Prepare for Anything

“How do you prepare a workforce for the future when you don’t know what the future will bring?” Author Pia Lauritzen poses this question in a recent online article in Strategy+Business [READ IT HERE]. Right from the outset Lauritsen answers the question by proposing it is by enabling your people to adapt to change, and to show them how to be prepared for anything.

Using a real-life case study from 2022 of the Audi paint shop, the article highlights the use of questions to understand how best to prepare the team for change. The questions used “revolves around understanding and embracing the five levels or shades of uncertainty on the journey towards transformation: wonder, scepticism, curiosity, doubt, and creativity.” Specifically, the five stages looked like the following:

1. Wonder: Why do I do this?
2. Scepticism: Are we sure this is what we want?
3. Curiosity: what is possible?
4. Doubt: Who should be trusted with what?
5. Creativity: How do we cocreate our future?

Within the article are some powerful examples of how these were used with great effect. Some of the discoveries during the process included:

• Finding our which departments were not communicating with others, initiating a process of breaking down silos.
• Learning where the most strategic thinkers were (spoiler – not in leadership), leading to involving more employees in the early strategic discussions.
• That the six keywords the leaders had anticipated would be the most important discussion points for employees were totally wrong – not one of them rose to any level of importance – there were six totally different main points of concern that the leadership team totally missed.

Quoting one of the leadership team, the article notes a very important learning from the experience, “But to make a sustainable and profound change and to create an environment where something can grow and have a long life, you must talk about the topics that are relevant to the people.” Seemingly so obvious, yet so frequently missed.

To summarise the learnings of the case study as a whole, the major outcome from using this powerful questioning process is to recognise the keys to preparing an organisation for anything is time, transparency, and trust.