Today’s insights are brought to you by my colleague and global futurist, Graeme Codrington.
We are only a few weeks into 2023, and already it’s clear that this is yet another year in a long line of years filled with disruption.
We are going to need more than just resilience and agility to get through 2023 – we are going to need to be antifragile and human-centered to make the most of this year.
And to quote Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the book by the same name ‘AntiFragile’ – The antifragile is something that will gain from disorder – it gets stronger under pressure and improves during disruption.
If this sounds like something that could be valuable to you and your team, then take a listen to the short video below for how you go beyond resilience and become antifragile to conquer 2023!
Graeme Codrington explains what this means, and why it is so important in the short video below.
For more information, and for some ideas about how to kickstart and conquer 2023, do take a look at Kickstart2023.com
TRANSCRIPT
If we’re going to conquer this year, we need to move well beyond just being resilient and agile. There’s way too much disruption in our system. If you’re in New Zealand, I hope you’re enjoying your new prime minister. Same in Brazil, by the way. If you’re in the United Kingdom, I hope you’ve downloaded the app to know when the public servants are on strike.
I hope you’ve been able to catch the trains, the buses and get a doctor’s appointment if you need it, and to be fair, it’s not just the United Kingdom. There are more public servants on strike all around the world than they’ve been in a long time. Russia is still engaged in an unnecessary war and our supply chains are disrupted. There’s chaos everywhere.
Extreme weather is causing droughts and floods and opposite parts of the world, and, of course, in America, we’ve got Chinese weather balloons being shot out of the sky and other unidentified flying objects, it’s a little bit crazy right now. In your environment, in your world, in your industry. I’m sure that the disruption is continuing. How do we respond to that?
Well, unfortunately, in some environments, the response has been bad. I think the airline industry is a good example of this. It’s fragile and it’s not dealing with the disruptive forces, it’s not dealing with the ongoing change, maybe as well as it should be.
A fragile system. If you hit it, it breaks and it battles to recover. If you drop it, it smashes. There are a lot of examples of that over the last few years and now so what we think we need is resilience. We need the ability to take a hit, we need the ability to deal with whatever the environment is that we find ourselves in, to be able to just get on with it. If you get knocked down, you got to get back up again, thanks to Chamber Wambo, when none of us can just say that we got to sing it and then say, and nothing going to keep us down. Right.
But we’ve got to go beyond just mere resilience. We’ve got to get to something called antifragility. Resilience is not the opposite of fragile, resilience just means not fragile, but the opposite, the antifragile, and I’m getting this phrase from NASA Nicholas Taleb’s book by this name. The antifragile is something that will gain from disorder. It gets stronger under pressure, and it improves during disruption. Does that sound like something that you want? Is that something that maybe would be valuable to you and your team?
I think we’d all like that and it would be a good thing to have. Our problem is that over the last two or three years, we’ve worked hard, we’ve been productive, and some of us have surprised ourselves as to how much we’ve been able to achieve. But we are exhausted, and we have come into this new year realising that it isn’t going to be a year of consolidation. It’s going to be a year of continued disruption and I don’t know if we’re ready for it.
So what we need to do is we need to ensure that all of our teams have this little boost as we get into 2023, that we help our people to benefit from being antifragile, to learn what that means, and to learn how to do it.
We need to help them to focus on peak performance, which is something like what professional athletes do, where they realise that, yes, you’ve got to give it everything, but you’ve also got to have time to recover, to refresh, to get back into training.
We need to develop environments that are energising and engaging for our people, environments that prioritise people cultivating positive emotions and engagement, and making sure that people are not just equipped to give their best, but actually want to do that as well.
If this sounds like something that you need to do well, have a look at Kickstart 2023.com. It might be a little bit too late in the year to call it a kickstart, but have a look at the website anyway, because it will help you to understand what you need to do to conquer 2023 and make this a fantastic year.
Especially helping your team to understand that we need to see disorder as something positive that can cause improvement and growth and development in our systems. That’s what I see, that’s what our team at Tomorrow Today sees, I hope that it’s something that you can see as well.
If you want more details, that website Kickstart2023.com, or make sure that you just connect with me directly if there’s any way that I can assist you and your team to do this, make sure that you make 2023 the year that it absolutely can.
Author of today’s tip, 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.
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.