Future-proof – prepare yourself and your customers for constant change

In 2010, five-year-old Tesla Motors had been making cars – to be precise, a car, the $ 130,000 luxury Roadster – for only two years. They had sold a total of 1,500. Auto industry insiders scoffed at the idea that electric cars were adequate, let alone superior to internal combustion cars, and ridiculed the company’s plans. for autonomous control.

Ten years later, Tesla’s market cap exceeds that of the next ten automakers in the world combined. Their number of units sold made them not only the number one producer of electric vehicles, but the Model 3 was the best-selling car in all nature in California in the first quarter of 2020.

This is what it means to live in a world of technological upheaval. When Hemingway’s character Mike Campbell says in The sun is also rising that he went bankrupt “In two ways: gradually, then suddenly”, he also described how today’s disruption creeps in imperceptibly, then becomes overwhelming. Less than two years ago, Tesla was nearly bankrupt and largely laid off.

Are your business coaching clients positioned to be the equivalent of the next Tesla, or now faltering competitors left in their dust? Every industry has the potential to be disrupted in the same way; there are at least ten Tesla-type companies disrupting other industries in similar proportions. COVID-19 has given us all a taste of what exogenous disruption looks like, but the slower but inexorable disruption of technology, in particular, artificial intelligence, will have a much greater impact. As AI grows exponentially – deep learning models are doubling in size on average every three months now – our ability to keep up will be so limited in comparison that it will make large-scale disruption the new normal. . Imagine the equivalent of COVID every year!

Training a person not only to cope but also to thrive in the face of disruption is a worldview shifting journey that can rebuild the very foundations of their career identity. Just as Navy Seals are trained for six months to deal with unpredictable threats, helping someone adjust to the carpet retiring from their business can be a life-changing transformation.

The International Coaching Federation (ICF) defines coaching as a partnership in a creative and stimulating process that inspires a person to maximize their personal and professional potential. The coaching process often opens up untapped sources of imagination, productivity and leadership. When you work with a professional coach, you are embarking on the path to greater personal and professional growth.

Coach for the future
Sustainability is the process of becoming resilient in the face of disruption, and we tackle it both in the business and in the individual, as each has different needs that shape the ecosystem in which they both reside. We apply the CHANGE process to companies:

1. Understand disruption: Find out what complexity, chaos and exponential progress mean for their world, industry and business;
2. Recruit change agents: whether inside or outside, identify people who can act as champions of change;
3. Antifragility assessment (term of Nassim Nicholas Taleb): assess their ability to strengthen themselves through disorder;
4. New vision: How the vision and mission of the company must evolve to be anti-fragile;
5. Generate KPIs based on speed, not position: too many KPIs are static. Think of a balance sheet: it’s a snapshot that says nothing about the movement. Retool reports to indicate rates of change;
6. Everything is on the table: To be successful, a company must be ready to reconsider everything, starting with its very identity.

When we consulted a boutique bank in Southern California, their executives expressed their goal of acquiring younger customers. Thanks to the CHANGE model, they realized that their customer representatives were almost all outside the age range of customers they wanted to attract. This awareness led to a greater awareness of the hidden assumptions that shaped important decisions.

When we support an individual to become more resilient and innovative within a CHANGING company, we apply the RIPPLE process to identify areas to be addressed:

1. Rarouse fears: people are afraid of the unknown and are afraid of becoming irrelevant or unable to cope. Lay them bare and examine which ones are real. They can have what Martin Seligman called learned helplessness, depriving them of the ability to respond to challenges;
2. IIdentity: People can associate themselves with a role or activity (“I am a ____; it’s just who I am”). Help them find a deeper identity than what they are doing. The circle of leaders^[1] can be used to help a client move from a reactive identity to a creative identity;
3. Pobjective: recreate their individual objective and connect it to the company’s mission;
4. Pprejudices or prejudices: do they have prejudices, such as a confirmatory prejudice, which blind them to disruptions and to opportunities / innovations? 360 ° assessments can help identify certain blind spots;
5. THEwin: help them move from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. How can they move to more proactive levels of the innovation diffusion curve? The Toyota kata^[2] can be used to facilitate this movement through cycles of continuous evolution;
6. Einvolve situational awareness. The disruption demands our constant attention and reassessment. The VUCA and Cynefin models contribute to this (see boxes).
7. It is important to realize that even when the future of an individual’s work is optimistic, when the application of AI promises a revolutionary change towards more efficient and fulfilling work, this shift in all kind on such a scale can terrify them. The fear of becoming irrelevant or fired is a common place to start RIPPLE.
8. Neurolinguistic programming chronology techniques are useful throughout this process, in particular, future rhythm—Asking the client to place themselves in a future (initially scary unknown), to identify and solve problems; then after the coaching, revisit the future in their more powerful identity.

Ready or not, here’s the future
Preparing for disruption is no longer an option for members of companies who want to survive. As a coach you are probably familiar with the The pyramid of needs, a pyramid model asserting that physical needs (food, etc.) must be met before an individual can grow in emotional, social, etc. expression, resulting in self-realization : to reinvent oneself. We affirm that in the face of the rupture, the pyramid is inverted for organizations: that the very survival of the company depends on its driving principles of transcendence, on themselves and on the company.

Not all companies will disrupt the world with a lightning-fast passage like that of Tesla Motors; but all businesses, like it or not, now live in an ecosystem shaped by dramatic disruption. Just as businesses must learn that their survival can now depend on the self-examination and transformation that coaching can bring, coaches must understand the dynamics of technological forces transforming our world. The future calls on us all to become the best of ourselves.

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The innovation diffusion curve

Everett Rogers showed how some Early adopters react to new developments first, then more and more people join the train at increasing rates until the curve stabilizes as the remaining laggards join in.

DIAGRAM taken from Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations (public domain)

VUCA

The US Army War College developed the VUCA interpretive model of a world whose threats have radically changed after the Cold War. In a corporate environment, the steps and questions for an executive within them are:

• Volatility: the existing dynamic is changing more radically than before. How to store resources and act faster?
• UUncertainty: Changes in ways that have unforeseeable consequences. How can they collect more information to reduce uncertainty?
• VScomplexity: changes in so many ways that it is overwhelming to try to understand them. How can they be resources that can see the big picture?
• Aambiguity: changes so as to create confusion. How can they test and measure their new world?

Cynefin

The Cynefin frame (from the Welsh word for habitat) developed by Dave Snowden at IBM Global Services describes five areas that any individual or business can encounter. Learning to recognize and respond appropriately to each area helps them make better decisions.

• Clear: “Known Knowns.” The situation is stable and established practices are the best answer.
• Complicated: “Known unknowns. »The environment is difficult to analyze and negotiate, requiring in-depth knowledge.
• Complex: “Unknown unknown”. Cause and effect are impenetrable; there are no right answers.
• Chaotic: The cause and effect are unclear, and seizures abound. Strong leadership is needed to create order and action.
• Confused: There is no clarity as to which area applies. Leaders need to break the situation down into parts that can be addressed in individual areas.

Cynefin is primarily used to consider the dynamics of situations, decisions, perspectives, conflicts and changes in order to reach consensus for decision making under uncertainty.

Pierre Dussault Eng is a certified professional coach (PCC) and leadership consultant / gestion.nextwaveinstitute.org

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pierredussaulting/