Forever Skills

The 12 Skills to Futureproof Yourself, Your Team and Your Kids

Kieran Flanagan, Dan Gregory

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780730359173
• eBook ISBN:
  9780730359180
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

What skills will matter most for work, business and life in the future? Where should you focus your energy and effort when the world is changing at an extraordinary rate? How can you future proof yourself, your organisation and your kids?

In this ground-breaking book Kieran Flanagan and Dan Gregory have interviewed hundreds of successful business people, educators, futurists, economists and historians to uncover the key skills that will always be critical to success in business and in life.

Where most futurists increase your sense of panic and anxiety with dystopian images of the not-too-distant future characterised by Artificial Intelligence (AI) taking our jobs, algorithms hacking our most private moments and Austrian-accented cyborgs raising our children, Kieran and Dan remind us that we need to look beyond the things changing around us and focus on the things that won't change within us.

• Identify the skills you have that will always be relevant
• Gain insight from business leaders, entrepreneurs, educators, sport leaders and more
• Learn why each skill matters, and how to make it stronger
• Discover the things that won't change as we inch toward the future

These 12 FOREVER SKILLS are designed to set you up for whatever the future may throw at you plus help you get more success in your work and life, today.

1
The Three Spheres of Change

We typically think of change primarily in terms of what’s changing. No great surprise, given our brains have evolved to view change as mostly threatening (often with good reason). So it stands to reason that we have a heightened sensitivity to the changes that occur in our environment, in technology and even in the moods of the people around us. We talk about it, hypothesise about it, evangelise it and complain about it. We try and predict it, manage it and keep up with it — and we often panic about it.

However, change has multiple dimensions and, consequently, multiple impacts. If we are to adequately prepare ourselves for an ‘unpredictable future’ we should take a more complete view of change. Our goal in this book is to broaden our emotional palette from one of fear and panic to one of calm acceptance and even inspiration.

Through our work and research in the worlds of professional training, business strategy leadership development and innovation consulting over the past decade, we have identified three critical areas of change. These three aspects inform how well people and businesses perform in an environment of change and also identify where their focus should be applied in terms of skills, strategy and investment in both time and resources.

We call these the Three Spheres of Change.

These Three Spheres of Change, while related, tend to drive significantly different outcomes, emotional responses and approaches. If used cleverly they give you a more complete view of change and how to manage it, drive it, lead it and not feel sick about it. Remember, one of our primary goals with this book is to remove much of the hype and panic around change so we can approach it with a more balanced perspective.

THE THREE SPHERES OF CHANGE™

The Three Spheres of Change are shown in figure 1.1:

1. what’s changing
2. what’s unchanging
3. what needs changing.

Figure 1.1 the Three Spheres of Change

The Three Spheres of Change are all important and should get equal attention. But they don’t. Rather, some tend to get the preferential treatment and focus of a favoured child in a 1970s television sitcom.

What’s changing is clearly the first and favourite child (the Marcia) and it gets the lion’s share of our focus. It’s bold, it’s in your face and it commands attention now. It is the most reactionary sphere and when we filter our views through it, if we’re not careful (and balanced by the other spheres), we can feel the need to take immediate action or else risk being left behind. This sphere drives business, technology, education and media who pump us up with worrying news about the importance of staying ahead. It is competitive.

What needs changing benefits from our bias towards the new and the excitement of fresh possibilities. It’s wide-eyed and promise-filled. This might be considered ‘the baby’ (the Cindy) of the change family. Used well, this sphere is proactive. It can help you not simply react but create the changes you want to see in your business, community or world. Entrepreneurs tend to spend quite a bit of time here.

What’s unchanging however, is the Jan Brady of change! It gets the least amount of attention when compared to the other two spheres, as it’s quieter and less demanding. It’s not as flashy as What’s changing or as beguiling as What needs changing, but it is crucial if you want a full view of change. It brings much-needed perspective. It does this by taking a broader view of change. It’s about human nature and our eternal needs and wants. It’s perhaps the most important sphere when it comes to navigating change and preparing ourselves for the future.

This ‘middle child’ of change tends to overlay quite nicely the ‘Not urgent but important’ quadrant of Dr Stephen Covey’s famous Urgent/Important Matrix, described in his self-help classic The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People. Like the ‘Not urgent but important’ quadrant, ‘What’s unchanging’ doesn’t seek immediate attention. However, an investment in it reduces fear and urgency and, in doing so, creates a sense of personal power and control.

Consequently, this is where we have focused most of our research and interviews for this book. There are already plenty of great books on the shelf about social trends and technological advances, and another significant proportion of recommended reading is devoted to innovation, new skills that will be required and how to make new change stick.

Forever Skills, however, aims to articulate what is worth keeping, nurturing and deepening.

So why is change such a big deal anyway?

FUTURE FEARS

Traditionally, human beings don’t do change well. In fact, our social and commercial histories are peppered with examples of resistance to change, from the Luddites protesting the rise of weaving machines in the early 1800s to the famously failed ‘New Coke’ experiment that almost destroyed one of the most powerful brands and businesses on the planet.

Human beings, it seems, are quite backward when it comes to moving forward.

Today, that sense of alarm is exacerbated by the overwhelming stream of ‘if it bleeds it leads’–style news reporting and ‘alternative facts’ flooding digital technology as never before. This can lead us to second-guess what we assume to be true and, in turn, drive us to be more paranoid and fearful than we once may have been.

We’ve conducted surveys around this fear of change with our audiences. While it does tend to increase as the average age of the audience rises, our surveys have demonstrated that the fear is actually quite universal. In fact, a simple shift in the frame we use to describe the nature of the change (for instance, looking at change in terms of housing affordability) can elicit a sense of dread even among digitally native Millennials and Gen Z’s.

But this is far more than just a social trend or an existential crisis. In The Art of Innovation, Apple’s former chief evangelist Guy Kawasaki notes that few market leaders have been able to ‘jump the curve’ and maintain leadership once a technological leap has been made.

Kawasaki observes that ice farmers in the frozen north failed to make the leap to factory-based ice production, who in turn failed to make the leap to the production and distribution of home refrigerators. This pattern has been replicated in many industries in the years since.

There are a number of reasons for this, not least of which is the fact that innovation requires a willingness and ability to kill the status quo. Not easy to do when you are actually part of the status quo and it also happens to pay your salary, cover your rent, take care of your children’s school fees and put food on your table.

The other, perhaps more sinister, force increasing this sense of trepidation about the future is the fact that there is a lot of money and power to be earned from fear. Entire industries thrive on this very human emotion and have little interest in dispelling fear or creating a sense of comfort about the future.

These include sectors such as insurance, politics, education, religion, the stock market, banking and even retail. Areas that in many ways play a positive role in society, but are also susceptible to using fear-based manipulation.

So if fear is often an incorrect (or unhelpful) response to the world of change, what are the alternatives?

EMBRACING NEW OPPORTUNITIES

Perhaps just as distracting as future fear is the temptation offered by new opportunities.

At first blush, this seems a far less dangerous preoccupation than fear. Surely the capacity to find opportunity in change is a good thing. Of course, it can be. However, as anyone who has ever sported a mullet or worn yoga pants for anything other than a yoga class can (and should) attest, not every trend or opportunity is worth investing in.

In much the same way that we can become distracted by what’s changing, we can also become enamoured with what could, or we believe should, change.

This is partly driven by the competitive desire, which many of us share, to be the first and to shape the future in our own image.

However, as Ohio State University’s Oded Shenkar suggests in his book Copycats: How smart companies use imitation to gain a strategic edge, being first to market is not always a recipe for success. In fact, Shenkar’s research found that as much as 97.8 per cent of the value of an innovation goes to the imitators, not the innovators. So much for being first to market!

Which is not to say that a mindset of openness to change or an awareness of opportunity is always a liability. Quite the contrary. However, in the same ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Three Spheres of Change
• Part 1 Creativity Skills
• Part 2 Communication Skills
• Part 3 Control Skills
• Conclusion
• Appendix A Looking back to look forward
• Appendix B Today’s workplace trends
• Appendix C Ten years of work and research
• The authors
• THE PODCAST
• Index
• End User License Agreement