Preparing Cognitive Athletes to Tackle Disruption

For the past two years, PMI has discussed gymnastic organizations that need to be adaptive and innovative to survive disruption.  This session explores how practitioners too need to become cognitive athletes, putting adaptive, creative and sensing muscles into enhanced performance.  Listen as Ade McCormack, the founder of the Disruption Readiness Institute, and Joseph Cahill explore how to prepare for an unknowable future.

As work continues to shift from enacting processes to more creative and innovative work, Ade proposes that professionals should similarly adapt:

• Develop your brand.
• Focus on traits rather than emphasizing skills.
• Focus on your humanity, rather than just your work accomplishments.
• Shift and pivot from repeatable skills and capabilities that can easily be subsumed by AI and other technologies.
• Sense for environmental, social and organizational change so you can experiment early, learn from failure and be in demand as the change wave takes hold.

Ade also identifies that the future of work will create challenges for organizations. Employers will need to shift their talent management approach from viewing people as simply cogs in the machine to treating them as cognitive assets that are the source of market-pleasing innovative products and services. This cultural shift means that instead of promoting efficiency and punishing failure, organizational leaders need to embrace experimenting and determining whether they are “failing enough.”

This podcast is full of insights focused on the post-Industrial age and 21st century talent.

In addition to founding the Disruption Readiness Institute, Ade has worked with some of the world's best-known brands in more than 40 countries. He has authored six books on digital and disruption and wrote for the Financial Times on the theme of digital leadership for over a decade. You can learn more about Ade’s perspectives, by visiting his blog at www.ademccormack.com.