AHC Featured at Jacksonville’s Talent 2030 Forum
Posted Jan 15, 2020 by Austin
Rick Maher’s Keynote to Focus on a New Mindset for Leaders in the Age of Uncertainty
“If you think the pace of change in business is overwhelming now, hang on. We’ve not nearly reached peak acceleration yet.” That’s from Rick Maher, President of Adaptive HumanCapital (AHC).
Maher has been working on the issues of disruptive change and how people and organizations can better cope with change for nearly 30 years. He believes that unless leaders and workers become more resilient and adaptable, many companies - perhaps entire industries – will be at risk for failure. (Think Blockbuster and venerable retailers like Sears.) “It’s urgent that we work on changing the mindset of the American workforce and develop the skills it takes to adapt quickly in response to chaos and uncertainty.” In other words, he wants leaders to decide that disruption will be baked into their business model. Rick calls it “Disruption by Design.”
That’s the theme of his presentation at the Talent 2030 Forum, scheduled for January 23 at the Hyatt Regency Riverfront in Jacksonville. The forum, hosted by CareerSource Northeast Florida and JAX USA, is designed to help employers, educators, workers and the public consider the future of work and what talent attraction and retention strategies will be effective over the next decade.
Maher says the old adage “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is truer for workers than ever. Resilience is the key to survival, and AHC's research indicates that resilience is only about 50 percent genetic. The other 50 percent is learned behavior. That means resiliency can be developed like any other skill and individuals and organizations can build resilience through training.
Adaptive Human Capital's Individual Resiliency Assessment measures individual resilience, and Rick will be featuring it at the Jacksonville event. Attendees will be able to take the 20-item assessment and gain valuable insights to their own strengths and areas for development. A new version of the Assessment will soon be launched as an online tool, allowing Adaptive Human Capital to aggregate the resilience scores of thousands of individuals and compare results across organizations and industries.
How can companies increase resilience in their workers? Maher says leaders should focus on 5 key traits to develop. A critical one, he says, is making your company a safe place to experiment and fail. “We want people to fail; it means they’re trying new things,” he says. “But failure has to become a learning experience, not an existential threat. If we punish people for trying something new that didn’t work, we’re stifling innovation and inviting disruption by outside forces. “We want to foster Disruption by Design,” he says.
If you’d like to attend the Talent 2030 forum, tickets are available online at http://bit.ly/Talent2030Jax.
Adaptive Human Capital applies the science of Industrial-Organizational Psychology to developing more adaptive human systems – at the individual, organizational and societal levels. In today’s global economy, organizations must move at the pace of change. We use proven, research-based approaches to helping people better manage change and foster a more open and risk-tolerant culture in the organizations we serve.