Why Sharpening Your iSkills (Innovation Skills) Could Be The Smartest Career Move You’ll Ever Make

A recent McKinsey survey found that fewer than 30 percent of business leaders feel confident that they are prepared for vast changes ahead. Most don’t feel up to the challenge of addressing the changes they see coming. The pandemic, combined with a deep global recession, and unprecedented social turmoil in the United States are huge distractions to say the least.

But the good news is that good news is on the way. A covid-19 vaccine will be ready in Q1 2021. and experts predict the pandemic will recede from crisis by 3rd quarter of 2021. The economy will then get better, and barring a coup, there will be new leadership in Washington come January 20th.

Here’s my advice as an advisor to managers around the world: Don’t let these triple crises go to waste. It’s time to use your skills as an innovator to focus on shaping the post-pandemic future to your advantage. As the changes keep coming at us — social, technological, demographic, climatological, political and otherwise — the mindset, skillset and toolset that got you here may not get you there. Yesterday’s skillsets are no longer are enough for the post-pandemic environment.

It’s time to focus on a set of skills that are often mentioned in passing, but are commonly assumed that one either has them or one doesn’t. I call them innovation skills, or i-Skills for short. As a futurist and innovation coach to over 200 of the Fortune 500 companies, I have led innovation skills training workshops in 54 countries and seen with my own eyes that these are developable skills, not innate characteristics. You get better with practice. And, going forward in this VUCA environment (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) sharpening and upgrading your iSkills will prove to be the smartest career move you’ll ever make.

The best place to start is to assess your current iSkills, so you know where you stand. To help you do that, I have developed a free that you can take to measure yours, and identify where you’re strong, and where you need improvement.

Meanwhile, here are three suggestions on where to start getting “future-focused” and innovation-ready:

1. Focus on short and long term horizons simultaneously. BCG’s research into the tenures of 7000 CEOs found that one of the biggest distinguishing traits of the successful ones is that they stay focused on the future. They don’t allow themselves to become overwhelmed and distracted with current problems. “You can’t just put out fires,” one executive summed up. “At some point you’ve got to start them.” Actions: A CEO in the IT services industry told me his 50 person firm is hosting strategic sessions twice a year during the crisis because things are changing so rapidly. And a company leader in the call center industry reports that she and her leadership team are now spending 20 percent of their time focused on the 3 to 5 year horizon.
2. Master new strategic foresight methods. Strategic foresight is the the act of identifying and tracking trends, examining scenarios of possible futures, assaulting assumptions and thereby forecasting what will happen and what will be needed in the future. Based on improved informational intake including front line observational skills, I teach executives to develop their own antenna, and not rely totally on data, or internal inputs. Questions are better than answers in this important iSkill arena, such as: how will climate change impact our industry and what do we need to do to prepare? What will 3D printed buildings do to our business? How will changing demographics affect our ability to attract and retain talent?
3. Continuously work to improve your innovation process. I once asked Simon Spencer, Borg Warner Corporation’s first Innovation Catalyst what led the company to completely revamp how they approach innovation. He said, “We simply looked around and observed we had a process for everything else, but why didn’t we have a process for innovation?” And that was the shot heard around the world as more and more companies have streamlined and outlined an overarching process so that everybody knows the score. These days, even small and mid-sized companies are paying attention to how they look, think and act ahead of the curve. “We have built an internal R&D team that is constantly scanning the horizon for new technologies that would be beneficial to our clients, as well as our internal teams,” said Jeff Miller, of Interstates Control Systems, Inc. Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

By Robert Tucker on Forbes.com