Bold New Breed

Direct link to Episode 16. Mark Gröb, head of the Immersive Tech Center for UPS talks about how Virtual Reality and eXtended Reality can bring value to organizations and people. His work is highly practical with clear business benefits. He covers how to make this fantastic technology real and how to scale it through a large organization.
Topics include:

• On-boarding and the critical chain of learning that makes people confident and comfortable
• Retaining and engaging people and removing the fear of mistakes
• Putting people in charge of their learning, both old and new employees
• Scaling up by enabling others to take control of meeting their needs
• Going beyond smoke and mirrors as an entrepreneur, and knowing your ideas will evolve

Direct link to Episode 15. Marie Reig Florensa, valedictorian of the Berlin Creative Leadership Executive MBA program, talks about what it means to lead from the heart, to discover one's purpose, and how people need to slow down and learn to listen to each other with openness. She describes living your purpose as a spiritual journey with a backpack where the contents vary along your journey.
Topics include: 

• Team building starts with your presence, your intentions.
• We live in a society driven by fear, and lack of clarity gives way to fear.
• Two ways to go against the status quo: the low and the high.
• We all need to open our field of possibilities, inside and outside ourselves and our organizations.
• The speed of change and innovation puts us into narrow funnels where we think, erroneously, that we are moving forward.
• Seeing relationships, emotions, experiences, energies, thoughts, helps understand how much easier it is to listen to the other and respect the other.

Grégoire Charpe-Civatte on leadership, slowing down and  taking the time to reflect, exercising the decision-making muscle and  learning as you lead:
https://www.netjmc.com/14-leadership-is-taking-the-time-exercising-the-decision-making-muscle-learning-as-you-lead/
Topics include:

• Leadership is not about having expertise, market knowledge and so on. 
• True leadership is being an orchestrator, able to point to the right direction.
• A good leader makes time to think about leadership.
• So-called agility and new ways of working are often a caricature, not productive.
• Organizations need to slow down and take the time to make choices.
• Managers have atrophy of the decision-making muscle and rely on outside “experts” because it is reassuring.
• We need more of a multi-disciplinary approach in our work 

Direct link to Episode 13. Guillaume Alvarez, Senior V.P Europe, Middle-East & Africa of Steelcase has a deep understanding of what is changing in organizations today thanks to extensive global research on a global scale Steelcase has conducted.  He explains how space can be orchestrated to increase people's well-being, strengthen their sense of purpose, and help make organizations more competitive.

Topics include:

• The serendipity of encounters that generate ideas and build trust
• Different spaces for different purposes
• Space lets you create a genuine employee experience
• Words don't work as well as in the past
• Orchestrating space to put leadership in the flow
• Well-crafted spaces make people feel more productive and believe in what they are doing
• Space enhances three types of well-being: physical, emotional, cognitive

You can see the show notes here
Sonja is the founder and CEO of More Beyond and she works with clients to create resilient and agile cultures and leadership. She works primarily with complex systems theory and has the gift of making it understandable and doable for all of us including in our daily lives.
Today we are in uncharted territory. We’ve got climate change, a global pandemic, social unrest, all happening at the same time. The levels, of uncertainty and unpredictability are off the charts. We haven’t had to make decisions in these kinds of contexts before.
She covers many aspects of complexity in our conversation, too many to summarize here!

See the show notes and episode information:
A wide-ranging conversation with Robin Vincent Smith of Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) about:

·      How the pandemic made decision-making more inclusive and flattened the organization. 

·      How the office has become the place to meet people, build trust and relationships, but not to do work. 

·      How they deal with new issues first by tapping their internal collective intelligence, building a community around the issue, then by buying consultancy intelligently and they finally hiring a new employee who is rapidly operational thanks to the strong foundation already in place. 

·      How the surge capacity in the MSF DNA is a strategic advantage both for operations in the field and knowledge development.

·      How they are now even more connected thanks to raw and real stories directly from the field to the central office

See the show notes and episode information:
Knowledge management is flows, bridges and mindset

Raûl says his role is a horizontal one, and needed in all enterprises whatever the industry. "I'm a plumber of information" he says and is more concerned about the flow than about the content. His concern is that the right information gets to the right people. He build bridges between the islands inside organizations that have grown and evolved over the years. Information sharing is above all a question of mindset. The generation of "knowledge is power" needs to evolve. "Knowledge management is people management" he says.

The Knowledge Argument

Raûl calls himself an "amateur philosopher on his LinkedIn profile. I asked him why and that led into a discussion about his website The Knowledge Argument.

Why do you call yourself an amateur philosopher?

It's good to put  arguments you have with friends about philosophical concepts in writing because "of course you cannot just talk a deep philosophy through WhatsApp."

He also sees putting his thoughts in writing as a legacy he is leaving for his daughter.

We talked about 2 of his posts, which I'll let you discover by listening to our discussion and reading his writing. I have shared 2 extracts here and will let you hear this thoughts in the podcast itself. The first is: Knowledge comes before happiness

See show notes: Chris explains the unusual origin of his name, Labonté, which means “the goodness”. I asked him how he got that name, which I have never heard in my over 30 years of living in France.  He told me the story which started back in the late 17th century and says it is a lot to live up to.
In one of his early jobs, Chris was very much a gig mindsetter, bringing new ideas to his boss, who, to his credit, listened and implemented them.
Chris believes in the importance of creating a culture that nurture individuals with a gig mindset. He feels they potentially bring high value to an organization because they will bring innovation and new ideas that go beyond what the “normal employee” brings. He even expresses a mathematical ratio as an example.
I asked Chris how the publishing industry has and is evolving. He told me there has long been the feeling that the industry “is about to die” with a “bit of a sky is falling” mindset. He goes on to talk about the fact that books are still selling at a high rate, but underlines the current difficulties for independent booksellers because of Amazon and the superstores or big box stores. Amazon is 50% of the entire market in the United States and he says that’s too much power for any single vendor.
There’s also a fear the book market will diminish with the advent of ebooks, but Chris feels the ebook has become a sort of replacement for paperbacks, cheaper than hardbacks.
Audio books are also on the rise. However, he strongly believes that there are  a lot of people who want to sit back with a print book in hand.

Florence Devouard, Wikipedia pioneer for 19 years and 2nd Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation following Jimmy Wales, talks to us about her life, her work in Africa – especially with young people in schools, and about how having a gig mindset has helped shape her sense of identity as an open knowledge advocate. You can discover more on the episode page: https://www.netjmc.com/8-florence-devouard-on-a-mission-for-open-knowledge/
Points covered include:

• Balancing the stories on the internet and Wikipedia through helping Africans represent their real lives
• Preparing children who are offline today to become our digital global citizens of tomorrow
• Local partners often cover the last mile in global initiatives
• Photography is a powerful tool for communicating life
• Shifting identity and reflecting the values that are important to you

The Sanofi Pasteur initiative is  Learn-Apply-Share. See more information on the episode webpage : Learning comes alive
“Learn” is what most companies do with all kinds of learning institutes and initiatives and so on. “Apply” is one step further and that “Share” is still  deeper.  That’s what is unique about the program Dany and colleagues have designed.

There’s something big going on which is why they call it Shift. “The name Shift refers to the end result. What are we trying to achieve? A shift from an earlier way of working. It’s a more permanent change. You can almost compare it to an earthquake and the plates have shifted and they’re not going to revert back. That’s what we want to see happening. So that’s why it’s called Shift.”
Interestingly, Shift starts with a one-page document. There's much more information on the podcast webpage and in our conversation: Learning comes alive

See how Decathlon is living diversity and inclusion on the podcast website:
Diversity and inclusion.

Their philosophy: Start with yourself and include the world around you. 
You will see how teams around the world are making this happen. This is an outstanding example of global collaboration and local specialization.

Decathlon Belgium, where Sophie is based, is organized as a network, not a hierarchy and a group of employees decided to tackle the challenge of diversity and inclusion. They reached out to people across the global company, in particular Hungary and Italy and realized they needed to talk to other countries and find ways for the countries to talk to each other.

Sophie and colleagues organized international online meetings to trigger conversations and share successes as well as challenges. This grassroots initiative took off and it was discovered that different countries were working on different issues: Brazil on racial discrimination, India on women’s experience, Hungary on disabilities.

There's much more information on the podcast webpage: Diversity and inclusion.

For more information on the podcast website: Proactive resilience: A race with no finish line

Horizon scanning and a focus on skills

A resilient person or organization can get through a crisis, but making it through once is not enough. being resilient is a state of readiness. A way of acting a way of thinking. It’s proactive, not reactive.

Individuals need to focus on developing  skills more than being satisfied with job titles: skills versus labels, as one person told me. Another talked to me about “personal future security”.

Organizations (as well as individuals) need to get good at horizon scanning: being aware of the external world around us.

Rapid response to major events and crises is not yet common

Results from my research 2013 and 2018 in my research about organizations in the digital age were similar to what BSI uncovered (see data on website page listed earlier). I asked more than 300 organizations around the world over four consecutive years (from 2013 through 2018) to state their agreement or disagreement with this statement: “Our organization can respond rapidly to major events or transitions such as market changes, competition, economy, downturns, environmental or disaster events”.

The answers were not encouraging. Only 25% agreed or strongly agreed in 2013 and then only  another 10 percentage by 2018.

Four keys to proactive resilience through a gig mindset work culture

• Reverse leadership: possibly the key to all the rest
• Decentralization: based on freedom within a framework
• Improvisation: using what’s available in real time to solve a problem
• Learning fast: enabling people to take charge of their development 

I have a story about learning in the podcast and will have future episodes about the first 3 points later.

Thinking about resilience when there is no crisis is a sign of proactive resilience

D. Christopher Kayes says, “Thinking about resilience, when there isn’t a catastrophe going on is one of the hallmarks of a resilient organization. It’s not only about responding to problems, but also about how to get ahead of them.”

See more information on the podcast website: Velcro Management and readiness

This episode is about how to put on and take off your tennis shoes easily. And a new way of working with people. Seriously!

It's about Velcro management, a new idea for most of us including myself until I met Marni Johnson from BlueShore Financial.   She talks about what it is, what it brought to their organization, and how to make it work for you – if you like the idea.

Chris Catliff, president and CEO of BlueShore Financial, says that leaders need to “forget the individual’s job description and provide them with opportunities to create and contribute to things they excel at and are motivated by.”

For more information on the podcast website: Willful blindness: what and why?

Ignore, resist or embrace?

When people come across something new, they ignore it, resist it, or embrace it. How do we get to the 3rd stage?

The gig mindset is often resisted by management, but not only. In order to combat it, we need to start with first understanding what's going on.

Living in the past and living in fear are two underlying reasons.

People are blinded by:

• Pride in past success.
• Faith in best practices and benchmarking.
• Fear of losing power.
• Fear of speed.
• A false sense of safety in silos.
• Filter bubbles.

Positive deviance: a totally different perception

Gig mindset behaviors threaten the past and have little fear! Although they are often perceived as deviant, they are in reality positive deviance.

More information on the podcast website: The gig mindset and internal civil disobedience

Peaceful protest in a large organization

This episode is about peaceful protests in a context where people want to change the way they work inside a very large organization.

I talked with an engineer who works in a global industrial enterprise headquartered in Europe. He and his colleagues wanted to find a way to bring visibility to new ways of working and emphasize the importance of flexibility and not getting fixed on one method or another method they’d put into place, a large social network, and people were talking about their projects.

Two mindsets: Where do you stand?

I’ll tell you about the two mindsets – traditional and gig – to the background of a beautiful waltz and a dynamic boogie.

More info on the podcast website: Why is the bold new breed important?

"Thank you for giving me an identity."

The Bold New Breed of employee is driven by the gig mindset. The gig mindset is a way of thinking and behaving like freelancers and independent gig workers. Except, the gig mindsetters are employees inside organizations.

They are a NEW Breed because they work differently from traditional workers.

They are a BOLD new breed, because they come up against management resistance.

When I talked about gig mindsetters in conference keynotes, I had these reactions from people in the audience:

"You're the first person to understand me."

"Now I know why I have the problems I have at work."

"Thank you for giving me an identity."

Why these reactions?

Gig mindsetters make management nervous, and feel threatened. They trigger strong reactions including getting sidelined or reprimanded. Three underlying issues:

• Gigmindsetters are here to stay. They make up a bottom-up movement emerging slowly in organizations around the world.
• They network intensively, cross boundaries and constantly scan the horizon. They detect early signs of change, take initiatives, operate with high autonomy and work to solve problems when they see them.
• But management behaviors have been stuck in a control and command mindset over several years.