Have you ever designed or created something and then presented it to someone (client or team) for approval or use – only for them to flat out reject it? (Queue sad music…)

This could be the innovative design for a long-standing product that your customers respond poorly to or even a well thought out project pitch to the rest of the business that falls flat.

There’s a key reason why this happens.
Understanding this is the difference between smoothly converting change resistant team members or clients and having door after door slammed in our faces (which we frankly don’t enjoy).

Here’s the reason.

The highly contested book, ‘The Selfish Gene’ by Richard Dawkins raises many eyebrows (including mine), but one thing the book has going for it is this…

The idea that human beings are wired to serve and protect themselves at the genetic and physiological level.

Many of us are well aware of that.
Without this sense and need to ‘self-preserve’ – we wouldn’t exercise our reflexes to get out of the way of a moving car or release adrenalin at the sound of a roaring lion.

This is also true of our response to change, transformation and even the question ‘should we have meatball pizza or vegetable lasagne for dinner tonight?’

Why?
Because there’s a key question we all ask ourselves when we:

• Hear about our team’s brand new reporting system
• Discover a job opening we’ve been hoping for
• Consume a piece of content on social media

It’s…
‘What’s In It For Me’?

If we could design strategy, content, products and services with the sole understanding that each and every person who receives it is asking:

‘What’s In It For Me’?

We would:

1. Use relatable stories – tell stories where your recipient feels like the main character.
2. Use the word ‘you’ and ‘we/us’ more and ‘me’ a little less – truth is that your client/team don’t care as much about ‘you’ as you might think.
3. Ask – you’re great at your job, but you’re not a mind reader. Ask your change recipient ‘how’ they wish to be lead or served and then leverage those insights to drive change.

Keeping this principle in mind and using it both in the workplace and your personal settings is key to ongoing success as members of an ever-shifting workforce.

So your challenge for the coming week?
Every time you try to convince someone of something, stop and ask how you can make it crystal clear what’s in it for them.

Resources:
Dawkins, R. (2006). The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press.

Got some #UnLearning to do?

Known to her awesome clients as ‘The UnLearning Lady’, Zanele Njapha, author of today’s Tuesday Tip, is the world’s leading voice on using key unlearning principles to help teams let go of outdated ways of working & transition successfully into exciting new ways of seeing, doing & being!

Zanele can support your team through her ‘ReImagine: UnLearn & ReLearn’ keynote that can also be delivered as an interactive workshop’.

 

This week’s combination of resources and articles offers insights and practical resources to help you equip yourself with the skill required in these disruptive times, as well as for the Future of Work.

• Making work wonderful- Graeme was interviewed by Bob Westrope on a fascinating podcast called ‘Boom! We broke it, let’s fix it’ You can listen here.
• Building a culture of learning at work. Read more here
• Winning through the 2020s. Read here
• Diversity in Schools – a conversation for white parents with Buhle Dlamini and Graeme Codrington. Listen to episode 15 of the Future Smart Parent podcast here.
• Stress is here to stay. You can’t get rid of it, but you can learn to manage it. Let us know if you’d like more information on our latest keynote presentation. Dealing with Stress and Burnout

We’d love to have a conversation with you if any of the above topics resonated with you. Our team continues to help our clients around the world to prepare for tomorrow, today.

TRANSCIPT

This is throw forward Thursday. I’m recording this in the second week of April 2022, when devastating rains have hit the Eastern province of South Africa, KwaZulu Natell, my home country. Every week I look at the future. I look at something which is probably going to happen sometime in the future and invite us to think about how it might impact us today and what we need to do in the light of what might happen. Obviously, climate change and extreme weather is a constant theme as we look ahead at the future.

It’s one of the massive forces that we know is going to impact the world around us. I have very little time for climate change and extreme weather deny us. It’s just ridiculous to deny what we can see with our own eyes. And this past week in South Africa, we have experienced extensive rain, and there has been flooding, dramatic flooding in the province of Kwazula Natal. Over 400 people are dead, thousands are missing, and there are billions of South African rains worth of damage to infrastructure.

I know that extreme weather has hit other parts of the world. I know that there are plenty of examples from around the world that we can look to and point to say these are the real world effects of shifting climate and changes in weather conditions. But of course, when it hits your home country, when it comes close to home, it has a bigger effect that’s simply being human. And so this week, I want to just remind us that this is not actually a future conversation. This is a now conversation with temperatures over the last month in both the North and the South poles higher than they’ve ever been before, with massive ice shelves falling off of Antarctica, which will over the next few weeks and months, ripple out to have impact on sea levels and to impact again the weather patterns of the world.

This is no longer something that we can say, well, sometime in the future, there will be an impact. We know that there will be real world impacts every day as we look at the news. It’s time it’s time for each of us to do more than just the minimum we can do to think about the climate and to think about the world around us and the natural resources that we use and abuse all the time. It’s time for each of us, for our companies that we work for, for the countries that we live in to take these issues much more seriously than we do.

What can you do to mitigate against extreme weather?

What can you do to reduce your carbon footprint and your impact on the world?

What can we do together? We need to do these things.

Now a sober reminder from South Africa to the rest of the world that we are going to see these news reports over and over again in many parts of the world.

It’s time to act now as always make sure that you join me every Thursday or this week.A little bit delayed as we were dealing with the consequences of this devastation in South Africa.

Join me as we look at the future and consider the implications for our world today.

I’ll see you next week. Bye.

Graeme Codrington, is an internationally recognized futurist, specializing in the future of work. He helps organizations understand the forces that will shape our lives in the next ten years, and how we can respond in order to confidently stay ahead of change. Chat to us about booking Graeme to help you Re-Imagine and upgrade your thinking to identify the emerging opportunities in your industry.

For the past two decades, Graeme has worked with some of the world’s most recognized brands, travelling to over 80 countries in total, and speaking to around 100,000 people every year. He is the author of 5 best-selling books, and on faculty at 5 top global business schools.

This week’s combination of resources and articles offers insights and practical resources to help you equip yourself with the skill required in these disruptive times, as well as for the Future of Work.

• Implement the 8 critical steps to keeping your kids safer and saner online. Sign up here.
• Tuesday Tip: Three types of innovation (and and how to get them all) Click here to read
• How to present remotely to a diverse audience. Read here
• Throw Forward Thursday: The Metaverse. [Graeme Codrington] Read here
• Great Expectations: Making Hybrid Work Work Click here to read.

We’d love to have a conversation with you if any of the above topics resonated with you. Our team continues to help our clients around the world to prepare for tomorrow, today.

TRANSCIPT

The Metaverse is rubbish, at least in the way that people are imagining it and hyping it up. Now, my name is Graeme Codrington and this is Throw Forward Thursday. Come with me to the future and a vision of what we don’t want the Metaverse to be. Virtual and augmented realities are the technologies that underlie the future of the Metaverse. And there are some really good use case scenarios for virtual and augmented or extended reality.

I think games and entertainment and interactive fun that we can have with each other are the best use case. There are some great use cases in medicine and engineering and some technical aspects as well. But the initial hype around the Metaverse at the moment is really coming from retailers and employers. The future of buying and the future of work. You know, the money people.

Facebook’s big pitch for the Metaverse is that we will be surrounded by screens and apps that help us improve our workplace productivity and buy things more easily. But that just sounds like the world I currently live in. I have the internet with 5G and WiFi all around me. I have a smartphone with all the apps that I need, and I can purchase anything I’d like via my phone. Why would I need this additional layer of virtual reality?

There’s a huge failure of imagination here. I mean, have a look at what Walmart suggested to us. Their virtual reality shopping experience might look like. I literally have to walk through the aisles of a shop, reaching my virtual handover and taking products off the shelf. And the shelves are stocked with multiple products.

It’s literally just a duplication, a replication in virtual reality of their physical store. Walmart are not the only companies to do this, as the first steps that people are taking into the Metaverse are just to put their physical presence into an online environment. Hsbc is buying plots of land in Facebook’s Metaverse so that they can build bank branches. Probably the most soul destroying thing you can do as a human being is to physically go to a bank branch. Why on Earth would I want to do that in a virtual reality environment?

I experience this quite a lot in my world, which is speaking at conferences and events. There’s an app called Verbella, for example, which people could hire out and build an entire conference. In this virtual island, you’d have to spend the first ten or 15 minutes creating an avatar of yourself. Then you arrive at reception and now you’ve got to walk around this environment. You can go down to the beach and there’s a beach volleyball court, there’s a soccer field.

And then you’ve got to walk from building to building. There’s a big auditorium, and then you’ve got to walk out of that building to some of the breakaway rooms all the time walking between these things. When we had conferences, people were continually getting lost in the system. We’d have to WhatsApp them separately outside the system, saying, Where are you? We’re trying to have a meeting now in the auditorium and someone said, I’m stuck on the beach volleyball court and I don’t know how to get to the main auditorium.

Where is the breakout? Room seven. Why would we do this to ourselves? Why would I want to build an avatar of myself in a virtual world if I can be anywhere and anything I choose to be a Dragon, I want to be able to fly or hyperspace somewhere. I don’t want to have to walk around a shopping centre or a conference venue pretending to be myself.

When I say it again, I could be a Dragon. That’s what I really want. Now, as it happens, the videos I’ve just shown you are from 2017 may be proving the point that this metabolic concept is a bit of a stalled concept and certainly is a failure of imagination. Mark Zuckerberg’s Vision when he launched Meta as a company in the Metaverse. His vision was to bring the office into your home, complete with all of your colleagues walking past your desk and distracting you as they wavered you.

And even worse, allowing your bus to pop in to your virtual office, which would be located in your home, for your bus to pop into your home unannounced at any time. I think the hardest part of working from home for most people was not having physical access to their colleagues, was getting that Zoom fatigue because you were engaging with your colleagues via a camera and being fatigued by that virtual environment, also being a little bit concerned about what that camera was looking at into your house.

We’ve all had to rearrange our houses to make sure that that camera doesn’t see the things that people shouldn’t see in your house and that we don’t get distracted by work and work doesn’t get distracted by us. What Mark Zuckerberg’s Vision does is takes the very worst parts of working from home and literally melts it into your face, literally immerses you in the worst part of working from home, only an out of touch tech boss would think that this was a great idea.

Give you another example, we’ve had virtual reality and augmented reality, let’s call them Metaverse concerts during Lockdown, which lots of people have enjoyed. And it’s been lovely to immerse yourself in an experience where you can feel like, well, what do you feel like? You feel like you’re in the audience at a concert and then you realise you’re not. Why would you do that to yourself? If I can be in the Metaverse and go to a concert, I remind you I would like to go as a Dragon and I don’t want to stand in row 27 with a whole lot of other people screaming and shouting around me.

I’d like to stand on the stage, I’d like to play the guitar, I’d like to be on the sound disc. I’d like to be able to fly around the conference venue. What we are experiencing at the moment is a complete failure of imagination. Yes, the technologies are fantastic. Virtual reality and augmented reality are definitely here to stay and we are going to see them being used in technical environments, as I’ve said already and I think in entertainment and gaming especially.

But they’re really going to be used when they either create a data layer in augmented reality that we don’t have access to in the physical world or they completely remove us into a fantasy world where we can be Dragons if we want to be. But to recreate the physical world and just allow us to enter it virtually I don’t think that that’s something that human beings really want and certainly they don’t want to immerse themselves into it for hours and hours on end.

And yet that is precisely what the picture of the meta verse is from most retailers and officers at the moment, a failure of imagination. And until we fix that, we’re going down a dead end path. Those companies that are buying land in Metaverse environments.

Well, you do realise that whatever the marketing says about it, that land is infinite, that land is on a digital platform somewhere and can be doubled, tripled or increased by a million times and anything that is infinitely available should be free. But hey, you’ve got to spend your marketing budget on something, don’t you?

Good luck.

Throw forward Thursday. This week is to a future we don’t want. A future I don’t think will happen. The Metaverse as we’re currently thinking about it is not a place we should go. Come back next Thursday when we jump into the future once again and see what we find there.

Next week we’re going to be talking about another aspect of the future of work and big tech companies, companies and what they’re doing and shouldn’t be doing with your personal data.

I’ll see you next week.

Graeme Codrington, is an internationally recognized futurist, specializing in the future of work. He helps organizations understand the forces that will shape our lives in the next ten years, and how we can respond in order to confidently stay ahead of change. Chat to us about booking Graeme to help you Re-Imagine and upgrade your thinking to identify the emerging opportunities in your industry.

For the past two decades, Graeme has worked with some of the world’s most recognized brands, travelling to over 80 countries in total, and speaking to around 100,000 people every year. He is the author of 5 best-selling books, and on faculty at 5 top global business schools.

We say “we need innovation”. But what type of innovation do we actually need?

Earlier this month, Keith Coats and Graeme Codrington from TomorrowToday Global visited and presented at the Dubai Expo.

It was billed as “the greatest show on earth”, and it didn’t disappoint – once you understood what it was trying to do.

It wasn’t meant to be a science-fiction vision of the future, but rather an inspiration for a world we can build together now. It focused on “opportunity, mobility, and sustainability” as three core themes, with 192 different exhibition pavilions to delight (and overwhelm) the senses (see Graeme’s video review of the Expo here).

This decision to focus on the “now” and the “possible” by Dubai Expo highlights a key issue with innovation. We can often be trapped into thinking that innovation means we have to come up with massive, bold ideas that turn our world upside down and change all the rules of the game.

Of course, if we find a breakthrough innovation like that, it’s amazing. For example, Google changed the way we found things online and made the internet accessible, and then also pioneered a model of giving services away for free in exchange for advertising. It seems obvious now – and of course, everyone is doing it, but it was a breakthrough at the time.

The problem is: these types of innovations are incredibly rare, hard to find, and normally very expensive to implement and get to market. To get this level of innovation an organisation needs to create a culture that encourages ridiculous ideas, that is not limited by current constraints, that rewards divergent thinking and that embraces a diversity of approaches. This is not easy to do.

A second type of innovation is incremental. Or, more accurately the power of the aggregation of marginal gains. Top teams that dominate their sports season after season don’t do so by making one big jump ahead and then staying there. Their competitors see what they’ve done, copy them and catch up. So, the top teams focus on constant, small improvements. A fractional improvement each week quickly compounds into a competitive advantage over the course of a whole season.

In business, this is what the agile methodology aims to deliver. And that’s innovation, too. The way to get this type of innovation in your business is less about trying to identify the correct next steps, and much more about building a culture of continuous improvement, fast feedback and agility.

A third approach to innovation falls in between the first two: it asks which bits of a future vision we can deliver today, and focuses on experimentation as the means of working out how to get from where we are to a possible future. This is what Expo 2020 was aiming to do.

Keith identified a fantastic example of this at the Emirates Airlines pavilion, where you could experience a Virtual Reality simulation of the future of flight. See Keith’s on-the-spot report of it here.

There must be ways for airlines to incorporate healthy flying habits into their service offering right now, even if we won’t have the smart seats Keith speaks of for a few years yet. Helping their customers to feel better and be healthier while flying would surely be a competitive advantage any airline would be able to use to good effect right now? The question is: what experiments could airlines try now to deliver this value to customers?

Ideally, your organisation should set itself up with processes, systems, and a culture that will allow for all three of these types of innovation to be common place. We’ve briefly touched on what organisations do to nurture these three types of innovation – what is your organisation focusing on, what do you measure and how could you improve in each of these areas?

As always – we’d be happy to chat with your team to help you unpack this further.

Best wishes,

 

 

This week’s combination of resources and articles offers insights and practical resources to help you equip yourself with the skill required in these disruptive times, as well as for the Future of Work.

• Throw Forward Thursday: Dubai Expo – Head, Heart and Hands.[Graeme Codrington]
• Take charge of your lifetime of career transitions: Watch Zanele Njapha/ TEDx Talk here.
• Elevate Podcast: Conversations with Women changing the face of Business. Episode 301: Taking the Road Less Traveled, with Zanele Njapha. Listen to Podcast.
• Introducing the bionic organisation – Read here.
• Future Smart Parent Podcast:

We’d love to have a conversation with you if any of the above topics resonated with you. Our team continues to help our clients around the world to prepare for tomorrow, today.

TRANSCIPT

It’s Throw Forward Thursday. My name is Graeme Codrington and this is our final report from Dubai Expo 2022. Weeks ago, I spent a few days at the Dubai Expo and it was a remarkable experience. They called it the Greatest show on Earth and I’m really glad that I was able to see it before it finished. There are obviously memories all over the internet and some professionally developed and official videos of Dubai Expo 2020 that you can find online.

I will put links to some of the best ones in the notes for this video or podcast and I highly recommend that you go and have a look at them. But what I’d like to do as a final reflection for you here in Throw Forward Thursday is to look at my first and last moments at Dubai Expo because as I was going through my videos, trying to pick out what I’d like to share with you these two videos and these two moments really did stand out for me and, well, I’ll explain as we go along.

The first moment I arrived, I landed in the morning very early in the morning, going to my hotel, got settled in, changed, hit the Metro, which took about half an hour to get out to the Expo site, got out of the Metro train, walked through the security settings and walked down into the main auditorium called the Alwasal Theatre. And as it happened, there was a children’s show that was on at the moment and children were singing. And literally as I walked into the auditorium, I’m not editing this or cherry picking something. Well, have a look at what I experienced.

I had come to Dubai Expo ready to engage my brain, ready to see the future. And within the first minute I had engaged my heart “We Are the World”, sung by a group of young people who were showcasing their talent for the world to see. It was perfect, actually. It took me a few more hours to realize what had happened. I kind of stood there amazed and enjoying the moment and then said, Right, Graeme, let’s get your head in the game. And if I went up the mobility roadway and dived into a few of the pavilions and sort of getting excited about the technology.

But I realized and I’ve reflected on this two weeks ago in the Throw Forward Thursday video that by lunchtime I had realized that the Expo was not what I thought it was. I thought it was going to be a science fiction vision of the technology driven future, whereas what it was and I think this is what it was intended to be, was a picture of what’s actually possible now and what we not just could be doing, but should be doing in the three themes opportunity, mobility, and I think especially sustainability.

And it was both a head and a heart experience. And I think at the end it was supposed to be a hands experience as well, with an invitation for us to actually do something. And while we are the world to build the world we want to live in, not to wait for somebody else to do that, not to just dream about, hopefully, maybe sometime in the future, but to actually do it, build this world that we want to live in.

The second reflection, and I hope this is not too self indulgent, but was as I left the Expo for the last time, on that main strip between the Owassell auditorium and the Metro train station that takes you out, there were these two heads. They were just heads during the daytime. But as I left in the evening, I realized that they had been lit up with multiple lights that had various patterns and displays on them. They weren’t just heads, they were displays of art. But there they were, these two heads that in the nighttime came alive with artistry and beauty, science and beauty. Well, let me just allow myself in the moment a little bit emotional actually, I think to just reflect on what I was seeing in the moment.

So that’s it. For my first day at Expo 2020 to Dubai. It’s been full and hot and behind me there’s a concert going on in the main auditorium which sounds fantastic. And then as I just switched my gaze a little bit, I realized that at every corner, at every moment, behind every tree, literally, there’s something else to experience here at the Expo. It’s been a day that’s been filled with experiences.

With art, with culture.

With humanity, a lot of sustainability, a lot of history as well as the future.

I’ve loved it.

It’s been great to be here. And I’ll be back on Wednesday to carry on being your window on the future. See you then.

Listening back to that sounds like there might have been a bit of alcohol involved. There wasn’t. Maybe a hotter day in the desert. Sun, of course, had affected me, but affected me is what Dubai Expo did not just impacted me, but affected me. And I think that that was the point.

I don’t think I can transfer that to you in a simple video like this. I think that the Expo was designed to be an experience that people have. So I hope that what you do is put yourself in a place where you can experience what the world not only can be, but should be. If we apply ourselves to solutions and outcomes and development that will ensure that we live in a sustainable world for all of us. A world that is good for everybody to live in, that’s really what we try and do at tomorrow, today. And that’s one of the pieces of the puzzle that these Throw forward Thursday videos are supposed to be they’re not supposed to be. Wow. Visions of the future, whether they are positive or negative, in a sense they are. But the purpose is not just to push your brain into the future and leave it there.

The purpose is to take you to tomorrow and then bring you back to today. That’s why we called our company tomorrow, today and that’s what we as a team try and do all day every day is help our clients get a picture of what can and should be and then work out well, what do we need to do about it today?

So thank you for coming along with me to the Dubai Expo for the last few weeks. I hope you’ve enjoyed some of my experiences of the Dubai Expo if you’d like more insights, if you’d like to get some more detail about some of the things that we saw while we were there and some of the leadership lessons that emerged from it, please feel free to contact us and we will make sure that we send you more info and respond to your particular of questions.

Otherwise, I’ll see you again next week in the Throw forward Thursday studio where we’ve got a little miniseries starting on the future of work.

Bye.

Graeme Codrington, is an internationally recognized futurist, specializing in the future of work. He helps organizations understand the forces that will shape our lives in the next ten years, and how we can respond in order to confidently stay ahead of change. Chat to us about booking Graeme to help you Re-Imagine and upgrade your thinking to identify the emerging opportunities in your industry.

For the past two decades, Graeme has worked with some of the world’s most recognized brands, travelling to over 80 countries in total, and speaking to around 100,000 people every year. He is the author of 5 best-selling books, and on faculty at 5 top global business schools.

This week’s combination of resources and articles offers insights and practical resources to help you equip yourself with the skill required in these disruptive times, as well as for the Future of Work.

• TomorrowToday rebrands as Schrödinger’s cat. Read about it here
• Throw Forward Thursday: Dubai Expo Robotics 
• How to Have Both Money & Impact As An Entrepreneur on episode 40 of Future-Fit Fridays. Listen here
• Watch “Part 1 – Why Are There Only 7 Of Us?” – 7 Black Executive Creative Directors have a frank conversation about the way things are #DiversityAndInclusion. Watch here
• Stress is here to stay. You can’t get rid of it, but you can learn to manage it. Let us know if you’d like more information on our latest keynote presentation. Dealing with Stress and Burnout.

We’d love to have a conversation with you if any of the above topics resonated with you. Our team continues to help our clients around the world to prepare for tomorrow, today.