Adaptability is the capability

There’s plenty written on the skills we'll need for now, tomorrow and the next decade to remain relevant, employable, successful and smiling.

Predicting specifics for an uncertain future can be lottery-like: sure, we'll get the numbers right ... eventually, but just not all at once or all in the one game!

So it's not one skill or 30; adaptability is the capability.

It's having the quality of being able to adjust to new conditions. How well can you continue to see, listen, learn, connect dots, and then change your behaviour based on all of that information available to you?

The capability is adaptability. And plenty of people are just not that adaptable.

Adaptability is having a force and power of resourcefulness. To be able to switch from one thing to another or decide on different skills you’ll deliberately apply to solve a perplexing situation.

We all find ourselves in challenging environments and tricky situations - how well do you play a capability of adaptability?

Look at where you're looking

Teamwork takes longer than it needs to because we struggle as a group to make sense of what’s going on. No wonder! We’ve never been more distracted, looking at devices, laptops, watches & journals as relief from the boredom, complication and irrelevance of meetings.

Check the distractions here:

⬇️ The guy (left) is looking at a Spotify playlist

➡️ She’s mindful with her coffee

↘️ Sunglasses dude is checking spreadsheets, emails or Slack 

🔀 The two on the right are writing in a journal, one just checked her Fitbit or Apple watch 

There are 5 laptops, 6 devices, 4 note pads and a folder-thingy.

We're perpetually distracted by other visual points of interest, stealing our focus from the team's work.

One person might be going OK making sense, but another two or three people may have ‘lost the threads’ of what's really going on.

Look where people are looking. Unless and until you have what I call a ‘Common Visual Point of Context’, you’ll all be drawn to you own ‘Individual Points of Relief’ (or Distraction). 

The 2 things for better cognitive load management

In their prediction for the skills we’d be needing now, by 2020, the Institute for the Future identified Cognitive Load Management in the Top 10.

It's about how we cope with all that information.

But it’s not one thing; I see Cognitive Load Management involving 2 capabilities:

🔹 To discriminate + filter information for importance, and

🔸To understand how to maximize our cognitive function (using a variety of tools and techniques.)

The answer is not about having a new app to manage, store or retrieve our own information better. We need to be able to firstly identify what’s important in the information we’re exposed to. And then we need to work with our own thinking, listening and sensemaking capabilities to handle that information better than we currently do.

I’m helping teams (via 1/2 day workshops) and individuals (via 1:1 skills sessions online) to build skill and change the way they cope with information.

It could be the best value session of your development program this year - being able to handle information better. What’s that worth to you? 

We can make information overload worse

To handle the never-ending flow of information we face, it’s useful realising that the way we currently do things could be making it harder for us to take in information with ease.

We can be so wedded to the automated and habitual way we do tasks: thinking, prioritizing, decision making, listening, note taking and learning, that we’re often blinded to the benefits and potential of newer ways.

This is why some newer ways of working are known as ... new ways of working. Of course!

I see this when I'm working with people, helping them manage their cognitive load. We’re used to our preferences (and we defend them), when we’re reading a document or listening to a presentation for example, yet we struggle with information overload and its effects. The devil you know, right?

We tolerate the inefficiency and discomfort of overload. Many people wrongly believe it would be too hard to learn a new way or the benefits wouldn't be worth the effort.

But newer ways of working are revealing better, easier and more effective ways of tackling all that information. 

 Would you be willing to try some new techniques to handle information overload? 

Map your expertise

Yesterday I lamented the waste of not knowing what people have experienced when they join the team. So here’s what to do: Map the expertise.

Not a spreadsheet or a folder of resumes/CVs that no one will ever read. Make a map of your expertise and make it visible and available. I call them ‘experience maps’.

1. Schedule an 'experience share' meeting now.

2. Give people time to prepare their map.

3. Everyone talks through what they’ve done and shows their experience map.

4. The map lives on and can be updated over time.

A learning-focused organisation sees the efficiency, and practicality of involving people to capture, hear and see the experience in the business. And then they leverage it. It’s wasteful, ignorant and unproductive not to.

What about you? What skills or experience do you have that people wouldn’t know?