Reinventing the Business Organization, Reinventing Skills

    

As readers of the blog hopefully know, I use this as a forum to share Business Acumen, Business Leadership, and Strategic Business Selling insights, ideas, and tools to help organizations, Reinventing-the-Business-Organization.jpgleaders, and individual contributors become more successful in their jobs of executing the strategy of the business.

My team of researchers, consultants, and I are constantly scanning the business universe for “weak signals” of changes and potential disruptions that will impact you in the near future.  One of the many weak signals of change that recently captured our attention is the concept of “reinventing the business organization.”

The concept of reinventing the organization is born from the idea that in the digital age, organizations will have to reinvent themselves to compete.  According to the latest research from Deloitte’s Human Capital Trends report, 88% of companies believe that they need to redesign their organization to succeed in the digital age and 90% of these organizations are exploring or designing the organization of the future. Yet only 9% of them understand how their internal organization’s network works, and 11% feel fully capable of redesigning their organization for the future.

This startling data presents today’s leaders with one of the most significant challenges of the next quarter century as millennials move from being individual contributors and first-line leaders into senior leadership and executive roles.

As we continue to conduct more research and try to seek solutions for helping our clients develop the skills they need for the reinvented organization, here are a few initial thoughts on where to start  reinventing skills and what the talent development process will look like to support that.

Artificial Intelligence SimBots as a foundation

I am very pleased to share that we have started our first project to design, develop, and deliver a SimBot™ to a client to help create a scalable and effective new digital methodology of developing skills.  This first SimBot is for sales professionals to practice and develop their strategic selling skills by positioning a value proposition to a simulated customer.  The three-minute experience provides intense data analytics across and entire 600-person sales force in the matter of minutes and also provides reports for closing skill gaps just as quickly.  The design, development, and delivery of SimBot platforms to become training mentors and coaches is going to be one of the most impactful changes leaders are going to support and execute as part of their “reinventing skill-building strategies” over the next few years.

Curated and customized skill building to support the new definitions of work and career

Another weak signal presented in the Deloitte report illustrates 65% of companies now have an open and flexible career model and 16% of the companies are planning on no career model at all, while 70% of companies are redesigning their entire career management strategy.  The implications to the way this new workforce will learn and gain the skills needed to perform the basic levels of their jobs will change radically.  Through machine-based learning, SimBots, business simulations, and other adaptive learning platforms, learners will be presented with customized, yet scalable curated content that will give them the right amount of knowledge and skills they need for the task at hand but not to build long-term organizational talent and succession planning.  That concept will become extinct.

Organizations will depend on the skills of outsourced workforces

Again, according to Deloitte, 51% of companies expect to use contingent, outsourced workforces.  That means that institutional knowledge, foundational skills, and highly refined skills that create long-term relationships with customers will also start to decline.  Skills will become even more transactional and task oriented and customer expectations will evolve to expect a different value proposition from the companies they buy from.

In summary, these three trends are the beginning of a completely different world than we know today.  Leaders should start thinking now about how they will develop the skills to and create the reinvented organization of tomorrow.

 Anyone up for a new idea called the “Reinventing the Organization Business Simulation?”

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Robert Brodo

About The Author

Robert Brodo is co-founder of Advantexe. He has more than 20 years of training and business simulation experience.