Congratulations, You’re Leading Organizational Transformation—Now What?
By Ben King Managing Partner, Reaching The Future Faster, LLCContributors Bill O’Connor, Kyle Hermans, and Nick Davis
“We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.”
—Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft
In recent months, we have all seen a huge increase in the amount of news discussing the impact of new technologies like AI powered ChatGPT-4, CRISPR, and the Metaverse. The pace of change continues to accelerate causing huge market shifts, and technologies such as these amplify this acceleration exponentially. While trying to navigate these market shifts global leaders are also having to contend with the impact of the events of the past few years—including a global pandemic, collapse of the world’s supply chains, extreme weather events and the outbreak of war—all of this leading to increased uncertainty about the future and how we as leaders navigate our way ahead successfully.
The COVID-19 crisis caused unprecedented health and economic hardships, but also spurred a wave of global innovation that enabled 10 years of technological progress to happen in just two years. The pandemic clearly showed that many organizations had the power to adapt to a changing environment faster than they thought. The question now is, how do we as leaders take this lesson and continue to operate in a more nimble and flexible manner.
Through our research and work with the most innovative brands in the world, we at Faster Future have created a list of mindsets that new Innovation Leaders must enable for themselves and their teams. Our goal with this framework is to give structure to these trends, and show how you can help move your organization from a slow and steady pace of execution, to an accelerated and nimble approach that will keep you ahead of the competition for years to come.
This proactive approach to future-focused leadership will unlock hidden opportunities and aid you in building future value for your customers. It will also ensure you and your teams are focused on the areas that matter most, and are measuring outcomes vs. outputs in your innovation initiatives.
From Unnovation to Innovation Mindset
Developing the plan for how an organization navigates to the future used to fall directly to the CEO, and perhaps be supported by a head of innovation or strategy. Today, the acceleration of technology, changing market conditions, global politics, and more is forcing the need for us all to become Future Ready leaders with adaptive, creative, and problem solving mindsets.
How does one build these capabilities and mindsets? We believe that by following our ten mindsets below, leaders can begin to build these skills, and then lead others to do the same. Of course not all leaders and teams start from the same place, so our framework allows you to rate yourself and/or teams to see which areas you are already performing well at, and where you might need some more focus in the future.
Navigating successfully to our fast approaching future requires discipline, foresight, intuition, and a deep understanding of the technologies and trends that are impacting us today and in the future.
Here are the mindsets that we believe will help get you there:
Each one of these mindset shifts has a description below and a technique on how you might address them. As a team, rate yourselves, and see where your results come out. We at Faster Future work with our clients through dynamic workshops and leadership courses to build their skills in these areas, so we know building capabilities in these mindsets is effective at helping leaders navigate their way to ahead successfully.
Finally, you can not see the future coming if you do not look up, and you can not understand what is coming if you do not look around. Leaders must know where to find the best insights and how to use them to take fast action. Organizations that invest in ongoing unlearning, relearning, and reskilling to build a future-ready workforce will lead the way.
Ready to take innovation further in your organization?
Faster Future specializes in cutting-edge technologies and mapping the uncertain future ahead.
We help leading brands, including over half of the Fortune 200, and various US Government agencies to understand the technologies impacting the world today and help them build future-focused strategies to navigate uncertain times ahead. Learn more about how to develop your own future leadership and vision, or schedule a free consultation today.
