Future of Work and Agility
Future Insight: Responding To Trends, Threats and Opportunities
This event and the accompanying report will explore why organisations are so poor at spotting what is happening in front of their eyes, and how we can help our organisations avoid the vicious cycle of creative destruction. We will seek to answer the following questions:
- What organisational mechanisms are required to scan the environment in a structured way?
- How can we build capacity to detect weak signals, and most importantly to take actions today to prepare for different outcomes and experiment with alternative solutions?
- What leadership capabilities do we need to improve our capacity to anticipate the future and act on it?
- What are the elements of an organisational culture where people feel they can speak up about what they see and how to respond?
- How can we build agility and flexibility in the right places, so we are controlled and ‘tight’ where it’s essential, while remaining ‘loose’ where necessary?
Interactive and challenging, this masterclass led by Margaret Heffernan gets to the heart of organisational performance and the need for constant scanning and future-proofing.
Who is it For?
Senior HR and business leaders looking to develop the skills to help their organisation improve the capacity to anticipate and plan for the future, and make change happen.
Speakers
Margaret Heffernan
Author, Broadcaster & Speaker
Margaret Heffernan produced prize-winning radio and television programmes for the BBC for ten years. She then ran media and software companies in the UK and the US. She is the author of five books, including Wilful Blindness (a finalist for The Financial Times Best Book award), A Bigger Prize (winner of the Threshold Prize) and Beyond Measure. Her TED talks have been seen by over eight million people. She mentors senior and chief executives, and writes for The Financial Times.
Sarah Gillard
Director of People Strategy, Insight and Assurance at John Lewis Partnership
Sarah joined the John Lewis Partnership in 2010, following a number of years working in fashion buying and merchandising for major high street retailers. She has worked in various roles for JLP, including trading, commercial strategy and operations. In 2017, Sarah was appointed Director, People Strategy, Insight and Assurance, leading the development and delivery of the People strategy and providing thought leadership and assurance on the evolution and sustainability of the Partnership model.
Dr. Kris De Meyer
Neuroscientist, King's College London
Dr. Kris De Meyer is a neuroscientist at King’s College London, specialising in the brain science of how people form their opinions and understanding of the world around them. Kris works with scientists and policymakers to help them engage constructively with citizens about controversial topics such as climate change. He produced documentary Right Between Your Ears (exploring the science of entrenched views). With experience design company fanSHEN he created The Justice Syndicate, an immersive experience looking at how people make decisions alone and in a group. For the Cabinet Office, they produced Shutdown, designing a novel way to get people to think about a future scenario which would be difficult to imagine.
Dan Barnard
Artistic Director, fanSHEN
Dan Barnard is Artistic Director of fanSHEN, a recovering theatre company, who now design and create audience-centric experiences which involve elements of performance, game and installation. fanSHEN make unforgettable creative interventions which are participatory, playful and political. fanSHEN’s recent piece The Justice Syndicate, created in collaboration with neuroscientist Kris de Meyer, was featured in The Observer, The Sunday Times and The Irish Times and was recently used as an unconscious bias training tool by NBC. fanSHEN also collaborated with de Meyer and The Cabinet Office to create Shutdown, a novel way to get people to think about a future scenario which would be difficult to imagine. Dan is also a Senior Lecturer at London South Bank University where he is part of the Centre for Research in Digital Storymaking and leads the Digital Performance research group.
