How can we reap the rewards of thinking smaller?

For too long we’ve thought big is beautiful. Mark Shayler tells us how to harness the agility and speed of a smaller business mindset.

Right now, this moment – and this one – is the most exciting time to be alive. Okay, knocking around with Ebenezer Howard in 1898 would have been pretty cool – so too would hanging around the Cavern Club in Liverpool in 1963, or Covent Garden’s Blitz Club in 1980. But right here, right now is a great place to be. Why? Brexit? Hardly. Political certainty? Errr no. Global stability? Probably not.

No, the reason that this is the best time to be alive is because there’s nothing we can’t do. Web 2.0 and Capitalism 2.0 have placed creativity in our palms. Literally. Everyone is a designer now. Everyone is a creator now. University has never been more expensive and less relevant. This is not a problem. It is an opportunity. When talent is priced out of university it goes somewhere else; it goes to its bedroom, to start-up spaces, to the park, to gardens, to the greenhouse.

Talent goes where it can grow, literally.

The future isn’t like the past; the way we build our careers is changing so quickly and this is difficult for everyone. It is difficult for those building their careers and it is as difficult for organisations looking for great talent. One of the biggest obstacles to growing our businesses is how we attract and retain the best talent in the world/ country/ county. We are only as good as the people that we employ and – if we continue to look solely for people with the skills that we have – then we risk missing the future, missing great people and great opportunities. The problem comes when things change and we don’t.

There are a few lessons here:

1. Don’t be baffled by Gen Z. They have grown up in a different world to you. Not worse; just different. They aren’t (as commonly repeated) entitled, they just have no certainty or rules in terms of career. Career means two things remember – a work thing and an out-of-control thing.

2. We have democratised creativity with web 2.0 (and even more so with the coming web 3.0) and we have democratised enterprise. Embrace that, use these new channels, new tools and new approaches to grow your business.

3. Stop thinking about graduates alone. Let’s be frank – many degree courses are alarmingly out of date. There are other routes to excellence and some of them come without a £60k debt. I’m not saying forget graduates, but I am saying embrace people who have taken other paths. You want to recruit potential, not just exam passers (noted that these two things are not mutually exclusive).

4. Just because they don’t look like you, it doesn’t mean that they won’t be brilliant. Study after study has shown that the most diverse companies are the most successful. Embracing diversity makes you stronger.

But what specific skills are going to take us through the next 30 years or more?

It really doesn’t matter where you look on the web, the same main skills are cited as the most in-demand by 2020. These were determined by a series of interviews with businesses in 2016 (so they may already be out of date). But these are the skills that employers say they are looking for:

- Complex problem solving

- Critical thinking

- Creativity

- People management

- Coordinating with others

- Emotional intelligence

- Judgment and decision making

- Service orientation

- Negotiation

- Cognitive flexibility

This is an interesting collection of skills. It is a very human set of skills. Just as well, as the advance of artificial intelligence will change the job market forever. I’m pretty optimistic about AI. Sure, it will have an impact; sure it will remove some jobs; sure some of those will be desk jobs; sure it’s scary. But it may generate as many jobs as it removes. That doesn’t mean your job isn’t under threat, it may be. But there will be a growth in those jobs that require softer, more human skills; those jobs that rely on creative spark and fluid thinking, those jobs that rely on insight and observation. So there is a clear theme here – the skills companies want, and those that are more AI-proof, overlap considerably.

I lecture in design and I tell my students that design isn’t about moving a pencil or a mouse. It’s about moving hearts and minds. That’s true, and to do that designers need to sit in the problem for longer, to be better at observation and listening. These are the skills they will need. The future will be about problem setting, rather than problem solving.

If you want a better answer, ask a better question

This is the age of the smaller business. Or, should I say, the smaller business mindset? My big clients all want to think and act like small businesses, harnessing the agility, the speed, and the nimbleness of companies that think small. Amazon famously states that a team is too big if it can’t be fed by two pizzas.

There’s a lot of sense in creating a big company made up of many, many small ones. My work on building startups inside bigger businesses indicates that anything over eight people slows things down. Rushing to a solution before understanding the problem takes you down the wrong route; not being open to newer ways of thinking, learning and recruitment reduces the ability to generate ideas that the market wants. And finally, not embracing the speed of modern product and service development (once you’ve sat in the problem for longer) means you’re wasting money and time.

This is the age of small.

Mark Shayler is a Founding Partner of the Do Lectures and author of the book Do Disrupt.