Future Here Now: Cultivating Talented minds
Selection
Hi.
In yesterday’s post I apologized for the low level mess that this week has become and that I’d be taking a break from new content about building Future Ready Minds, and giving you some selections from past publications. Like yesterday, this selection also comes from The Local Economy Revolution Has Arrived, available wherever you get books.
Look for the interview with Christina Aldan and (hopefully) Rachel Hawkins to go up later tonight, if I can get adequate WiFi.
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Post - 2013, I led a team that developed a plan for a Power Plant (a community-driven, diversity-powered innovation center) in a midwestern city. One of the community leaders’ primary motivations in supporting this work was to increase their Talent supply. They had tried recruiting, which hadn’t generated much, and now the call was to help the city’s residents, especially its growing number of young, non-white residents, to become long-term employees of the community’s businesses.
In preparing the strategy, I interviewed an HR manager at the city’s biggest and oldest employer, a company that’s a household name. We talked for about 10 minutes about how important innovation was for this company, how central “innovation” was to their business plan. Encouraged, I started to explore ways that the proposed Power Plant could support their goals -- the training, the unique experiences, all of the ways that we could accelerate innovation inside and outside this company.
To which she responded, “Oh! We can’t have them take work time to do training and innovation. Who would run the lines?”
And I crash-landed back in the Industrial Era.
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Expecting this crucial new Talent to come to us perfectly formed, fully equipped, dropped into a role with a minimum of training is like asking my son when he was five to do algebra. He hadn’t learned that yet. But it’s also like asking my son at 18 to amuse himself with a wooden train. It’s not just a matter of skills, it’s a matter of mindset.
If we have been talking about, yelling about, crowing about “Innovation” for the last however many years, and then we put people who have been raised with that message in sit-down-and-do-what-you’re-told environments, it’s no wonder that so many are disaffected, pessimistic, unwilling to commit to the effort to buy into your offerings, whether it’s a job or a public meeting. They believe, reasonably so, that all your big talk has nothing behind it. And in their guts, the most talented know that it’s not worth their energy.
It’s time to build Fusion Era businesses and organizations that can capitalize on Fusion Era Talent.