have leaders who are so preoccupied by their strategic plan that they do not see the fast approaching iceberg. But perhaps there is a growing body of leaders who see the iceberg as a selfie opportunity and so the organisational mission is to get it in shot? Friends Leadership is in crisis. But the exec education sector continues to milk the factory cash cow. It is pretty well understood by the students that in purchasing an MBA you are not buying anything special by way of content. You are buying a network. They might find that the skills they acquire on a three-day, residential, interpersonal skills course a better investment if their goal is to simply acquire some friends with benefits. Leadership needs a reset.

What can Cary Grant, LeBron James and Pythagoras teach us about organisational design? In this post, I make the case for a new type of organisational model that benefits the individual, the organisation and society. Let’s start at the start. There are two types of factory. Factory A: There is a visible conveyor belt along which physical components travel. Factory B: There is an invisible conveyor belt along which data travel. Both factories are staffed by lifeless robots. In some cases, these robots are electronic and in many cases they are organic. The organic robots are humans who are typically mindlessly slavishly following some documented process. Their brains remain largely in sleep mode apart from when their manager admonishes them for deviation from the process or for being too slow. The inert soulless factory, whether it be the utilitarian plant or the more modern steel, glass and soft furnishing  kind, is where cognition goes to die. Wired for life Disruption has wrested the reins of control from humanity and we find ourselves, again, at its mercy. The pre-industrial era was one of great uncertainty. Today hyper-uncertainty awaits. Technology and global supply chains are only two of the forces that are making the future unknowable. I am an advocate of harnessing our tribal wiring, given that tribes are the most successful human operating model of all time, tested in the harshest of environments. Tribes survived because collectively and individually they harnessed their cognitive capacity to sense, decide and act in a manner that promoted their survival. Thankfully we are still wired for tribality, but modern society required us to surrender the fuse.   The rise and fall of civility So am I advocating a rejection of our industrial era behaviours and revert to a more primitive form of existence? Not exactly. In fact, I am advocating the opposite. The industrial era was a manmade construct that led to the rapid growth in cities. People now lived in very close proximity, unlike on the savanna. For the associated societies to thrive, people needed to behave in a manner that preserved order and minimise the stress of living in what is a social minefield. Laws were created to ensure a base level of societal conduct. We collectively learnt to be civil to avoid having to revert to legal recourse several times each day. We learnt that civility has benefits in that it facilitated social bonding. This in turn led to communities, a form of urban tribe. Over the years, we have refined civility to the extent that it is documented today in books on etiquette. However, as urban society has become less dangerous and our need to rely on others has lessened, some of us today pay little heed to being civil. This is an unhealthy trend and simply raises the overall stress levels in societies where this is happening. This incivility creates societal disharmony. Eventually it will lead to an exodus of the best talent. The employers will follow suit, leaving a failed society / state in their wake. Unfortunately, civility has something of a brand issue. Today, it connotes elitism and perhaps even weakness. ‘Keeping it real’, underpinned by authenticity and honesty, is understandably considered a virtue. Though cavorting with your boss’s partner because that’s ‘how you roll’,  might well be keeping it real, but it runs the risk of damaging your career, and possibly your limbs. I believe we need to reembrace civility as this is key to creating productive human-centric organisations and societies. Grace – A survival mechanism Focusing on business, I would say we need to build what might be termed as a graceful enterprise. Grace is both elusive and somewhat ethereal. Animals have it. Plants have it. But it would appear that only some humans are graced with grace. Cary Grant, Pythagoras and LeBron James come to mind. Famous actor, Cary Grant embraces grace in respect to his graceful sensitivity, particularly in respect of putting others at ease. Greek philosopher, Pythagoras exhibited grace in his elegant theorem of the same name. Basketball player, LeBron James demonstrates grace through skill and poise on the court. As  it turns out Cary Grant was an acrobat, so he also had poise. LeBron James, by all accounts, is a nice guy, so he exhibits grace off the court as well. Grace, poise and elegance are entwined. They are often used to describe something pleasing to witness. That said, I think whilst grace embraces poise and elegance, poise and elegance do not imply grace in all circumstances. Let me strip these characteristics down to their primitive forms: Grace – The ability to sense what is happening in the environment, including people, and engage in a manner that restores or maintains harmony. Elegance – The ability to develop the simplest solution to a problem. Poise – The ability to act with ease and balance. I think of grace as a collective term that captures the essential qualities of grace, poise and elegance. Recursive, and possibly thus inelegant, I know. Intelligent or graceless? As it turns out, these are the three fundamental characteristics of living organisms. The ability to sense, decide and act. Do all three well and you get to live. Fail in any one area and it was ‘game over’ for our ancestors. As I have written previously, we need to build intelligent organisations. We are moving into a world where it is less about strategic planning and more about situational awareness. The finite game of winning has become the infinite game of staying in play. That is the game our pre-industrial ancestors played. And they played it well, given that you are here reading this. In essence we need to build graceful organisations that embrace grace, elegance and poise. Graceless organisations can be characterised by cultural toxicity and a lack of awareness of what is happening in their markets. Infighting, micro-aggressions and exclusion preside over harmony and mutual respect. They are unnecessarily complicated in structure, eg. too many layers of management coupled with arthritic decision making. Their leaders respond to events in a knee-jerk and overcommitted fashion, causing organisational imbalance and thus increasing market vulnerability. The workers are in a continuous state of stress. Fear and anxiety are not the foundations on which to innovate. Cognition is squandered and so there is less available for innovative activities. Such cognitive leakage restricts the throughput of innovative outcomes. This is a problem given that innovation is what attracts and retains customers. I like to move it Our brains are optimised to sense and move. We are particularly optimised to engage with other people. Thinking, in the reflective and pondering sense, is not really what we were designed to do and that is reflected in the low proportion of our brain dedicated to thinking. However outside the domain of sport, we are only valued for our capacity to think and so many of us treat our bodies as simply an intermeeting transportation device. The market thus values cognitive elegance, but is explicitly indifferent to grace and poise. Though at some level we register grace and pose in others and are lifted by it. Some of us have become so decoupled from our body that we have lost the ability to hear what it is telling us emotionally. Nonetheless, society values thinking, given its link to innovation. I would argue that if we rebalanced our mind-body relationship and our attitude towards others, we would actually improve our capacity to think. This is why poise and grace are so important and not just elegance. The future of work? You will know you are working in a graceful organisation because: Your colleagues have excellent interpersonal skills, value your contribution and actually care about your wellbeing. Your organisational structure is as simple as it can be. It is optimised to enable you and your colleagues to do great work together, virtually or in person. Your leaders(s) has the demeanour of a delightful commercial airline pilot. Somehow making you feel good about yourself as the plane rapidly loses altitude. Having pulled out of the tailspin, she offers a measured apology for the inconvenience, thanks you for your cooperation and proposes that you have a wonderful day. Hopefully, this is the future of work. Factory RIP I encourage leaders to create such graceful organisations and I encourage the talent to gravitate to them. For me this is true digital transformation. It’s less about technology and more about people. We need to put the inhumane factory model to sleep. Graceful organisations will in turn likely stimulate graceful societies. Let’s get started. After you…

The grand experiment The Covid pandemic triggered a spontaneous and global management experiment to explore the management implications of operating a largely remote workforce. How would it impact productivity? How would managers cope with not being able to hover over their subordinates? What’s in it for me? During the pandemic a new generation of people entered the workplace. They had never known what it was like to commute, be nice to people they didn’t necessarily like or be able to learn by watching the behaviours of more experienced people. They quite liked fitting work around their lifestyle. I am of course generalising. Not every young person wants to work from home, particularly if their home is a shoebox above a perma-rave. Some of us more experienced workers saw benefits in terms of reclaimed travel costs and more time to think, and thus do better work. Nobody likes the feeling of being continually stared at by their manager as if they are a clear and present danger in respect of the organisation’s stationery supplies. An added bonus was that we became reacquainted with our families and discovering that they were actually ‘good people’. Dressdown ‘every’day Thanks to remote working we learnt new skills such as how to look presentable from the waist up and how to appear to be paying attention during Zoom meetings. It was truly liberating when we first witnessed our boss and clients wearing hoodies on Zoom. Now anything other than pyjamas was suitable ‘above the waist’ attire. It wasn’t long before both young and old concluded that remote work was the way forward. Work needed to fit around our personal agendas. The power axis was tilting from the employer to the talent. Where are you going? Most organisations today are predicated on industrial era principles, in particular, the system comes first and the people second. Trust is a ‘nice to have’ byproduct. Anxious micromanagers soon discovered the power of new technology in respect of remote management. In turn the workers discovered the importance of keyclick productivity. The red light on your video camera now gave your home the feel of a neo-Stalinist work cubicle. So remote working wasn’t a perfect arrangement for workers, but it was better than spending significant tranches of your life under someone else’s armpit on public transport or getting entangled in a pop-up carpark twice a day. Playtime’s over Up until recently there was a sense that the remote working war was over. Managers had given up on how to broach the subject without triggering a psychological distress contagion throughout the workforce. However some of the biggest brands and employers such as Amazon, Goldman Sachs, Boeing and Tesla are now mandating a return to work. Some of the tech players like Microsoft, Google and Apple are being less hardline with a more hybrid policy. The broad sense is that work and workers are returning to the office. Does AI know best? So what is triggering this? Is it just another way for insecure and distrustful managers to remind the workers who is boss? Or is there more to it? My perspective is that AI is driving the agenda. AI will steadily take over all the industrial era process jobs. This is not limited to assembly line work. It also relates to those that on the face of it appear to be knowledge workers, eg. they spend their day in a spreadsheet or handling customer related issues. So AI is coming after us unless we can do something of value that it cannot do. AI is closing us down fast in respect of creativity, but we still have capabilities in: Linking concepts  Thinking in constructs Humour  Emotional intelligence Pattern matching Contextualising Picking up on weak signals in very small datasets. AI is making inroad on all these fronts. But until it develops consciousness and intention, we still have a role to play. The sum of all whiteboards In essence our ability to apply our natural cognition will be seen as a valuable complement to the emerging artificial cognition. But surely this cognitive work requires us to be far from the madding crowd, making remote working the way forward? That is true. But humanity’s superpower is in its ability to collaborate. Two people and a white board is more valuable than two rooms of one person and a whiteboard. Our sociality causes us to try to impress others. This creates an upward force. Everyone benefits from collaboration. BTW The more diverse the group is, the better. Use your gym membership So if you are currently holding the line and continuing to work from home, the question you need to ask is whether you are missing out, and even halting your own self development, by not regularly meeting up with your fellow cognitive athletes at the cognitive gym (formerly known as the office)?Or does this arrangement suit your employer because having you out of the office and monitoring your computer usage is ideal for training up the AI to do your job? It would be a shame if the next time you go to the office it is to attend your leaving do.

Are you sitting comfortably? Imagine a world where giraffes are known for their ability to create start-ups. They love the buzz, and their height allows them to spot trends before others. Deep down they fantasise about one day becoming a unicorn. However, their entrepreneurial energy becomes a little counterproductive as the organisation starts to mature. Elephants on the other hand are great at process thanks to their great memories, often making excellent accountants. It makes sense that at some point a giraffe would want to have an elephant join the leadership team. So its day one for the elephant. She turns up at the giraffe’s plush offices. However the elephant cannot enter the building. It’s far too narrow. The giraffe, being so smart, recognised the issue and suggested that the elephant lose some weight in order to fit in. So, the elephant immediately joined an aerobics class (this is quite an old story) that was taking place in the grounds of the office. The giraffe was pleased that the elephant was endeavouring to fit in but was horrified when it looked out of the window and saw the elephant uprooting some trees. These trees were a major feature of the staff (primarily giraffes) onsite catering facility. The giraffe stormed out to scold the new employee. The elephant was angered by the tone of the giraffe. It did not end well for the giraffe and the elephant found itself back on the job market. Variants of this story are a staple when teeing up the topic of DEI (diversity, equality and inclusion) to three-year-olds. And it might appeal to adults too if the story was constrained to one species. DEI is more nuanced than perhaps we are prepared to accept and thus requires more thought (and action) than we are prepared to give. That workforce diversity needs to be enforced through regulation is an indicator that many business leaders don’t quite understand value creation. In this post, I will propose that disruption is coming to the rescue, but there is a price to pay. The impact of that payment will depend entirely on the extent to which you embrace your humanity. Read on. Definitions Firstly, here are some broad definitions, given the context of organisational culture: Diversity  – The practice or quality of including or involving people who do not fit the profile of the majority. Thus, diversity includes, but is not limited to, gender, age, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, physical and mental ability. Equity  – The practice of being fair and impartial. Inclusion  – The practice or policy of providing equal access to opportunities and resources for people who might otherwise be excluded or marginalized. Talent – People who can add value in a manner that cannot be replicated by an algorithm or a robot. Cognition – The ability to sense, predict, decide and act in a manner that maximises the chances of living long enough to reproduce, particularly under inhospitable circumstances. Social ineptness is not a superpower The human tendency to stereotype served us well on the savanna. Conclusions had to be jumped to immediately or it might be ‘game over’. Back then stereotyping was a time-sensitive and energy conserving feature. In a less deadly world, where we can afford to spend a bit more time and energy on assessing the stranger, stereotyping is essentially social ineptness. The equivalent of taking a dump in the middle of the room at a networking event because your pre-frontal cortex has missed the last few (thousand) software updates. So, you want to be a placeholder? Then there is the organisational problem. The industrial era factory model, which has been in place for around three centuries, does not actually value humans. Keep in mind that when I say factory, I mean anything that has a conveyor belt, whether physical (an automotive factory) or virtual (an investment bank). The conveyor belt can be transporting car parts or data. Both are factories. Both are process and efficiency oriented. Both view risk as something to be carefully managed, ideally to the point of elimination. Just to highlight the human point. The factory needs to run efficiently. Tech does that job well. But where the tech isn’t sufficiently mature, the business owners have had to reluctantly use people. But the people are not being employed as humans, but as process cogs. ‘Technology placeholders’ waiting to be swapped out once tech becomes available. The trouble with humans is they have aspirations and are not always predictable. But if we must use them then let’s keep the risk to a minimum. It is worth noting that the industrial era model has in many ways genetically mutilated humanity. Being a cog in the machine doing mindless process work (think painting sex toys or staring at spreadsheets) is not in our nature. You don’t fit in But how do employers keep the efficiency risk to a minimum? Well, the trick is to employ people who are compliant and low maintenance.  Given the adversarial nature of industrial era work (owners versus workers), the workers do not have to be liked or trusted, but they do need to be compliant and agreeable. As we have transitioned from products to services, people have moved closer to the front of the factory, ie engaging with the market. They are still required to do process work, but the bosses need them to convey a certain set of behaviours that are supportive of the organisation’s branding. Thus, talent acquisition has become a little more nuanced. Yes, cogs are now needed for the front of the machine, but they need to display certain attributes. So, the tendency was to pick employees in the image of the founder. It was almost as if service companies were a means to enable lonely entrepreneurs to pay for friends with minimal embarrassment. Your ability to deliver counted for little if your prospective boss didn’t like you or you didn’t fit the brand mould. If you weren’t on for squandering your Friday night getting ‘tanked up’ and stroking the boss, then you were not considered a team player. Don’t take it personally This was never about the person and their individuality, but about brand management and efficiency. Industrial Darwinism ensured that the primary, secondary and tertiary education systems organised themselves to meet the needs of the primary employers. Thus, as we speak, certain schools and universities are nurturing embryonic Goldman Sachs and Unilever employees. Think, ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ without the pushy parent or assassination tendency. So, we have a machine that turns out the cogs, just as the major employers like them. If you don’t fit, ie you are not that into blind obedience or brown-nosing, or you might require extra HR attention, then you were for all intents and purposes a faulty cog.  Plus the industrial era model took a rather dim view of those who might require special attention in respect of, for example, their religious, reproductive or disability needs. The employer-employee power axis tilted strongly towards the employer. So like it or lump it. Peak cog So it was too bad if you were mismatched with the industrial era factory model. Or was it? In any case, the good news is that this ‘human as factory cog’ model is dying. It cannot struggle with the uncertainty that comes with the increasing disruption we are seeing in the world today. The new model for business is one where innovation trumps efficiency. Innovation requires humans as algos and robots aren’t up to it yet. But it requires a particular type of human. One that is less compliant cyborg and more cognitive athlete. In fact, today organisations need humans to be human in order to unshackle their curiosity, courage and thus innovation-fuelled creativity. In an increasingly volatile world, innovation is both the antidote to uncertainty and the scent that attracts the most rewarding clients. All change If your key attributes are a smart outfit and an obsequious manner, then you will likely become a protected species in the coming years because post-industrial organisations will have little use for you. This new reality is a problem for old school employers and employees. The employers do not like change as it threatens to upset the factory and thus cashflow. The employees do not like change for similar reasons. But this new model requires workers to wake up and activate their brain, and that is not to everyone’s taste. So what does this mean for workers going forward? If you can’t outperform technology, you are irrelevant. You are unlikely to beat tech at chess or Go, but your ability to draw insights from small datasets (think emotional intelligence), creating and thinking in constructs gives you an advantage in the workplace. Beyond the cog spec But does this have any bearing on diversity? Traditionally people have been recruited to do a specific job and that job is usually defined in a job specification (ie. a cog specification). There are certain buzzwords on that spec and the role of the recruiter is to find resumes that include those buzzwords. Industrial era recruitment is thus a form of Bingo. For reasons mentioned, the recruiter will also look at academic qualifications and experience. This is where it can put some minorities at a disadvantage. These requisite past experiences and education thus tune the talent pipeline for organisational homogeneity. Great for the factory, but disastrous for organisations looking to thrive in an unknowable future. Such organisations need cognitive diversity. Different ways of seeing the world leads to more innovative outcomes. The market increasingly doesn’t value experience. It values value. Your organisation might well win awards for the diversity of the leadership team. But if they all went to similar schools and have had a similar career path then that is window dressing diversity or worse still ‘woke washing’, where the illusion of diversity is created to boost profits. It’s not a crime to go to a given school or have a particular career path. Every experience has some value. But the value capital of an organisation is somewhat limited if everyone is essentially a clone / mini-me version of the CEO. New sources of value Our humanity is key to organisations going forward. I believe we are saying goodbye to the professional caricature of slickly dressed, ever present and always upbeat. Being human means having experiences that recruiters would typically not recommend you share on LinkedIn. It means caring about your family more than the organisation. It means not leaving your personality in the carpark each day. I believe that your unique life experiences, vulnerabilities, struggles, upbringing, hobbies, personality and worldview will increasingly be perceived as sources of value. The industrial era wasn’t interested in these. Humanity is not an attractive trait in a cog. It is your unique combination of the above along with your value creating capabilities and that will make you employable in this increasingly chaotic world. It is the diverse combination of people (un)like you that will make organisations attractive and thus valuable. Not so fast Ironically, as robots and algos make their way into the building, the need for people has never been more acute. Again, not corporate compliant process cogs, but cognitive athletes whose capabilities extend beyond those of tech in respect of creating value. The power axis is starting to tilt away from the employer and towards the talent. Thus whether you are a majority or minority, your ticket to economic certainty will be defined by this new definition of talent. One shouldn’t expect to turn up to the dojo and insist on being given a blackbelt. There is a path to be taken. But by the same token do not turn up with your blackbelt to a gun fight. That requires following a path that involves firearms training. In the post-industrial age, skills are disposable, and learning is thus a daily habit. Organisational diversity So diversity is an imperative for organisations looking to stay in play post-Covid. But not the diversity as defined by regulations and often expressed in tokenism, but cognitive diversity. By cognitive diversity, I am not solely focusing on neural diversity, but on the wider idea that people who think differently, for reasons mentioned, are critical to organisation success. Our education system needs to be reset to reflect this new reality. Churning out compliant cogs, whilst dehumanising and discriminatory, would be okay from an organisation perspective if it was clear what the cogs were needed for and there were a steady flow of people willing to do dehumanising work. But we are entering a post-skills world now, so employing people for their skills will be of limited value as increasing market disruption will likely make those skills redundant sooner rather than later. Better to hire for cognitive diversity and skill people up as required. Another approach would be to adopt a gig economy model where organisations hire and dispatch as the needs of the organisation change. In my view, smart organisations will do what they can to acquire the most adaptable and creative people and should endeavour to retain them for as long as possible. Think premier league team sports. The war for talent is about to become very acute. Careers are so last year Certain roles, such as surgeon or barrister, require predictability in their training and career paths. But even these are being threatened by tech. We are likely to see less doctors and lawyers and more medical and legal engineers. Most significantly there will be fewer people needed in what today are considered aspirational roles. I admire how some parents, who themselves faced discrimination, are pushing their children into high-status, well-paid roles. But they are in fact setting them up for social and economic disappointment as the associated career paths crumble. Better to help them nurture their creative potential. That will better ensure their economic future. So, what next? We all have bills to pay, so job number one is to find and retain a job. Forget your passion, follow the money. As you develop your capability, the passion will emerge. I mention capability and not skills. Skills are important as they get the job done. But as mentioned, skills are transient. By capabilities I am referring to the ability to learn quickly, to be adaptable and to think of yourself as a one-person enterprise, because as the gig economy becomes more prevalent that is what you will be. You need to work hard on your personal brand (the sizzle) and your ability to deliver (the steak). And you need to do it daily. There is no clear path. And if you aren’t struggling, you aren’t learning. If your boss is giving you a hard time, keep in mind there is an outside chance she is doing so because she cares. There is too much untapped potential lying economically idle simply because of the institutional bias of the factory model. Thankfully this model has had its day. Society cannot afford to exclude capable people from the workplace. And society itself must signal that the game has changed so that we can all take steps to building a better future for all.

The problem CxOs have always been told that strategy is the key to success—that a well-thought-out plan underpins organisational success. But what happens when the future refuses to be predictable? A 5-year plan becomes obsolete in 6 months. A single disruption (AI, regulation, geopolitical shift) derails an entire roadmap. The pace of change is faster than your ability to adjust. 📉 The result? Leaders get caught in decision paralysis—afraid to commit, but equally afraid to do nothing. The real problem isn’t just uncertainty itself—it’s that most organisations are still trying to fight uncertainty with rigid, outdated strategy models. 💡 What if the key to leadership today isn’t crystal ball gazing but developing better organisational adaptiveness? A case study One CEO I know had a carefully crafted 5-year roadmap for their company. It was built on: ✔️ Market research ✔️ Trend analysis ✔️ Competitive positioning. Then three things happened in 18 months: 🚨 A regulatory shift that changed the industry dynamics overnight. 🚨 A disruptive AI-driven competitor that redefined customer expectations emerged. 🚨 An economic downturn that forced budget cuts. By the time their next board meeting arrived, a significant element of the strategy was irrelevant. The problem? They had built their strategy on the assumption that the world would remain stable. 💡 Leaders often fail because they choose to follow their plan even when it starts to deviate from reality. A psychiatric disorder often acquired whilst attending business school. Next steps If traditional strategy isn’t working, what’s the alternative? Smart leaders aren’t trying to predict the future—they’re designing their organisations to adapt to it. 🚀 Here’s how leaders can rethink strategy for an uncertain world: ✅ 1. Stop planning for a single future—build for multiple scenarios. Instead of one rigid plan, create a set of adaptable strategies that flex as conditions change. ✅ 2. Shrink strategy cycles from 5 years to 6 months. Your strategy should be a real-time, evolving process, not an annual checkbox exercise. ✅ 3. Invest in decision-making speed, not just data. The problem isn’t too little data—it’s that organisations aren’t structured to respond fast enough when data changes. 📌 Most leaders focus on forecasting. The best leaders focus on adaptiveness.

The problem Most talent management systems are built for a stable world—linear career paths, rigid roles, and annual performance reviews. But we no longer live in that world. High performers are disengaging. Quiet quitting is rising. The ' Great Resignation ' was just a warm-up act. The real problem? Organisations are still managing their talent like inventory, rather than as dynamic, intelligent team players. ⚠ If your talent model can’t adapt in real-time, neither can your organisation. A case study A large financial services firm had the right people on paper—but performance was stagnating. The issue? Their talent strategy was designed for control, not creativity. People were boxed into roles, with little room to grow or adapt. Once they shifted to a dynamic talent marketplace—matching internal talent to real-time priorities—engagement rose, innovation unlocked and productivity jumped. Many staff thrived in what became ‘time to productivity’ challenges. They recognised that the pressure to become 80% competent in 20% of the learning time was both exciting and a skills accelerant. 💡 When you treat people less like machine cog and more as adaptive nodes in a living system, you activate the untapped intelligence sitting dormant in your organisation. Next steps To move beyond traditional talent management, consider these steps: 💥 Shift from roles to capabilities - Think in terms of what people can do—not just their job title. 💥 Recruit on traits  – Traits such as learnability, innovativeness, creativity and being comfortable with ambiguity are more valuable in the long term. 💥 Build a talent marketplace  - Use tech (and trust) to let people flow to where they’re most needed. 💥 Integrate sensing into HR  - Real-time feedback loops help you understand mood, energy, and emerging needs. It also helps you manage the talent supply chain with greater finesse. 💥 Design for emergence  - Support stretch assignments, side projects, and peer learning. 👣 Start small. Pilot with one team. It’s time to shift gears and move from people as cogs to people as cognitive athletes. 💡 People that are free to pursue opportunities and are adept at becoming productive quickly will not find themselves at the mercy of the AI steamroller.