Podcasts

Navigating our new VUCA world

Adaptability
Episode:

16

2020-11-03
Decoding AQ with Ross Thornley Feat. Ira Wolfe

Show Notes

Ira Wolfe is the President and Chief Googlization Officer at Success Performance Solutions. Terrified and fascinated by VUCA-level change, a future of work global thought Leader and author. Host Ross Thornley and Ira discuss 'what is VUCA' (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) and why does it matter? Skills he thinks are essential for the next decade and what people could start doing today to help them thrive in an exponential world?

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Timestamps

  • 0:58:  Ira's background
  • 2:44:  Life before Success Performance Solutions and highlights along the way
  • 8:13:  Ira's freedom to move around and how he identifies
  • 10:05:  Critical thinking in approach to practice and how it evolved
  • 14:58:  VUCA and why it's important
  • 18:24:  Who can we learn from
  • 24:29:  Unlearning, including stories involving it's positives and difficulties  
  • 36:11:  Practical ways to help individuals prepare for the future
  • 45:15:   Ira's favourite chapter from all of his books and why. 
  • 48:41:   What Ira is most excited about in the future of Success Performance Solutions 

Full Podcast Transcript

Episode 13- Decoding AQ with Ross Thornley Feat. Ira Wolfe - Navigating our new VUCA World

Intro  

Hi, and welcome to Decoding AQ, helping you to learn the tools mindsets, and actions to thrive in an ever-changing world. 

Ross  

Hi, and welcome to the next episode of Decoding AQ. I have Ira Wolfe with me today. And I'm really excited because it intrigues me when I read people with interesting LinkedIn profiles and Ira describes himself as a millennial in a baby boomer body. Now, who wouldn't want to be thought of in that way? So welcome, Ira.

Ira  

Hey, Thanks very much, Ross. Pleasure to be here. Very excited about being here.

Ross  

Great. So Ira is the Chief Googlization Officer at "Success Performance Solutions". And essentially, you help small and medium-sized businesses, recruit smarter, hire faster and retain longer. So I guess you're in high demand right now.

Ira  

It's amazing. We were having this conversation just a few months ago, before the pandemic, obviously, global pandemic so everybody understands that. If we were having this conversation back, let's say in March, and you would have asked me, “What do I think was ahead?”, I would have fully expected especially for my business, that people would have put the brakes on I've been as the baby boomer, as you can tell from the body.

I've been around for, you know, a few decades. Most more recently, I've been through 911 and then certainly 2008 The Great Recession. And during those times, business literally came to a complete standstill. Businesses didn't hire, I mean they laid off a lot of people but they didn't hire, put a freeze on. They didn't promote, people who were thinking of leaving weren't leaving, people who were running companies and maybe thinking retiring or moving on or doing that because of the economy. And I fully expected that's what the second quarter would be. And yet in the second quarter, our business was up 58%. 

Ross  

Wow.

Ira  

Which, you know, lots of reasons for that. I think we'll end up talking about that with change, and so forth. But yeah, it's pretty remarkable how not only how steadily steady the businesses, but the growth we're experiencing.

Ross  

Tell me a little bit about, you know, life before, say 25 years ago, when you started Success Performance Solutions. What got you into it? What fascinated you at that time? And what have been perhaps some of the highlights of that that journey? I imagine there's been many, but see if you can pick a few.

Ira  

Yeah, there's absolutely. So prior to, here's the one remarkable thing, if you if I look back over my 40, almost 40-year business career. The sense of that is that I'm not really doing a whole lot, I'm doing a lot differently. But the skills that I was using back then and certainly hopefully have improved over a few decades are the same. I really had good critical thinking skills. I understood the value of customer service, of working with people of building good teams, I grew up in a family of retailers, a small business. And, you know, again, it was hard work. There almost all of them are in small communities. But I saw the role of the business as an employer. Basically the value that they put on customers, the relationships on retaining good employees, all that stuff. And overall good marketing. I often say I'm my I'm probably a marketer at heart and just happen to be in a couple of differences. 

But my first career I actually was a dentist. And that was my pathway since I was a young kid. I don't know why. It's actually, this today, or over the weekend was four years to the date that I did my TED Talk. And during the TED talk, it was about change. The title of it was “Make Change Work for You”. And in that, I basically said I loved everything about dentistry for dent, but I loved everything about dentistry, but dentistry. 

And why I even chose dentistry, you know, this traceback well our fifth-grade teacher went around the room one day, asked everybody to stand up and say, What do you want to be when you grow up and for some reason I pulled dentistry out of the hat and maybe my stubbornness or being obstinate or just setting a goal and say, I'm going to achieve it one way or the other is I became a dentist, and I had a successful very successful practice. 25 years ago.

I basically retired from dentistry got out started this business, people asked me, what are you going to do? I mean you're a dentist. Expecting that most dentists, they're good clinicians, they can you know, from as a dentist, they can drill and fill, if you're an attorney you're good at aspects of law maybe negotiation, if you're an accountant you're good with numbers, all those types of things. And that was the limiting factor. But I never looked at myself as my identity was not as a dentist, my identity was as an entrepreneur and business owner. 

And so when I left, I literally just left behind, it was just another chapter just like when somebody starts a business and starts another one, transferred my skills. Again, that's that constant. Because where I developed really good skills as a diagnostician, people even my dentist competitors, and even the local physicians used to send people to me that they had neck pain and they couldn't diagnose it and they basically would send them to me, not for the treatment always, but for helping with the diagnosis.

Critical thinking skills, diagnostic skills are more important than ever, and that was transferable. Learning how to build teams transferable. You know, we're talking, we'll talk a little bit about assessments, doing assessments. That's with our X-rays and other laboratory tests. So I, personally, I have a continuum along there and that continuum is maybe a good lesson for other people, because it's how do you identify what skills would work in any industry in another occupation, and with so many people that either out of work or will be out of work or even from organizations? What are the skills that, regardless of the environment, regardless of the business, they're going to need those skills.

Ross  

It's interesting, you talk about that, because I remember years ago, speaking to somebody, and it was all of this focus about change, and everything's changing, it's speeding up, and someone said, what isn't going to change in the next 10 years, you know, 20 years, that's something you can build a business around. And it's interesting when we look at certain universal skills that can be applied, whatever the environment, whatever the market is, and we just look for the unique way in which we deploy them. 

And I guess what you've done throughout, is this balance of who you are, and who you mentioned something there about your own identity, and how you identified because often, what I've seen in the conversations in countless of these interviews and with people is how wrapped up their identity is, with what their belief of what their possibility, what their potential is and their future. And it's amazing that you've given yourself that freedom to shift and maneuver around in there.

Ira  

And it is freedom. I mean, it's interesting. I mean, when I left, and people would say, Why don't you, you’re a doctor. I mean, why don't you a stat, why don't you use the doctor title. And initially, I didn't do it, because people, it's a little bit confusing, because people that assumed I was a psychologist because I was working in the psychology space. And I didn't want to basically use that as a deception. It also was a little bit of a hurdle, because not only were friends and family and neighbors, and you know, and my patients asking, “Well, what else do you know?” I mean, “How are you going to run a business? How are you going to coach people in business?” It was also kind of leaving that behind. 

But I was very comfortable doing it. I mean, even it was funny, even when I had a practice people would like the fact that they knew me personally, and they wouldn't use the doctor title. And when I was leaving, they go, “So what do I call you now? I mean, you're just a Mister, are you a doctor?” and I go, “You always call me by my first name before, nothing's changed”. 

So yeah, but it really, really is important, especially in today's world where we've, you know, people so used to that, I've had this job, I've had this title, what are other people gonna think? And fortunately, that stigma is going away that there are a lot of people that have that identity, and that's going to be a problem.

Ross  

And I guess, you know, fundamentally of how you approached your practice of that critical thinking of diagnosis, and treatment and observation and I guess that's what shaped your career perhaps in terms of now how you look for assessments or diagnosis or information and data. That you're then looking to deploy interventions, how, really is that evolved and shaped during your career path of the experiences together with your fundamental approach.

Ira  

Well, it certainly happened, you know, helped a lot in this business. I started and again, many people are familiar with these tools. You know, like Myers Briggs, DISC tool, I was introduced to those. And again this sounds unusual to a lot of professions to people that know professionals, who are really, really good technicians or clinicians or experts or subject matter experts in their field. But they weren't always the best business managers. And I was using DISC in my practice in my business almost 35 years ago, to understand how do we become better as a team, I brought an associate in and different personalities than me and t there are conflicts, and how do you use that tool to help understand different people's points of reference. 

But, you know obviously as a medical clinician, we were using X-rays and blood tests for years. So they were an important part of it. But there wasn't, and I guess this is what really helped me in my transition, as opposed to other people who, had the hammer, and everything looks like a nail, they were experts in DISC, they are experts in a big five-tool. They were experts in Myers Briggs, they had this one expertise, and they tried to solve all problems, conflicts, sales skills, customer service skills, team building leadership, one tool did it all. And that never was the case. So beginning when I started this, I started with DISC, and then I added a values assessment. And then I added a motivation assessment. And then I added personality assessments, and I added cognitive skills. And, you know, now we do technical skills as well. 

And honestly, I mean, it takes multiple assessments to get a big picture and I'm sure we'll end up at some point talking about the adaptability of the AQ. What I really liked about the adaptability of quotient is that you have well 17 dimensions, but just 15 different dimensions, but 10 of them are related to us personally, and they really hit on so many factors from so many. It's almost like a 360. You know, what are the different components and you put them into one assessment, where in the past we had to basically combine those, so I think the on that continuum, or where I came at as an advantage of entering the assessment business was that I understood the need to put together multiple components, and then how to integrate them. And oftentimes, especially using like a behavioral model and a personality model, you'll get a conflict. 

For instance, for anybody that might be familiar with DISC or Myers Briggs, you know, the “I” is somebody energized by influencing others. And obviously, with extroversion, somewhat related to extroversion and Myers Briggs are people that are motivated by having other people around and by conversation, and influencing and engaging with others. Yet, when you measure them in other with other tools, sometimes you have somebody that's 100% of an “I”, they're 100% on the scale of engage of influencing others. Yet on the outgoingness scale, they're only 50%. And somebody says which one of these tests is wrong? And neither are wrong. They're both right. They just measure different, parts of us.

Ross  

Nuances. Yeah.

Ira  

Yeah. And that's super important. A lot of people don't get it. People want human behavior, they want an easy solution. You know, it's like, isn't there a 10-minute test that can tell us everything we know about this person that's 100% predictable? And the answer's no.

Ross  

It's an interesting point, isn't it around how, in our visions of what we're building, getting teams to perform, getting organizations to keep pace with opportunity is that things are shifting, things move not only in the singular in the mind, and brains of an individual, but then the layers of complexity when you then add other people, other teams, other organizational pressures and the politics of scale and then markets. It's a really complex challenge. And it leads me a little bit to something, you know, linked to your TED talks, and a lot of what you talk about around change, and this term that seems to have now sparked a lot more use in terms of, VUCA. And I'll say it slowly and carefully, V, U, C, A. And tell us a little bit more about that your experience in it and why is this important right now?

Ira  

Yeah, well, one is I think it's incredibly appropriate, so, different ways to say it. I'm not sure there's one right way, you know, we use VUCA. Less was, we get less trouble that way. 

Ross  

Yeah. 

Ira  

So VUCA represents Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. So we see those words every single day, you hear them on the news, you read about them. You know if you listen to the podcast, everybody's talking about the, not necessarily volatility. That seems to be in the financial world. But certainly and in the politics. But certainly uncertainty is a personal thing that we face complexity, for sure. And then ambiguity, I did not come up with a term, I will give full credit where credit's due. I know it wasn't one person. But it really came from the US military back in the late 18, I keep saying that, 1980’s, late 1980’s and early 1990’s. 

And for those of you who are around, that was a pretty big deal when the Berlin Wall came down, and Germany got united. But that was just representative of how the world was changing because we were no longer what they recognized that we would no longer be necessarily just fighting countries, we certainly have our enemies lists, as each country does. But the driving forces and the control of those entities of the sovereign nations would be really terrorist groups more amorphous, nondescript and also with cyberspace. They recognized how that was going to come. 

So VUCA represented to the US military. So the military is how are we going to defend ourselves? What's the world going to look like? Who's our enemy, and it completely changed, it's a model. And just as marketplaces change, business market changes, political landscapes change, just our environment changes. We have basically new allies, and we have new enemies. And I can't think I've been talking about VUCA for well, over 10 years, I've written a whole lot of articles about it, and then we'll get put to rest and these people just didn't get it. Yeah, it sounded good. But hey, we're in a small town or in a small community, we're in our businesses and our industry as slow-changing, whatever it is people sort of understood that's where we had it, but that won't happen.

Ross  

They didn't feel it, yeap.

Ira  

And then 2020 yet, you know. I mean VUCA is the world we live in now.

Ross  

So that's now you know, the swimming pool that we're all swimming in. So if that is now, not just a theoretical, not something that existed in pockets and niches, whether it was military or certain markets that saw it in that way. If all of us have now been plunked in this same storm, that is that's the reality. Where have you seen the types of skills or leadership or organizations that have best equipped to deal in that swimming pool? You know, give us some insights as to the leadership traits, the kind of skills, and certain organizations that perhaps you've been working with, that we could learn from?

Ira  

So well, when everybody I mean, the situation we're in now. And again, a lot of certainly the pandemics global. In the US, we're currently faced with social unrest, social injustice, pursuit, we've got a, pretty volatile, dynamic political challenge on our hands and race on our hands. So there are multiple fronts that were all involved in. And so everybody was basically caught off guard. I remember sitting in and now it seems like years ago, it's hard to believe, but it was it was either March or the beginning of April, and I was on a call. And I remember, they had the Chief Operating Officer, I'm trying to blank, not chief operating the CHRO from IBM. 

And it’s one of the organizations, that we try to take lessons from, especially on analytics, basically capturing the data. I remember her saying, because somebody asked a question, what caught you off guard and they said, We were completely unprepared because the one thing that we never did was we never defined who an essential worker was, and essential workers who actually became the essential workers in a pandemic in a crisis were not who they initially identified as essential workers. You know, frankly managers were non-essential workers.

Ross  

Delivery drivers, the new heroes. Some very, unexpected.

Ira  

Yeah so this company with several 100,000 employees, a company that we recognize as one of the best in the world of understanding HR, or what the impact, I won't say they're doing everything is right. But that was stunning, and it had the data and was able to predict it, completely ignored. And they admitted it when we went down the list and say, “We have to send everybody home except essential workers”, they did not know who the essential workers are. So you can imagine that trickling down to Main Street, America, and most other businesses that are not focused on that aspect.

So and again, my expertise is certainly more in the HR human capital arena, there aren't many companies prepared. There are some that are doing a better job than others. Everybody's on a learning curve. I really disliked the new normal term. So if anybody has a better term that they can share with me other than, the new normal, normal 2.0, and the variety of those. But we're living in this VUCA environment, we're living in a new environment, and what's that going to look like? What's the future? 

And so we're all adapting, which ultimately becomes what's the skill that we need? We worked on leadership skills, you know, I know you measured grit, you know, that certainly became a bit of a buzzword, thanks to Angela Duckworth. And it's like, how do we measure grit? Agility has been around for a bit, how do we measure agility, and all those are really, really important. But again, one hammer doesn't fix doesn't work with all the nails that are out there, I mean some are nails and some are screws. You know, there's a lot of different challenges we have. 

So I mean, the constants that we've been talking about, and again, working on the skill side, I mentioned that earlier, and it's not patting myself on the back but fortunately I've had good critical thinking skills, and that's carried me through. I have a healthy sense of curiosity. I've always, not intentionally because I really don't like formal education. Although I've got three degrees, so I got them more from credentialing. 

But I've got, you know, it's also that learning, that continuous learning and as an old baby boomer, all my friends are, “Why are you learning that? Why are you taking that course? Why are you going back to school? When are you gonna retire?” I see no purpose in it. I still have a lot to learn, I want to learn new things. I'm excited about what the future is. 

And I think, you know, whether it's continuous learning, whether it's being open-minded, whether it's critical thinking skills, of that's not new, that hasn't changed. As a post and pandemic, oh we need to switch our gear. Those are the skills we've been talking about, we would need for that for a decade. What we didn't expect is we're going to need so much of it so quickly.

Ross  

I think that it shifted from about being a vitamin to being the cure, from being an ambition for people to have that to being the burning platform of requirement because the stakes have shifted.

Ira  

Yeah and to some extent it was, here's what you need to work on. And it's like, okay, it's graduation, everybody. Now you got to apply it. You can't work on it. It's not, “Oh we have that in our budget for next year”. No, it's here, it's now. And people say what about leadership skills? Well, what are leadership skills? Critical thinking, relationship management, you know, working with people. And people go, what about technology? Well, there's still a high need to be able to work with people and people who are running the technology, we're not quite at that robot stage yet. You know, it's more of that Co-Bot that Collaborative Robots stage. 

So, but what's interesting is and I think, what's what I've seen come out during the course of this year with through the pandemic, I haven't seen any people talk about new skills, except for one with an emphasis. And I know you also pick this up in the AQ is Unlearning. I don't actually recall seeing unlearning in any great extent through 2020. I mean, maybe, you're obviously more aware of it because you've been doing the research with this. 

But even following, you know, I know we're fellow SU People, you know, Singularity University, follow the leaders. It was mentioned, but it wasn't as in the forefront as it is now that there's a recognition that we have to unlearn a lot of what we took for granted, we took as normal. And that's a skill, I mean when we need to get beyond that. And it's not just being open to new ideas, because you can be open to new ideas, you can have the mental power to do it, you can have the fortitude or resilience and grit, to be able to go about and do it. But rewiring our brains forgetting that is just, it's tough.

Ross  

It's tough. And it's a, it's a bigger challenge than the face of it, a lot of things is about the timing, you can talk about something and it never really gained the traction. And unlearning, for example, particularly with Barry O'Reilly's book and a lot of this, drive towards it. It's a sense of accepting vulnerability. And as a human race, we're not very good at that, that we're good at acquiring knowledge, and then being an expert. And then that, I think, is a limiter, to the curiosity to the discovery of new and to be able to let go of something. 

And where it becomes really hard. And I think I've talked about this on a couple of others, was take, for example, judges, and the legal system. And when DNA came in, I think was around the early 80’s, ‘84, or something like that. And where anything post that period, if DNA evidence, gave them, you know, the reason to put them away, it was as seen as 100%. But what about all the people that were put away prior to that point, that now when looked back, the DNA says, No, that isn't correct. The system has to say unlearn, and say, No, we got it wrong. And it didn't work like that. Everything came up to, protect old knowledge to protect the old things, rather than be able to say, “Ah, we made the right decisions at that point. With that data, we now have new information, we need to make a new decision and undo some decisions”. And that's a real difficult skill. And when it comes to learning, when we learn things that have given us an applause, given us some sense of reward in some way, and then it shifts, it's very hard to let go of knowledge and something that has helped us along the way. So I think it's a very topical piece. It's a very challenging piece. And I think it's critical and key to surviving right now.

Ira  

And it's tough to grasp the idea because there's so much emphasis that we need to learn, you know, we need reskilling and upskilling the role of education. And so we're talking about all this learning. And at the same time, simultaneously, we're talking about unlearning. We're talking about how we need to unlearn what we did before while we're learning it. And then, you know, how do we do both at the same time as this isn't like, well, there's gonna be a four-year degree and unlearning and then we can take, then you can just brain dump and we can move forward. The reality is, we got to do it. Now. We got to do it on the fly, we need to do it quickly. And what do we need to unlearn? And what do we need to learn? And, you know, that's somewhere that fits into the adaptability.

But it wasn't definitely another piece into the equation. But even as you were saying, you know, people took this binary choice, it's like, Okay, now we're gonna, we're 100% we're gonna rely on DNA. And then, but it wasn't all or none, because how do we know it's that person's DNA? You know, how do we know for sure, and then our diagnostic abilities for DNA have changed or improved a great deal we didn't have to technology before, just because we were able to identify the genome frankly, wasn't you know, undone were identified, you know, for years after DNA was entered into the courts as viable evidence. 

So it's always going to be evolving. That's the thing that people have a tough time they want to know, well, maybe we should wait till we get that it's the old you know, wait, wait till you buy for your first computer. It's funny, it's been maybe 10 years, but I saw one of my daughter's friends. After that, it was years since I saw her but they were best, they were really good friends from kids. And she's you know, we one thing we remember from you, you were like the first people in the town that had a computer that you know, that the kids and they came over and it was an Apple 2e.

Ross  

Yep. The black with just a green screen.

Ira  

I remembered. Yeah, a huge box and slow as can be. You know, we can go out, have lunch and take a trip and come back and we're still booting up. But it's a long time ago, they were introduced, but the wiring. The one thing I have to find is the link to it and I love it, I can't remember the gentleman's name, but he's a young guy, and everybody's younger these days to me.

Ross  

So relative, isn't it? So relative.

Ira  

And he used the example of, and again, this fits perfectly into the learning unlearning of how our brains are wired, and something as simple as riding a bike. So, the old saying was once you learn how to ride a bike, you'll always learn, you always can hop on the bike and pedal away. And that was true until what he did was, he worked with a mechanical engineer, and they reversed the mechanism in the steering column. So you're driving down the bike, you hop in your bike, and you're like this. And if you turn left the wheel goes left, if you turn right the wheel goes right. And that's also how you balance it, you're constantly kind of balancing it. What they did was he reversed the mechanism. So if you turn left, the wheel goes to the right. And he demonstrates this, how hard it is. Now, I haven't found anybody to change it on our bike to try it.

So that he demonstrates it and it's remarkable. And it took him a while to unlearn the path because it's impulse, it just becomes subconscious.

Ross  

It’s wired and it’s instinctive. Yeah, it's fascinating.

Ira  

Even these little adjustments we make were enough to topple him. He then went to Europe. And he traveled and it happened to be in Europe. And he rented a bike with a normal mechanism. And he couldn't ride it. I mean, he had all these people watching him trying to ride it, I think it looked like it was in Italy, ride a bike. And he kept falling over. He couldn't go more than three or four feet without falling off the bike. And they were like, is this guy drunk? Is there something wrong with him? And it just exhibited I mean, I would definitely use that, I have his permission. It's on YouTube with 26 million views I think. To use that as a method of how uncomfortable it is to unlearn and learn a new skill. Even if it’s as simple as riding a bike.

Ross  

It's an excellent, excellent example. And, and we hired one of those bikes for an event last year. 

Ira 

Oh okay, so you're familiar with it.

Ross  

Yeah, I mean, they're there. I've tried it, you know, it's really hard. We have people who were, crossing their arms over and holding the left handlebar with the right and seeing if that worked or sitting on it backwards and trying to do it going backwards, all these different techniques. And yet it took the guy months and months and months to learn it. What was interesting a couple of pieces was...

Ira  

What's also interesting, too. I’m sorry to interrupt.

Ross  

Yeah, yeah.

Ira  

He showed. I don't know if you saw the video with this child, his kid.

Ross  

Yeah, his child who'd never learned an ordinary bike.

Ira  

Yeah, two weeks yeah, it took a month or two. This kid, like two weeks.

Ross  

100% because they were just all learning from scratch.

Ira  

It’s so hard. 

Ross  

Yeah. Yeah. And it's a great example of familiarity and subconsciousness and our decision-making process. So when we see a physical example like that, and analogy of okay, riding a bike, that's a reverse bike, we can see it. I can't get more than a meter, takes you nine months to figure it out then when you go back to the other way you can't even do it. But yet a child can do it in the same time period as they would you know, riding and learning a normal bike because they've got no point of reference.

What's difficult is then to take the mental shift to apply that to how you operate your business, how you operate your teams, how you operate your decision-making of, take email for example. For many that riding a bike is email, can people unlearn to then figure out texting or figure out a Snapchat or other different communication methods that might seem so counterintuitive, even adoption of things like VR and augmented reality and they seem far out until they become disruptive of those things? 

And what I've liked about learning more about your mindset, your style is one of curiosity and continual learning. And that I think, is what I believe as being a key shift for society is not thinking I need to do the majority of my learning in this period of my life and then just top it up with a little professional development along the way, rather than reimagining who I could be in new chapters like you said, you know, that was just one chapter, I'm on the next one. And hey, maybe there'll be another 25-year chapter in the future of those things.

Ira

It’s a lot shorter.

Ross

It's exciting and when we're excited about something, and we're motivated, and we're fascinated, then there's a future, and there's hope, another important part of adaptability, right? Without hope, then, it all falls, it all falls apart. In terms of getting practical now. So from these analogies and stories, and theories and models, and assessments. Some of the practical tips of what could an individual listening to this, who perhaps is working in a team, they recognize that it's a hypercomplex world, you know, there's uncertainty everywhere, they might have levels of anxiety and stress, and they're seeing it in their colleagues, and they want to do something about it. What could they do? Where would they start, just give us some kind of practical ways to help those types of people have a better tomorrow?

Ira  

Why does it sound like a setup here, but it's not. But the other is. And I will give credit to him too. We'll go back to VUCA. Bob Johansen from the Institute for the Future, he came up with this and he called it VUCA Prime. And if you take the volatility and have a vision, have a purpose, identify what is your purpose, and I know people are struggling with that, you know, right now, and I'm not an executive or a personal or life coach. So there are people that can really help you walk through that, I'm a much better strategist than I am a personal coach. 

But so the V can be transitioned from Volatile  to Vision. The Uncertainty could be transitioned to Understanding and that certainly fits into the unlearning. To read, explore, keep an open mind. And then it's what are the skills that are required to understand. The C transitions from Complexity to Clarity, You know, you look for the signs, you look for the bright lights, you look for the people who, you know, it's definitely related to vision, but who are the people that seem to be leading us toward a future, not trying to hang on to the past? And again, it's a journey, and nobody has the right answers. But again, it's that clarity, and the A, which was maybe as a solution, which was sort of Ambiguity, that we have all this information especially in the US now, with all the information coming up with, what's the right way? How should we best approach the pandemic? And it's both coming from experts. How do we Adapt, how are we Agile, which is the A. So VUCA Prime is Vision, Understanding, Clarity and Agility, or Adaptability. So that fits beautifully into that. Now, that's conceptually, that strategy, that's business, even person, people. 

What I was so excited and passionate about in fact, I was on a phone call this morning, and he said, I just had to set up with a call with you right away, because I haven't seen you this excited in years. Because I was introducing them to the AQ. So And honestly, people, this was not a setup call. But it's a tool to help people individuals understand where I am, if I need to learn a new skill, what is it? Or unlearn a skill because the learning’s part of it. Is there something in my personality that may hold me back? Is it my introversion? Am I too impatient? So are there things in there? Is it the way I'm approaching? Or maybe my thinking style is limiting? And also is the environment? And I think the environments are incredible.  Now I'm a small company, I’m my own boss and I sort of set the rules, but there are people working within organizations and for owners or business people or managers, executives, saying “Are we ready to go forward?”

And typically what they do is, “Hey, do we have the right personalities on the team?” And that was the best we had up until recently and we measured cognitive skills to people that have the ability to keep up with the pace of change, sometimes they had the right attitude, the right character, but they didn't have the mental horsepower. These things are just moving too fast. What the AQ does I mean it's well rounded is, I get it, it's not the cure-all. But you know, I don't want to disappoint Ross but you know

Ross  

Part of the mix.

Ira  

It’s not the vaccine. It says, here's the DNA and here's the environment you're working in. And if we live in a world where there's nature and nurture. So the nature part is going to come from our ability, and our character and the nature part is going to, or the nurturing part is going to come from the environment. Do we have an environment that's conducive, which also goes back to that learning. If you're familiar with fixed mindsets and growth mindset, which I could tell you that if you interviewed me 30 years ago, especially 40 years ago, but 30, maybe even 20. I was really inflicted with a fixed mindset. Because even as much as I said, I didn't identify with dentistry. I also wanted to be recognized as an expert. 

And I sort of was fighting that stigma of dentists moving into business. And therefore I had to walk a tightrope that I couldn't, I wasn't allowed to make mistakes. And I was self-limiting. And that was a challenge. Oh I need a degree, Oh I'm not going to be successful because I don't have this and somebody else. If somebody else has an MBA and I didn't have an MBA, so how can I possibly do this? And you start to believe the hype and the fixed mindset for it, you know, we don't have enough time and don't want to go spend the rest doing that. 

But look up Carol Dweck’s book, it's D W E C K and Mindset. Or just Google it, you can read, there's a million articles on it. But the fixed mindset says, I have the certain expectations that people have of me, and therefore I can't try anything new. I can't take that course. I can't say, I'm going to take a year off and do something because people will think something's wrong. 

And what if it doesn't work, and then I'm a failure. And then they go, I'm going to be knocked down a notch because people look up to me, and they think I have all the answers. Where the growth mindset is, hey, I'm going to journey in life, and we're going to make mistakes, and we're going to trip up and we're, you know, we're all in this together. But I'm going to continue on my road. And that's the learning part. At some point I came out of that, there's a lot of people that aren't and as parents, people, parents are still doing it to their kids. We got to get them into the right school, we got to get them in the right place, I gotta get 4.0 or 5.0, like, 100%, you can't look stupid, and then all of a sudden, is now you don't want to try out for that sport, or you don't want to go to that college. Because what if you don't excel?

Ross  

I think what's interesting about environment is not about throwing the responsibility to somebody else. It's about you as an individual being informed and implementing the environment in which you now know you can thrive. So as a leader, providing it for others, things like team support, emotional stress, all of these things have factors to how somebody is able to adapt or not. Sometimes they need some pressure, need some friction, if it's too cuddly and nice then nothing's going to change. 

So it's this careful balance of understanding the responsibility of curating an environment at which individuals can thrive and can adapt. So for us, it was a very intentional choice, to look at the environmental influence and factors on who adapts and when. And what you talked about there of this practicality of, having vision, having clarity, having an agile situation for people. I'm just eternally excited, by this balance between getting information, getting data, reflecting, and then making decisions and choices and having as we came back to early on in our conversation, freedom. And the freedom to create a future and the permission to do so, that is different. So wherever somebody is, the environment can give them freedom, but you can give freedom to yourself within that, those kinds of choices.

Before we go, I know that you've been a prolific writer. And if there was only one word in one letter, I think you'd probably pick a G because we've got recruiting in the age of Googlization. We've got geeks, geezers, and Googlization, and some earlier ones around the perfect labor storm, and understanding business values and motivation. If you could only write one chapter from all of those books, what would it be entitled? What would it cover? And why?

Ira  

It's a great question I probably take subtitles from the most current book because I think that's the theme that has gone through all of those, which was when the shift hits your plan.

Ross  

And say that slowly, again, for everybody.

Ira  

When the shift hits your plan. 

Ross  

When the shift hits your plan, I like that. Okay, tell us more.

Ira  

And that was the original title of the book, by the way, when recruiting in the age of Googlization. And so the first book, for anybody that says, we don't recruit, we're not an HR, I can tell you that the first 130 pages in the book talk talks, nothing about recruitment, it talks about exponential change, VUCA. I've had quotes from Ray Kurzweil in there and how fast the world was changing. The acceleration and talk about autonomous vehicles and 3d printing and sensors and how that's going to change in the context of, here's the world we live in and then here's the world we have to create that recruit it within. And I'm thinking of that right now, is there another book? I hate writing books by the way. 

Ross  

Yeah, just one chapter. You can only do one chapter.

Ira  

Yeah, one chapter and that's already done then I just have to update it, is when the shift hits your plan. And again when the shift hits your plan, here's a roadmap. Here's the next step, here's a few tools that anybody could do. I don't care if you're a Junior, you're in high school. You're a young adult, you're out of work. You're retired. I mean here are the tools that you can do that. And again, I think the AQ is part of that.

Ross  

It blends in nicely, doesn't it?

Ira  

Yeah, VUCA prime, work on one of them. I mean, it's not like, “Oh that sounds like a lot of work”. Pick one. 

Ross  

It's interesting, the resilience has been talked about a lot as a word at the moment. And you mentioned grit as another dimension that we measure. In grit about the passion and perseverance over the long term. But resilience in their sense of when the shift hits the plan. Resilience, I don't want people to confuse that about endurance, and to endure hardship. Resilience in the context of adaptability is how quickly you can bounce back, when your plan shifts, when it gets changed. And to see that as a skill that you can acquire over time to be forward better. So when a shift happens, it's not about having this endurance and just topping it up so that you're being eroded. It's about how I can bounce to a situation that is better and that's the lens and context that we like to think of it about.

And I'm being interested as a final piece in terms of what you're most excited about because I know you've joined in a deeper way with us at the AQ movement, and really excited about it and in the US starting to talk to a lot of your network. What was the one thing that really struck a chord with you and excited you most about the opportunity?

Ira  

It's, you've provided me a model. I mean, one of the things that's been missing in my TED talk was about make change work for you and I address some of that in my book. But how do I take it down to a one on one, I mean, we need to change one person at a time. There's not going to be some mass vaccine that we can get everybody. There's not,  you can't pull everybody into a motivational 10,000 people into a stadium and have, motivational speaker, get everybody rah-rah and go, “Yeah yeah we need to change”.

What excited me most is that you've pulled together through the research and again, I realize it's a hugely collaborative effort. But through the research and working with a lot of people's and talking with some of the smartest people in the world, we're able to identify these multiple dimensions that just resonated with. First of all, they resonate with me because I deal with that every day, and put them into a tool that somebody can invest 20 to 30 minutes and get the roadmap. I mean, so this isn't going through months and months of coaching and therapy to figure out what you need to do.

This is saying, “Hey, here's the starting point. And let's move forward” and these people are struggling, people that are continuing to do well are struggling I mean, I'm thriving but I'm struggling at the same time because I, frankly don't know what's gonna happen next quarter next year. And being able to provide a tool, and then eventually some services that can help people see that there's hope, that there is a future, that this tremendous opportunity is not only going to give them a job, but it's going to improve their well being and hopefully improve their communities and their families and be able to give back in a much greater sense.

Ross  

Perfect, perfect. And so your title of your business, the more I think about it, the cleverer it is. If people are looking for success, if they're looking for performance, and they're motivated to find solutions, they need to get in touch with you, how do they do that best? What's the best way to get in touch with you if they've been intrigued by your thinking and our conversation? How do they do that?

Ira  

Well, most simply, you can go to, well you can look up Success Performance Solutions, so you can see it in the back. It's "successperformancesolutions.com". That's the business site. And you can also just, you can google or Go to "IraWolfe.com". It's I R A W O L F E .com or just google me, I come up in all sorts of, a lot of places between books and podcasts and interviews and so pretty easy to find.

Ross  

Wonderful. It's been a pleasure to get to know you over the last few months. And I'm excited for our journey together. And thank you for sharing your expertise, your wisdom, your thoughts for everybody to benefit from. Here’s to an abundant and adaptable and successful future.

Ira  

Very much and thanks a lot, Ross.

Voiceover  

Do you have the level of adaptability to survive and thrive in the rapid changes ahead? Has your resilience got more comeback than a yo-yo? Do you have the ability to unlearn in order to reskill, upskill, and break through? Find out today and uncover your adaptability profile and score your AQ visit "AQai.io" To gain your personalized report across 15 scientifically validated dimensions of adaptability for limited time enter code "Podcast65" for a complimentary AQ me assessment. AQ AI transforming the way people, teams, and organizations navigate change.

Outro

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