Magazine BEAST #16 2019

#Business | Human Capital
17
In other words, how would you define the main
mission of the HOW Institute?
We help organizations and individuals to raise their
awareness of the challenges they are facing in the so
called VUCA world (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity
and Ambiguity) by helping them to develop innovative
learning and knowledge management strategies and
systems (including – or replacing - their corporate training
programs) and we also offer workshops mainly about soft
skills and new organizational models (new work). In other
words, we give them the opportunity to become a true
learning organization.
What are the next steps in the development
of the HOW Institute? Are you planning to bring new types
of trainings to Luxembourg?
Considering that certain types of skills and capabilities
will be more and more necessary and thus in demand to
maintain employability and drive performance and wellbeing,
we are also, as mentioned, organizing our own
workshops to help organizations and individuals to navigate
the complexity of the (digitally transformed and AI driven)
VUCA world with serenity and effectiveness. As such we are
focusing mainly on the necessary soft skills like emotional
and social intelligence, curiosity, critical thinking, creative
thinking and imagination, capacity to deal with criticism,
empathy, autonomy, willingness and ability to learn quickly,
capacity of decision-making under ambiguity, mindfulness,
cross-cultural competencies, virtual collaboration,
transdisciplinarity, willingness to take risk, etc. We are
preparing a series of seminars and masterclasses around
these topics for 2020.
According to you, where is the future of training
and knowledge heading to?
From scalable efficiency to scalable learning!
In the 20 TH century, large organizations existed to provide
scalable efficiency. They existed to make the same widget
or execute the same process repeatedly. This size of scale
drove down costs, led to greater efficiency and created
competitive advantage.
But a world shaped by almost constant exponential
change creates near constant disruption; the things we did
yesterday won’t be effective tomorrow. We need
to constantly adapt. A world of near constant
disruption requires near constant innovation.
In a world requiring near constant innovation,
doing the same thing repeatedly is a recipe for
obsolescence. But the mindset, approaches
and institutional practices we use, mostly
continue to be linear.
As a result, organizations are increasingly being confronted
with new and unexpected situations that go beyond the
textbooks and operating manuals and require leaders to
improvise on the spot, coming up with new approaches
that haven’t been tried before.
On top of that, customers are ever better informed and
ask for personalized products and services. Skills have a
shorter and shorter half-life. While skills are still necessary
for success, the focus should shift to cultivating the
underlying capabilities that can accelerate learning so that
new skills can be more rapidly acquired.
At Google for example, recruiters mainly ignore titles and
diplomas. During the recruiting process, candidates are
presented a problem to be solved. The way a candidate
solves the problem is the only capability that is evaluated,
along with social competencies necessary for efficient and
engaging team work. In other words, only the capacity
to rapidly acquire new skills and capabilities even in
areas where the candidate has no prior knowledge along
with social and emotional competencies are evaluated.
Continental, the tire manufacturer, just to mention another
example from a more traditional industry, has adapted its
recruiting process in a similar fashion. This way of doing
is based on the assumption that hard skills can be rather
easily acquired whereas capability gaps and characters
trait gaps are more difficult to address.
Just like organizations and management as a whole have to
become «agile» (as the new paradigm for the VUCA world),
learning has to become agile as well.
Learning today is as colorful as a rainbow:
• From 5-minute microlearning to full time camp’s
• Analog, digital, hybrid
• Self, peer, group, social, MOOC
• Various methods and formats
• Holistic approach (mindset,
skillset, toolset)
• Continuous setups,
journeys, safaris
To further explore our
mission and offerings
and how we can help
to make your learning
colorful as well, you can
visit our website:
how-institute.lu
Sylvain COTTONG
Audrey ROUACH BAVEREL
Economist & Futurist Mindstyle Coach and Consultant
BEAST MAGAZINE #16