Just a few weeks ago, the US and Canadian space agencies announced a new manned flight that will fly over the moon. Meanwhile, more than 50 years after man first set foot on our only natural satellite, many organisations are considering upskilling processes to adapt the roles of their professionals, their competencies and skills associated with the digital era, that future that is now.
But sometimes the results are unambitious competencies and skills that become obsolete within a few years because business is moving faster than adaptation efforts. Why does this happen?
Many of these design processes, which are judiciously focused on a “human centric” approach, are carried out through interviews and/or focus groups with relevant stakeholders (senior management, business and people managers, employees in their current role, …), but this approach may have a lot to do with this lack of ambition. Gathering the vision of those employees who currently play a role or who are “in the day-to-day running of the business”, usually visualises a more or less near future, almost “imminent”.
It is not so common to find professionals with a function “glued to the business” who have, in turn, a clear vision of the long-term future and how, for example, technologies will impact on the market, customers, competitors, etc. For this reason, convening working sessions with the professionals of the organisations “bare-bones”, without further ado, leads to an updating of skills under slightly incremental evolutionary parameters in a world where the speed of change is approaching at an exponential rate. Business, as we said, is moving faster than the evolution of the company. And what has all this got to do with travelling to the moon?
John F. Kennedy, the former president of the United States of America, announced in 1962 during a lecture at Rice University that he would be the first country to send a man to the moon, which NASA achieved seven years later.
In essence, President Kennedy cast a clear, challenging and seductive vision to the world about a huge long-term challenge. How would they achieve it? How would they solve the enormous technical challenges? No one stopped to explain it, or to detail the myriad of drawbacks to be overcome. Let’s remember that just a few weeks ago a Japanese expedition failed in its moon landing attempt and the Starship rocket promoted by Elon Musk exploded a few seconds after launching. It would not be so easy if, with the incredible technological evolution of the last 50 years, we are still like this.
President Kennedy’s bold vision inspired the Moonshot Thinking phenomenon, a way of generating long-term solutions that are sometimes disruptive, but in general, ambitious as well as activatable in the short term. It tries to avoid one of the great problems of innovation, i.e. that it is modestly incremental, because it is bound by a vision of conservative advances due to the consideration of a future that does not change much. In the digital age this can mean not being able to keep up with the pace of change demanded by the market.
How does Moonshot Thinking add value to an upskilling process? Actually, it brings value to any innovation process. Let’s look at a working sequence that we recommend to our clients to think big first but focus on the day-to-day afterwards:
1. There is nothing better than co-creation and the activation of collective intelligence in a company in order to find effective solutions and to activate and maintain a momentum for change through involvement. The organisation is part of the solution, which is why it is still an excellent idea to keep the classic individual interviews, focus groups, etc., in place.
2. This process will be enriched by actions within the organisation that help key stakeholders to understand where the world is going, but not the world 3 years ahead, but many years ahead: 15, 20, 30 years, etc. The speed of change in the market, competitors and customers, supported by the incremental development of technology, will accelerate this time. The actions to be carried out can be of the type of presentations of future trends in technology, cases of radical change in traditional sectors, … and even work in ad hoc sessions with specialist science fiction authors. Reality often ends up surpassing fiction.
3. Once these new qualitative inputs have been introduced, which help those involved to understand the incredible magnitude of the changes (technology, markets, habits, …), it is time for Moonshot Thinking. In multidisciplinary workshops, we invite participants to generate a “man in the moon” vision of the challenge to be developed, for example, what will a leader of a commercial team be doing, what will happen around him, … in 15, 20 or 30 years’ time. To do this, they will check a list of trends: will they affect their business/role or not, and how? This exercise generates some resistance in organisations, so it is important that the facilitators get the participants “on their feet” as it is easier to “bring down” a crazy vision than to “bring up” a mediocre vision.
4. Once the change factors have been identified and how they can affect the role, with a “Moonshot” mentality it would be necessary to carry out a “retrocast” exercise, that is, for this vision to be fulfilled in 20 years, what should happen before in 15, 10, 5, 3 years, 1 year?
This is the way to “land” an aspirational vision, a way that has become popular in innovative organisations and that reaps very good returns by disrupting new sectors with well-established companies. One example is Tesla in the automotive industry.Introducing this way of thinking and doing greatly enriches the design of an upskilling programme if it is not to be born moribund and rendered obsolete by the business, the market and the competition in a short time. This approach to creating solutions from the future to the present, rather than from the present to the future, is key to competing successfully in a world of continuous and radical change.