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Topics for Future Shapers

Access essential leadership development content, taking away actionable ideas that can help to progressively modify your leadership style and drive the right outcomes for you and your organisation.

Each topic contains around 2 – 3 hours study time, conveniently divided into bite-sized chunks (anything from 3 – 20 minutes each).

Topics feature insights from a range of expert leaders in video, audio and text, and include:

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Overview

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The Essentials

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Activities

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Insights

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Key Concepts

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Key Questions

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Action Checklists

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Thought Starters

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Avoiding the Pitfalls

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Dos and Don’ts

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Progress Checks

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Focus – the Essentials of Leadership (questions to relate the topic to your concept, using the Institute of Leadership & Management’s framework)

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What’s Next: Recommended Further Information

What do we need to know about the present and future, and how should we prepare?

The context: succeeding in an age of opportunity, challenge and change

Outlines what is different for leaders, teams and organisations now, in the third decade of the 21st century, and – just as importantly – what remains the same.

Navigating the forces shaping the future

Explains the implications for current and potential leaders of our unfamiliar and constantly-evolving context.

Future-proofing your career

Gets personal by providing tools, techniques and a timely reminder of the importance of curiosity, openness and especially learning for future shapers. We highlight the importance of attitude and mindset alongside skills development, and the need for learning to have a context and, where appropriate, to be a shared endeavour.

What do future shapers need to understand about mindset, thought processes and behaviours in order to survive and thrive, now and in the future?

10 X thinking: developing a growth mindset

This topic makes the essential point that despite the challenges we face, now is a time of immense unrivalled opportunity. What we need, however, is the confidence and aspiration to reframe our present and succeed – neatly encapsulated in the concepts of 10X thinking and growth mindset.

Developing resilience and leading in adversity

This topic provides the insights needed to stay the course, recognising that both success and failure, opportunity and adversity, will all come our way in the course of a career – and sometimes in the same day. Staying afloat – and helping others to do the same – is a necessary part of navigating a future that can suddenly shift from calm to stormy and back again.

Ruthless prioritisation: managing time and stress

This topic focuses on the insights, mindset and behaviours needed to manage two challenges that have always existed but now seem even harder to conquer: time and stress. The solution lies with a personal combination of mindset, energy, and practical tools; in particular, the ability to prioritise.

Developing empathy and connection

This topic recognises that in times of opportunity, challenge and change the ability to understand how other people are doing and not simply focus on oneself is a superpower: difficult to achieve yet vital for short and long-term progress. We are social creatures and in unfamiliar times we feel better – and work more effectively – when we are sharing, connecting, supporting and (when needed) leading.

Decision making in a time of uncertainty

Highlights the most common and significant psychological pitfalls, and explores the key frameworks and attitudes (notably including collaborating with others) that will help solve problems and make effective decisions, even in foggy and charged times.

Support + challenge: the essence of coaching

This topic combines issues relating to mindset, psychology and personal effectiveness. Encompassing issues of learning, connection, resilience and much else besides, the focus moves to proactively deepening our ability to shift our thinking and make progress. The shift is to provide support and challenge, and the essence of this is coaching.

What are the most useful, practical tools that will deliver impact in both the short and long-term?

Preparing for the future: scenario thinking and maximising opportunities

As Future Shapers we need to be able to understand the way our industry and business is changing – the specific issues that are shaping our present and future, as well as what to do when the utterly unexpected arrives, both good and… less good. This understanding results in better immediate actions, and also influences our longer-term strategic thinking.

Ambidextrous leadership: developing and executing strategy

Being prepared for the future has many benefits but three stand out in particular: the ability to be proactive in seizing opportunities, the ability to be reactive as soon as events arise, and an enhanced ability to think longer term. This ability to deliver results today while also laying foundations for the future is the challenge of ambidextrous leadership.

Visioning

There is a vital, sustaining technique for ambidextrous leaders that is incredibly useful, whether making significant quick or immediate decisions, or as a guiding star when going on a longer journey into a planned future. It is visioning, and it underpins ambidexterity, it brilliantly connects leadership with business priorities and plans, and it is indispensable.

Driving innovation and continuous improvement

If visioning is the guiding idea that keeps us focused and moving forward, then the next question is how, in practice, do we achieve this? Just doing the same thing as before – in a changing context that brings opportunities as well as challenges – is a recipe for decline, and no way to achieve a progressive vision. So, we believe that an indispensable challenge for anyone who is envisioning and shaping the future is innovation in all its forms, as well as steady, sustained improvement.

Mastering digital transformation

Innovation and improvement are essential, and there is one major area of innovation that requires a special focus: digital. The effects of technology – which are almost always over-estimated in the short-term, and under-estimated in the long term – are impossible to ignore for anyone looking to shape the future and innovate. We look at how to harness digital technology, a crucial part of innovation.

Leading in the new workplace: adaptability, agility and complexity

Our new, evolving context is, in many ways, unsettling and unfamiliar; we risk using the solutions of the recent past to deal with new and emerging challenges – such as leading people in adaptive, flexible ways through complex issues, often into unfamiliar territory. This section explores the challenges of the “new, next normal”: what they are, and what leaders need to know, do and believe as a result.

Leading in a digital world

In the “new normal” using digital technology to support, enable and amplify your leadership is a key aspect of succeeding as a future shaper. Specific digital tools and techniques are now an indispensable part of leadership – leading virtually, for example – yet for people across generations, cultures and levels of leadership they are unsure how best to harness these tools and succeed. This section highlights key techniques that will enable future shapers to lead in a digital world.

Building collaboration and cooperation

If leading in a digital world is one developing challenge, then three others also merit special attention for future shapers: building collaboration and cooperation, leading leaders through change, and shaping the culture so that it is fit for purpose. We start with the need for collaboration and cooperation, closely followed by…

Leading leaders in times of change

Change is, of course, eternally present; what we experience now, however, is a specific type of change. Instead of stable predictability punctuated by change, we now live in a time of constant, unfamiliar, profound change, often with a technological element. Discerning short-term change from longer-term shifts, for example, is a valuable skill. To shape the future, as distinct from simply leading people through change, requires an ability to lead leaders through change, amplifying the changes that we need to see throughout the organisation.

Shaping an inclusive, aligned and cohesive culture

This is the last – and, in many ways, the most significant and profound – of all the skills required of future shapers. Societies, stakeholders, talented employees, future leaders and customers demand more than ever, and there is a pressing need for organisational cultures with genuine integrity, ethical leadership, compassion, inclusion, zero tolerance of discriminatory or unethical behaviour, and a need to be accepted by the communities they serve. This broader responsibility for business is invaluable, overdue and inescapable. Creating and sustaining these cultures is a challenge for anyone aspiring to be a future shaper.

Making it happen: great learning, like effective leadership, needs a context and it needs to be both practical and impactful. Whatever your project or initiative are you applying the best techniques and actions to ensure success?

Sustaining momentum and overcoming immunity to change

This topic - delivering a change initiative– one of the largest – is where the practical insights from the Future Shapers program are put into action and applied to a significant change initiative.Future topics Each month we publish one new topic, reflecting the dynamic, shifting times in which we live. These topics may change – for example, the arrival of another global pandemic might alter our thinking about the most significant current issues – but we believe (and customers tell us) that future shapers would benefit from future topics covering the following themes:

‍Trusted Advisor – communicating (in all its forms), consulting, inspiring trust, mobilising, engaging and influencing

‍High Performance Leader – adapting to a new context, developing individual and team effectiveness, coaching, elevating performance, inspiring talent, leading exceptional teams

‍Strategic Decision Maker – visioning, developing strategy and strategic thinking, mastering strategy execution, building strategic capability, shaping the organisation and brand in line with the strategy, advanced decision making and problem solving

‍Innovator – developing new products, processes and ways of working, design thinking, creating new sources of value, harnessing the power of knowledge and data, succeeding with digital transformation, building a culture of innovation

‍Transformational Leader – overcoming business challenges, building operational effectiveness, preparing for future opportunities and roles, driving world-class business performance, and developing, starting and launching a business or major initiative

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