Being Future Fit and even more Human: The time is now
Being future fit has taken on a whole new meaning.
It’s a phrase that’s often bandied around – we want a future fit workforce; we want to be a future fit organisation. While people often think of what technology requirements they need, I was compelled to go deep on this last week as the story of Sam Altman’s role at Open AI unfolded.
He went from being sacked, to having a new role, almost taking his entire workforce with him and then being reinstated. I’m not sure we fully know why and how it all unfolded but one of the rumours that has been flying around has been off a super advanced intelligence being developed in the background. And realistically whether it will be Sam Altman and team or another group, someone is working on it.
I remember Arun Pradhan saying in a keynote speech many years ago now – “The robots are coming” and although at the time I knew he wasn’t joking, now, a year on from LLM entering our workforce, I have a completely different understanding of that statement.
Being Future Fit will mean we need to be even more human. What will we have, as humans, that the machines won’t? Essentially, it’s emotions, intuition, critical thinking, consciousness, connection, and the ability to self-reflect.
While we have shown with Coach M to some extent that rapport can be manufactured and people will open up and feel connected to the tool, and one of my personal key drivers to creating the tool is to give people the time to slow down, connect, and help people connect with their inner wisdom as they apply learning.
The real skill leaders within organisations, will be the ability to activate the left-hand hemisphere of the brain. Skills required in coaching to a high level, not in a mechanistic way, are skills that activate this area and that’s why I’m certain that the need for deep coaching skills will become greater over time.
Coaching is an ideal place to start when it comes to developing these exclusively human skills. And not following a method but immersing in the principles of coaching and what it means to go deep in a short period of time. It’s a jumping off point for activating our intuition, critical thinking, connection, compassion and the ability for self-reflection.
I’ve recently had the privilege of taking some very experienced coaches through the Turning Learning into Action Methodology training. “The TLA methodology is the most egoless, simplistic, yet incredibly powerful coaching methodology I’ve ever used” was one of the comments made during the training.
Many organisations have tried to create a coaching culture; instinctively, they know it is the way forward but to what level has it been achieved.
Were robust learning transfer processes in place?
Did we get leaders beyond following a formula or asking set questions?
Were they equipped to coach people who were difficult to coach and didn’t immediately fall into the formula?
Join us on this Future Fit journey as I work towards ensuring we start to nurture and activate the right hemisphere of our brains. Events last week showed me it’s a time critical mission. No more hiding our light under a proverbial bushel. Developing people in this way is essential. Who’s with me?
