You can't put the toothpaste back into the tube now." - Heather McGowan

Let's say I'm scanning the horizon, and I might see the need to understand Chat GPT or generative design. And so, I bring that research back into the project as well as back into my functional home.

What I call myself is a Future of Work strategist and a keynote speaker and an author. And Chris Shipley and I wrote The Adaptation Advantage, which came out in 2020. The premise of it was, the future work is really learning and we can't have fixed occupational identities or fixed ideas, we have to essentially get adept at adapting, and that came out just prior to the pandemic. And, oh boy, we did not know how much we were going to need to adapt then!

I say there are four shifts that a leader needs to embrace. First is a shift in mindset. You're not managing people and processes any more, you're enabling success. And to be intentionally provocative about it, I say, "You used to think of the people as working for you. Now, you work for them. You enable their success, because you're not going to get anywhere without their success". The second is a shift in culture. We used to, when we had the same skills and knowledge of the leader and the team, and then usually across the team, you could pit people against each other. Forced rankings, all those kind of bad ideas, Hunger Games kind of stuff, that doesn't work anymore. So you've got to shift from peers as competitors to peers as collaborators.