Keith Ferrazzi says by embracing radical adaptability, high-return practices and crisis-agile responses, HR can help to introduce new and effective ways of working to boost innovation, productivity and business resilience.

The concept of the ‘future of work’ is a fallacy. It’s like saying, “I’ll learn how to be a good listener for my partner someday to benefit the future of my relationship”, or, “I might book a doctor’s appointment one day for the future of my health.”

Work is happening in the here and now. By thinking we can push lessons, change and transformation into the future, we are giving ourselves a free pass to sit on our hands and do nothing, and organisations are suffering as a result.

“We’ve been hearing future-of-work conversations for decades. It’s probably a 30-year-old idea,” says Keith Ferrazzi, Chairman of Ferrazzi Greenlight, entrepreneur, best-selling author and speaker at AHRI’s upcoming Convention in August. “But people still haven’t changed because they didn’t have to in the past.”

But now, they do. Business, environmental and social conditions are forcing work to change, which means executives and HR leaders can no longer kick the can down the road.

That’s why Ferrazzi and his co-author Kian Gohar call their new book, Competing in the New World of Work, a book about the ‘present of work’. This is an important re-frame, and it’s exactly how we need to start thinking when faced with challenges around new ways of working, changing employee expectations and more complex economic environments.

“I feel like some executives are clinging to old [methods] that are no longer working,” says Ferrazzi. “If we continue to [hold on] to old ways of working, we will continue to be exhausted.”

Some leaders are demanding employees come back to work. They’re looking over people’s shoulders to make sure work is getting done the ‘right’ way and they’re forcing prescriptive processes because “that’s how things have always worked around here”. But this approach helps no one. Instead, employers need to embrace ‘radical adaptability’, says Ferrazzi.

See HRM’s article on how to manage a micromanager.

The radical adaptability framework

Ferrazzi’s radical adaptability framework has four elements:

1. Foresight – “You’ve got to be constantly looking around corners. You also can’t simply focus on your own insights; use the wisdom of the crowd,” he says.

2. Agility – “[Agile teams] are constantly reassessing their paths. This is the absolute opposite of the laboured, bureaucratic work processes that many of these same organisations were practicing previously.

“Agile [work styles] push teams to ask critical questions like, ‘Where can we create value? How can this project keep getting better? Who else can we include to solve the problem?’”

3. Collaboration – “[This] has nothing to do with where employees show up for work. It has everything to do with how they show up.

“If we listen to the same echo chamber of voices in our heads and don’t question ‘Who else should we be listening to?’, ‘What information should we be gathering?’, ‘Who should be challenging us?’, we’ll end up on our heels in a crisis.”

4. Resilience – This is the glue keeping teams together, he says, and it needs to be modelled by its leaders.

There have been plenty of challenges in recent years that have warranted drastic change within the business community; some companies rose to the occasion, while others perished (think Blockbuster). Ferrazzi wants us to avoid making the same mistakes in these post-pandemic years.

“If we continue to [hold on] to old ways of working, we will continue to be exhausted.” – Keith Ferrazzi

“We hit this massive disruptive inflection point [in] the pandemic, and we were forced to do work differently for a period of time. But now, I see the elastic band of old ways of thinking and working snapping back.

“But now, we’re dealing with a global crisis again – in terms of the softening of the economy – so that provides a level of [impetus] to change how we work.”

But to take that step, HR leaders need to be curious about how they can change not only strategies about work, but mindsets too.

“When I talk about radical adaptability, it’s not just about changing products or pivoting to understand new markets, it’s about the importance and power of being curious about the way we work.”

This is a topic Ferrazzi will dive into more deeply when he visits from Los Angeles later this year for AHRI’s National Convention in Brisbane.

Learn how to become crisis-agile

Radical adaptability is a natural state that many teams and individuals experience when faced with a crisis. A fire is lit beneath them, forcing them to come up with workarounds for the challenges placed in their way.

“During the pandemic, we were focused on taking in information from wherever possible and adapting and analysing it over and over again. We were used to being curious as opposed to the typical nose-to-the-grindstone approach,” says Ferrazzi.

He calls this ‘crisis agility’, which is breaking down your work into “bite-sized sprints” with clear outcomes and autonomy given to the owners of each task. This allows you to change plans last-minute should you need to adapt to new circumstances without getting bogged down in month-long timelines or time-consuming preparation.

“Delta Airlines is a good example [of crisis-agility in action]. We were working with them to help re-engineer the airline industry. I was meeting with the Chief Operating Officer and their direct reports quarterly to talk about how to strategically reinvent travel.

“When the pandemic hit, Delta lost nearly 90 per cent of its revenue, so those quarterly agile sprints moved to twice a day. This idea of breaking work into short bursts means you can raise your head up from working and say, ‘What happened? What did we learn? What’s going wrong?’ You have a lot of transparency and candour.”

You might only work in a crisis-agile manner for a brief period while you get through a rough patch. Or, sometimes – as we experienced in 2020-2021 – it can be drawn out for longer.

“The most important thing for leaders and HR to ask themselves is, ‘What is the velocity of this change that we have to adopt? And what should the frequency of the check-ins look like?’
“Organisations often have big annual plans that end up drawing on for months and months.

“[We make the work] overly complex, it meanders all over the place… but if you have meetings every other week, talk about progress candidly and have the whole team offer insights, you can arrest failures well in advance [of them becoming bigger issues].”

Becoming sustainably agile

While crisis agility is an effective strategy in the short-term, teams can’t run on the smell of an oily rag forever. At a certain point in time, you need to learn how to shift your approach into more sustainable practices. You could argue that we’re at that point in time now.

Take Target, for example. When lockdowns prevented the usual swathes of shoppers from entering its stores on foot, it had to come up with an entirely new model of delivery. Within a matter of days (yes, days), the retail giant launched the first version of its mobile app.

This was possible largely due to its leadership team’s decision to invest in in-house software capabilities and training in leadership and change management in the years prior to the pandemic.

Detailing the process in an article for Forbes, Ferrazzi notes that it would have likely taken other companies months to develop the plans for an app before briefing it into their development team, let alone the entire app itself.

“With agile project management, business teams drive the planning and prioritisation of technology investments,” Ferrazzi wrote.

“Because [Target] had already started to learn agile ways of working, when the crisis hit, it was able to get on with it. They were able to work in short sprints,” he told HRM.

After moving to its digital strategy, it launched 30 new brands in 30 months using the Agile framework.

“In the past, [Target] was only able to achieve four brand launches in that same timeframe. That’s [multiplying] their results by almost 10,” he says. “Once you begin to run an Agile work cycle, you’ll become addicted to this way of working.”

“When I talk about radical adaptability, it’s not just about changing products or pivoting to understand new markets, it’s about the importance and power of being curious about the way we work.” – Keith Ferrazzi

Develop high-return practices

A common mistake business leaders make when trying to transform ways of working is taking a short-sighted approach, says Ferrazzi. They loosen the reins and abandon unhelpful bureaucracy when they feel they have no other option. But then, as the dust settles, those old, unhelpful processes and mindsets creep back in. Why? Because humans feel safest in their comfort zones.

“I’ve seen this in the mandate to come back to the office, because [some leaders] think that’s how we build culture. Well, I can prove to you – and we’ll do this when we’re together [at AHRI’s Convention] in August – that the reality is that companies that choose to reinvent the way they work improve their cultural attributes, sense of connectedness and bonding by doing work differently in a remote environment.”

HR needs to help leaders and managers reject old notions that can inadvertently prevent experimentation from taking place.

“It’s all about getting your teams to adopt new practices that yield better value and create a contagion of wanting to change the way we work. We call those high-return practices,” he says.

These practices might include:

• Embracing asynchronous collaboration. Recognise that collaboration doesn’t have to start with a meeting. We can be bolder and more inclusive when communicating asynchronously. To help achieve this, Ferrazzi suggests creating a decision board –  a document that people can feed into with information about the problem they’re trying to solve, the solutions they’re considering and the people who need to be involved.
  
  “If you can use other forms of collaboration outside of meetings, you can reduce the number of meetings you have by 30 per cent and improve the number of people who feel heard. In the average meeting of 12 people, four people feel they’ve been heard. But when you shift to asynchronous communication, ten people feel they’re heard.”

• Starting each meeting with a ‘sweet and sour’ check-in, where people share something sweet happening in their lives (perhaps a personal achievement) and something they’re struggling with. This is a great way to develop trust and break down walls, he says.

• Asking powerful questions, such as, ‘What’s not being said here?’ or ‘Whose perspective have we skipped over?’

“HR has not traditionally been responsible for changing the practices of work,” says Ferrazzi. “The negotiation of getting that responsibility is not going to come through a pitch deck. It will come from introducing these high-return practices.”

He gives the example of trying to get executive buy-in for a project.

“Instead of booking in meeting after meeting and hoping you get the executive sponsorship you need, do something different. Put a three-minute video together about where the project is heading, where it’s struggling, what you think you’ve achieved and what you want to do in the next month.

“Send that, along with a spreadsheet, to the executive sponsors and say, ‘There’s a three-minute video attached. You’re welcome to watch it and then shoot me a video back if that’s easier, or here’s a spreadsheet with a few questions that we have. Answer me how you like. The main thing is that we co-create the solution together.’

“That is a very powerful way of interacting with someone that they have never experienced before.” 

A longer version of this article first appeared in the May 2023 edition of HRM Magazine.

Don’t miss out on hearing from Keith Ferrazzi on the power of radical adaptability and more at this year’s AHRI National Convention and Exhibition in August. Book your spot today.