Michelle Gibbings provides five tips to help you prepare your team for the next 12 months and beyond.

The past 10 months are a stark reminder that the world is always full of surprises – some we want and some we don’t. While we can use tools like scenario planning and strategic foresight to try and predict the future, one of the best business planning tools is being adaptable and open to the unexpected. Here are five tips to help you prepare your business and your team for the next 12 months and beyond.

1. Welcome curiosity

In a world that is continually changing, it’s essential to be open to challenge and new ideas. Making progress comes in different ways. You can reinvent, tweak around the edges, improve the process or start from scratch. The possibilities are vast.

Often when people come up with new ideas, it is because they looked for a solution to something that annoyed them, they were curious, or they saw a better way to do something.

For example, Velcro was invented in the 1940s by a Swiss engineer, George de Mestral. It was a day-to-day activity – walking in the Alps – that ultimately resulted in this still-used invention. He paid attention, and he was curious. He saw how burrs stuck to his clothing and his dog’s fur when walking in the Alps and then took that curiosity one step further.

Encourage your team to be open to finding ideas in their typical working day. By identifying frustration or pain points, getting curious and noticing advances in other industries, they can spot opportunities for improvement.

This practice helps employees get comfortable with change, encourages them to play an important part and tangibly demonstrates the benefits from their involvement.

2. Build a learning culture

The skills and competencies your team requires now and into the future continue to evolve.

The World Economic Forum recently updated its perspective on the critical skills needed in a post-COVID-19 world. There are four:

1. Future literacy – which enables people to better imagine and make sense of the future.
2. Systems thinking – having the mindset to think, communicate and learn about the connected systems in which you live and work. Applying a systems thinking approach enables you to identify patterns, and then improve how you analyse problems and design the optimal approach to remedy.
3. Anticipation – how you learn to recognise possible futures and to use this developed consciousness to shape the decisions and actions you take today.
4. Strategic foresight (and future studies) – to broaden your exploration of alternative futures and better investigate the world view that underlies possible, plausible, probable and preferred futures.

Underpinning all these future skills are emotional intelligence, cognitive flexibility, problem-solving and critical reasoning. For these skills to flourish, they need an organisational culture where employees can challenge, explore, suspend judgement, and are supported to examine problems in different ways.

3. Identify the gaps

 Across your team, identify where there are strengths and gaps in the required capabilities of your business and how those elements will either hinder or enable your practice’s progress.

Once you’ve identified those gaps, you are then ready to develop the capability program that aims to close those gaps. The program of work may include short courses, online discussion forums, leadership programs and other development activities.

As part of this process, create opportunities for your team members to practice and embed their learning. This may be through on the job practice, volunteering, conducting an online demonstration or practising with a colleague; all of which help embed new knowledge and skills.

4. Create space for thinking

While there is specific learning that underpins all new skills, one common element is that they all require space and thinking time.

To thrive in an ever-changing landscape, employees need dedicated space to think, ponder, reflect and analyse, so ideas can arise. Finding that time, doesn’t happen by accident. It takes deliberate planning and conscious thought. It’s recognising the value that stems from what on the outside can appear like ‘doing nothing’.

5. Encourage accountability 

Being fit for the future of work isn’t just the responsibility of the business. Employees and leaders need to be ready and willing to adapt, dig deeper into their understanding, and take accountability for their learning and development.

Businesses play a crucial role in supporting their team members to identify their skill gaps, acquire new skills, and then internalise those latest capabilities, which not only benefit them but also their colleagues and the business itself.

Michelle Gibbings is a workplace expert, who works with global leaders and teams to help them get fit for the future of work. She is the author of ‘Step Up’, ‘Career Leap’, and ‘Bad Boss’.