As we said in the previous article, achieving highly adaptive organisations in highly uncertain and disruptive environments requires a representative number of people at all levels with specific human qualities (sometimes called strengths), which we refer to here as transformational human competencies.
Human competencies are those that favour and enhance a high degree of flexibility, openness and support for people in the culture through collaboration, openness, honesty, valuing others, recognition and open-mindedness and open-heartedness
Human competencies that are highly transformational include:
- Curiosity: helping people to be open to new ideas and to find opportunities in difficult situations.
- Respect: for others, regardless of their differences, which helps to foster trusting and cooperative relationships in difficult situations.
- Patience: and the ability to be persistent can be especially helpful in situations where solutions are not immediate or easy to find.
- Tolerance of ambiguity: helping people to feel more comfortable in uncertain situations and to keep an open mind for new solutions.
- Humility: and the ability to recognise that one does not have all the answers can be a driving force to keep learning and adapting in changing situations.
- Courage: helps people face difficult situations and take difficult steps to move forward.
- Self-respect: helps people stay true to their values and principles, even in challenging situations.
- Optimism: can help people find opportunities in difficult situations.
These qualities are particularly useful in environments of uncertainty and disruption because they enable people to keep an open mind, adapt to new situations and find opportunities in the midst of adversity.
All of them very difficult for machines to replicate.
And they are difficult to acquire only by habits and learning by doing because they have to do with learning by being and with transformational practices.
When we reread the above list of human qualities or competences, it is obvious that the most effective and optimal learning of them will never occur when we study them, impossible. Nor when we understand them, not even when we practice or do them, but really when we are able to apply them in any field of action, not only in the one in which we practice them, and when we can explain them as if we had already lived them.
Learning by doing reinforces the retention of learning by repetition. By adding learning by being, the individual engages in new behaviours and habits in a much more fluid way, which are integrated into his or her way of BEING and represent the culmination of a transformation (individual and/or organisational).
So how do we make patience, curiosity, respect or optimism germinate, for example, depending on the case?
Learning by being works:
-With metacognitive models of becoming aware of what we have really been able to change, reflecting on it, visualising it and rewriting the personal or organisational story with a powerful storytelling based on all the previous.
- Changing neuronal circuits and this is possible with meditation or mindfulness.
- And sharing these learnings with others. The social motivation to show others ways to change positively impacts on the process of encoding new learning in the brain and connections with other people in the team/organisation.
In summary, to differentiate ourselves from robots and artificial intelligence (AI) and to be able to create value for others, the world, the company and work, we must work on and enhance above all:
- Our competence for complex problem solving and teamwork.
- And some of the transformational human competencies that allow us to positively impact on achieving an open, flexible and collaborative environment, where there is openness, honesty, recognition, open-mindedness and open-heartedness. Many things that in the past have been at odds with the world of work.