Margaret Heffernan

UNCHARTED: How to navigate the future

The time horizon for accurate prediction is now 150 – 400 days out. Which means that the 3-legged tool of management (forecast-pal-execute) is broken. But that need not leave us helpless. Individuals and organizations can find in uncertainty the creativity, ambition and robustness they need to stay meaningful and important in the world—but only if they’re prepared to rethink core concepts like efficiency, planning and strategy. Ineradicable uncertainty may be the defining characteristic of our age and it requires a new kind of leadership, from everyone.

In this presentation, you will learn:

• What makes forecasts reliable—and unreliable
• The value of experimentation
• Holding the tension between responsiveness and long term thinking
• How preparedness beats planning

The One Firm Firm

After years of streamlining and hunkering down to weather the crises, what companies now most need to do is pull their people together. Collaboration and innovation are vital skills in global business—but where do they come from? How do leading companies get the alignment, trust and energy they need to get their people to work well together? What are the impediments to, and habits of, creative collaborative teams?

Working across cultures, time zones and technology is logistically difficult but it’s usually the human factors that make it hard for companies to achieve their aims. Everyone talks about collaboration but few know how to do it, what it feels like or what organizational structures enable—or disable—it. What they all know is that if they can’t figure out how to do it will, others will.

In this presentation you will learn:

• The meaning and characteristics of collective intelligence
• The business case for collaboration
• Incentives that make people pull together
• What gets in the way of teamwork
• How great leadership teams function

Two For One: Seeing Risks/Seizing Opportunity

Big data, market research, social media: we can know more than ever and yet we keep missing the most important trends, information and trends. Why? What makes companies and individuals willfully blind?

Pulling together a century of psychological, industrial and economic research, Margaret Heffernan argues that willful blindness is the biggest risk most organizations face. But the good news is that those companies that confront the issue don’t just reduce their risk; they also make themselves inherently more creative and collaborative. It’s a twofer: when you see more, you can make more and risk less.

In this provocative presentation, you will learn:

• What blinds companies to their risks
• Why most employees don’t share their knowledge
• How companies can kill creativity—or stoke it
• The power of noticing and acting on what you see
• How diversity can make companies smarter