This article is based on the opening keynote by Keith Coats, Global Leadership Expert at The NASSCOM HR Summit, 2017
 
The NASSCOM HR Summit, organized by NASSCOM, a not-for-profit industry association, took place on the 20th and 21st of July 2017 at the ITC Grand Chola in Chennai, India. The conference witnessed the participation of top industry experts who delivered thought-provoking keynotes on the transformation of organizational culture, roundtable discussions with HR experts, and key discussions focussed on relevant market insights on how to prepare your organization for the future.
 
The two-day conference included sessions on actions for today, tomorrow and the day after. The main focus being prescriptions for the challenges in the future. In brief, the discussions were aimed to help HR take a 360 degree view of the organization to reflect on its evolved role.
 
Keith Coats, Global Leadership Expert and Co-founding partner of TomorrowToday Global, and a keynote speaker at the event, shared his insight on how organizations can equip themselves to embrace the future and the roles HR professionals and leaders should own in the process. His keynote also explored the necessity to be adaptively intelligent and how HR can build this capacity in both the organisation and leaders.
 
According to Coats, the challenges have never been greater for leaders – from navigating the volatile and uncertain geopolitical forces that are reshaping current reality to engaging Millennials. Leadership thinking and practices need to be reconsidered to prepare for organizations that will need some brave reform and transformation.
 
There are 5 practical takeaways for leaders.
 
#1. Be Curious
Great leaders have the vision to see what is needed and understand where they stand. They have the ability to hold the big picture and think strategically. However, many leaders underestimate the need of constant learning. They have answers but no questions. They aren't curious. Learning comes from being in uncomfortable situations, and many leaders won't step out of their comfort zone today.
 
This eventually builds up a wall against all of the ingredients that go into learning – dealing with uncertainty, asking questions, and learning how to listen. Leaders who aren't adaptable are in trouble.
 
Encouraging your team members to have one ‘curious conversation’ every week or month would be a refreshing idea. A ‘curious conversation’ is where they intentionally seek out someone from whom they have something to learn. Curiosity might have ‘killed the cat,’ but a cat has ‘nine lives!’
 
#2. Ask Questions
How do we get our leaders to have curiosity conversations and build the sense of curiosity that leads to the ability to ask the right question? If we are not asking the right questions, we are in serious trouble. We need to ensure that our leaders don’t think that it is their responsibility to see who is coming up with the answers, but it is their responsibility to ask the right questions.
 
Einstein was once asked if he had to solve the world’s biggest problem and was given an hour to do it, how would he tackle the task. He said, “I will spend the first 55 minutes finding the right question. Because once I have the right question, I only need 5 minutes to solve the problem.”
 
HR professionals need to learn how to ask the right questions and not run into solution mode quickly. What are you measuring and why? The information you get is only as good as what you measure. What are you missing because of what you’re measuring? What are the questions you need to ask but you’re not asking?
 
#3. Experiment More
We need to experiment more. This is something that is not often practiced. We need to have an award for the team or that individual who failed more spectacularly. It is important to know what people are learning about/from failures. Repeated failure is stupidity, but what’s important is to understand what not to do.
 
#4. Be a Learner
One of the most important qualities of a leader is the ability to learn. It is said that the illiterate of the 21st century are not the ones who cannot read or write but the ones who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
 
There is a distinction between adaptive learning and technical learning.
1.      Technical challenges – Deal with problems that can be clearly defined and can be addressed with known solutions or ones that can be developed by a few technical experts.
2.      Adaptive challenges – It is about learning what to do when you don’t know what to do. The solution requires a new learning and all the stakeholders should be involved.
Learning at the diagnostic stage, learning at the solution stage and getting all the stakeholders on the same page – is the key to survive in the future. The agenda for learning, unlearning, and relearning can be understood from the simple evolutionary biology which says the DNA evolve from one form to another. It decides what it needs to keep, discard and create or rearrange itself into. Likewise, it is important for a leader to understand what he needs to keep, discard and create or rearrange in his organization. This is the ultimate learning agenda.
 
#5. Confront your Limiting Orthodoxies
The adaptive leadership demands you to have the ability to confront. Netflix is one of the greatest examples for this. Netflix sold its billionth CD in 2007 (10 years ago), and 3 months later they decided to position themselves as an online streaming market. This is the ability to confront your limitations, and as an HR professional it is your responsibility to bring this change.
 

 
In the chart above, what you see on the left hand side is what will be the destructing factors for our future and the ones on the right hand side are the business models that can strongly emerge. The link between the two is the capacity of the HR professional to marry those. There sits an entire framework to understand.
 
“I do not say HR is an agenda but is THE agenda, and you are the leading voices in it. You are the brokers of hope. In order to meet the challenges of tomorrow, we must think differently and should be willing to act differently. HR departments are the custodians as the brokers of hope in the organization,” Keith added.
 
In brief, change and disruption are no longer buzzwords. “The storm is not coming. It is here!” (As quoted on www.nasscom.in/hrsummit/ )