The Black Swan was supposed to be rare. In today’s workplace, it can sometimes feel almost routine.
For Mrinal Sinha, chief people officer, Axis Max Life Insurance, that captures something important about the environment organisations are operating in. AI is advancing, consumer behaviour is shifting, workplaces are becoming increasingly multigenerational and employee expectations are changing alongside all of them.
Speaking at the HRKatha Inner Circle, held in partnership with Culturelytics, Sinha pointed to an interesting overlap between the consumer and the employee.
The same aspirational Indian buying a credit card, he observed, may also be an employee. The expectations shaped by experiences outside work do not disappear when that person enters the workplace. People increasingly expect to be treated differently there too.
That creates one kind of pressure at the frontline. Employees need to become effective on the job faster, making what Sinha describes as “learning compression” increasingly important.
But the pressure looks different at the leadership level.
Traditionally, leaders have been expected to scan the environment, anticipate change and prepare their organisations for what comes next. The difficulty, Sinha suggested, is that the rate of change itself is beginning to challenge that model.
“The rate of change and your ability to predict and scan has gone out of the window,” he said.
His analogy was Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s idea of the Black Swan, the rare and difficult-to-predict event with enormous consequences. Such disruption might once have been imagined as something encountered perhaps once in a generation.
“I think it is happening every quarter or every month,” Sinha observed.
That changes the capability question for organisations. If change cannot always be anticipated early enough, readiness can no longer depend solely on predicting the next disruption. It must also depend on how quickly people can learn, adapt and respond once circumstances change.
For frontline employees, that means shortening the journey to effectiveness. For leaders, it means developing the capacity to navigate an environment in which yesterday’s assumptions may have a considerably shorter shelf life.
At the HRKatha Inner Circle on the Culture–Performance Equation, Sinha’s observation raised a larger question: when disruption becomes continuous, is the real organisational advantage the ability to predict change, or the ability to adapt faster when prediction fails?
Watch Mrinal Sinha explain why organisations may need to rethink readiness in an age of relentless change.