Future of Work January CityAM

FUTURE PROOFING Why tech is the differential for business success

SELF-CENTRED What big businesses can learn from the self-employed

GETTING EMOTIONAL Why it’s okay to bring your feelings to work

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AWARD-WINNING BUSINESS JOURNALISM • JANUARY 2019

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skills gap THE FUTURE OF WORK How adopting a better working environment can help companies attract and retain the best employees

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Don’t worry – a robot takeover of the workforce won’t be happening any time soon OPENING SHOTS JOANNE FREARSON

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ECHNOLOGY IS altering the way we work, and tasks once performed by human beings are now being done by robots. Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and automation are making companies more efficient, productive and reducing costs – but what sort of jobs does it leave we humans to do?

Research by the World Economic Forum (WEF) has forecast that by 2025 machines will perform more current work tasks than humans – 71 per cent of tasks are performed by humans today.

Every industry and sector is likely to be impacted by this shift.

Already, in the retail sector we are seeing chatbots act as customer service agents or AI monitor stock in warehouses. The automotive industry is using artificial intelligence in the development of driverless cars, while in the legal profession machine learning is being used to analyse documents.

Some commentators

have even suggested a “robot apocalypse”, where workforce automation will make working humans quite literally redundant.

Is this a genuine concern? Not according to the WEF, whose research predicts that, while some 75 million human roles will be displaced by automation, 133 million new ones will emerge to take their place.

But what will these jobs look like? According to the WEF, positions that will be in demand include data analysts and scientists, software and applications developers, and e-commerce and social media specialists. Sales and marketing professions, innovation managers and customer service workers – roles that require human skills – will also be very much needed.

The skillsets most experts agree machines won’t be taking over any time soon are the ones that require emotional intelligence – or “soft” skills. People that have good communication, teamwork and

“The skills most experts agree machines won’t be taking over any time soon are the ones that require emotional intelligence” critical thinking abilities will be very much in demand.

The more monotonous, routinebased jobs such as data entry, accounting and payroll will continue to decline, with the WEF study projecting that 54 per cent of the workforce in large firms will require reskilling or upskilling.

As well as these new roles, the way our current jobs are structured will also change. The World Bank’s report The Changing

Entrepreneurialism at the Corre

T

HE WORKPLACE is changing.

Entrepreneurialism is now a career aspiration of millions who want to take back control of their lives – with research by Studio Graphene revealing that more than a quarter of UK adults would like to start their own business.

At next-generation management consultancy Procorre we have entrepreneurialism in our DNA, and are committed to developing the individual skillsets of our staff and securing cutting-edge projects for our growing portfolio of consultants. We’re investing in exciting new ventures that we believe will be significant to the economy, and also evolving our business for the future of work as we see it in order to be at the forefront of UK industry.

Best of both worlds Despite changing attitudes and aspirations, we understand that making the step from full-time employment into the world of becoming a self-employed consultant can be daunting, so we do things differently.

We offer a multitude of benefits – including private healthcare, legal advice, pay through illness and global mobility advice and support for projects abroad – while also providing the flexibility and financial

rewards a career in consultancy brings.

We believe this approach to not only be critical to the future success of our industry, but a potential blueprint for wider future employment.

Our forward-thinking business model is helping us build a reputation as the consultancy of choice, and one that takes an alternative approach. We were set up by entrepreneurs, and this entrepreneurial mindset continues to run deep throughout the organisation.

Being the change we want to see Currently, more than 1,000 Procorre consultants work worldwide on projects for some of the largest multinationals and global conglomerates, yet we believe more should be done to recruit higher numbers of women into top consulting positions.

As a result, we launched our Procorre100 campaign last year, an initiative that will see us recruit 100 women in 100 business days into our network, using the consultancy model as a force for good within our target sectors.

sectors where we have the skills and knowhow to run successful projects and can provide our consultants with new, exciting prospects.

We’ve recently identified a burgeoning market ripe with opportunity, where we already have a great level of expertise: renewable energy. Through Procorre’s backing of CorreEnergy, a new global business which will unlock the substantial hidden value of renewable energy sources, we will create opportunities across a raft of disciplines required to realise this mammoth project over the next five years.

Corre Energy is a global platform to provide “Storage as a Service (SaaS)” for energy, underpinned by blockchain technology to address failures in regulated power markets globally.

To meet significant demand for the skills that CorreEnergy will generate, we’re looking for consultants across a range of specialisms, from industrial control systems to cyber-security, and everything in between.

INDUSTRY VIEW

Creating opportunity As an innovative, entrepreneurial business we are always on the lookout for growth

Anne O’Donnell (left) is CEO of Procorre +44 20 3432 0480 www.procorre.com

Nature of Work suggests there will be an increase in non-traditional jobs and gig economy or contract positions.

Employees are more likely to have more flexible working hours and remote working will increase as technology increasingly enables us to do our jobs from anywhere with a broadband connection.

But for all this upheaval to be a success, the common thread in research is that companies will have to invest in their staff and retrain them in order to meet the new demands of these jobs of the future. Presently most companies are falling short on reskilling and need to put more investment in this area if we have any chance to succeed.

The robot revolution might not take the form we think it will. But it is coming, and to be more efficient and productive companies will need to think about ways to enable humans to get on with the more creative, soft-skilled side of working life.

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JOANNE FREARSON

C

OMPANIES ARE turning towards artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline their critical processes and make things simpler and more efficient.

But how is it really helping them?

“From wearable devices to chatbots, connected appliances to autonomous vehicles, we live in a world where machines are getting smarter every day,” says Steve Newton, executive vice president UK at Worldpay.

“Technology has become embedded into every aspect of our lives. Brands are only just beginning to scratch the surface with AI, but as the technology becomes more sophisticated, it will become another way for businesses to gain advantage in multiple areas of operation.”

One of the reasons why brands have been embracing technology in the workplace, Newton explains, is to improve the customer journey and experience.

Research carried out by Gartner indicates that 81 per cent of businesses will compete mostly on customer experience over the next two years. “Brands that offer a hyperpersonalised experience through the use of machine learning and predictive analytics will be the ones that stand out from the crowd,” says Newton.

In the retail industry, which has been struggling of late from poor sales, AI, he points out, has been used to improve customer satisfaction and drive more detailed sales insights in e-commerce. “If businesses can make changes to better serve customers, this can help generate more loyalty and in turn revenue,” he says. “On the operational side, AI will help to streamline and speed

Why tech is the gamechanger for companies AI and machine learning are making firms more productive.

So what’s behind this change, and how is it helping companies connect better with customers? up day-to-day operations, predicting and preventing problems before they occur.

“Businesses implementing the technology successfully are likely to have the potential to reap the rewards of cost and efficiency savings, allowing the opportunity for growth and expansion. Anything that reduces day-to-day life admin and menial tasks for time-poor consumers has the potential to succeed.”

By using technology to improve the experience for customers, companies are changing the way people work and how things are traditionally done. A store of the future, Newton explains, could see the traditional checkout process removed entirely, while retail robots could be on hand to answer questions and take payments.

Or in a restaurant, food could be preordered via a chatbot and customers could pay through invisible payments technology without having to interrupt a staff member for the bill. “Reducing these delays would remove two of the major friction points in

the customer service journey, and allow waiting staff the time to deliver a worldclass service,” he says.

“It makes sense for businesses to automate mundane tasks to enable staff to focus on adding value through great customer service. That does not necessarily mean fewer staff, but freeing up time for workers to directly help customers.”

Companies are already beginning to do this. For example, Amazon and Walmart have both been rolling out robots across their fulfilment centres, while robotic catering has already become a reality at the Henn na restaurant in Japan’s Huis Ten Bosch theme park.

But Newton warns that brands need to strike the balance between technology and the human touch. “Ultimately, human skills remain essential for many tasks, making the marriage between humans and machines vital to success,” he says. “Robots will not replace workers, but jobs will evolve to focus on more skilled, creative and complex tasks.”

JANUARY 2019 Publisher Bradley Scheffer | Editor Joanne Frearson | Production editor Dan Geary | Head of production Maida Goodman Sales director Paul Aitken, | Campaign directors Adam Robins, Thomas English

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Reading the runes: why data science is key to the modern workplace As technology changes the way people work, finding employees who can make sense of the limitless data it generates is becoming increasingly important…

find out quickly if a potential new product is viable.

“In a space of a few hours [a developer can] actually come up with a minimum viable product to either prove the theory or kill the theory,” says Abel.

“What you can now do in a couple of days is something in the past would have taken months or years. The likelihood is that business demands will need to be done quicker. They are going to need to pivot more often or they are going to be disrupted themselves.

“What we are seeing is that the time-tovalue [ratio] is a lot shorter now, and the time to invest to get value is a lot lower.

[Businesses] don’t want to put money on the table so early. They want to do things faster than they ever did before.

“If it comes to the point where you have to build a business case and go to a board to get funding, you have probably missed the point of innovation.”

A

UTOMATION AND AI in the workplace are increasingly enabling machines to take over the repetitive tasks long performed by human workers. And as technology changes the way organisations work, the vast amounts of data this technology generates are a resource with huge potential.

“The biggest asset on your book going forward is data,” says John Abel, senior business director of Oracle Engineered Systems at Oracle EMEA. “If you look at the value of any company in the world now, it is [tied to] the way they use data. The highvalue companies are data companies.”

Abel sees data scientists as increasingly valuable assets to business. As companies harvest more and more data, people who can understand that data can help a company innovate quicker and provide “light-bulb moments” by being able to tap in and see what the data means. The greatest value lies in employees who are able to understand the fundamentals of what a business does today and what they can do tomorrow, then pivot the company in the right direction.

Working smarter

Can data be faked?

But there is still a lot to learn about the data these technologies produce, and there has been criticism it could be subject to human bias in the workplace, or even be tinkered with – after all, AI systems are ultimately trained by humans. “How do we know the data going into AI is good enough data that the outcome is a truthful?” Abel says.

He has spent a lot of time trying to address these worries through The World Bee Project. “We were looking at whether the honey from a hive is the honey that the bee keeper provided to the shop,” he says. “Is that the same honey that originally started in that hive, or has it been tampered with?

“You want to say data X goes through process Y and comes out as data X and we know it is the same stuff. That is the holy grail of data ingestion – as the volume of data increases the ability to spot anomalies gets much harder.

“People don’t realise this, but honey has a formulation which tells you the hive that it came from. We are starting to use IoT sensors [which can transfer data over a

network] in honey to determine the matrix of honey to make sure humans can’t tamper it, or use human bias to say it was from this ‘special hive.’”

Abel believes that if companies use IoT sensors alongside blockchain technologies – where everything is recorded on a network and nothing can be changed unless all computers agree – for security and AI when running their data systems, these problems can be overcome.

“Companies that have those DNAs in their profile – from source to usage – will become much more valuable going forward, because they have a chain where they can prove the data that entered is the data that came out,” he says.

The price of being left behind Although there is a still a lot to learn when it comes to introducing these technologies into the workplace, Abel points out that if companies do not bite the bullet, they will face being disrupted by their competitors.

“If it comes to the point where you have to build a business case and go to a board to get funding, you have probably missed the point of innovation” – John Abel, Oracle

“What we are now seeing is much more volatility in the world today,” Abel says – pointing out that, traditionally, going into a downturn would automatically spell a period of reduced innovation spend and a general focus on cost reduction.

“You can’t do that anymore,” he cautions.

“You have got to innovate and you have to be optimising. You have to do both. You can’t just stop. The minute you stop innovating is the minute you could be disrupted.”

But by using AI and automation technologies, companies can innovate quicker and

As more and more companies embrace AI and automation, people’s roles will also change. Abel views this as a natural evolution of the workplace – pointing out that many jobs we do today didn’t exist 20 years ago.

“The people before me never had machines,” he says. “They were doing everything in paper format. Every generation has had a chasm to cross, and once it is crossed things are disrupted. Some jobs are lost, but others are created.”

Employees need to be multi-skilled in different areas of the business instead of just be expert in one thing, he explains. But Abel dislikes the term “reskilling”, as he thinks the focus should be on continual learning in the workplace.

Although AI is more efficient at undertaking repetitive tasks or logic questions than a human, he is yet to be convinced that a time will come where the creative parts of a human brain can be replicated by a machine. “[What AI] has not yet done is what humans are very good at, which is creativity,” he says. “Where there are no set rules AI isn’t very good– it can’t just come up with a light-bulb moment.

“Everybody’s brain is different – the way they answer problems. If it is a creative problem the way you answer might be very different to me. If it were a logical mathematical problem, we both would probably come up with the same answer and take the same steps to get it.

“But if I gave you a picture I might say it is a dog and you might say it is a cat. The human side of our creative mind is very hard to replicate with machines.”

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The missing key: how agile culture unlocks successful transformation D

IGITAL TECHNOLOGY, including AI, automation, big data analytics and faster communication, is causing rapid change to the world we live in. Consumers want customised products, a seamless experience across all touchpoints, and instant access to information. As a result, organisations are finding that they need to reinvent themselves to keep up with these new demands made by both their customers and their employees.

As a result digital technology can also bring major disruption to established markets and organisations. New products and services, powered by new business models and agile development processes, emerge regularly and rapidly. And driven by technology, consumer expectations are constantly changing.

The competitive nature of commerce has intensified. To keep ahead of the game, businesses need to transform themselves.

However, transformation is never easy. And technology, while essential, is never a complete solution. As John Edmonds, PPM portfolio development manager at AXELOS Global Best Practice, says: “For successful transformation to occur, organisations need to address the human factors that run alongside technology, ensuring that organisational culture promotes change and that the end user’s experience of using technology enables them to work effectively and without frustrations.” All too often though, these human factors are ignored.

of communication and break down hierarchical “silos”.

96%

• Plan to be flexible. At the heart of agility is an adaptable mindset that recognises the need to change plans frequently according to changing context.

The percentage of global organisations that believe in some form of transformation… but only 47 per cent believe they can extract the value from a future transformation initiative

• Deliver iteratively and incrementally by breaking work down into short bursts with frequent monitoring and feedback. By aiming to deliver something of value as early and as frequently as possible, an organisation becomes far more resistant to being disrupted.

Source: KPMG Global Study 2016

• Measure the value being delivered. Transformation is not an end in itself: companies change in order to deliver better value to their stakeholders. That value needs to be quantifiable to demonstrate the success of the transformation.

Any guidance designed to help organisations embrace change successfully must have a number of attributes: • It must guide its users towards a longer term viewpoint of the market, from different perspectives including competitors, regulators and customers.

• It must enable employees to speak the same business language so they can approach problems in the same way. Achieving this will involve the sharing of best practice across departments and business units.

Communication An essential part of any organisation is the communication between people. Many organisations are hierarchical in how they communicate to staff. Information goes from the top down or from the bottom up.

But it rarely goes sideways, from department to department, or team to team.

This means valuable insights about what is working well within an organisation is lost. As a result, working practices stagnate. And when a sudden change to day-to-day routines is forced on employees, without justification, they are unreceptive. The ability of managers to locate and share knowledge to support change is crucial.

Agile working practices Companies that disrupt industries such as Amazon, Airbnb, Uber, Innocent Drinks or Netflix, are highly agile. They have seen how an emerging technology has created an opportunity in a market sector and have used that technology to create a point of difference. Larger, older, slower companies find that point of difference hard to challenge, especially when it involves a totally new way of doing business.

Agility is a critical element of commercial success. Many companies have some experience of agile working, but this knowledge is often locked away in isolated teams or departments who have used a specific agile delivery approach. Taking the knowledge of good practice around agility and sharing it across an organisation is essential.

Transformation through people Communication, agility, and the recognition that transformation only happens through people: these are the building blocks of a successful organisation. That’s why companies that focus too heavily on technology are likely to fail to transform themselves.

“It’s people who have to work with technology and implement it,” John Edmonds of AXELOS points out. “It’s people who have to seek out information, such as the best way of bringing a product to market or the best way of automating a factory. It’s people who have to use the technology they are given at work.”

That’s where products such as AgileSHIFT from AXELOS show their strengths. AXELOS, a global joint venture company between the Cabinet Office and Capita, was created in

2013 to further develop and manage bodies of best-practice knowledge, the more wellknown ones being ITIL®, MSP® and PRINCE2®. Last year, AXELOS created AgileSHIFT to encourage all areas of an organisation to be more agile and to create a culture of enterprise agility.

AgileSHIFT is a guide to help organisations adapt and thrive in this rapidly changing world.

It is useful across all functions of an organisation, from finance and HR to operations, sales and marketing. The framework helps organisations transform by addressing human factors and helps ensure everyone in an organisation has a baseline knowledge and skill-set that helps them to work in an agile way.

There are a number of practices that AgileSHIFT suggests be encouraged to foster agile ways of working. These are: • Actively and continually engage with all stakeholders, so that everyone develops a sense of being part of a change, not a subject of it.

• It must be pragmatic – useful and easy to use, supporting innovation, giving people not just knowledge but the ability to share and discuss knowledge, and to develop new ideas based on that knowledge.

“Digital disruption is a threat to any organisation, large or small,” Edmonds explains.

“And the dangers of not defending against disruptors are major ones: loss of market share, the inability to maintain profit levels, a long-term slide in share price, and ultimately, commercial irrelevance.

“In contrast, organisations that embrace change by ensuring they support strong cultures of innovation, agile working practices and the ability to share and develop knowledge will not just survive: they will thrive in an age of rapid change.”

Technology may be an enabler of commercial success, but it’s people who will make visions of digital transformation come true.

INDUSTRY VIEW

• Build collaborative, cross-functional teams in order to create effective channels

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Keeping humans in the loops “The work we do will be different in the future, but a world where all the work is done by machines is a recurring, wrongheaded fantasy which resurfaces at moments of great technological change”

T

HE FUTURE of work is at the heart of every major socio-economicpolitical debate raging around the world today. Whether it’s about Brexit, border walls, migrants landing on the beaches of Southern Europe, or the concentration of wealth among the 1 per cent, all of them are really about the nature and distribution of work. From work, and what is derived from it – money – comes power.

From its absence stems powerlessness.

This long-evident truth is more relevant in 2019, precisely because people understand that work is changing more quickly than ever before. Given that the stakes are so high, the arguments are fiercer.

And the main reason why work is changing so quickly? Science-fiction technologies that are becoming more and more real: artificial intelligence, robotic process automation, augmented reality, gene editing.

Many people are excited by what they see emerging, but many others aren’t. Many are scared that what little grip they’ve had on the economic ladder is slipping...

The prevailing feeling of many is that human work is going away, that we’re all doomed. Study after study – most famously Oxford University’s 2013 report that suggested almost half of US employment is at risk of machine-based replacement – has laid out a bleak view of a post-work world.

gulf apparent to all but the most ideological of eyes. Those who have kept up with the rise of automation and arbitrage have done well. Conversely, those who haven’t have seen their share of the spoils become thinner and thinner.

Placing the means of production in the hands of more and more people therefore is the surest route to the economic efficiency that remains key, but also the social harmony that is important, to ordinary people and elites alike.

And of course, the means of production are now literally in everyone’s hands. With a smartphone, a teenager in Preston can trade Yeezys, a semi-retired teacher in Cornwall can tutor a student in Bristol, a stay-at-home mum in Coventry can sell the jewellery she makes while her baby is taking its afternoon nap. Spreading more of these type of opportunities (and the ability to create them as much as use them) into more people’s hands addresses the needs of wealth creation and wealth distribution.

The fact that these opportunities are spreading is core to our view that there is a future for human work. Of course, the work we do will be different in the future, but a world where all the work is done by machines is a recurring, wrong-headed fantasy which resurfaces at moments of great technological change.

A focus on wealth creation and distribution

The jobs of the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Technology has clearly played a role in the widening gulf between winners and runnersup (it would be impolite to say losers), a

But how different will this work be? In our recent reports 21 Jobs of the Future and 21 More Jobs of the Future, we have laid out

some of the types of work we see emerging over the next 10 years. They range from the low-tech and semi-obvious to the hightech and hard-to-fathom. All, though, are emerging at a time when the commercial value of human skills is being radically reassessed. In considering the work of the future we have set out the Four E’s of Skills…

Eternal: some human skills emerged at the dawn of man – the skill of burping a baby, of opposing a thumb, of leveraging sticks and stones and fire, of co-operating within the group. Of adapting. No matter how brilliant our technologies become, they – and many others – will continue to be of value.

Enduring: though the bushman of the Kalahari didn’t have much call to sell things, the skill of selling has been important to man for as long as recorded time. Other such enduring skills – the skill of being empathetic, of trusting, of helping, of imagining, of creating, of striving – will continue to endure. Enduring skills are central to jobs of the future.

Emerging: new skills in the future relate to the complexity, density, and speed of work. Are you able to work with a 315MB Excel spreadsheet? Can you handle the sensory overload of a drone’s virtual cockpit?

Can you assess which Common Vulnerability Score System action you should take first – in the next 15 seconds – before the cyberperimeter is breached? Fast twitch/no blink/e-game honed/multitasking candidates apply here…

Eroding: invariably, this year’s leading-edge skill becomes next year’s commonplace prerequisite. Twenty years ago consulting firms hired large teams of slide deck designers. Nowadays, a graduate new-hire that couldn’t put together a presentation (using Prezi not PowerPoint) on day one would be viewed in shock and amazement. The list of eroding skills is getting longer by the day, and many of them relate to technology.

There’s not much call for loading film or setting up UUCP networks nowadays. If too many of your skills are on the eroding list, it should be time for a reboot.

The future of work is being reworked The fear at the moment is a product of a world changing at an unprecedented speed and of a swathe of people (not necessarily always older people) aging out of it.

2019 marks an important point where how people and organisations engage with the future of their work will determine how bright their future is. Keeping humans in the loops – not simply of a machine algorithm, as AI developers talk about – but the loops of economic and societal systems which underpin functioning societies is the great task ahead. The leaders who emerge at this moment of profound change will be those who seize the incredible opportunities new technologies are generating and who spread them as widely – to humans – as possible.

INDUSTRY VIEW

Ben Pring is director of Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work www.cognizant.com/futureofwork

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One more time, with feeling: why it’s okay to get emotional at work We spend nearly half our lives working, yet feelings in the office are still seen by some as taboo. Business Reporter investigates why the future could be emotional…

“W

E OFTEN forget we are humans,” says Mollie West Duffy, over the phone to me from New York. “We have feelings all the time and yet between 9am and 5pm we don’t supposedly have them.”

Duffy, who’s promoting her new book about emotion in the workplace, No Hard Feelings, is referring to the tendency to act like our emotions don’t exist once we step inside our place of work. Although it’s popular to think a stiff upper lip may get you further ahead in the office, Duffy thinks it is more likely to lead to poor decision making, lower productivity and health problems.

Duffy, who co-wrote the book with illustrator and design consultant Liz Fosslien, knows this from personal experience. Both women were diagnosed with work stress-related health problems after they started their careers, by keeping their feelings locked in.

Emotional decision-making Research shows, Duffy explains, that decision making in the workplace is based on our emotions whether we are aware of them or not. “Decision making we think of as something completely rational, yet the science proves that it is not completely rational,” she says. “The best thing we can do is try to become a little more aware of how our emotions are affecting us.”

One emotion Duffy believes we should be paying more attention to at work is envy. People don’t often pay attention to this emotion, says Duffy, as there is a stigma around it, but its usefulness lies in the way it can tell you what you wish you had.

Duffy also recommends honing into anxiety and regret when making decisions. People should

“We have feelings all the time and yet between 9am and 5pm we supposedly don’t have them” – Mollie West Duffy

ask themselves how they would feel if they didn’t make a decision in a month, five months or a year from now. If they feel regret, it indicates that perhaps more importance should be placed on that decision.

Excitement is another emotion to keep an eye on – a wave we might want to try to ride out before making a decision. We might make decisions to hastily if we only use excitement as the gauge, Duffy explains.

Emotions are infectious But whether they’re positive or negative, we should pay attention to what our emotions are telling us at work. “By ignoring our feelings at work, we are overlooking important data and risking preventable mistakes,” says Duffy. “If you are ignoring how you feel and how others feel, you might send out emails that cause unnecessary anxiety. Your work is not going to be as meaningful if you are not opening up yourself to that side of yourself.”

Duffy, whose regular job is as an organisational designer, believes that as our jobs become more collaborative, complex and stressful, it will be our emotions t hat w ill help us nav igate the changes. Emotions are so powerful they are contagious, she tells me. “This has actually been proven: that emotions can go viral,” she says. “There is a study that shows that if I have a nasty co-worker and I get grumpy and I go home irritated because of this and snap at my husband, he can actually catch my bad mood.

“If he then goes to work the next day grumpy, he can then put his colleagues in a bad mood.

One bad attitude from a colleague can spread to other colleagues.”

If you’re feeling down, Duffy recommends taking a short

Below: Mollie West Duffy, co-author of No Hard Feelings

amount of time out to do the things you need to do to get yourself back on track.

When it comes to difficult conversations about problematic issues in the workplace, Duffy believes it is important not to rush into them. Rather, wait until people are calm before having a conversation about how the situation made you feel. She points out difficult conversations should not be avoided completely as this denies all parties the opportunity to improve the situation.

Not everyone feels the same way It’s also vital to be aware that everyone has a different communication style, Duffy says, and to take into perspective things such as cultural background, gender, age and levels of introversion or extroversion.

“All these can make a huge difference in how we communicate,” she says. “Gender stereotypes can hurt women. If women speak with confidence they are often told they are being aggressive and if they don’t then they are told to be more confident.

“Women [often] try to avoid being aggressive. So they use qualifiers. Women say things like ‘I am not certain’, or use hedging words like ‘might’, ‘but’ or ‘I think’, and frame requests as questions, whereas men tend to dominate the conversation by talking over each other.”

She advises women to lean into that confidence, and avoid questions, hedging words and other deflective strategies. Men, on the other hand, should refrain from talking over people, and give them credit for the things they say.

Emotions and the bottom line Studies have also found that organisations where compassion and gratitude are encouraged don’t tend to have a high staff turnover. From the point of view of savings and productivity, Duffy says there is a good argument for firms to focus on emotional wellbeing.

Research has shown the most ruthless hedge fund managers brought in less money than those that didn’t have this attitude.

People who have rude or aggressive bosses also have a harder time retaining important information. This is likely to lead to bad decisions.

“When we feel like we are supported by our colleagues we tend to stick around longer and we were better able to cope with job stress and were better employees,” she says.

But there is still a lot to be done for the workplace to really embrace emotions. Over the last couple of decades, Duffy points out, the focus has been on emotional intelligence. But most of the research on this until has been on emotional intelligence for leaders, ignoring the possibility it might be useful for every employee. This seems crazy, says Duffy, who believes this type of training should start the moment people begin a job.

There are a lot of benefits to be had by embracing emotions at work. They are something organisations need to recognise and understand, as if they don’t they risk not only damaging their staff’s wellbeing but also the bottom line.

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Bridging the talent gap in a post-Brexit world UK companies are finding it difficult to attract skilled workers, as concerns over Brexit bite. Business Reporter speaks to the CEO of Silicon Valley tech firm Pivotal about how to create a good working environment and recruit – and retain – the cream of the crop

THE BIG INTERVIEW JOANNE FREARSON

“The rest of the worlds can learn these methods. There is nothing magical or unique about Silicon Valley” – Rob Mee, Pivotal

W

ITH THEIR reputations for disrupting industries and get ting t hings done quickly, Silicon Valley companies have developed their own distinct work culture. Hi-tech start-ups from around the world have flocked to the region to gain access to talent, and learn the workplace ethos that makes these high-growth companies tick.

But do firms really need to be located in upstate California to be the next Apple or Airbnb? And can companies in the UK have the same appeal, as fears loom that Brexit turmoil will cause Britain to become a less attractive place to work?

British companies have already been struggling to fill positions. With UK job vacancies at near-record highs, the UK tech sector has been suffering from a skills shortage, and positions that once attracted a large number of foreign workers now draw in few.

The latest UK Labour Market Outlook by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and The Adecco Group found a significant drop in the number of both EU and non-EU migrants employed in the UK. So what does the future hold for attracting talent in the country?

Rob Mee, CEO and co-founder of Silicon Valley headquartered software firm Pivotal, sees huge challenges ahead. “Certainly Brexit is going to have an impact,” he says. “People can

already see that companies want to potentially diversify their concentration of people across Europe.

“That is something that concerns me. We have had access to a really diverse talent pool here. It is one of the great things about operating in Europe. For example, we do a lot of product development in Dublin and people apply from all over Europe.

That is fantastic.

“I would hate to see us to lose that here. I don’t know what exactly will eventually happen [but I] think it would be a big disadvantage to British industry to lose access to all of the talent.”

Not all doom and gloom Mee thinks Brexit will lead to companies diversifying their executive functions to other cities in Europe to a certain degree. But he does not believe they will pack up and leave the UK outright, but rather spread the risk around so everything is not concentrated in Britain.

Speaking from his firm’s London office, Mee says the UK still has a lot to offer despite the uncertainty surrounding Brexit. “London has been for hundreds of years an industrial and banking centre,” he says. “It is a place where people want to live and do business. This is where technologists and creative people are working together to build next-generation software.”

And Pivotal, he assures Business Reporter, is not leaving any time soon.

“We will have a lot of customers concentrated in London for a very long time, so we are here and we will keep growing here,” he says.

“We also do have a presence in Paris and Berlin and other cities that we will likely expand to in Europe over the future. We will stay close to our customers where ever they are.”

Although mainland Europe is central to Pivotal’s plans, Mee believes London will continue to have enough gravity and activity to retain

Companies don’t have to be based there like Google (below left) to start thinking like a Silicon Valley company, says Pivotal’s Rob Mee (inset below)

companies for the foreseeable future – but he can’t say Brexit will not have an impact.

The Silicon Valley way A potential solution to the increasing talent gap in the UK, thinks Mee, could be found in creating the right workplace culture.

He believes a Silicon Valley mindset can be transplanted anywhere.

“The notion of a Silicon Valley culture is actually not restricted to a particular geography,” he says. “It can be anywhere. Silicon Valley is just a matter of state of mind. You can have that state of mind no matter where you are. It is really a way of doing things, and that can be done almost anywhere.

“The rest of the world can learn these methods.

There is nothing magical or unique about Silicon Valley. It is a collaborative and creative and innovative culture and it can be established pretty much anywhere.”

Indeed, having its own roots in Silicon Valley gives Pivotal something of a headstart when it comes to embedding this mindset in its other workplaces around the world, by seeding each new location with existing staff.

Mee explains that new offices are seeded with a team of four to six, who then begin to hire from the local talent pool. Eventually the founding employees return to where they were originally based, leaving the new office composed of people who have been hired locally.

“Recently I visited Sydney, where we have an office,” Mee explains.

“They told me when I was there

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CIPD and The Adecco Group Labour Market Outlook report: key figures

70%

34%

70 per cent of employers report that at least some of their vacancies are proving hard-to-fill

34 per cent of employers have found it difficult to retaining staff over the past 12 months

48 per cent report an increase in their EU workforce expressing insecurity about their jobs as a result of Brexit

90%

26% 26 per cent of UK citizens also felt insecurity about their jobs as a result of Brexit

48%

48%

90 per cent of employers say current migration proposals will not, or only to some degree, meet their needs for low- or medium-skilled labour

48 per cent have raised starting salaries in response to recruitment challenges

SOURCE: CIPD/ADECCO GROUP

that they had just celebrated losing their first original Pivot from a different office. They were all hired in Australia.

That typically happens in most of the offices where we go.”

Pivotal’s culture, says Mee, is one of collaboration, agile working and continual learning. The company has a pairing programme where two employees from a team work together on a project. Developers, designers and product managers sit together throughout the day to learn from each other. The idea is to facilitate a faster transfer of knowledge between teams. It also enables employees to respond to changes in the marketplace quicker, and be more innovative and agile in their general approach. “That is a very appealing workplace no matter where you are,” reckons Mee.

Learning from the past Pivotal’s open-plan London office in Shoreditch certainly gives off the impression of a place where staff members can work together side by side. There are community breakout areas, a kitchen stocked full of free food and drink and a relaxation room for staff to chill out in if they need to take a break.

When people think of Silicon Valley, Mee agrees, they tend to think of fast-moving software firms such as Google, Facebook and Twitter – companies that were built on the same agile working culture Pivotal uses.

“These are methods that are optimised for a continuously changing world and continuously changing requirements,” he says.

“From the early 2000s, companies in Silicon Valley started adopting a more agile way of working, and a more experimental model of software development”

But working in Silicon Valley wasn’t always about agility and collaboration.

Originally, Mee says, software companies built everything up front. They would see if a project worked for customers after 18 months of development, to often find out it was not quite right.

As a result of these rigid systems, there was a high failure rate of projects.

From the early 2000s, companies in Silicon Valley started adopting a more agile way of working and a more experimental model of software development: the fail-fast, learn-fast mentality. “We have a hypothesis,” says Mee. “We are going to validate it to see if it true or is it false. If it’s false can we do something else? If it is true, let’s invest more. That approach has enabled software developers in Silicon Valley to start disrupting industries all around the world.

Mee points to this as the point of divergence, and that the reason the big Silicon Valley companies that emerged from it have been so successful. “They have adopted a much more scientific, a much more evolutionary model of software development,” he explains. “It is very disruptive, and allows them to move much more quickly and challenge established industries.”

And the rest of the business world has finally started to catch onto this way of working, says Mee – not just start-ups or the technology companies.

Pivotal is seeing its larger customers also adopt these modern software development techniques.

“The fact that the world is recognising that this is actually the way that software development needs to be done is fantastic,” says Mee. “There is definitely a movement that is ticking over to the mainstream.”

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The era of the intelligent digital worker has arrived W HE N YOU consider some of the most innovative and disruptive inventions of all time, you would probably list Gutenberg’s printing press, Newcomen’s steam engine, the Jacquard loom, Babbage’s analytical engine and Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, to name a few.

All these inventions have forever changed the course of civilisation. Now imagine an innovation in the world of computer systems – a completely autonomous digital worker capable of making independent decisions, which can augment, support and assist their human colleagues. The era of the intelligent digital worker has arrived.

The inspiration for the digital worker came in 2001, when Blue Prism attempted to tackle the longstanding issue of automating repetitive, transactional mission-critical tasks. How do you automate processes that aren’t integrated or have very limited IT interoperability, in order to execute corporate policies and business goals? The breakthrough came when the company launched its Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software that carries out tasks in the same way humans do – via an easy-to-control, automated “digital worker”.

Extending the art of the possible

These digital workers are quickly evolving and becoming very sophisticated. They not only mimic the way human workers access and read the user interface, to interoperate and orchestrate any third party application, they also work like humans but faster, without human error and on a large scale, 24/7.

They can also collaborate, work in teams and combine forces to complete workloads, constantly regrouping for time-pressured tasks. Digital workers adjust according to obstacles – different screens, layouts or fonts, application versions, system settings, permissions and even language.

Digital workers can even prioritise the order of tasks based on demand or congestion, such as latency in applications and networks or systems outage. This added operational agility continues to operate within the full governance and security of the IT department, enabling human employees to focus on higher-value activities.

RPA the AI enabler This power to automate leads to a eureka moment because it becomes the foundat ion for a n ongoing dig ita l transformation. RPA is emerging

as the execution platform of choice, for swiftly exploiting best-of-breed artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive technologies across the digital enterprise. The most advanced digital workers will seamlessly interact with human workers, systems and applic tions to create a powerful, intelligent, digital ecosystem.

We are already seeing a shift from rules-based decision-making to a more advanced intelligent automation. One that increasingly delivers “thinking” and analytical capabilities to ensure that digital workers more closely replicate human decision making. Blue Prism is working to embed and deliver six skill categories including; knowledge/insight, learning, visual perception, collaboration, planning and sequencing, and problem solving, so digital workers can extend automation capabilities by enabling artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive services helping customers drive more innovation.

For example, sophisticated digital workers are starting to make use of natural language processing, intelligent optical character recognition (OCR), communication analytics, process optimisation and machine learning (ML). A large Pharmaceutical company has an automated documentation digitisation and discrepancy

Why work isn’t working M OST OF us spend the majority of our time at work, yet too many of our days continue to be filled with routine, time-intensive tasks that impinge on our ability to do more meaningful work. Our annual study, The State of Work, substantiates this, with 91 per cent of business leaders saying that skilled employees drain too much time on mundane activities.

This is bad for employees and businesses.

As employees, we have become used to digital experiences outside of work that make our lives easier and more convenient, but these aren’t reflected at work.

All the while, at a macro level, sluggish productivity remains one of the UK’s biggest economic challenges. The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that UK workers are 16.3 per cent less productive than those in other G7 nations.

It’s an issue that continues to puzzle economists. Yet a key barrier to productivity growth is poor adoption of new business technologies, which can unlock more meaningful work.

Making work, work better for people Putting people first is key. Employees want to know that they’re realising their full potential at work. Digital workflows that make routine work easier

and faster free people to focus on the more fulfilling aspects of their jobs. And this is possible with the technology available today, rather than looking to sophisticated implementations, such as AI, that aren’t a commercial reality for most businesses yet.

ServiceNow’s platform enables digital workflows to be created to deal with the repetitive tasks in every business, such as dealing with common customer enquiries, HR requests and basic issue resolution.

Alexander Mann Solutions, a talent acquisition and management specialist, added ServiceNow digital workflows to take on the numerous repetitive and manual aspects of managing more than 250,000 job interviews annually. Now the average time to schedule an interview has reduced from five days to two.

This has transformed the way employees work at Alexander Mann and freed them up to evolve their roles into high-touch recruitment facilitators and solution designers. Candidate satisfaction has also increased to more than 93 per cent.

checking solution using OCR that alerts teams of any data mismatches or gaps across shipping documents. Another combined digital workers and ML program scans for potential compliance risks from conversations with customers.

The future of work will require the blending of human and digital labour. But far from a bleak, dystopian future where robots replace humans, a digital worker is just another team member helping to increase productivity and drive better customer interactions through automation. In the end businesses must embrace this change to empower everyone and further drive innovation.

INDUSTRY VIEW

Pat Geary (left) is chief evangelist at Blue Prism www.blueprism.com/who-we-are

The productivity dividend Such improvements are particularly important for the UK’s growing knowledge economy, where the adoption of intelligent digital workflows has the ability to enhance knowledge-intensive activities and accelerate the pace of development.

In fact, based on the latest employment figures from the ONS, we believe 5.7 million workers in the UK (16 per cent of the total workforce) with roles in financial services, customer services, IT, legal, HR and facilities management could benefit from intelligent digital workflows. This is thanks to business outcome figures derived from methodology developed by Forrester Consulting, which prove ServiceNow digital workflows can deliver a 20 per cent productivity gain by taking on repetitive tasks.

Applied to those 5.7 million workers, this figure has the potential to boost the UK’s gross value added (GVA) and the UK economy to benefit from a staggering £64.6billion “productivity dividend”. This productivity boost is within reach – it simply requires businesses to grasp the nettle. We need to make the world of work, work better for people now.

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Philip van der Wilt (left) is senior vice president, GM EMEA at ServiceNow +44 (0)1784 221600 www.servicenow.com/workflow

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What big business can learn from the self-employed T HE FOCUS of most big businesses is normally growth, increasing profitabi l it y a nd i mprov i ng productivity. But does this always square with the people who work for these companies, and who want to pursue the careers and lives they aspire to?

In the UK, the trend is growing towards self-employment.

Figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) showed 15.1 per cent of the workforce (4.8 million) in 2017 were selfemployed, compared with 12 per cent (3.3 million) in 2001.

Self-employed tech designer and internet consultant Paul Jarvis, who swapped a successful life in the big city to live on a remote island in Canada, does not think big business growth is all that it is cracked up to be.

Jarvis – who has worked with high-powered clients from basketball player Shaquille O’Neal to big corporates such as Microsoft, Mercedes-Benz, Yahoo and Warner Music – ditched the corporate world after getting tired of the pressures of growing his successful business bigger.

“Being big is more fragile than people think,” says Jarvis, whose latest book Company Of One, questions the endless growth rates businesses aspire to. “It is because being big requires a very growth-focused business.

It requires more resources, more moving parts, more everything in order to be sustainable.”

Does being bigger make you happy?

Jarvis says that although growth is important initially to get your

company up and running, constant growth isn’t necessarily a good thing. If his business became larger than it currently is, “I don’t think I would be happier,” he says. “I would probably be less happy because it would take more time. It would be more stressful, be more responsibility, as I’d have to hire more people.” For Jarvis, a successful working life is making his business profitable enough so he can go about pursuing the meaningful pleasures in life, and have the life he wants.

He believes smaller businesses can be more resilient than bigger ones, as they require fewer resources and more autonomy in decision-making. “I can run a business with very simple rules, processes and solutions,” he says.

“I don’t need to have an idea, then pitch it in a meeting and then have another meeting about the first meeting and run it by a board of directors. If I make my business as simple as possible, it is easy to keep track of.”

Technology and the self-employed The growing trend towards self-employment, Jarvis believes, has been fuelled by advances in technology. The internet has made it relatively cheap to start a business, and people no longer need to be in an office to work, or invest in expensive systems to set up a business. “In the same amount of time it takes to write an email to you, I can write an email to 30,000 people on my mailing list,” he says. “I can reach people who live all over the world. I can get replies from all of them and have conversations

with them… [it] reaches more people than just setting up a shop in my local town.”

Jarvis is not suggesting everyone becomes an entrepreneur, but thinks big corporations can become more agile if they try to apply a more “self-employed” mindset. “To run a small business out of a house, it requires almost nothing to be profitable – and profitable businesses are sustainable,” he says.

Even by giving employees more flexibility in their hours or place of work, says Jarvis, could prove very beneficial to any business. “The more a boss gives their employees autonomy and the ability to make their own decisions, the more employees will feel ownership of their project,” he points out.

“They are going to do a better job. [Businesses] will get higherquality work.”

“Maybe an employee works better in the morning, then takes their kids to the pool in the afternoon and continues working in the evening. They still get the work done, but they have more autonomy over their day.

“If a manager sees that, hey, this is actually working, my employees aren’t just lollygagging [being idle] around town or posting on social media all day, bosses would be more inclined to give autonomy to their staff.”

Is small the next big thing?

As technology and working practices evolve, Jarvis thinks more big companies will be hiring staff with similar traits to those of the self-employed.

“If a corporate wants to retain the workforce – especially a younger workforce – then it will have to look at the traits of being a company of one,” he says.

“Bosses will be more inclined to want to give autonomy to their staff. That is going to retain them more. Nowadays people want to feel fulfilled in their work, and if a corporate job isn’t giving that to them they may start to look elsewhere.”

Don’t worry if you think Python is a snake T HE VALUE of soft skills is easy to underestimate. The name doesn’t help. It implies characteristics that are fuzzy, feel-good and nice-to-have, rather than robust or impactful.

At a time when businesses are battling to hire software engineers, artificial intelligence (AI) experts and data scientists, do recruiters really care about things skills like creativity or time management?

New research from LinkedIn reveals that they do. In fact, finding employees with these characteristics is keeping business leaders awake at night just as much as the need for advanced coding skills such as C++ and Python is. In this year’s LinkedIn Global Talent Trends report, 86 per cent of UK talent professionals said that soft skills were more important to their company’s success than they had been previously – and 92 per cent said they were either as important or more important than hard skills.

Digital skills are valuable but have a limited shelf life. Flash, the must-have programming language of a few years ago, no longer even features on a ranking of the most in-demand hard skills compiled from LinkedIn insights.

Cloud computing, the UK’s most in-demand hard skill this year, didn’t feature at all in 2008. This rapid cycle means that the ability to adapt and learn is at least as important as the specific skills somebody has when you hire them. The need to future-proof workforces is the reason why adaptability now ranks in the top three of the UK’s most in-demand soft skills.

Automation promises to replicate rigid technical skills, but it’s far more difficult for machines to learn interpersonal skills such as creativity and persuasion (the UK’s two most in-demand soft skills according to LinkedIn insights). Because these can’t be standardised or automated, they hold the key to differentiation and competitive advantage. While hard skills help to build new technologies, soft skills are vital for monetising

them. There’s no point in building a state-of-theart, AI-driven trading system if you don’t have the marketers and sales teams who can convince clients to use it.

Digital disruption demands new, “distributed” ways of working, with people in different time zones communicating through a combination of email and video calls while rarely meeting in person. Offering things such as flexible working is often one of the only ways for businesses to access scarce digital skills. The need for an imaginative approach to managing and inspiring increasingly extended teams pushes soft skills such as creativity and persuasion to the top of recruiters’ agendas. Creativity, persuasion, adaptability and collaboration were listed as the most in-demand soft skills the UK companies need, but have a hard time finding, based on LinkedIn data.

More appreciation of the value of soft skills puts pressure on recruiters to find dependable ways to identify them. Forward-thinking businesses aren’t satisfied with asking interviewees about how they solved challenges in the past, or watching their body language for clues about their personality. A growing number are giving candidates problems to solve, dropping them into unfamiliar situations, and then using a panel of observers to assess how they perform.

They’re also casting their nets wider and using methods (for example LinkedIn Talent Insights) to identify people with the potential to learn rather than just finding those who already have the right skills. In the workplace of the future, how you do things is just as important as what you can do.

INDUSTRY VIEW

Jon Addison is head of Talent Solutions at LinkedIn UK Download the LinkedIn 2019 Global Talent Trends report at https://lnkd.in/gtt19

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What artificial intelligence means for the future of work “Instead of being viewed as alternative to human intelligence, AI should be thought of as a tool that augments human intelligence” – Murat Bicak, PMI

T

HERE IS no organisation, industry, or company that is immune to the effects of technology disruption, from connected devices to automation and artificial intelligence (AI). Whether it’s vehicles that gauge and react to their environment, online chatbots simulating conversation, or sophisticated algorithms that sort through massive amounts of data with unimaginable speed, the future of work is being shaped by new technologies and their promise.

AI is the technology that may well have the most impact. While AI means “artificial intelligence,” what it represents is far different. Instead of being viewed as an alternative to human intelligence, AI should be thought of as a tool that augments human intelligence. In this context, AI’s potential to change the future of work – specifically, how people view work, deploy talent, and create value – needs to be rethought and reimagined.

There is a lot of fear surrounding AI because of its presumed potential to eliminate jobs. In fact, according to a report by the World Economic Forum, 65 per cent of children now entering primary school will hold jobs that currently don’t exist. Certainly there is no question that when it comes to such tasks as processing algorithms, recognising patterns, and deep learning, computers can operate with a speed, breadth, and accuracy not matched by humans. But the idea that AI is a job destroyer is largely incorrect. To assess whether AI could replace humans at work, a McKinsey Global Institute team examined more than 2,000 different tasks that constitute jobs – an alternate view to looking at jobs themselves. Each was scored against 18 different capabilities that could potentially be automated.

The research found that approximately half of all activities people are paid to do could be automated through adaptation of currently demonstrated technologies. The research also indicated that this is unlikely to occur at this scale before 2055, pointing out various technological, societal and cultural obstacles.

But whether this happens in five years or 35 years, the real issue is what the elimination of tasks – not jobs – will mean. And it should be viewed as a positive. When machines are allowed to do these tasks, humans will have time freed up to focus on those things machines can’t do: ask probing questions, perform critical analysis, use subjectivity, think creatively, and apply emotional intelligence. By relying on machines for the appropriate tasks, humans

will have more time to focus on overcoming business challenges to drive growth.

Research from Accenture speaks to AI’s potential to boost growth. According to Accenture’s Reworking the Revolution (released in 2018), if businesses invest in AI and human-machine collaboration at the same rate as top-performing companies, by 2022 they could increase revenues by 38 per cent and employment levels by 10 per cent. Of the 1,200 senior executives surveyed for the report, almost two-thirds (61 per cent) said they expect the share of roles requiring collaboration with AI to increase in the next three years. More than half (54 per cent) said that human-machine collaboration is important to achieving strategic priorities. In parallel, 69 per cent of the 14,000 workers surveyed said it will be important to develop new skills to work with intelligent machines.

Despite leaders’ conviction about AI’s importance and employees’ belief in the need for skill development, only 3 per cent of executives said they plan to increase investment in training and reskilling programmes over the next three years. This disconnect could thwart AI’s potential as a driver of revenue and employment. Investing in skills and talent is an investment in the future. When a significant number of tasks that have traditionally been part of a person’s job can be performed by a machine,

the more accretive capabilities that an individual is hired for – critical thinking and decision making, creativity, and innovativeness – can rise to the surface.

Regarding the future of work, the focus needs to be on roles – where people are brought into a project because of a match between skills and needs – rather than jobs, where people are limited by narrow descriptions of duties. Organisations will structure themselves much more in this way, delivering value through projects that come together and disband rapidly and frequently.

People will contribute their specific capabilities to projects. Talent will be more fluid, mobile, and on-demand within organisations, with teams shape-shifting as needed to deliver specific business outcomes.

Large consulting companies, such as McKinsey and Deloitte, already work exactly in this project-oriented manner. They are proof that multi-billion-dollar organisations can be as nimble and agile as start-ups in delivering value by viewing strategy through the prism of projects.

The nature of projects and programmes themselves is changing and will continue to do so. Project managers and business alike can prepare for this change. There will be more exploratory projects requiring different methodologies and frameworks.

The project manager is going to have to rely on a very different toolbox that allows him

or her to adopt the methodology, management style and thinking most appropriate for the project at hand. Value will be created by innovation-oriented projects and transformative programmes to support not only new products but new business models.

Businesses should be thinking about how to retrain and reskill individuals for a business landscape that will continue to be transformed by AI and other technologies.

They also need to empower and encourage people to take risks, with the full understanding that when they actually go forward and test, they may fail. But through fast failure they can learn and continue testing until they find the right way to add value.

Incremental change will not be sufficient for organisations to succeed in the future, and resistance to change or an unwillingness to invest in change could prove fatal. Indeed, organisations governed by the top-down, hierarchical business models that dominated in the last decades of the 20th century lack the innate resiliency that allows them to survive something as disruptive as AI. Such organisations are unlikely to have the vision to see its potential and reap the rewards.

INDUSTRY VIEW

Murat Bicak (inset, left) is senior vice president, strategy of the Project Management Institute. For more information, please visit www.pmi.org/uk