The principles of playfulness, experimentation and systems design underpin how she likes to get things done. Emily is focused on changing the world for the better, by working with organisations and individuals to think about possible futures and their ability to evolve the systems around them for good.
The future is anyone’s to predict. 5 years ago, very few people were thinking about a global pandemic and its effect on the way we want to work forever, let alone the impact of Brexit, rapidly advancing climate disaster, plus new global tensions…. A lot can happen in just a few years to disrupt world order.
What we know is climate justice, AI, the metaverse… these things are coming down the tracks with speed and are already changing the employer-employee relationship, shifting market paradigms, totally changing the way people live, care about, and want to engage with each other.
And whilst these outside factors are acknowledged, most organisations are still not set up to withstand the change coming.
We can no longer operate in 20th century models of skills, structures, processes, or behaviours. If an organisation wants to survive, it will need to embed the increasingly critical skills of operating in complex systems so it can pivot away from crisis and quickly capitalise on opportunity.
Business agility will become even more essential in the next 3 years, let alone the next 10. Sadly, most organisations aren’t seriously investing in liberating their talent for adaption and growth within an environment of constant change.
HR teams have the opportunity to be the engine of this capability. They are the glue which assesses, develops, and reinforces the culture of an organisation, and they are tapped into the business in a way that is under-utilised and strategically mis-understood.
HR teams will need to invest in their own strategic pivot before they can help their organisations do the same. Yes, they will still need to be partners of commercial leaders, and manage the central operations of talent management, but what would a truly agile HR team look like?
Perhaps their skills will be less about process and project management, and more about curating ecosystems. They will have to be skilled at executing nudge theory – designing and implementing smart interventions that move mindsets and behaviours at pace. They will have to shift to a heavily decentralised and highly autonomous mode of action that is aligned around a vision for the organisation, not a set of tasks or ridged project plans.
Everyone with a People title will have to be leading the strategic direction, not just the most senior bods, and they will have to operate with transparency, creativity and iteration to respond to the external environment and the needs of their people.
Smart change will be emergent, with increasingly frequent periods of turmoil which shift the needs of the organisation dramatically as we’ve experienced with the Pandemic and the war in Ukraine. HR teams will have to practice fire drills for all sorts of circumstances and create alignment behind the principles that sit behind any action.
They will have to listen closely to external forces in ways HR teams have traditionally not focused. They will have to watch for trends in changing external culture and implement new technologies and ways of working that attract and keep new kinds of talent.
They will have to design systems that cope with a new generation of employees who don’t want traditional career ladders, but instead a project portfolio of wide and braggable experience coupled with an explosion of mental health epidemics driven by all our uncertain futures.
Long has the mantra “your people are your biggest asset” been wheeled out at conferences, but we still have organisations that put data and digital or process and policy on a pedestal somehow separate from the talent who create it. Despite the rhetoric, most organisations assume the humans within them are treated like automatons. As long as this continues, we won’t see the burst of creativity, teamwork and experimentation required to grow businesses in the future.
When our children enter the workplace AI will be well established. Skills that will be needed will be creative design, collaboration, influence and getting things done at speed. That’s what I look for when recruiting. Teams which have a combination of traditional and non-traditional background means diverse perspectives. People who follow their passions create networks of like-minded individuals who thrive regardless.
People who are passion-driven are also more likely to be team players – they are driven by the need to be curious; they ask questions and are always open to experiment and find purpose in what they do. And they will demand a different organisational shape from the hierarchical structures we’ve been governed by in the last 100 years.
The question we need to ask is – are we brave enough to make bold changes to ensure we are recruiting for the future world, where autonomous teams are the fabric of organisations, and purpose goes hand in hand with accountability? By embracing the need to create a workplace for tomorrow, only then will we be ready for the future.
