"...In the wild of waiting"

Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash

Greetings -  

I hope this edition finds you well and enjoying the early days of Fall! Summer is not going quietly into the night here in northern, CA and we continue to enjoy magnificently sunny and warm days. Such a treat!

A theme of my current work is the future and more specifically, the evolving nature and contours of professional life. Ambiguity, uncertainty and unpredictability reign supreme. Organizations and their employees are wrestling with myriad issues - the meaning of work and it's role in our lives, inter-generational workforces, organizational responses to societal issues and trends, economic instability, accelerated technological advancement and so on. Questions abound: how best to prepare? What can I control or influence? What do I need to let go of because it no longer serves me? How do I not get swept aside in the wave of technological growth? What is my purpose and how can I craft my career to align with my values and give me the greatest sense of joy? And so many more.

This edition, the Articles and Blog Posts/Opinions sections specifically, highlights multiple perspectives and vantage points as to the future of work and our role in it. There are considerable insights to glean and thought-provoking questions to consider. While there are no easy or clear answers, the authors offer useful frameworks and tools to facilitate the necessary sense-making step(s) so we can increase our adaptability to and capacity for change.

As always, happy reading and listening! 

Be well, take good care of your families and community. 

-kj

PS - (Missed a newsletter? Past editions can be found here: https://www.kevinjordan.coach/blog. And if you hit paywall on an article(s), feel free to send me a note and let me know what you need. I have subscriptions to many of the sources that I cite.)

Spotlight Articles

Leaders who role model thoughtful questioning, active listening and instill a deep desire to learn and grow have the ability to create sustainable cultures that value our gifts and inspire us to bring the very best of ourselves every day. They create the conditions to achieve individual and team excellence, define measures of success, and provide the support necessary for us to flourish. Ultimately, they are intent on seeing each individual as well as the collective for who we are and who we might become. What a gift it is to be recognized for our talents, contributions and successes in ways that honor our individuality and facilitate group success.

In their recent HBR article, Coaching Your Team as a Collective Makes It Stronger, Sanyin Siang and Michael Canning note that "teams today are having to learn how to deliver results in shorter cycles with fewer resources. They need leaders who can help them learn collectively from their successes and failures, optimize their performance, and adapt quickly to changing demands. Leaders who adopt the approaches to team coaching...are well positioned to achieve this, and in so doing can successfully differentiate their businesses by drawing on the remarkable power of the collective." [For an excellent companion piece, please check out Successful Leaders Are Great Coaches.]

Articles 

Harvard Business Review: 3 Ways to Prepare for the Future of Work. "...We have to recognize that we will ultimately make sense of this difficult and exciting transformative period only by creating a new sense of normal for ourselves, one that accommodates rather than resists ambiguity and ongoing uncertainty. That’s simply not something we can do in isolation. But within our organizations, focusing on collective leadership, we can begin to do it together."

Harvard Business Review: The New-Collar Workforce. "There’s a huge, capable, and diverse talent pool out there that companies aren’t paying nearly enough attention to: workers without college degrees. It’s time for a skills-first approach to hiring and people management."

Harvard Business Review: Businesses Need to Bring Younger Employees into Their Leadership Ranks. "...Striving towards intergenerational leadership is key to overcoming these issues and unlocking competitive advantage by enhancing businesses’ capacity for renewal."

Harvard Business Review: Reskilling in the Age of AI. "...To adapt in the years ahead to the rapidly accelerating pace of technological change, companies will have to develop ways to learn—in a systematic, rigorous, experimental, and long-term way—from the many reskilling investments that are being made today. Only then will the reskilling revolution really take off."

Harvard Business Review: How to Prepare for a GenAI Future You Can’t Predict. "The single best thing organizations can do right now — during this period of what feels like a soul-crushing amount of change and uncertainty — is to methodically plan for the future. That requires knowing generative AI’s limitations as well as its strengths and adopting a culture of continual evaluation and improvement. It also means getting past clever product demos to much more mundane, pragmatic conversations about the trajectory of development, how data are being used, and the practical ways in which companies can use emerging tools. Resist the temptation to reduce your workforce — and instead use strategic foresight to create a future where AI is leveraged by a highly skilled workforce, and where human–AI teams are more productive, creative, and efficient working together than apart."

Harvard Business Review: 5 Ways to Future-Proof Your Career in the Age of AI. "But above and beyond specific use cases, we’re interested in exploring the question of whether there might still be strategies that professionals can deploy to generate unique value, even as AI begins to showcase its prodigious (and exponentially increasing) power. In other words, what can we do personally to stave off the displacement that may happen as a result of AI and future-proof ourselves in the age of intelligent machines? Here are five strategies we find especially critical."

Blog Posts & Opinions

Seth's Blog: Possibility and Opportunity. "It takes compassion and confidence to offer resilience, responsibility and agency instead of insisting on power and control."

Yale Insights: Reinventing the Way We Work--Again. "We have been and continue to be disturbed by fundamental questions of what it means to be human. We don’t know how to really be in a world where we don’t have the answers and we disagree about even how we see the issues. And these are the kind of questions that are coming up about what it means to work together. We think the question is, should we all be in the office on Friday? The question is actually more, do we even want to work? What is work? And why is work? How can we expand our experience of work to be simultaneously many things at once: be more meaningful, cultivate more belonging, unleash more potential and yet, cost less time, effort, energy and “human-ness”? How can work be better?"

Talent Management: Preparing for the future: Developing internal talent marketplaces. "Developing an internal talent marketplace that highlights individual skills, talents and strengths can help position your company for the uncertainties and complexities of the future."

Podcast

Freakonomics Radio Network: No Stupid Questions: How Do You Deal With Big Life Changes? "What’s more stressful, divorce or jail? Are you in the middle of a 'lifequake'? And should we all be taking notes from Martha Stewart?"

Arts, Music, Culture & Humor Corner

The Marginalian: Polish Poet and Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska on the Creative Power of Uncertainty. "What is true of art is even truer of life, for a human life is the greatest work of art there is...But to live with the untrammeled openendedness of such fertile not-knowing is no easy task in a world where certitudes are hoarded as the bargaining chips for status and achievement — a world bedeviled, as Rebecca Solnit memorably put it, by 'a desire to make certain what is uncertain, to know what is unknowable, to turn the flight across the sky into the roast upon the plate.'"

The New York Times: U2’s Music Shaped My Life. Then It Helped Save It. "While I was undergoing treatment to eradicate a tumor, listening to songs from the band’s long career became its own vital form of medicine." [I have had the great fortune to see the band's residency in Las Vegas at Sphere. The show and the venue represent a bedazzling, spectacle of unprecedented digital heights. Just WOW!]

The University of Chicago: Center for Practical Wisdom: Does everyone deserve compassion? "Across all the studies, people's judgment about deservingness held steady. 'We found that people do not think everybody deserves compassion,' Yang said. 'They actually reserve compassion only for people who they think have good moral character and moral status.'"

The New Yorker: Shouts and Murmurs: Participation Trophy. "Although you had signed up for only one event that Field Day—a relay race in which you ran in the wrong direction—you never questioned my presence in your life. When Ms. Musgrove handed me to you and said, 'You tried your best,' you pumped both fists in triumph. I’ll never forget how you caressed me with your gentle, Yoo-hoo-scented hands. When you held me to your chest, I could feel your heart pounding, and, though I knew that it was partly because your body was so unused to exercise, I sensed that there was also something more powerful at play."

Reflections

"I hope today is one of those days
you find joy right here in the waiting.
I hope the uncertainty in this season
does not hinder you from creating.
You are free to paint new things
without knowing what tomorrow will be.
You are free to practice the art of trusting
right here in the wild of waiting.
So much is unknown, and yet,
there is this effortless rhythm called grace,
inviting you to go deeper into living, right here,
before the future things fall in place."
~ Morgan Harper Nichols

"When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free."
~ Wendell Berry

"...I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community, and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. Life is no ‘brief candle’ to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for a moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to the future generations.” 

~ George Bernard Shaw

“Deep listening is an act of surrender. We risk being changed by what we hear...Empathy is cognitive and emotional—to inhabit another person’s view of the world is to feel the world with them...The most critical part of listening is asking what is at stake for the other person. I try to understand what matters to them, not what I think matters. Sometimes I start to lose myself in their story. As soon as I notice feeling unmoored, I try to pull myself back into my body, like returning home. As Hannah Arendt says, ‘One trains one’s imagination to go visiting.’ When the story is done, we must return to our skin, our own worldview, and notice how we have been changed by our visit.”

~ Valarie Kaur