Adaptive Intelligence and skills

Sean Bowman, Director Stagira Consulting Pty Ltd

If culture eats strategy for breakfast, then Adaptive Intelligence eats skills for lunch

 

Sean Bowman, Director, Stagira Consulting Pty Ltd

We don’t really know whether the legendary Peter Drucker actually said the much quoted phrase “culture eats strategy for breakfast” – a phrase made famous by Mark Fields, CEO of Ford Motor Company.  No one can actually recall Drucker ever making this statement, and it never appeared in any of the thirty-nine books he authored. 

However it doesn’t really matter, as what we do know is how accurate this phrase is. 

The success of any strategy, no matter how brilliantly conceived, is dependent on the quality of the people who are responsible for implementing  that strategy. As we know “quality” is more than just how experienced, knowledgeable or skilful people are. The way people behave individually and collectively is critical. If these behaviours are destructive or even merely sub-optimal, the brilliantly conceived strategy won’t realise its potential and may even fail. 

A suboptimal culture will always eat a company’s strategy –  and for breakfast it seems. 

So who eats what for lunch? 

This is a question that Forbes magazine asked in November 2017 –  “Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast.  So What’s For Lunch?”. 

Based on the sheer weight of recent commentary, you might think that the answer to that question is skills, driven by the seismic change that technology is having and will continue to have on the future of work.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) certainly thinks so. In partnership with the Boston Consulting Group, they released a paper at Davos entitled Towards a Reskilling Revolution. “As the types of skills needed in the labour market change rapidly, individual workers will have to engage in life-long learning if they are to achieve fulfilling and rewarding careers” the paper contends. 

It’s hard to disagree. 

The paper then goes on to look at the future US employment market and observes that, while many jobs will disappear, even more new jobs will be created. In fact, according to the WEF, a net increase of 11 million jobs in the US by 2026 (I do struggle with this last part, but will save that topic for another day). 

The key focus of the WEF’s paper is the “data driven” modelling showing the path and degree of difficulty of reskilling from current to new job families using job fit correlations. Overall it’s a very reassuring paper. The potentially massive disruptive impact of technology will be fine as long as companies and individuals commit to reskilling. 

And many others have recently been commenting on the skills that will differentiate us from robots. Stephen Parker from KPMG recently wrote that “creativity, curiosity, emotional intelligence, teamwork, communication and strategic skills” will be crucial as machines take over mundane tasks.

And a former colleague of mine and now CHRO of Unilever, Leena Nair, recently posted on LinkedIn that “employees with highly transferable skills like communication, strategic thinking and collaboration have been found to be the most resilient to the advent of technology.”.

All so true. 

So to summarise –  the collective assertion is that as long as people and organisations have a commitment to lifelong learning and reskilling with a particular focus on soft skills and emotional intelligence, all will be fine.  

I totally agree. 

However this simple assertion and solution to a complex challenge is easy to state, but the reality is that humans have a pretty poor track record of sustaining personal change. 

In my last article, I made this point. Many leaders with high levels of personal awareness, and the strongest desire to change have nonetheless struggled to sustain personal change. The best evidence of this is that most company talent reviews are replete with recurring development needs for their senior people and key talent. Year after year after year.

So let’s just reflect on this for a moment.

If leaders, with high quality 360’s, well-resourced development plans, leadership programs and executive coaching, struggle to address key development needs – where will this leave the millions of workers around the world that don’t have access to high quality insight tools and/or well funded development initiatives.  The millions of workers that the WEF and many others are saying – just reskill and all will be fine. 

It’s easy to say that people just need to reskill, and even easier to list these skills, but in reality developing skills such as communication, strategic thinking and collaboration is really really difficult.

The best analogy is saying that the solution to obesity in the western world is simple. Everyone just has to lose weight, right? It’s easy. Just eat less and exercise more. I’ll even help you with some tips– the 5/2 diet, gym membership, meal replacements and protein shakes. 

Weight loss is technically a simple skill. A very simple skill that millions and millions of people never master, in spite of the strongest desire to change. A skill that is much more simple than developing collaboration or communication skills.

The reality is that change for humans is difficult. The human mind has evolved to resist change – to preserve the status quo in order to make sense of a complex world.

Losing weight is a classic example – it is an adaptive change – more than simply acquiring and adopting a new set of technical skills. Other skills such as creativity, curiosity, teamwork, communication and strategic thinking are even more adaptive in nature. You go on courses to learn theory and acquire knowledge about these topics, but changing mind-set to sustain behavioural change in any of these areas is an enormous adaptive challenge. 

This is the essence of Adaptive Intelligence. It’s not enough to have high quality insight and genuine desire to change. IQ and EI are as important as ever, but the capacity to actually change is the key capability.

The reason that most change efforts are not sustained is that development initiatives do not focus on changing mind-set and addressing an individual’s capacity for change. The focus is too often on acquiring a new skill, instead of building Adaptive Intelligence. 

Acquiring skills at a personal level to equip and take advantage of a changing world is similar to a company developing a strategy to respond to market forces and dynamics.  And just like the fact that organisational culture is critical to strategic success and will eat strategy for breakfast, Adaptive Intelligence is the same at a personal level. 

It’s really important in this so called “Fourth Industrial Revolution” for companies and individuals to identify new skills needed and embark on development initiatives to reskill and change.  The degree to which such development initiatives stick and result in sustained change is function of an individual’s Adaptive Intelligence. Without strong Adaptive Intelligence, personal change will not occur and/or may be sporadic. 

This is why Adaptive Intelligence is the most critical capability. Reskilling and lifelong learning crucially requires Adaptive Intelligence. It will distinguish between those that flourish and those that flounder.

And it is why Adaptive Intelligence eats skills for lunch.