Designing for Change: Time for a Future of Work Executive
New Leadership is Needed for a New Era
“In an increasingly chaotic future, what you need is great clarity of direction... but great flexibility of how you get there.” - Bob Johansen, Distinguished Fellow - Institute for the Future
I’ve been thinking and speaking a lot about BANI lately as I’m putting the finishing touches on an upcoming book. If BANI is new to you, you can think of it as a description of the climate in which we all now live, as individuals, and groups, but also as businesses and even government organizations.
BANI comes from the Institute for the Future (IFTF), and stands for brittle, anxious, non-linear and incomprehensible. BANI helps to explain why companies can rise in an instant and fail just as quickly, why political parties around the world can spring up from nowhere to take power and six months later be more unpopular than their predecessors.
I spoke to Bob Johansen - Distinguished Fellow at the IFTF about BANI, in relationship to his book Leaders Make the Future: 10 New Skills to Humanize Leadership with Generative AI. You can see the full interview below from the Humanity Working podcast.
What Bob and his co-authors expertly describe in the book is that this new world is so altered that we need a different set of capabilities to navigate it and thrive in it. And not only that, most leaders are not currently meeting the moment. Some are intentionally exploiting it, but many are just floundering amidst it.
I agree with all of this, but I’d also go further, and argue that we need a new executive role - a role explicitly focused on ensuring that the company is future-ready.
But before I get into why I believe this is needed, let’s get into what the role is.
The Future of Work Executive, Defined
The idea of a senior executive with a future of work focus has been around for a while now - for example with people like Phil Kirchner championing the idea of a Chief of Work, which brings together functions like HR, IT and Real Estate to create and optimize an all encompassing employee experience. As Kirchner points out, some organizations like Moderna, ServiceNow and Lloyds are already close to a having a true Future of Work executive.
If you would like to read more about how this can come together, I’d recommend the excellent newsletter by
- Work Forward, and specifically this article.Full disclosure, Brian has also been one of our guests on Humanity Working, to discuss his great book - How the Future Works. This interview is below.
This discussion around a Chief of Work captures something absolutely vital, that companies thrive when employees are engaged in the experience of work, and that traditional employee engagement initiatives don’t solve the problem.
In my own work on engagement, I’ve seen that three things are necessary for employees to be consistently engaged:
The experience of work, including how, when and where it happens must support the employees needs, both while they are working, and in the context of their broader lives.
Work must have some form of tangible meaning, in a way that is connected to business value and the employee’s own sense of purpose.
For engagement to be sustained, employees have to feel that they are continuing to grow as an employee and person, and that their organization is invested in their growth.
A Chief of Work can absolutely focus on creating employee experiences addressing these issues, and they should.
But I believe that a Future of Work Executive should have an additional remit - making the organization future ready by positioning the organization for change.
What this means in practice is building a workforce of the most adaptable employees possible, and supporting this with infrastructure, policy and culture that supports adaptability, as shown in this diagram.
So yes, this is about creating an environment where employees can thrive right now (and the organization can benefit) but it’s also about creating an environment where employees will thrive tomorrow, as individuals, teams, and larger groups.
I believe this is vital, not just because it will keep employees relevant and help organizations grow, but because it is intrinsically linked to engagement. Change is happening, and adaptability is the single most important indicator of sustained employee engagement that we’ve found.
The Relationship to Digital Transformation
At this point, most medium sized and larger organizations have undergone or are undergoing some form of digital transformation - updating and supposedly future proofing their technology environments on a foundation of cloud computing.
In my time at Microsoft, I was often responsible for explaining to companies why they should go through this transformation, and what benefits they should expect to see.
Somewhere in my Digital Transformation presentation deck, there was typically a slide or two about an important aspect of the process - the people. Using our own example at Microsoft, I’d make the argument that the people inside the organization were a massive part of digital transformation. If they were supportive, they would be an accelerator, but if they opposed it, they would be like a brake, permanently deployed.
Most of the organizations I spoke to did understand this, but there is a difference between understanding this and knowing what to do about it. A few did nothing other than firing the people who did not appear to embrace the change. Some rolled out training programs through traditional L&D functions. Others took things more seriously and decided to invest in an organizational change management program, designed to ensure that not only was training available, but that employees were leaning into that change. And perhaps the most enlightened combined those change management initiatives with Growth Mindset training (often with mixed results as I detail in The Slow Death of Growth Mindset).
In retrospect, it’s clear that while something is better than nothing, none of these approaches are enough. Digital transformation is not just one big change, it has ushered in an era where change is continuous. For that to be sustainable we have to move beyond the idea that change is something that happens TO employees (no matter how well managed) and instead towards a world where change is something that highly adaptable employees navigate as part of their job.
Do We Really Need Another Executive?
I know, the C-Suite has been expanding like crazy for decades now, but there are occasions when a new executive role absolutely makes sense.
Typically this happens when four things are simultaneously true:
A domain has become strategically central
That domain crosses multiple business units
Existing roles don’t have the focus to lead the domain
The domain affects long-term survival, not just short-term optimization
I believe we are at this point when it comes to a Future of Work executive.
Organizations are increasingly realizing that employee experience is directly connected to improved performance, and that employees are increasingly struggling to keep up with change, so this is now strategically central.
Future of work readiness absolutely does span multiple business units, and there is no single executive today that is focused on making people, process, and technology future ready.
No one executive is currently laser focused on this challenge. Your Chief Strategy Officer is likely focused on forward looking business strategy, not your people. As for your CIO? See the Digital Transformation discussion above.
And as for long term survival? No executive can tell you with a straight face that they know what is coming. All that they can say is that it will be different, and we will need to adapt.
So, now is the time.
We live in a BANI world, and we need a Chief Adaptability Officer.