FORWARD Development Partner Pete Cohen in conversation with Industry Fellow Diana Wu David.

Diana is a female futurist, speaker, educator and author who is passionate about empowering individuals, businesses and boards globally to master the skills, mindsets and capacities they need to create inspiring futures that matter.

Pete and Diana discuss the shifts she is observing in industry from “just in case” learning to “just in time” learning in response to the increasing rate of change, as well as the nature of networks within organisations and role that technology is taking in bringing together the ideal group of people into teams to deliver projects.

Diana's book 'Future Proof - Reinventing Work in an Age of Acceleration' looks at how accelerating change, disruption, globalization and increasing longevity are creating a new and uncertain world of work.

Diana's Future Proof Lab provides executive coaching for senior executives, board directors and entrepreneurs, board, ExCo or workshop facilitation and team coaching, foresight advisory and capability development.

https://dianawudavid.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dianawudavid/

Otter transcript of this conversation

https://otter.ai/u/87ydC9O2vwRpV4S1_EWMIX1D4Vk

Production by Michael Donaldson https://8sided.blog/8sided-about/

Peter Thomas talks to Stowe Boyd, one of the FORWARD Fellows, who is a work ecologist and Chief Scientist at Workfutures, an exploration of critical themes in the ecology of work and the anthropology of the future.

In this conversation, Stowe and Peter talk about 'rewilding' organisations: essentially the idea that while organizations are seen through the lens of process optimisation, they are in fact underpinned by complex social networks, where individuals and groups are connected to others in an ecology.

The benefit of seeing organisations as ecologies - and letting them thrive through rewilding - is to increase their resilience: natural ecosystems with more weak ties and more incidental interactions are more resilient, something that would seem to be essential in the midst of a polycrisis.

Listen in as Stowe unpacks rewilding, and many other topics, in this wide-ranging discussion of alternatives to the conventional management discourse about organizations.

Transcript here:

https://otter.ai/u/y2R-h-8GRmYcVhDX9aGAPpR2fDo

Read Stowe's article on rewilding here:

https://webexahead.webex.com/the-ecology-of-work-growing-resilient-growing-wilder/

Take a look at workfutures.io on Substack:

https://www.workfutures.io/

Peter Thomas talks to Josie Gibson, FORWARD Fellow and co-founder at the catalyst network, a membership community of accomplished individuals who apply breakthrough thinking to complex business and community issues.

Our starting point is that "culture conversations are a waste of time", a point that Josie connects to the need for effective collaboration. Culture is an output of repeated behaviours over time, says Josie, and rather than talk about culture, we should instead think about creating a loosely held yet compelling vision, the co-creation of operating principles and practices and the fostering of an authorising environment and appetite for experimentation.

Transcript at

https://otter.ai/u/pc2pcryyRU_dkzIB_2OSewbzD9s

Daniel Bluzer-Fry talks to Tracy Brown, author of 'How We Talk About Work', which looks at what ‘creative makers’ - the designers, developers, creatives and strategists who conceive of and build the digital products, services and experiences that we rely on today - think about work. The book is based on three years of research with 85 participants across six continents with over 200 illustrations that bring their words to life.

Daniel and Tracy discuss the book and also topics including neurodivergence, learning and skills and how organisations approach them.

Transcript

https://otter.ai/u/83w-amHbWT0bmGn2t2Px8PUKZos

Read more

https://tracylouisebrown.com/news/how-we-talk-about-work

We’re living in a time of growing complexity and pace. We’re living longer and working longer than ever before. And at the same time, jobs and skills are no longer linear or stable: technology advances mean upskilling and reskilling are now the norm and will continue to be so.

What’s the impact of this context on our capacity to adapt to ongoing change? Can building change capacity have a multiplier effect — to support not just skills acquisition but also broader outcomes in areas such as health, wellbeing, diversity, inclusion, innovation, lifelong learning and more?

Sally McNamara, Development Partner at RMIT FORWARD, discusses these questions and more with May Samali, a professionally certified leadership coach, facilitator, business founder and venture partner. May is an Australian John Monash Scholar and holds a Master's degree in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School.

Transcript

https://otter.ai/u/kYfTaUWI-826jtFepdRr8qdVd_Q

Read more

Change Resilience: the meta skillset of the Information Age?

https://medium.com/rmit-forward/change-resilience-the-meta-skillset-of-the-digital-age-7f58990b71e3

The Spirit of Leadership

https://leadershipcircle.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Spirit-of-Leadership-Whitepaper-2021-07.pdf