Stretch

Stretch

Karie Willyerd and Barbara Mistick have been friends for many years. STRETCH is their first book together. Karie works as a ‘Workplace Futurist’ for a SAP company, and Barbara now lives in academia as President of Wilson College in Chambersburg Pennsylvania.

My key question, having read the book, is will STRETCH futureproof you? Call me a sceptic, or indeed call me a huge admirer of Dave Coplin – author of BUSINESS REIMAGINED and THE RISE OF THE HUMANS – and I have to say that nothing can futureproof any of us. Tomorrow’s workplace will probably be a frighteningly different place as Coplin explains in his books, in platform and broadcast appearances, and in Microsoft UK where he works. I am not sure Willyerd and Mistick paint such a clear picture. Take their “Seven Megatrends” for instance: Globalisation, Demographic shifts, Explosion of data, Emerging technologies, Climate change,

Redefined jobs, and Complexity. I think most of us agree that all these phenomena are manifestly already with us, affecting today’s workplace, and just about everything else in our lives.

The authors make much of their three Stretch Imperatives: ‘It’s all on you’, ‘You need options’, and ‘You have dreams’. The title suggests making an effort, and the imperatives imply that making yourself futureproof is within your own grasp. Indeed the whole book is studded with earnest entreaties for self-improvement, in the pursuit of ‘your career dreams’. Isn’t that the whole problem with an approach which attempts to give people survival tips, without being able to paint a picture of what the future might look like?

Willyerd and Mistick seem to me to be stuck in planning for transitional change – where you know where you are going, whereas trying to anticipate what the workplace of the future might be like is transformational change – a voyage into the unknown.

Without being unduly harsh, it seems very strange to write about career dreams, when most experts agree that careers in the old sense are dead. It isn’t that we are powerless in the face of enormous change. Coplin’s THE RISE OF THE HUMANS is all about what people can do to cope. But he had already written BUSINESS

REIMAGINED to explain just how different the workplace will be. My concern about STRETCH is that the authors simply don’t attempt this task. Futureproofing is a tough ask if we don’t define what that future might consist of.

On the positive side, the guts of the self-help programme advocated by the authors are hard to criticise. Keeping calm and doing the same old thing is most unlikely to work out well. Whereas following the advice from Willyerd and Mistick is entirely sensible. Keeping yourself educated, mastering new skills, keeping your options open, seeking feedback and a host of other suggestions has to be good advice.

But to imply that all this will make you employable and prosperous for the foreseeable is at best disingenuous. Foreseeing the foreseeable might be a start. In case anyone thinks I am being too critical, just tell me honestly how accurately you were able to predict the events of the last few weeks. Very few of us turned out to be either farsighted or futureproof – especially the great, the good and the powerful, who should have had the best intelligence.

 

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