Stop getting stuck in your head - experiment, take action, and learn from every step!

The biggest challenge that I see for corporates over the next few years is that everyone's skills have to change. Jobs on a massive scale are going to be reimagined. Everything is going to be either disrupted or augmented by new technologies, and new technologies are being adopted at an ever-increasing rate. What we need is a new model of the kind of people who will be working in this new tech-enabled world And how do we not only plan for that workforce, but how do we map out how to get there? Because you really do need to work with the people you've got. Everyone's going to be racing to recruit people with tomorrow's skills. You will have to build them yourself. Change and growth in the industry in any industry in the next 3 to 5 years. Yes, we have new technological capabilities, but technology does not create change. You have to get a handle on the human-centered needs that you're not serving today, that you can serve tomorrow, and get yourself together to serve them. GenAI gives us an amazing leg up in terms of capabilities, the speed of work. It's, it's an incredible tool. But anyone who uses it extensively has to caution new users. GenAI doesn't come up with things that are genuinely new. It doesn't go into unstructured situations find the problem, create novel solutions, and experiment with people to finalize something that's a good offering or a good, a good solution. Also, it can't ask good questions. It doesn't examine itself. There's so many things that GenAI cannot do. What we need is to understand fully what it does well and what humans do well, develop our human skills more profoundly, and develop those skills to synergize with our technology so we get the best of human and tech all the time. The most surprising lesson I've learned is one rooted in digital transformation. For tech heads, tech lovers like myself, I look at new capabilities. Look, as an entrepreneur, I look at new opportunities and say, yeah, duh, this is how the future should be. Let's go. And nobody wants to do it. Even with virtual work, we had capabilities long, long ago. Nobody wanted to do it. Until COVID came along. Then once everybody does get excited and does feel pressure, people tend to think it's the tech that drives the change. It absolutely is not. It's the people. It's figuring out what's needed, coming up with a plan. You're never going to implement according to plan, but you're not going to implement without one. That's a steal from Eisenhower about winning wars. It takes getting a real handle on people, on understanding your business deeply, on understanding your customers deeply, not just your employees, and then coming up with ways forward and creating experimental routes where you try things out, gather the data because you're doing something you've never done before. Learn from it and adjust your strategy. Then go collect more data trying something else and repeat. So people have to learn how to do learning business, experimental business, not just marching according to the plan that you set last year. Piece of advice for turning ideas into action. One key thing I think besides sharing vision with everyone is to give them room to think with their hands. Stop planning everything. Stop thinking of everything. Stop driving from your head. Start thinking with your hands and your feet and your heart. And let people know that if they fail experimenting and trying to push something new forward, that's fine. It's only a failure if you don't learn. So create those learning loops and let people, get people comfortable experiment, experimenting with something new. Hi, I'm Dr. Cj Meadows from SP Jain School of Global Management. I run an innovation center. I'm a multi-book author, including one on the future of learning coming out later this year. Join me for the People Matters Tech HR Conference on the 18th of July at Marina Bay Sands to learn how to move from inspiration to action.