Recruitment or human resources (HR) managers know how difficult it is to find good employees; candidates either lack certain skills or they won’t fit in with the company culture. Business owners often focus on technical skills alone and don’t assess the qualities and characteristics that make up the ideal employee. This could end up adversely affecting culture, productivity, and may even protract training efforts.

Regardless of the industry or nature of the job, there are certain key qualities that hiring managers in all kinds of industries might look out for if they want their employees to succeed in the business world.

Key takeaways

• Both soft skills and hard skills are important for a good employee.
• The top core skills sought by employers in 2025 include analytical thinking, leadership, resilience, AI and big data, and talent management.
• Employee training and development can be a practical solution to address skills gaps in the current workforce.

What skills are employers looking for?

Both soft skills and technical skills, or hard skills, are equally important in an employee. Soft skills include the social expertise, personality and character makeup, communication skills, emotional intelligence, influence, and approach to work that an employee shows.

These serve to complement the hard skills — those abilities that have been learned and can be measured and quantified — and can make an employee more of an asset to a company.

The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs Report surveyed employers around the world to explore the exact skills and characteristics sought after. Some skills are seen as requirements for workers, deemed ‘core skills.’

In South Africa, core skills include analytical thinking, leadership, and resilience.

Top 5 Core Skills in 2025, South Africa¹

Globally, the top skills differ slightly. For example, 62% of employers in the UK identified creative thinking as a core skill in 2025. Other skills include motivation and self-awareness, technological literacy, and empathy and active listening.

Other skills were identified as ‘skills on the rise.’ These are skills employers expect to increase in importance over the next five years. In South Africa, top ‘skills on the rise’ include AI and big data, technological literacy, and resilience.

Top 5 Most Increasing Use Skills by 2030, South Africa²

8 skills and characteristics of good employees

Here are some of the top skills and characteristics of a good employee, combining today’s core skills and tomorrow’s sought-after skills in South Africa and around the world:

1. Analytical thinking

Analytical thinkers can break down complex problems and emerge with logical, data-driven decisions.³ These employees can find meaningful connections in data and help identify cause and effect relationships between data. Seven out of 10 companies consider it an essential skill in 2025, making it the most sought after quality in the World Economic Forum’s survey.⁴

Companies generate massive amounts of data, and employees who can analyze it effectively are invaluable. This skill leads to better strategies, more efficient processes, and a deeper understanding of business challenges.

Examples of analytical thinking in the workplace:

• Reviewing customer feedback to pinpoint areas for product improvement
• Using A/B testing results to optimize a website’s user experience
• Breaking down a complex project into smaller, manageable tasks

Economist Education
Critical Thinking: Problem-Solving and Decision-Making in a Complex World

2. Leadership and social influence

Leadership comprises a variety of skills that help create a sense of collective direction, confidence, and strategy. Good leaders can also wield their social influence to positively influence their team’s attitudes and behavior.⁵ Even without formal authority, these employees can build trust and push organizations towards a common goal.

Emotional intelligence plays an important role in these traits, too. Strong leaders are also compassionate and encouraging of others.

Examples of leadership and social influence in the workplace:

• Mentoring a new hire and helping them acclimate to the team
• Stepping up to resolve a team conflict constructively
• Leading a brainstorming session

Online leadership courses can help you develop specific management and interpersonal skills, such as conflict resolution and communicating for influence.

3. Resilience, flexibility, and agility

Resilience, flexibility, and agility include a variety of traits that center around bouncing back from setbacks, adapting to changing circumstances, and quickly navigating new challenges.⁶ Despite the stressors of the workplace, which could include anything from demanding economic conditions to rapidly shifting priorities, employees with these skills maintain their composure, efficiency, and problem-solving mentality.

Examples of resilience, flexibility, and agility in the workplace:

• Taking on a new role and responsibilities with a positive attitude
• Prioritizing tasks into a system based on what needs immediate attention
• Anticipating potential challenges and preparing contingency plans

4. AI and big data

Those who understand AI and big data know how to use technical tools to gain insights and automate tasks. It’s not just for data scientists; it’s about being literate in these technologies to improve your work.

Becoming comfortable with these tools will likely be necessary to keep up with shifting workflows and expectations: More than half of all LinkedIn members stand to see their jobs change in some way due to generative AI.⁷ Employees that have the technical know-how to engage with AI and big data tools deeply could be critical for companies that want custom solutions for their projects.

Examples of AI and big data knowledge in the workplace:

• Apply a machine learning model to predict customer churn
• Using a business intelligence dashboard to create a dashboard that tracks key metrics
• Writing an algorithm to automate a repetitive data entry task and save time

Online artificial intelligence courses can help you prepare for a changing workforce and expectations.

IBM
Generative AI Engineering

5. Talent management

Talent management is about attracting, developing, and retaining great employees.⁸ Workers with good talent management skills don’t need to work in HR to be positive forces in this area.

For managers, talent management could include the specific responsibilities that come with having direct reports — guiding professional development, onboarding new staff, and completing performance review, for example.

But even non-managers can exhibit talent management skills by helping cultivate an environment that rewards and supports talent.

Examples of talent management in the workplace:

• Helping to onboard a new employee and introducing them to the company culture
• Identifying an employee’s strengths and recommending them for a project where they can shine
• Establishing professional development goals with an employee and giving them time during the workday to pursue them

Yale School of Management Executive Education
Human Resources Leadership

6. Technological literacy

Technological literacy is the ability to effectively learn and leverage technology to solve problems and complete tasks. It extends beyond basic computer functionality to include things like new software, digital platforms, and online tools.⁹ Tech literate employees also demonstrate agility and speed when picking up new technical tools.

There are new technologies surfacing in the workplace constantly, but the most important tools in a few years may be things we don’t even know about yet. Businesses need employees who can not only adapt to rapidly developing tools, but help others do the same.

Examples of technological literacy in the workplace:

• Mastering a new project management software like Asana or Trello
• Troubleshooting a minor software issue on your own
• Discovering new technical tools that you can apply to your team’s workflow

7. Creative thinking

Creative thinking is the ability to come up with unique, innovative solutions to problems. In the workplace, a creative thinker can help challenge the status quo and improve products, processes, and services.¹⁰

Not all people are born creative, but creativity is a skill that can be learned through experimentation, imagination, questions, collaboration, and information processing.

Examples of creative thinking in the workplace:

• Proposing a new feature for a product to meet a customer need
• Discovering a new way to measure an initiative’s success
• Finding a low-cost solution to a budget constraint

8. Curiosity and lifelong learning

Curiosity and lifelong learning represent a desire to continuously seek out new knowledge, ask questions, and improve your skills.¹¹ These employees have a proactive mindset that drives their own professional growth.

Curiosity is also fundamental to project success: asking questions early and often can help identify hurdles before they happen and opportunities for improvement. When employees ask ‘why?,’ they can form a deeper understanding of their work.

Examples of curiosity and lifelong learning in the workplace:

• Taking an online short course to learn a new skill relevant to your job
• Seeking out feedback from managers and peers to identify areas for professional development
• Reading industry reports to stay informed about the latest trends

Recruiting vs. training

All over the world, businesses are seeing skills gaps emerging. In South Africa alone, more than 60% of businesses identify skills gaps as a key barrier to business transformation by 2030.¹² 

One possible solution is training existing employees to become proficient in new skills – both hard and soft — and in turn creating ‘good employees.’ This also means that a new approach is needed when recruiting. Hiring employees who show potential to be further skilled and who display some of the qualities listed above may be an effective tactic. 

Given that top talent is likely to become more and more scarce and in demand, employee training and development might well be the best and most practical solution.

Knowing what skills and characteristics to look out for, in existing employees as well as when recruiting new employees, will ensure that these desired qualities are nurtured and developed throughout the business, regardless of the job title or function. The skills of a good employee reach beyond technical acumen and business experience. While these are important to get the job done, how these tasks are carried out, and the interactions with other team members, are indicative of the attitude, approach, mindset, and adaptability of a good employee.

GetSmarter can guide you as your learning partner, and help your business to create a tailored upskilling plan to meet your unique needs.

[Empower your team with the right skills]

The post What are the characteristics of a good employee? appeared first on GetSmarter Blog.

Browse the resources for teachers below to find insights, lesson plans, teaching tips, and community support. Online teaching courses can also be a great way to engage in a community and develop skills.

The links below are just a sample of what is available to educators online. GetSmarter does not endorse any specific lesson plans, organizations, or publications listed here.

Lesson planning and classroom resources

Edutopia

Edutopia offers teaching strategies, classroom tools, and evidence-based project ideas. It focuses on promoting best practices across topics like social-emotional learning and technology integration.

National Geographic Education

National Geographic offers a free collection of resources for teaching that includes maps, videos, interactives, and more. Browse resources by topic, resource type, and U.S. grade level.

ReadWriteThink

This is a free collection of reading and language arts instruction materials. ReadWriteThink offers lesson plans, printables, and student interactives for teachers of all ages.

Teacha!

The Teacha! platform is a library of lesson plans and teaching resources offered for free or priced by the seller. From printables to decorate your classroom to worksheets, there are resources available for a variety of ages and languages.

Teachit

Teachit offers an online library of English-language teaching resources for primary and secondary classrooms. Browse worksheets and lesson activities that are curated by their publishing team of former teachers.

Twinkl

Twinkl is an online library of downloadable education resources for teachers in the United States, South Africa, and around the world. Browse lesson plans, art projects, unit assessments and more by schooling phase.

University of Cape Town (UCT)
UCT Learning and Teaching in the Digital Age bundle

Professional organizations for educators

For teachers in South Africa

Teacha! communities

The communities page on Teacha! is a message board for teachers to share resources and find support among different teaching groups. These communities focus on different focus areas, such as tutors and teachers from specific countries.

National Professional Teachers’ Organisation of South Africa (NAPTOSA)

NAPTOSA is a trade union representing educators in South Africa. It advocates for members’ rights and interests, providing support in labor matters, salary negotiations, and improving working conditions. Trade unions can also have resources on how to become a teacher in South Africa.

South African Society for History Teaching (SASHT)

This professional organization promotes the development of history education in South Africa. Founded in 1986, SASHT organizes conferences, produces the journal Yesterday & Today, and offers resources to foster teachers’ professional development.

The South African Society of Music Teachers (SASMT)

SASMT has been a professional association for music educators in South Africa for more than one hundred years. It supports members through advocacy, professional development, and music competitions and events.

South African Association for Language Teaching (SAALT)

Founded in 1964, SAALT supports language teachers and researchers through resources, conferences, and global networks. They focus on multilingualism and cutting-edge teaching practices.

For teachers in the United States

National Education Association (NEA)

The NEA is the largest professional organization for educators in the United States, representing over three million members. It advocates for public education and educator rights, providing resources, professional development, and a platform for educators.

National Art Education Association

NAEA is a professional organization for art educators in the U.S. Founded in 1947, it provides members with access to online learning, local community associations, grants, and more. NAEA also engages in advocacy for arts education and hosts an annual convention.

National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM)

Founded in 1920, NCTM is the world’s largest mathematics education organization. Members have access to resources, research, and a community of math educators.

National Science Teaching Association (NSTA)

NSTA is a community of more than 35,000 science educators and professionals devoted to science literacy and education. The organization supports members with access to professional development, conferences, a national network, and more.

National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS)

NCSS is a professional association focused on promoting and enhancing social studies education. Membership includes access to learning resources such as instructional videos, educational guides, and more.

For teachers everywhere

Education International

A global federation of education unions, Education International (EI), represents over 33 million teachers and education workers in 180 countries. EI champions quality education, teachers’ rights, and democratic values. Additionally, it facilitates collective action to enhance education globally.

International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE)

ISTE is a global nonprofit organization that supports educators to innovate teaching and learning using technology. It offers professional development, networking, and resources, including standards, to enable educators to develop engaging learning experiences with technology for their students.

Teaching news and publications

Education Week

Education Week is a source of news and information on K-12 education in the U.S. It provides in-depth coverage of educational policy, teaching practices, and research.

Mail & Guardian

The Mail & Guardian’s “Teachers” section covers in-depth news, analysis, and stories related to educators in South Africa.

TEACH Magazine

TEACH Magazine is a Canadian publication for K-12 teachers that delivers practical content on classroom management, reading, professional development, and more. Read about how AI is changing education, get tips for dealing with difficult parents, and find reading recommendations.

Worlds of Education

World of Education is a publication from Education International for teachers, activists, and advocates to share their insights and engage in a global conversation. Browse articles that cover everything from the global teaching shortage and academic freedom to engaging students.

Related programs

University of Cape Town (UCT)
Instructional Design

University of Cape Town (UCT)
Teaching With Technology

HARVARD'S DEREK BOK CENTER
Higher Education Teaching Certificate

The post Teacher resources: 20+ lesson planning tools, communities, and more appeared first on GetSmarter Blog.

Transcript

Globalisation’s dynamism is a powerful force for change and, in some key respects, a disruptive one that can systematically undermine prevailing economic practices and social networks, and in some cases, even threaten the stability of the state itself.

If, as we have seen, populist protest is one reaction to the bewildering impact of globalisation, the challenges posed by globalisation can produce other reactions that potentially result in outbreaks of violence and conflict at the international level. New technologies and platforms, when coupled with novel means of communicating, like social media, can act as instruments for magnifying these problems by reaching out and mobilising new audiences.

Violence and conflict have many sources and expressions. According to Mary Kaldor, a professor of global governance at the LSE, the end of the Cold War may have reduced the prospects for inter-state war, but it created the conditions for the rise of intra-state conflict. Other academics suggest that sustained violence within states is motivated either by greed – the desire for access to resources by one social group – or grievance – sustained discrimination, persecution, or the exclusion of one social group. These motivations trigger violence, and can lead to armed separatist movements, like that of the Kurds in Turkey and its neighbouring states, who challenge state primacy. Another source of conflict that can exacerbate social tensions with dire consequences is rising inequality, a by-product of rapid economic growth experienced by many emerging economies.

Two contemporary examples illustrate how the effects of globalisation can induce conflict or foster cooperation. Firstly, the onset of democratisation movements that swept through North Africa and the Middle East from early 2011, which in some cases lead to the collapse of states and the rise of civil war, provides an example of the way that globalisation can exacerbate instability and conflict. Structural unemployment was especially pronounced amongst the youth in these regions, linked to the short-sighted macro-economic policies pursued by authoritarian governments in the region in what were, for the most part, closed economies.

A series of incidents triggered protests in countries like Tunisia and Egypt, fanned by the use of social media, that ultimately toppled their authoritarian governments. As protests swept Syria, terrorist groups like ISIS moved in to join the armed opposition in fighting the Assad regime, using social media to proclaim a “new caliphate” and recruit fighters from abroad. Turkish and Russian military forces were eventually drawn into what was now a civil war, as were military advisors from Western governments, while nearly 11 million Syrians fled to other countries to seek refuge. Criminal gangs took advantage of their plight, and the EU’s efforts to manage the refugee crisis proved to be controversial domestically, provoking a backlash in some of its member states.

Another example is the outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in West Africa in early 2014, spreading rapidly across the region and through infected air-travel passengers to Britain and the United States. This brought about an unprecedented global response. Poverty in Sierra Leone and other countries in the region contributed to weak public health systems that failed to contain the spread of the disease, and resulted in over 11,000 deaths by 2016. After an initial delay, these systems were bolstered by millions of dollars in financial support. Medical teams were sent in from China, the United States, and Europe, working alongside local health officials and the UN’s World Health Organisation to employ the necessary means to effectively bring the epidemic to a halt by 2017.

Without effective collaboration between these actors, the epidemic might have spread across other parts of the world.

When people think about social media, what generally comes to mind are memes, likes, information-sharing, and keeping in touch. However, according to Professor Chris Alden, Course Co-Designer on the Business, International Relations and the Political Economy online certificate course from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), there is a concerning flip side to this, especially when considering the relation of social media to social tensions on a global scale.

The post Social Media and Its Relation to Social Tensions appeared first on GetSmarter Blog.

Transcript

Certain beliefs and values arise in different places over time and these give certain populations economic advantages that, in turn, explain differences in the wealth of nations.

Some of these beliefs and ideas are non-verifiable, like punishments or rewards follow death; heaven perhaps, or not heaven. We’ll never know because people die and they can’t come back and tell us, so it’s just a belief.

Other ideas are verifiable and false, like racist ideas or antisemitism, about how certain groups of people are intrinsically better or more or less valued. Other ideas are self-fulfilling. The belief that your neighbours won’t cooperate in any collective action leads you not to cooperate either, in, for example, building a park for children for a neighbourhood or cleaning the streets or a neighbourhood safety watch.

You might do it individually and your neighbour might be willing to do it individually, but the belief of each of you that the other won’t, leaves everyone not to do it, and so it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. When such ideas and beliefs are highly pervasive and persistent in a group of people they’re called culture.

A contribution by David Landes in 1998, who argues that some people and some countries are just better than others because their habits are better attuned to hard work, thrift, double-entry bookkeeping and timeliness.

Such people are also rational, meaning they’re non-superstitious and open-minded, meaning they’re not given to bigotry, population expulsions, for example, of Jews or Muslims at various points in the last few hundred years, et cetera.

And so they’re more given over to the sorts of behaviours that tend to lead to more investment and to capitalist growth than other regions and other countries that don’t have those beliefs and those habits.

Some 800 years ago or more, certain Italian communities in the north developed horizontal social bonds amongst urban free men. While, in the deep south, vertical relations of dependency predominated between patrons and peasants. The horizontal bonds led to trust and cooperation, which then led to social structures to solve collective action problems and, hence, drive forward development and economic growth.

In the south, meanwhile, vertical bonds between lords and peasants led to dependency, instead of trust and cooperation, and, hence, institutional forums to solve collective action problems never emerged, and so the region stayed poor and remains poor to this day.

So, let me leave you with this thought: if it’s true that culture, values, and beliefs are intimately linked to development, as drivers of development, then what do we do?

How do we promote development amongst countries and peoples that have, in effect, the wrong beliefs and the wrong cultures? Who is going to change those beliefs? How do you do that? And are we right as outsiders, as Westerners or as development professionals, to change what somebody believes, to change another people’s culture in order to get some sort of development effect?

For many people, culture is typically something that sets a country apart, such as its food, dress, architecture, and traditions. But according to Professor Jean-Paul Faguet, Co-Convenor on the Economic and Political Development in Developing Countries online certificate course from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), culture can be so much more than that. It can also be a powerful driver of development.

The post How a Country’s Culture Drives Its Development appeared first on GetSmarter Blog.

When it comes to implementing policies, it’s important to first understand the way in which decisions are actually made. Associate Professor Daniel Berliner, Course Convenor on the Public Policy Analysis online certificate course from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), suggests that a good starting point is comparing three different types of decisions – namely rational, incremental, and punctuated – and the various influences that shape them. 

Transcript

Have you ever wondered how policy stakeholders decide on what policies to implement? Why is one strategy chosen rather than another? Why do countries such as Germany and the United States address funding for higher education in such different ways? Or, why might two countries choose very different strategies to address illiteracy or poverty?

In order to understand this, we need to look in more detail at the decision-making stage of the policy cycle.

We will compare three different types of decisions: rational, incremental, and punctuated. Rational decision-making proceeds by clearly defining policy goals or objectives, assessing different possible means of achieving them, comprehensively gathering information and considering all relevant factors, and scientifically identifying the most appropriate policy choice for achieving the desired goals. This sounds like an obvious approach to decision-making, and usually what we would prefer policymakers to follow, and yet, this model is often not followed in practice.

The theory of rationality assumes that actors have perfect information and that they are able to identify all possible courses of action before making the choice that will maximise the benefits of a policy. The theory also assumes that stakeholders will be able to predict the outcomes of each possible policy choice in advance in order to make the ideal decision.

It is often more likely that individuals face resource constraints and imperfect information and thus make satisficing rather than maximising decisions.

The incremental decision-making model was developed in order to address this gap by placing more emphasis on the role of politics at this stage of the policy cycle. Charles Lindblom is credited with developing this model in the 1950s, incorporating some of Herbert Simon’s insights about bounded rationality. This theory emphasises the importance of political activities, such as bargaining and negotiation, over the rational analysis of different options. Incremental decision-making is usually shaped more by what is politically feasible, rather than by perfectly following a comprehensively rational process.

As a result of both cognitive and political constraints, policymakers build on the policy solutions that are already in place, which means that policy changes slowly and incrementally. There are also power dynamics built on the existing policy, which means that it may be easier to only incrementally change policy decisions, rather than trying to negotiate a massive change in the political and resource power dynamics.

A prominent theory that looks in more detail at rapid, large-scale policy changes is punctuated equilibrium theory, which was developed by Frank Baumgartner and Brian Jones. As in the incremental model, punctuated equilibrium theory recognises the importance of power in the policy process. But this model also highlights that these cognitive and political constraints on policy changes do not always result in a pattern of incremental policy changes. Instead, policies often remain stable and unchanging for long periods of time, followed by large, rapid changes that take place very suddenly. These are called punctuations.

In practice, the type of policy decision often varies a great deal depending on policy area and institutional context.

The post How Policymakers Formulate Their Decisions appeared first on GetSmarter Blog.

If history has taught us one thing, it’s that there has always been an uneven distribution of power in countries across the globe. For Professor Michael Cox, Course Co-Designer on the Business, International Relations and the Political Economy online certificate course from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), what needs to be considered is the effect that this has on international politics, as well as the possible consequences of shifting this power dynamic.

Transcript

One of the big issues in world politics – if not the biggest – is why some states are more powerful than others and what the consequences are for international politics because of the uneven distribution of power across the world. A related issue, of course, is what happens to the world when power shifts from one state to another or, indeed, from one region to another.

In the past, when we have witnessed such great shifts, the result has rarely been peaceful. Thus, when France became increasingly powerful following the French Revolution, a near twenty-five-year war followed. The economic rise of Germany a century later was one of the more obvious causes of World War One. And in the same way, the rise of the United States and the Soviet Union following World War Two was the principal cause of the Cold War. By the same token, when great powers fall – as they have done throughout modern history – the outcome is rarely peaceful either. But does history repeat itself?

Is history an accurate guide to the present or simply a toolbox from which we can draw useful lessons? These are key questions as we look at the rapidly shifting international landscape today.

Newspaper headlines are full of stories about terrorism, failed states in the Middle East, and the tragedy represented by migration. However, behind the headlines, much larger shifts in the tectonic plates of power are taking place. Is the once dominant West now in retreat, and will the East, in the form of Asia, replace the West at the heart of the world system by the end of the twenty-first century? Now, many believe this is bound to happen, given the rise of China at the centre of a new Asian order and the many challenges facing the West today.

Indeed, the two great events of 2016 – the UK’s vote to exit the European Union and the election of Donald Trump in the United States – are read by some as signs that the Western liberal order is in deep trouble. And to add to the West’s many woes, one of its most successful constructions – the European Union – remains mired economically and divided politically against itself.

Meanwhile, China looks set to continue its upward ascent, and Asia, its economic drive towards ever greater prosperity. Indeed, if Goldman Sachs is to be believed, by the year 2050, China will be the biggest economy in the world, and India, the third largest. In 1950, Asia was an economic pigmy representing no more than 5 per cent of world production. A century later, it could well be more than 60 percent. That is the scale of the change.

Still, the West – it is argued by a number of other writers – retains a significant structural power. Thus, the United States remains by far the most productive economy in the world. It also spends more on defence than the next ten countries put together. And it has a formidable array of dependent allies worldwide.

Even the European Union, many insist, should not be underestimated. With its numerous world-class companies, its array of internationally recognised universities, its stable political systems, and its strong institutional connections, the EU will remain a major international actor moving forward. To talk, therefore, of a major power shift in which the West is the loser is premature. The West still rules – for now.

The post How Global Power Dynamics Between Countries Are Shifting appeared first on GetSmarter Blog.

Transcript

Public policy is an important way in which governments respond to the needs of citizens.

Public policy is the system of laws, regulatory measures, courses of action, and funding priorities that are created by a governmental entity.

Governments use public policy to solve societal and economic problems. The policies chosen by a government represent an aggregation of the individual preferences of individual members of society. Public policies differ widely between different countries.

In the Netherlands, for example, healthcare is provided free by the state; while in the United States, healthcare is largely operated by the private sector. Countries differ in their solutions to societal issues, such as migration, climate change, abortion, and taxation.

Frameworks help us to order and simplify reality, in order to understand trends and identify solutions to public policy problems. They also provide a lens through which we can make predictions about the consequences of different possible public policy reforms, and which we can use to suggest explanations for public policy processes and outcomes.

When it comes to identifying and solving societal and economic issues, where does a government begin? According to Associate Professor Daniel Berliner, Course Convenor on the Public Policy Analysis online certificate course from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), the answer lies in public policy.

The post Defining Public Policy appeared first on GetSmarter Blog.

Digital transformation, business innovation, and new customer needs have made it vital for professionals to adapt their project strategies to accommodate the complexity and uncertainty associated with constant change. Trudi Lang, Senior Fellow in Management Practice at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, speaks about the shift towards crafting robust strategies that can withstand emerging market forces.

Transcript

Every strategic project has a set of assumptions about the future context underpinning it. This is what we might call a scenario, for example, but a set of parameters of thinking about the future that makes sense for the strategic project. Some of these may be some of the reasons why the project got the green light in the first place. The project is actually addressing these sorts of future changes. And so, it’s really important for us to understand that there is a scenario and there is a set of assumptions sitting under every strategic project.

But as we know, the world changes and it can change quite dramatically. So, if you were a taxi company, for example, about say 15 years ago and you were thinking of merging with another taxi company, you’d be making a judgment about, “Well, what’s the future of the taxi industry?” to see whether that particular merger was a good idea or not. And so, whether you considered things like changes in social values, in technologies, deregulation – the sorts of things that led to Uber and similar sorts of companies coming into the whole taxi space and disrupting it – would have been some key questions you would have been thinking about that would underpin that decision as to whether you are going to merge with the taxi company or not. So, your view of the future is consequential in thinking, really, about these big strategic projects.

So, this brings me to my second point, and it becomes very difficult dealing with the sort of novelty and the uncertainty in this sort of emergent complexities, to really, to try and predict them. It’s not useful in that sort of context.

So, if you feel the data that you have is going to be relevant for the future, then perhaps you can forecast and model. But that, I think, is very hard in these sorts of emerging complexity situations. I mean, climate change is a classic example of this: What will be the impact of climate change? I mean, we don’t have data really from the past that helps us be able to predict or forecast exactly the impact of that. In those contexts, then, prediction doesn’t become very helpful. And so, we’re much better off focusing then on how do we build in a robustness to our strategic projects that they actually can deal with a whole range of different things that may happen in the future. So, what we’re doing with these emergent complexities in strategic projects is shifting from trying to predict or forecast the uncertainty to focusing on making the projects as adaptable and building in a robustness with them.

And so, what scenario planning is about is you have a set of assumptions, about the future sitting under your current strategic project, and then we think, “Well, what are a couple of other scenarios about how the future context could unfold? How could the future unfold that’s equally plausible to what we currently understand?” And that gives us some contrast then to really think about, “Well, how is that different from what we are assuming?” And that helps us learn about what we need, might need to do in terms of changing the project to be more robust. And so, what we’re doing then is taking the strategic project and looking at it in the context of each scenario and seeing what we learnt from that.

And a really good analogy of this is the aircraft manufacturers, and they have a thing called wind tunnel. And what they do is they put the model of the plane in front of a wind tunnel and the wind tunnel is simulating all sorts of weather conditions because what they’re wanting to do is to test the plane, to make sure it’s robust, that it can fly through every weather condition that it might come across.

So, this is a really good analogy for scenarios. What we use is the scenarios become the wind tunnel for us to actually then put our strategic project in each of the scenarios, and to ask the questions about what do these conditions mean for our particular project: Are there learnings here for us that we need to adapt the project in a certain way to be much more robust, to deal with some sort of change that we’re starting to see?

But also, the scenarios are different frames of the future. So, they can also open up all sorts of new opportunities and new options because they give you a new way of seeing the world and seeing the future. And that can often bring innovation into a strategic project as well.

The post How To Think About Strategic Projects appeared first on GetSmarter Blog.

To remain competitive in a disruptive and uncertain marketplace, today’s business leaders face increasing pressure to make more informed, long-term strategic decisions. Olivier Sibony, Guest Expert on the Oxford Executive Strategy Programme from Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, explains how collaboration can help avoid bias in decision-making and steer a business in the correct strategic position. 

Transcript

Cognitive biases are not the sorts of biases that you hear about when you read the news about bad cops or when you read about gender biases, right? Those biases, those prejudices about certain groups, are of course, a very important kind of biases. But cognitive biases, specifically, are ways in which our cognition, our understanding of reality, is distorted in predictable ways.

Typically, the mental models that we apply to a situation, when we’re thinking about strategy, are grounded in our experience, which often is in the same company, but not always; in our experience of an industry and the way that industry behaves. And we find it difficult to think about it the way an outsider thinks about it. So, the way another player thinks about our industry is very difficult for us to imagine. There are ways to force ourselves, but typically we underestimate the threats from other players.

The typical example of this would be when some years ago you would interview the heads of the big airlines and ask them about the newcomers like Ryanair and easyJet. And their answer, unanimously, was, “They’re not a threat. They are not in our business. They are from another world. They are addressing a different audience. They are flying to different airports. They are serving different needs.” Now, that’s the sort of mental model that prevents you from seeing reality.

Obviously, one question about these biases is, what can we do about that? So, if I’ve got this mental model, and the only way I’m thinking is “airlines are big airlines” and, you know, “a small company with an orange logo cannot be a threat”, how do I change my view about that? And what my experience as a consultant has shown me is that, you know, even the very, very, very best executives that I was running into, even myself, even my colleagues, you know, we’re all stuck in our mental models. It’s impossible to know what we don’t know. It’s impossible to see the world with somebody else’s eyes.

So, the only way you can do this is by literally bringing someone else into the decision, so that you are going to have someone else’s eyes along with yours. So, you need more than one opinion. You need collaboration. So, the fact that different people will bring a different pair of eyes and bring a different lens to look at reality and bring a different mental model, that’s very important when crafting strategy.

But of course, once you have around the table a number of people with a number of different views, hopefully they are all going to be different. What do you do then? How do you reconcile that? How do you make a decision? So, that’s where the second ingredient comes into play, and that’s process. You need to have some sort of method to make sure that those divergent views express themselves, but also to make sure that you actually reach a decision and, if at all possible, the best possible decision at the end of that process. And those two ingredients, the collaboration, the team, and the process, the method, are the two things that you need to try to overcome your biases.

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Innovation is a key tool for managing challenges that cannot be predicted in today’s fast-paced and uncertain business world. In this video, Sandra Steving Villegas, Guest Expert on the Oxford Strategic Innovation Programme, discusses why corporations may find it valuable to partner with start-ups. She explains how contemporary mindsets and new technologies in start-ups can boost innovation when applied in the often slow-changing and traditional corporate environment.

Transcript

There’s a whole range of reasons why corporates and start-ups should explore working together. And the main one is that it’s a real opportunity to bring together two fundamentally different entities and hopefully create something that’s bigger than the sum of their parts.

Corporates have access to resources, they have expertise, they have regulatory permissions, they have capital; whereas start-ups have a lot of the new ideas, a lot of the new technologies, and very new ways of working and, kind of, a can-do mindset where nothing’s going to really stop them. And so bringing both of those two things together, there’s an opportunity to create something new.

The reality is that corporates need a really diversified playbook in order to make good on all the opportunities and the threats that are happening in the innovation space, in their categories. And most of the corporates that are doing this well are building new businesses in-house. They are also investing in exciting new technologies and start-ups, and they’re also partnering. So the reality is that partnerships are one of the key pillars for how corporates can really drive their own internal innovation agendas.

And there’s three key ways in which that really can help move the needle with regards to corporate innovation.

Corporates are notoriously slow-moving and risk averse, and working with the right kinds of partners in terms of start-ups can really help them experiment and, sort of, work much more quickly. So it allows them to, sort of, look at new business models and how they’re running. It allows them to often experiment with new data sets, trial new technologies before diving deep in and spending millions of dollars deploying them, and it can also be very important with regards to reducing costs and speeding up impact.

A lot of corporate innovation programmes are under a lot of pressure to perform and begin to deliver results and working with companies that are already doing some of these things and merging their resources and their capabilities means they can get things to market much more quickly.

And the final one, which isn’t any less important than the other two, is that it can start to shift entrenched cultures. A lot of corporates are very risk averse. They’re very operationally focused. They’re very incentivised with business as usual. And often start-ups are very good at showing them new ways of working and new ways of thinking, and perhaps beginning to, sort of, shift and create a more entrepreneurial mindset inside that corporation.

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