What reading will you do to prepare you for the future

The Institute for the Future continues to urge us to prepare for the future skills we'll require to cope with uncertainty, change and new ways of working. If you can't zip out of the office to complete a 'Future of Work Diploma', what are you doing to educate yourself so you're ready? Over the weekend, during the week, on holidays, people often find gaps in the day - after breakfast, waiting in the car, in airport queues, after dinner, waiting for the weather to change/clear/change again.

All of these times - and more - are opportunities to be taking on bite-sized chunks of insight and learning.

Our brain loves this; much better than cognitively overloading ourselves or filling up our sponges with too much information in one hit.

So, what are you reading... and planning to read?

Here are some ideas for you I've worked on over the past six years...

(Hey pssst! The purple one is available for FREE download via my website; the others, where you usually get your books or via my website).

The person with the most spontaneity wins

As leadership evolves from command and control to consultative/coaching and beyond to facilitative, those who can handle what happens are well placed.

We can’t predict what people will say, what will happen at a meeting, how a client will respond or what the board might ask for, so we may need to respond in the moment.

Spontaneity is a strength that's incredibly powerful in times of uncertainty. We can spend so much time though, rehearsing scenarios trying to cover all of the possibilities, to try to prepare for the future.

Do we fear we wont be able to handle things, that we will lose control?

Maybe we don’t trust ourselves to handle what happens.

But improvisers have known it for decades: we have incredible resources in us and we need to trust that we can handle so many situations. Could you be more spontaneous, you know, go with the flow? Responding to what happens rather than trying to control what happens?

🔆To build spontaneity, notice your response when things DON'T go as you hoped, expected or planned. What you do next is spontaneity. And it's a SUPER SKILL for the uncertain future. 

Just thinking, or capturing the thinking

Working on tasks like problem solving, idea generation or planning and decision making means we can get into some pretty heavy thinking.

I wonder... are we doing too much thinking and not enough capturing of the thinking?

Have you had that situation where you've come up with an idea, some clever thoughts and then ... it's gone, disappeared as quickly as it arrived? Can't remember it?

It’s a waste to think great things and not net, trap or curate and gather them. Too often we dismiss our thoughts and ideas as not being valuable, but they’ve just been created as thoughts; they haven’t been further morphed into an action or an implementable thing.

Give yourself the credit that yes, you did come up with an idea, a possibility. Then capture it as soon as you can!

A library of ideas is something to draw from later on.

We can't always sit down and expect brilliant ideas to come to us on demand. Rather, we can capture them when they come throughout our daily habits and activities. This is the clever art of idea curation.

Q: Do you lose your ideas or do you catch them?

Be CURIOUS

Being a risk taker and explorer in times of uncertainty can feel like it’s a great risk, but it can also reap huge rewards. It means stepping into uncertainty, unknown and unsure.

But go, step into it. Be intrepid. To be otherwise is to be timid, weak, pusillanimous – yep, that’s a big word that will stop you being able to work with uncertainty.

When we are fearful of uncertainty, we get smaller ideas, take smaller risks and try to stay in 'safe and same'.

Businesses that support risk taking can achieve some mighty innovative things. So to work in uncertainty, we simply need to be curious.

And if we are scared, curiosity becomes the opposite of fear. Be CURIOUS. Wonder. Enquire.

Be intrigued and interested and you'll be just fine working in uncertainty. 

Try something else - EXPERIMENTS

Experimenting helps us refine, edit and alter our offers, services, designs and ideas. It's rare for a product or service we use to not be shaped by experiments. It's about seeing what works as well as what goes wrong.

Working with a global manufacturer over a number of years, I would often walk past a room labeled ‘Test Kitchen’. It was where clients, customers and users of their products were brought in and let loose!

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is big on experimenting. He said, ‘If you double the number of experiments you do per year, you're going to double your inventiveness.’

So get your ideas out there so people can have a taste of some of it sooner, rather than waiting and giving them the whole finished thing later ... which they may not like the taste of. Imagine all that time working on something that wasn't to their taste. Put something out there, reflect on it, adjust it, put out another version of it, testing that… and onward.

Q: Are you much of an experimenter? Let me know in the comments below.