C
Catalyst | Comment
Our differentiator as humans? Adaptability
A
s a species, Homo
sapiens is an
unimpressive animal,
n ot p a r t i c u l a r l y
strong, quick, or
resilient. We cannot fly, we cannot
swim. We can run and climb, but
only just. And yet, from our humble
beginnings in a small region of Africa,
we spread to the whole planet, at all
latitudes, and then we went on to reach
the Moon. How come?
We were successful because we were
adaptable: rather than specialists, we
are excellent generalists. The thick skin
of polar bears makes them mighty in a
cold climate, but it’s a death sentence
where it is warm. While other animals
developed their own strategy and stuck
to it, humans have been shifting their
strategies continuously, changing
their tools, rules, diet, to adapt to
different environments. Agile thinking,
rather than being something new, is
something old. Ancestral, in fact.
It would be then a wasted
opportunity to tie the agility debate too
tightly to a technological framework.
Technology is important, of course
(agile workplaces do need WiFi),
but it’s a tool in a box of many, and it
won’t make us nimble on its own. At
the most basic level, many employees
have known the initial joy of starting
to work from home once a week, only
to find that, from home, they couldn’t
get any work done. The technology was
there, the mindset was not.
To build a truy agile mindset, we
need more than infrastructure, we need
ideas – and there is a simple way to
find them. The nine-to-five, the office, a
more-or-less linear career progression,
are all recent inventions; to understand
what to do once they are disrupted, we
could do worse than look at the world
as it was before they were invented.
Take John Timpson. Famously,
Timpson, the British key-cutting
and shoe-repair company, has been
implementing an ‘upside-down’
management model for decades,
which leaves a breathtaking level of
autonomy to staff: most decisions about
how to serve clients are left to each
branch, rather than handed down by a
head office.
Timpson has only two rules: look the
part, and put money in the till. This is
an innovative, agile approach to sales,
but it is also a modern translation
of the oldest approach that exists,
that of the small shop-keeper who
personally knows their clients.
The skills which come into play are
quintessentially human. How to think
clearly, how to tell stories, how to keep
focus: these are the things we need to
learn in order to be agile. They will help
us to draw a line between our actual
goals (putting money in the till) and
the procedures we have been using so
far to get there (rules decided by a head
office 10 years ago).
These so-called soft skills, better
labelled humanistic skills, give us a
backdrop against which agility, and
thus change, can happen, as it did for
our whole history as a species. They
make it possible for us to imagine that
we are not tied to our current situation.
That the sky is not the limit; we can get
to the moon, and beyond.
Francesco Dimitri is an author,
business facilitator and executive
consultant.
Francesco Dimitri
“The nine-to-five, the office, a more-or-less
linear career progression, are all recent
inventions, and to understand what to do
once they are disrupted, we could look at
the world as it was before”
Issue 3 - 2019
53