Future Proofing Your Organization: How to Lead Through A Digital Era with Crystal Washington
With an ever-evolving market and fast-changing technology, the onus is on businesses to stay ahead of what’s next. In this episode, we explore how you can future-proof your organization so that it's ready for whatever lies around the corner — from implementing innovative technology to preparing your teams for future growth.
In This Episode, You Will Learn About:
What is future-proofing
Leading change as a leader
A framework for implementing change
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About our guest:
As a technology strategist and certified futurist, Crystal Washington takes complex social media, app, and web topics and makes them easy to understand and accessible to everyday people.
Crystal’s clients comprise Fortune 500 companies including Google, Microsoft, and GE, and as a sought-after keynote speaker, she has entertained and educated audiences around the globe.
As one of Forbes’ 50 Leading Female Futurists, She appears weekly on season two of the Emmy-nominated show, Life 2.0 and she’s appeared in numerous publications including Entrepreneur and Bloomberg Businessweek. Major television networks regularly call on her as a tech expert.
Crystal is the author of "One Tech Action and The Social Media Why."
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The Role of a Futurist
I started off in the hospitality industry, which is not where I planned. I was top of my class in high school. I was going to get a business degree, but then Conrad in Hilton, College of Hotel and Restaurant Management contacted me at the University of Houston, and said, we'll give you a free ride and some extra money if you choose this major. I understood not having, a student. It's basically a business degree where you have to like people. I went off into that industry afterward. I was always in sales and marketing. It's something about the psychology of people and the psychology behind guiding people to make decisions, which was interesting to me.
But during the time when I was in there and I was great at sales, I was great at revenue management, I had all those different roles, but there's this little thing called social media that was just kind of popping up on the landscape. And this is when Facebook was only open to college students. MySpace still existed. Twitter was in its infancy. And I remember at this time I'm in my early twenties, I'm over a department of people old enough to be my parents and grandparents. I wouldn't even tell them my real age because I knew they'd eat me for lunch. But I went to my boss, an older, baby boomer, gentleman and I said, “Hey, I have a feeling this social media thing is gonna be big. Can you imagine if companies start using this?” And of course, now we're like, “duh.” But at the time, it hadn't happened yet. And I said, imagine someone drinks a Coke, and I said, “Coke can have a conversation with their biggest consumers that love them and they can actually like build a relationship in a weird way.” My boss looked at me and said, “Look, kid, you're cute and you make us a bleep load of money. Stick to what you know.” I did something that was so millennial before it was a millennial thing to do. I quit my job, I quit my job because everything in me said that was gonna be huge, and I started a digital marketing firm.
The speaking came from the fact that I started with small mom and pops, got up to British Airways, Google hired me as a client, Microsoft, but everyone's a member of professional organizations and they would say, crystal, you and your team are so great and you explain what you're doing along the way. You're not just getting us more business. Can you come to speak it? Whatever. I kept doing these as favors to clients, and then, I realized it was taking up too much time and I was like, I can't keep doing this. It's not billable hours. And when I made the decision, the first organization that contacted me said, that I said no to after that point, said, “But we'll pay you.” And I said, “Oh, I didn't know that was a thing.” When I googled it and I looked at professional speaking, I was like, I'm doing the wrong thing. That was the beginning of my speaking career.
But the foresight, which is the study that futurists do, came from the fact that I was applying a lot of the thought process that goes into being a futurist before I knew what a futurist was. I'm very good at scanning landscapes, seeing what's coming, and then either bastardizing the technology or using it in a way it wasn't intended. Or sometimes seeing future innovations and how things can be combined, and then helping people prepare for the possibilities. And then later on I went and got certifications and did courses and all that stuff so that I'm officially a futurist. But that's the journey, and so that's how I met where I'm at right now, a full-time professional speaker and a futurist.
What Future Proofing is for the Organization
Before we jumped on, we talked about the time and dedication that you take to do market research on what the trends are in the workforce, in the general economy, so that you are always on top of the trends as well as, as you had mentioned, projecting into the future. There's been a lot of changes in the workforce most recently, within the past couple of years. You talk about future-proofing the organization. What does that mean?
A futurist is someone who organizations bring in and who scans the horizon, and basically, they help organizations plan for possible futures. There's a future that we all expect generally, but then there are two to three alternative futures that are very plausible. For example, I live in Houston. I'm expecting to have a nice hot, normal summer. However, it is very much plausible that a hurricane could hit where I live and there could be mass flooding and I could have no electricity and all these different things. Then how do you prepare against that other possibility? Many of us, might have had parents that, talked about always having plans, A through C or A through D. All this is taking it up on a professional level.
Future-proofing an organization is when the organization as a whole or individual department starts to look at, yes, this is what we're projecting will happen, but what if this thing happens? Or what if this thing happens? And it's not just random stuff, like, I wouldn't prepare, I talked about the Houston Hurricane's a possibility. I'm not going to prepare for a vampire attack, right? Because while technically I guess it could be possible, the chances of that happening are low. You're looking at a high-probability alternative future that you prepare against. Oftentimes when we prepare against alternative futures, what happens is, that even if those futures don't occur, it usually strengthens our businesses for other things that do occur.
Trends that Can Influence the Future
What trends are you seeing right now in the workplace and how can organizations and leaders futureproof going into the future?
I think one of the bigger trends that I'm seeing is what I like to call pants on fire. Everybody right now is trying to figure out what's happening. The world has shifted dramatically in the last three years, and the rate of change has increased to a level, unlike anything we've seen in living human history. It's very hard to plan against when you don't know what the economy's going to do. What you don't know is what's happening, in terms of socioeconomics and global issues. There's so much labor market. On one hand, we're hearing about quiet quitting. The next day we're hearing that this company's laying off 10,000. This other company's laying off 12,000. There's all of this massive shifting. what's happening is, is we also live in a highly consumable society where there's this pressure to constantly innovate, I think what I'm seeing is that a lot of organizations are people they know they need to innovate. They know they need to adapt to change, but they don't even know where to start because it's just so much and it's overwhelming, and their teams are overwhelmed. Even the leaders themselves, they're having a hard time getting their footing and their people don't know what's happening either.
There's a lot of confusion and fear is what I'm seeing. And then when you start introducing some of the newer technologies, like people talk about, chat GP, which is built on GPT three technology. When you start looking at the increase in robotics, we see Boston Dynamics with some of the robots, the humanoid as well as the one that reminds of an attack dog. People are freaking out about all of this stuff. I'd say that's probably one of the bigger workplace trends that I'm called in to help with.
Anytime that there's a new technology in our everyday lives, there's an element of excitement because we get to see how might this improve the processes, the automation that provides more resources to help us succeed. But then there's also the element of uncertainty around it. What is the probability in the future of how it might affect; there are big conversations about chat GPT, and I've been using different programs for a long time and I see the benefit, but I'm also seeing the potential problems that it may cause with copywriting, with possible, they're talking about students and writing their papers, and now they're talking about possibly going into using the old school composition workbooks.
Effects of Innovative Technologies
When it comes to some of the innovative technologies that you are seeing in the workforce right now, are there any technologies where you're saying, “Yeah, this would be really beneficial”, or are there any technologies where you're going, I might see the concern if we implement this into the organization?
Honestly, because I'm as pragmatic as I am, any piece of technology for me has benefits and drawbacks. That's just how I think. For instance, Oven is great, right? We get to warm food with it. The oven is not great if you put an animal in it, that's a live animal, that now someone did something horrible and weird. As with anything, there are positives and negatives, and for me, technology is neutral. Just like money is neutral. If you hand somebody who's responsible and has kind heart money, they're going to find ways to be a blessing and an asset to their community using that money. If you find someone that has poor money management skills and tons of issues, guess what? They're gonna create more problems with that money. Technology is often the same way. And a lot of the newer technology, part of the challenges, and no one's talking about this, is that when we think of leadership within organizations, you know, in the 1980s, even the nineties, technology really wasn't introduced into the workplace until the kinks were worked out. You got something, it came to you, was already prepped, t was ready to go. There might be part two or a newer version in three years, but it was pretty much worked out.
Now we have this issue of not only leading up until this point, have we had technology that was introduced in an agile fashion, meaning it's changing as they're putting it out. But now we have the technology, so we'll go back to like the GPT three and some of the blockchain technologies and things like that, where it's being created as we're starting to use it. And we are playing the game as the rules are being written. The benefit to that is, as leaders, we have the opportunity to drive the technology. We have the ability to drive the usage. When you have some of the companies that are developing some of these things, giving them suggestions, starting to call in if your company's looking at using something that's brand new, developing a relationship with the developers and the company behind it, which is something most people don't think about before drilling ready for commercial adoption is brilliant because you can drive it. You can tell them what's working, what's probably not working, where there are some challenges, where your legal team would tell you you wouldn't be able to use it, and you suspect that other companies would have the same challenge. This new world requires leaders to take ownership of more than just their own companies, but the tools they wanna take and drive them in the direction they want them to go.
Leadership and Technology
I wanna add to that cause it's a great concept that what you're talking about is taking the lead in ownership and partnering. When I was working for an organization, we had what was called advisory boards. And part of these advisory boards, with an open dialogue, communication as to say, what's working within the organization, what's not working, what are some solutions, ideas that you have to take it to this next level? And when we were integrating new technology within our organization to help our sales force, I was part of the advisory board for a new program that we are integrating into.
And I like you, love technology, love to dig in and to say, okay, well, I need these reports, but these reports aren't working. Here's how we can improve it. But at every level within the organization, people can step into these leadership roles, leadership is not a title. It's stepping into these roles and providing feedback because often the people that are on the user end, that are using it day in and day out provide the greatest perspective into what enhancements can be made in the future, and maybe what's not working to just overall provide a better outcome and how you can use this technology in your everyday.
Think about this as leaders, oftentimes we're not the ones implementing, it's our team members. What that means now is that we have to empower our team members and give them a voice, so that we can then use their words to drive the technology. Let them know, no, no, don't just grumble because something's not working a certain way, or it doesn't integrate properly. Tell me, give me your feedback. I'm going to share this with the company and it will cause shifts so that we can get what we need. It requires leaders to really empower their frontline people or the people they're dealing with with the technology or the customers that it's presenting issues with. And just really encouraging them to use their voice. When things are changed because of their feedback, giving them credit, telling the other company it was this person that was frontline that told me this, that helped you telling the other team members, ah, thank goodness that George said this or that Sarah said this because of these, now they release this. Let people feel good about using their voices. They're more likely to do it again, and all those people that are watching are more likely to do it as well.
When you involve people from your team in being part of the solution, you talked about quiet quitting. When you involve people in the solution and come up with the innovation and the ideas to take that organization to the next level, with the technology that's being integrated, it's going to increase employee engagement. And when you increase employee engagement, then you're gonna be taking that next step and increasing employee retention, and also it is a part of ownership. And when you have part of the ownership, that's also gonna have a positive impact on the culture as well.
Overcoming the Uncertainty Brought by Change
What do you do possibly, when you see companies implementing changes or technology? However, they're met with resistance, because a lot of times people don't like change. We tend to resist it. What might recommendations you suggest for some of those leaders?
I want to offer a slightly different perspective because we've often heard that people don't like change. There are some biological reasons for that, which we don't even have time to get into. But most people perceive change as dangerous and that's part of the reason why we exist right now because our ancestors understood that the smallest little change in a berry could mean the difference between it being something edible like grapes or something deadly like moons seeded. They look very similar. I have to honor the fact.
There's a reason we think that way, but most people, it's been my experience, are not resistant to change. They're resistant to change that they didn't have a part in. Before you implement some sweeping change, all of us probably have been a part of an organization where the suits decided that we should just implement this thing and it was a stupid decision because they didn't know, they weren't frontline. Anybody that knows any teachers will say that administration will say, “Oh, we're gonna do this”, and the teachers themselves are like, it's not practical, it's not going to work. We've all been in those situations. What that means is that the smart need to sit down with their team and say, “Okay, what are the challenges we're seeing? All right, we're seeing these challenges.” What are the holes that we have that we need to fill to make us serve our customers or our purpose better, and to make this a good working environment while we're doing it? Because oftentimes, with many organizations that are larger, they're silos. Once you get them in it and they start talking about their suggestions and what they need, okay, now if you find a technology that addresses those things, and then you come back and say, “All right, we heard you. You said this, and this. What we're gonna do is we're gonna implement this over here because this answers those issues. And Sarah, you said this, George, you said this. We'd love you to take the lead on being the first to learn the technology as we roll it out so you can see how it relates back to those original suggestions.” Well, now you don't have resisted team because they were a part of the change, and they see the technology as an answer to their being heard and addressing their concerns.
People are intelligent, so you can't use technology that doesn't address those things and just pretend, let's treat people with some respect. But you're gonna find far less resistance when people are a part of designing the change versus just dropping something on people and saying, “Go.” Especially since not a small amount of organizations try to implement technology, oftentimes that really doesn't solve the issues they already have. Sometimes things are just shiny and everyone says this is industry standard, so they do it. The other challenge is, it doesn't meet their company culture. If you're using a technology that doesn't really blend with the culture you already have, your people are not gonna do it or they're going to do it begrudgingly, which means they're going to half do it.
I can think of two specific examples where change has gone wrong and when change has helped the organization go to that next level and improve efficiencies within the organization. The first one was we were going through a new product launch and we were in the manager's meeting and the marketing team comes up with this marketing plan and it’s this beautiful marketing plan, but it's taking a shift on our approach on, we were a very science-based company, and we were going a little bit more fluffy in our language. I'm gonna use that word because that's the word that we had said. But that product launched for this particular product failed. It failed miserably because when the marketing team came in, 90% of what they had created was already baked.
Now I have learned that anytime that there is a new marketing initiative, any strategic initiative within the organization, the first question I always ask is, how much of this plan has already been baked, ready to go, and what percentage of feedback do you wanna hear? Because that sets the tone for how deep the feedback that I'm gonna provide. And then I've also seen, as you had mentioned, an organization when they were implementing new technology within the organization, had what was a pilot team. They would roll it out to maybe 10%, in this particular example, it was a salesforce. They roll it out to that 10% of Salesforce. They provide the feedback, they make any adjustments, and they might do that for a couple of months before they roll it out to the whole organization. And to take that a step further the people that were part of the pilot program. Taught everybody else how to use the technology, and it was on a peer-to-peer basis, they were really able to get the buy-in from everybody else.
At the end of the day, if people are a part of the change, they're less likely to resist it. And the last example you gave was brilliant because now it's their peers that are helping them. They've already bought in and, I'm guessing the organization chose some of the top players probably. These are people that have the respect of the people that they're training. That was brilliant.
It was the people that had been with the organization, the people that were also in their career development plan, they maybe wanted to step into a marketing role and maybe there was a partnership with the marketing team on a particular initiative or a program that we were gonna be integrating into our sales force. It really does, as you had, it gets people involved, it gets people part of the implementation process, part of the solution, being able to share ideas, and anytime that we're more involved in integrating any changes within the organization, any products, technology within the organization when we're part of that, we're gonna take more ownership. And then as you had shared, that peer-to-peer interaction was probably the most impactful.
The Framework on Future-Proofing
Anything else that you wanna leave people with? Maybe they're in a leadership role, they're going through some changes within their organization. Any other words of advice that you wanna leave with us?
I'm a big fan of giving people actionable things that they can implement. I would love to leave them with a framework. This can help them future-proof their organization. I just wanna give them a basic framework because sometimes it's hard to know what you should be implemented so that you're staying competitive and relevant.
These are my suggestions, when you think about what you're expecting to happen in your organization, I think it's really smart to think about three alternative scenarios over the next couple of years that could happen. For instance, I know what I expect to happen, but maybe a hurricane is one of my alternate scenarios. Maybe another one is a resurgence of Covid, or whatever. I'm just giving an example, of three things that you do not want to happen, but that could plausibly happen, so write out those scenarios on a piece of paper. These are three different sheets of paper. At the top, you write out what the scenario is: How would that impact you? How would that impact your clients? How would that impact your team?
Next up, you do a SWOT analysis, for each and every one of those three scenarios. You wanna do them separately because something that might be a strength in one scenario might be a weakness in another scenario. You do your SWAT analysis in all three, and then the second to last step is to come up with three things that you can do right now that would protect you or help you get through each scenario. There's gonna be three for each one, and you do that after the SWAT analysis, cause that gives you some insights.
The very last step. So now you actually have three action items per set. So that's nine total. Last step, when you're looking at scenario one’s suggested action items: Does this first one help with either one of these other two? If so, if it helps with more than one, circle it. If it doesn't, cross it out. Do that for all three action items and those action items that'll help you through multiple scenarios. Those are the things you should be implementing right now. That is how you future-proof your organization. And even if none of those scenarios happen, I guarantee you that the actions you're taking there will protect you against other scenarios you didn't see and even help you better prepare for your desired future. That's how you know what you should be implementing.
Diversity as Key to Future-Proofing
That is great advice, excellent advice. And what I'm hearing from you is to go in with the plan. Think of all the different possibilities that could possibly happen, what action steps to take, and what pitfalls may happen. Maybe what part of your organization, the team members within your organization you wanna bring in to support any of the changes that you're making within the organization. But overarching, what I'm hearing from you, go in with the plan.
Be ready, because then if those things do happen, guess what? You've already prepared against it. Your team is already ready. And then can I share one last thing? I'm going to encourage everyone to keep an open mind because they're gonna hear my next statement through the lens of their own bias, but I need them to walk through it.
The last thing I want to say is, Diversity is key to future-proofing an organization. When people hear diversity, they all have different thoughts. I wanna be very clear. I'm not a DEI expert. I'm a futurist. But here's the reason why I say that. When you have people that have different languages of origin, so maybe English is their second language, what you'll notice if you've studied languages or anyone that knows multiple languages, knows that there are some concepts in one language that is impossible to translate. That's because there are some things that are taboo in one culture, and people look at things differently in another. If you do not have diverse perspectives at the table, actively working on future proof in your organization, you are leaving yourself open to disasters, PR issues, and lawsuits. You need moms. You need some younger people. Yes, we need the standard folks that we've seen. Maybe they happen to be Caucasian baby boomer men that have been in the industry. We need them too. We need people that have English as a second language from a few different countries. The more diversity you have, the more different perspectives, see the possibilities, and for sure the greater number of suggestions for potential action items that can help you future-proof. Again, I'm not a DEI expert. This isn't about the cool kids inviting the other kids to sit at the table. I have no opinion on that one way or the other. I'm talking about this purely from a planning standpoint. The more diversity you have, the greater your pool of ideas. You cannot have a diversity of thought without diversity of life experience.
I wanna add another element of diversity, cause I agree with you a hundred percent anytime that you're integrating anything within an organization. You want people that are very experienced and have the expertise you want, but you also want as much diversity as you can. And what I found to be extremely helpful when I was leading a team was the people that were completely new to my organization. When I see advisory boards it's always these people that have been with the organization for a long time and I want that's valuable. Because they know the culture of the organization. They have a history of possibly working with customers, but the new people to an organization come with a very curious approach. They don't have that mindset of, well, that's what we've always done, or that's not gonna work because we haven't tried it before. They're taking ideas from different organizations on, how they have approached their business that they could possibly integrate into the company that they have just joined. They're always gonna be possibly asking questions.
When you say diversity, it is truly integrating different perspectives. People that have been with the organization for a long time, people that are brand new to the organization, and people that have different backgrounds within their own upbringing. The more diverse, the more innovative ideas that you're gonna have. And to take that a step further, think about it, our customers are diverse. We need to ensure that the people that are making the decisions, almost mirror the people that we are customers.
Actually, I would say even greater diversity and make sure that it's different people of different abilities too. I love the fact you talked about fresh voices. I had a very interesting experience in high school, so I was part of a NASA competition where they brought in high school student kids with the top grades all over the city, and they brought us into the Houston campus. We were in the areas where the astronauts were, so it wasn't the public-facing areas. They brought us in, they did this whole competition about us designing a mission to Mars. And they gave us things, how much weight we had to carry, all these different things. So we were all kids that are brilliant at calculus and physics and all those things, and so they broke us into teams and I'll never forget that the CEO of my team paired with one adult and a lot of different kids, I was president of my team, but the CEO of my team was actually the CEO of a company that made in inflatable housing for Mars. This was in 1999. This is before people were talking about it. These are the people we're with. As we were developing all these ideas, they had all these NASA scientists that were giving us feedback, and going over our notes. And I'll never forget when we presented our projects so that they could be graded. And we saw who won, and my team won, by the way, they got copies. They said, “Wait before we give this back, we need to get copies of everything you all have created. They copied all of these high school students' work, and we all had to do releases.
What was NASA doing? NASA was farming high schoolers for new ideas. Did we have the same knowledge set as their scientists? No. Did we have the same training? We hadn't even gone to college yet, but our minds were still open and so they knew they could get a fresh idea. Now if this is good enough for NASA to go to 17-year-olds, certainly as leaders of our organizations, we might say, you know what, there might be some interesting data points for some people outside of the set that we normally listen to. That is a great story, and talking about really leaning into diversity and hearing and being open-minded to other perspectives and thoughts.
