The Shortlist with Becks Clarke

Sam.

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. I'm Johnny Campbell and welcome to the July 8th edition of the Shortlist. So welcome back, everybody. I hope you've been enjoying the last 11 or so episodes that we put out there. Already enjoying getting stuck into season two here on the Shortlist. And as always, I want to encourage anyone listening live to please join in the comments. We've got a great guest today. We've got a fantastic topic I think is going to interest all of you and engage you. So we'd like to see your questions, your comments, your thoughts on LinkedIn or YouTube. We're going to take those live. Myself and our guests will take those out and try and address and answer them. We want to get your thoughts, your examples on this as well. As ever, if you want to check out our upcoming lineup on the Shortlist or you'd like to basically check out some of our previous episodes, you can do so@socialtalent.com the shortlist, where you'll get a preview of what's coming over the coming weeks. But again, as I said, you can access any of our prior episodes for free and watch the videos or listen to the shows as well. So that brings me to today's episode. We're going to talk about adaptability. I'm going to talk about how, particularly out of COVID and the Pandemic, we've all learned that adaptability is an essential survival skill. At least I think it is. And I'm hoping we can have a good discussion on this with our guest today. Our guest today has been a friend of mine for some time. She's currently the head of Talent Acquisition for Europe, Middle east and Africa for Adobe. Prior to that, she ran global TA for King Games. Bex Clark is joining us live from the UK today and I'm going to hand over to Bex to kind of give you a bit more context as to what makes her passionate, what she does, and a little bit more about the company she works for. Bex, over to you.

Thank you Jonny, and thank you for the invite to join you this afternoon. Much appreciated. Always enjoy our conversations. So a little bit of background about me. I'm currently leading the TA organization for EMEA for Adobe, as Jonny alluded to. So, and we're very much about driving the world through digital experiences. So very topical at this point in time. I've been in the business just over six months, so had a very interesting journey of kind of three months of BAU and then thrown into our COVID Pandemic world. So definitely needed to be adaptable through that time. Interesting topic for me. So you know, the ability to be adaptable in terms of how it drives you as an individual, what it means within the organisations you're in, has huge impact. So really, really interesting discussion and looking forward to talking.

Jonny, I want to explore adaptability, both in the personal sense. I'm keen to get your experience of how you have become more adaptable if you have as a result of the pandemic, maybe in a personal way, because I'm going to share some insights even if you don't want to hear them. Bex, I'm going to share them with you about I've learned things about myself and how I've had to be less rigid over the last three, four months in certain things. But I want to talk about that then and take the bigger conversation into the workplace. You know, we work in the world of talent. I want to talk about, you know, what that means for organizations and the importance or lack of importance of adaptability, where it does rank, where it should rank, where it comes from as well in particular. So let's dive into those after we jump into a couple of really relevant articles from the news this week and ask Niall to get on with this week's news. We might be cheating when we say the news this week. You were presented with a news article to research and instead you found yourself reading what was a bit of an essay from Peter Skoblich in Harvard Business Review. But I'd encourage anyone listening or watching this to check this out. Learning from the Future. This is a really interesting article. I'll sum it up and get your opinion on it. But essentially Peter was talking about, you know, how most organizations really weren't prepared for this particular crisis and it's unlikely that we'll be prepared for the next crisis because these kind of things are black swans and you just generally don't have a frame of reference to deal with it. And he gives an example, a really good example, a long, detailed example of an organization who have basically build systemic planning into the organization, planning for future crazy scenarios to try and learn from the future, as he puts it, to try and figure out what could happen in multiple different scenarios so that if any of those happen or if a combination of bits of those happens, which is perhaps more likely, they have kind of flexed their muscles, their brain muscles, to think about different scenarios and to react well to those. So, Bex, I'm keen to kind of hear what are your thoughts about the. The approach that the author put forward in this article and what do you think it means for teams?

Yeah, I think it's a good question, Jonny. So I think, you know, for me, scenario planning is kind of the crux of what he's talking about. And I think, you know, that always makes sense. I think my question is, you know, in reality, how often does that happen and how do you actually encourage organizations to do more of that? So, you know, certainly my experience has seen businesses that are much more reactive rather than kind of driving that proactive thinking that then is needed when you're looking at scenario planning. You know, I think Covid is an extreme. It's, you know, it's an absolute massive thing nobody could have planned for it. It touches kind of everything in a working context, but massive impact on personal lives. And those two things together are just a complete and utter, you know, complete and utter kind of nightmare as a whole piece. So, you know, I think my question is more around how do you encourage and drive businesses to see the benefits in scenario planning and actually carve out the time to that and then how do you really create kind of diverse thinking in that scenario planning so that you aren't, you are, you know, you're not just thinking about the two or three, three things you think might be likely, but you're actually really kind of reaching and digging deep for, you know, more, more unlikely scenarios in that mix.

What has your, your experience been like directly in, in the companies you work for? I know you, you only just joined Adobe a few months before the, the pandemic. Perhaps, you know, don't have the same experience there, but even in previous organizations. What was the approach to this kind of planning that you've seen hands on in the past?

Yeah, I think I've probably seen it. I've seen a mix in my career, Jonny, over the last 20 years. So, you know, I've worked in organizations that have been much more forward thinking and actually have, you know, have done this to a degree. I definitely haven't seen any organization I think has done it amazingly well. So, you know, I've certainly seen businesses and even within the talent arena, we've done what if Scenari. So if we want to be this size or we want to grow at this rate, what would that look like? You know, what are the hurdles we're likely to overcome? How do we do that? So I think I've probably seen a mix, but I definitely haven't seen an organization that I think, you know, has absolutely nailed this.

Like I've seen. I'm part of a, I'M doing a leadership program this year. Right. I went back to school, Bex. Right. And I was meant to be in New York last week doing my school schooling. Yeah, I got that. Got canned fairly well.

Yeah.

Oh, it is. Right. So we've been doing this through ess, the business school in Barcelona. Great, great business school. And, you know, I'm doing this with 31 of their CEOs. And every one of them, when we kind of got stuck into Covid, we got on some online seminars and stuff, every one of them had scenario planned in a very, very similar way. Right. And we were no different to kind of go, you know, what are the different scenarios? What if it's a V dip, what if it's a U? What if it's double dip? And they kind of mapped, what would they do? And they'd mapped what were their cost plan be, what is their approach to changing their products, etc. And so we all did this planning. We didn't. There wasn't, it wasn't a moment where someone showed us a slide and then we went back into the planning. We came together and said, what have you been doing? And it turns out we all did pretty much the same planning. And my take is that you scale out to enterprises. It's probably what most businesses did. It happened, we planned. Right. As opposed to. The real difference here is planning before it happens and planning for things you can't predict. And I like this because we often go and this is what experience brings you. Right. I talk about hiring somebody who's only got a certain amount of experience in this sector. You know, whether she or he is young or old doesn't really matter. It's that they're new enough to the role and people get quite confident after three or four years. They know everything. Right. We know what it's like, but actually experience, experience is the. Is the. Is going through things several times so that when something comes up, you go, I have dealt with something similar to this before. Here's how it worked out and here's either what I did right or I did wrong, so I'm going to correct it. And that's generally what experience means, right? You've just seen it before. I think the problem here is that no one experienced something like this. And what they're trying to do here is artificially create an environment where you have seen so many experiences and scenarios in this kind of exercise, this systemic way of approaching planning that I think the author related and I like this.