The state of critical roles: why readiness still lags behind intent

The accelerating pace of change in the modern workplace has necessitated a proactive approach to envisioning the future and what will be required to support organizations as they evolve and adapt.

To advance the conversation, we recently facilitated a future-storming session to reimagine the future of work and talent strategy.

Future-storming is the process of identifying risks and trends that might affect your business or industry vertical, combining them in new ways, and thinking of solutions to mitigate these risks. The ambition? To break the chains of traditional thought, sparking insights into the evolving domain of talent strategy.

Here are five transformative themes that surfaced during the session:

1. Fluidity of talent:

Gone are the days when “talent” described a fixed set of competencies an individual brought to the table. In today’s world, talent is an amalgamation of adaptability, resilience, and the capability to evolve. AI and automation, while replacing routine tasks, can't replace the human capacity to grow, reimagine, and pivot.

The traditional talent pool, defined by rigid skill sets, is making way for a reservoir of potential. It's about harnessing the innate human ability to unlearn, relearn, and traverse uncharted territories. Recognizing this fluid nature of talent can redefine how organizations recruit, retain, and nurture their human capital. The future will prize the ability to learn and relearn, shifting from fixed competencies to a reservoir of ever-evolving potential.

2. Skill evolution, continuous, embedded learning:

The gig economy drives continuous learning, demanding flexibility and growth. The concept of learning in organizations is evolving beyond formal training modules. Today's employees are in a perpetual state of growth, thanks to digital platforms, cross-cultural collaborations, and the changing demands of their roles.

No longer can learning be a one-off event. It must be seen as a journey where every experience, every interaction, and even every failure is an opportunity to grow. This shift to continuous learning also means embracing failures as valuable lessons, promoting a culture of curiosity, and embedding learning in everyday tasks. Organizations that foster curiosity and value each failure as a learning opportunity will lead the way. The pathway to career progression is increasingly carved by demonstrable capabilities.

3. Culture, diversity, and the rich tapestry of learning:

Cultural diversity isn't just a buzzword; it's an untapped treasure for organizational growth. There is a burgeoning global talent landscape with increased cultural exposure which fosters innovation and holistic problem solving. Diverse teams, with their unique experiences and backgrounds, bring varied problem-solving methodologies, fresh perspectives, and richer insights, serving as an invaluable asset for organizational growth.

These multi-cultural interactions and experiences act as opportunities for informal learning, introducing employees to different ways of thinking and innovative solutions. Encouraging such interactions not only fosters a sense of inclusivity but also ensures a holistic organizational growth trajectory.

4. Embracing the tech-human synergy:

The technological renaissance envisages a world where computers and robots assume many of our current roles, from documentation to Q&A. The emerging synthesis of technology and biology, including embedded tech and wearables, offers insights, from employee well-being to real-time emotional feedback.

While technological advancements promise efficiency and scalability, the human element's value remains unmatched. The blend of technology with human intuition, creativity, and empathy is the key to future success. The ideal modern professional is one who not only leverages technology but also understands its boundaries, ensuring that technology serves humanity and not the other way around. While technology offers efficiency, the human touch provides empathy, intuition, and creativity.

With advancements come ethical considerations, especially with AI and machine learning. Balancing technological ability with an ethical foundation ensures that organizations remain not just profitable, but also principled.

5. The subtle art of leadership:

Work will undergo an existential reevaluation. The rise of decentralized leadership, the emphasis on enriching organizational culture, and a holistic approach to talent assessment will redefine organizations. With flattened organizational structures, fostering trust and embracing entrepreneurialism are necessities. Leaders will be more focused on collaboration, understanding, and guidance. In this landscape, leadership also means being tech-savvy, yet understanding the nuances of human emotion is also requisite. It's about removing barriers, and being a facilitator and mentor.

Furthermore, as work boundaries blur, leaders need to be agile, adaptive, and always ready to guide their teams through tumultuous waters. The responsibility is to create environments where employees feel empowered, engaged, and eager to contribute.

Reflections

The future-storming session offered a blueprint for navigating the complex terrains of the talent landscape of tomorrow. The future of talent and learning is unfolding, and through sessions like these, we aim to empower leaders to be the sculptors of that future.

Collins, L., Hartog, S., Werder, C. (2023). Future Storming: Reimagining Talent Strategy for Today. Delivered at the Conference for Society for Industrial/Organizational Psychology, Boston, MA.

In recent years, the coaching market has continued to make major advancements in how to scale coaching for the many. It is commonplace to see small-group coaching, learning circles, peer to peer coaching, bot coaching, self-paced coaching, asynchronized coaching, and even instant coaching, with a live person at your fingertips. It’s easy to believe that innovation in the science of mindset and behavior change knows no borders.

So, what’s the problem here? With such advancement, what could possibly jeopardize the quality and integrity of coaching today? It might be different than what you think. Yes, much comes down to the coach themselves, their experience, and how they are resourced to do their work; but with more qualified and well-equipped coaches out there than ever before, this is less of an issue. The problem lies in the pivot towards selecting your own coach, and the challenge is ensuring you make an unbiased choice.

‍Swipe left to reinforce your bias

‍Today, choosing your coach is as simple as swiping left. Aided by apps modelled after unregulated dating platforms, employees can select their coach by scrolling or swiping through a list of options. These dating apps appeal to some of humanity’s most rudimentary motivators, such as physical attraction and affinity bias (defined below). Instead of matching with the best fit, Coach selection processes are becoming riddled with the same biases towards race, gender, and sexual orientations that most organizations are working hard to eliminate.

There are two main biases emerging in this approach to coach selection:

• Affinity Bias: Affinity bias, also known as similarity bias, is the tendency for people to connect with others who share similar interests, experiences, and backgrounds.
• Confirmation Bias: Confirmation bias is the inclination to draw conclusions about a situation or person based on your personal desires, beliefs, and prejudices, rather than on unbiased merit.

These biases lead to two common coaching traps:

‍Coaching Trap #1: Many scaled coaching organizations today use dating algorithms (think swiping left or right) to assist in coach selection. At first, an employee will only see a coach’s photo and would need to click on their image to see further details. While this is a fun and inventive way of enabling the employee’s speed to coach selection, as exposure to someone’s face only further reinforces basic biases; based on psychology, employees are more likely to choose the person that looks like them.

‍Coaching Trap #2: Across the globe, there is a strong bias towards both a specific set of educational institutions (the Ivy League) and certain levels of academic achievement (graduate degrees, whether in medicine, law, or other fields). Thus, graduates from lesser-known institutions and bachelor’s degree-holders may be considered less valuable. When selecting a coach, this bias frequently plays out with the perception that coaches with rarefied educational backgrounds will deliver better results.

By enabling coach selection in this way, employees are almost encouraged to reinforce their own biases, which include ageism, sexism, racism, name bias, beauty bias, cultural bias, and more. These biases are the ones that companies are working hard to disrupt via policies on rewards, hiring, employee lifecycle, and in society. Despite this, recent studies show alarming trends, even in early careers:

One study of high school students found that females considered to be attractive earned eight percent more than those who were not considered attractive, and men of below-average attractiveness made 13 percent less than other men who were considered attractive.¹

In another study, White-sounding names received 50 percent more call backs for interviews than Black-sounding names. Even with a higher quality resume, there is still a strong bias towards White-sounding names, which elicit 30 percent more call-backs. For Black-sounding names, the increase is much smaller. Applicants living in better neighborhoods also receive more call-backs, but this effect is not impacted by race.²

So, here’s the problem: the coach you think you need could not be the one you actually need. Just because you feel comfortable with a person or “see yourself” in them doesn’t necessarily correspond to effective change. Many people reflect on their coaching experiences and find that the coaches or people in their life that they’ve learned the most from are very different from themselves.

In a time when everyone is working together to eliminate bias and encourage equity, this is one more area where we need to lead change.

What’s the alternative?

‍To ensure quality coach selection, you need to follow a few key principles in your approach:

1. Make sure your coaching approach and initiative are aligned to strategic outcomes, a change agenda, and your organization values. This can be used to simplify and focus your pool of coaches based on experience, industry knowledge, specialties, and organizational or individual need.
2. Ahead of time, ask your employees to reflect on what they believe is important to them in a coach. This will normally result in them naming some of the higher order needs based on past experiences, current needs, and context.
3. Your coaching partner should have a “Coach Talent Director” role or similar. This person should know all there is to know about how to maximize their coaches’ talent and match it to yours. Invest in this relationship, carefully scoping out how this person can you be your guide on the side in getting the fit right for your organization.
4. Allocate a coach to each employee based on their stated needs. Take pulse checks along the way from both parties to check in on how the match is going.
5. If the coaching match isn’t working, or the chemistry isn’t there, make it easy for people to change without judgement or impediment.
6. If choice is a key requirement, introduce the coach selection only after working with the Coach Talent Director to select the information that is critical for employees to know. This information should be designed to help employees make an unbiased choice – qualities such as coaching style, approach, experience, and industry background are appropriate, but photographs and names should be avoided.

So much effort to reduce bias has been implemented into hiring, promotion, succession, and performance management processes that it would be a mistake to ignore biases in coach selection. To continue moving the needle on equity and inclusion – which not only delivers business results, but also makes our society better as a whole – it’s essential to take a critical look at your coach selection process. You just might be accidently helping to reinforce bias by encouraging employees to swipe left on a coach in an app.

‍References

1. Gordon, R. A., & Crosnoe, R. (2013, December 10). In school, good looks help and good looks hurt (but they mostly help). Council on Contemporary Families. https://contemporaryfamilies.org/good-looks-help-report/.
2. Bertrand, M., & Mullainathan, S. (2003, July 28). Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A field experiment on labor Market Discrimination. NBER. https://www.nber.org/papers/w9873.

Technology choices are often made under pressure - pressure to modernize, to respond to shifting client expectations, to demonstrate progress, or to keep pace with rapid advances in AI. In those moments, even experienced leadership teams can fall into familiar traps: over-estimating how differentiated a capability will remain, under-estimating the organizational cost of sustaining it, and committing earlier than the strategy or operating model can realistically support.

After decades of working with leaders through digital and technology-enabled transformations, I’ve seen these dynamics play out again and again. The issue is rarely the quality of the technology itself. It’s the timing of commitment, and how quickly an early decision hardens into something far harder to unwind than anyone intended.

What has changed in today’s AI-accelerated environment is not the nature of these traps, but the margin for error. It has narrowed dramatically.

For small and mid-sized organizations, the consequences are immediate. You don't have specialist teams running parallel experiments or long runways to course correct. A single bad platform decision can absorb scarce capital, distort operating models, and take years to unwind just as the market shifts again.

AI intensified this tension. It is wildly over-hyped as a silver bullet and quietly under-estimated as a structural disruptor. Both positions are dangerous. AI won’t magically fix broken processes or weak strategy, but it will change the economics of how work gets done and where value accrues.

When leaders ask how to approach digital platforms, AI adoption, or operating model design, four questions consistently matter more than the technology itself.

• What specific market problem does this solve, and what is it worth?
• Is this capability genuinely unique, or is it rapidly becoming commoditized?
• What is the true total cost - not just to build, but to run and evolve over time?
• What is the current pace of innovation for this niche?

For many leadership teams, answering these questions leads to the same strategic posture. Move quickly today while preserving options for tomorrow. Not as doctrine, but as a way of staying adaptive without mistaking early commitment for strategic clarity.

Why build versus buy is the wrong starting point

One of the most common traps organizations fall into is treating digital strategy as a series of isolated build-vs-buy decisions. That framing is too narrow, and it usually arrives too late.

A more powerful question is this. How do we preserve optionality as the landscape continues to evolve? Technology decisions often become a proxy for deeper organizational challenges. Following acquisitions or periods of rapid change, pressure frequently surfaces at the front line. Sales teams respond to client feedback. Delivery teams push for speed. Leaders look for visible progress.

In these moments, technology becomes the focal point for action. Not because it is the root problem, but because it is tangible.

The real risk emerges operationally. Poorly sequenced transitions, disruption to the core business, and value that proves smaller or shorter-lived than anticipated. Teams become locked into delivery paths that no longer make commercial sense, while underlying system assumptions remain unchanged.

The issue is rarely technical. It is temporal.

Optimizing for short-term optics, particularly client-facing signals of progress, often comes at the expense of longer-term adaptability. A cleaner interface over an ageing platform may buy temporary parity, but it can also delay the more important work of rethinking what is possible in the near and medium term.

Conservatism often shows up quietly here. Not as risk aversion, but as a preference for extending the familiar rather than exploring what could fundamentally change.

Licensing as a way to buy time and insight

In fast-moving areas such as AI orchestration, many organizations are choosing to license capability rather than build it internally. This is not because licensing is perfect. It rarely is. It introduces constraints and trade-offs. But it was fast. And more importantly, it acknowledged reality.

The pace of change in this space is such that what looks like a good architectural decision today may be actively unhelpful in twelve months. Licensing allowed us to operate right at the edge of what we actually understood at the time - without pretending we knew where the market would land six or twelve months later.

Licensing should not be seen as a lack of ambition. It is often a way of buying time, learning cheaply, and avoiding premature commitment. Building too early doesn’t make you visionary, often it just makes you rigid.

AI is neither a silver bullet nor a feature

Coaching is a useful microcosm of the broader AI debate.

Great AI coaching that is designed with intent and grounded in real coaching methodology can genuinely augment the experience and extend impact. The market is saturated with AI-enabled coaching tools and what is especially disappointing is that many are thin layers of prompts wrapped around a large language model. They are responsive, polite, and superficially impressive - and they largely miss the point.

Effective coaching isn’t about constant responsiveness. It’s about clarity. It’s about bringing experience, structure, credibility, and connection to moments where someone is stuck.

At the other extreme, coaches themselves are often deeply traditional. A heavy pen, a leather-bound notebook, and a Royal Copenhagen mug of coffee are far more likely to be sitting on the desk than the latest GPT or Gemini model.

That conservatism is understandable - coaching is built on trust, presence, and human connection - but it’s increasingly misaligned with how scale and impact are actually created.

The real opportunity for AI is not to replace human work with a chat interface. It is to codify what actually works. The decision points, frameworks, insights, and moments that drive behavior change. AI can then be used to augment and extend that value at scale.

A polished interface over generic capability is not enough. If AI does not strengthen the core value of the work, it is theatre, not transformation.

What this means for leaders

Across all of these examples, the same pattern shows up.

The hardest decisions are rarely about capability, they are about timing, alignment, and conviction.

Building from scratch only makes sense when you can clearly articulate:

• What you believe that the market does not
• Why that belief creates defensible value
• Why you’re willing to concentrate risk behind it

Clear vision scales extraordinarily well when it’s tightly held. The success of narrow, focused Silicon Valley start-ups is testament to that.

Larger organizations often carry a broader set of commitments. That complexity increases when depth of expertise is spread across functions, and even more so when sales teams have significant autonomy at the point of sale. Alignment becomes harder not because people are wrong, but because too many partial truths are competing at once.

In these environments, strategic clarity, not headcount or spend, creates advantage.

This is why many leadership teams choose to license early. Not because building is wrong, but because most organizations have not yet earned the right to build.

This article was originally publish on Rotman Management

IN OUR CONSULTING WORK with teams at all levels—especially senior leadership—my colleagues and I have noticed teams grappling with an insidious challenge: a lack of effective prioritization. When everything is labeled a priority, nothing truly is. Employees feel crushed under the weight of competing demands and the relentless urgency to deliver on multiple fronts. Requests for prioritization stem from both a lack of focused direction and the challenge of efficiently fulfilling an overwhelming volume of work. Over time, this creates a toxic cycle of burnout, inefficiency and dissatisfaction.

The instinctive response to this issue is to streamline, reduce the number of initiatives, and focus. While this is a step in the right direction, it doesn’t fully address the problem. Prioritization isn’t just about whittling down a to-do list or ranking activities by importance and urgency on an Eisenhower Decision Matrix; it also requires reshaping how we approach work more productively.

In our work, we have found that three critical factors lie at the heart of solving prioritization challenges: tasks, tracking and trust. Addressing these dimensions holistically can start to address the root causes of feeling overwhelmed and lay the foundation for sustainable productivity. Let’s take a closer look at each.

‍

You’re buckling in for an overseas flight in a brand-new Boeing 777. The pilot comes on the PA: “Ah, ladies and gentlemen, our flight time today will be six and a half hours at a cruising altitude of 33,000 feet. And I should mention that this is the first time I have ever flown a 777. Wish me luck.”

Before setting foot in the real world, pilots, military personnel and disaster response teams use intense simulations to learn how to respond to high-intensity challenges.Why should we place corporate leaders and their teams in situations without first giving them a chance to try things out? The risks are huge — new strategy investments can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. BTS offers a better way to turn strategy into action: customized business simulations.

‘Now I Know What it’s Like to be CEO’

A customized business simulation of your enterprise, business unit or process, using real-world competitive dynamics, places leaders in a context where they step out of their normal day-to-day roles and gain exposure to the big picture. Participants make decisions in a risk-free environment, allowing them to experience critical interdependencies, execution best practices and the levers they can use to optimize their company’s key performance indicators. It takes the concept of a strategy and makes it personal, giving each individual the chance to see the direct impacts of their actions and the role they play in strategy execution.

Leading corporations are increasingly turning to business simulations to help build strategic alignment and execution capability when faced with the following business challenges:

• Key performance objective and new strategy implementation.
• Accelerating strategy execution and innovation.
• Improving business acumen and financial decision making.
• Transforming sales programs into business results accelerators.
• Leadership development focused on front-line execution.
• Implementing culture change as tied to strategy alignment.
• Modeling complex value chains for collaborative cost elimination.
• Merger integration.

Within minutes of being placed in a business simulation, users are grappling with issues and decisions that they must make — now. A year gets compressed into a day or less. Competition among teams spurs engagement, invention and discovery.

The Business Simulation Continuum: Customize to Fit Your Needs

Simulations have a broad range of applications, from building deep strategic alignment to developing execution capability. The more customized the simulation, the more experience participants can bring back to the job in execution and results. Think about it: why design a learning experience around generic competency models or broad definitions of success when the point is to improve within your business context?  When you instead simulate what “great” looks like for your organization, you exponentially increase the efficacy of your program.

10 Elements of Highly Effective Business Simulations

With 30 years of experience building and implementing highly customized simulations for Fortune 500 companies, BTS has developed the 10 critical elements of an effective business simulation:

1. Highly realistic with points of realism targeted to drive experiential learning.
2. Dynamically competitive with decisions and results impacted by peers’ decisions in an intense, yet fun, environment.
3. Illustrative, not prescriptive or deterministic, with a focus on new ways of thinking.
4. Catalyzes discussion of critical issues with learning coming from discussion within teams and among individuals.
5. Business-relevant feedback, a mechanism to relate the simulation experience directly back to the company’s business and key strategic priorities.
6. Delivered with excellence : High levels of quality and inclusion of such design elements as group discussion, humor, coaching and competition that make the experience highly interactive, intriguing, emotional, fun, and satisfying.
7. User driven: Progress through the business simulation experience is controlled by participants and accommodates a variety of learning and work styles.
8. Designed for a specific target audience, level and business need.
9. Outcome focused , so that changes in mindset lead to concrete actions.
10. Enables and builds community: Interpersonal networks are created and extended through chat rooms, threaded discussions and issue-focused e-mail groups; participants support and share with peers.

Better Results, Faster

Well-designed business simulations are proven to significantly accelerate the time to value of corporate initiatives. A new strategy can be delivered to a global workforce and execution capability can be developed quickly, consistently and cost-effectively. It’s made personal, so that back on the job, participants own the new strategy and share their enthusiasm and commitment. This in turn yields tangible results; according to a research report conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by BTS, titled “Mindsets: Gaining Buy-In to Strategy,” the majority of firms struggle to achieve buy-in to strategy, but those that personalize strategy throughout their organization significantly outperform their peers in terms of profitability, revenue growth and market share.

Business Simulations: Even More Powerful in Combination

Comprehensive deployment of business simulation and experiential learning programs combines live and online experiences. The deepest alignment, mindset shift and capability building takes place over time through a series of well-designed activities. Maximize impact by linking engagement and skill building to organizational objectives and by involving leadership throughout the process.

Putting Business Simulations to Work

Simulations drive strategic alignment, sales force transformation, and business acumen, financial acumen and leadership development, among other areas. A successful experiential learning program cements strategic alignment and builds execution capability across the entire organization, turning strategy into action. Results can be measured in team effectiveness, company alignment, revenue growth and share price.

Learn more about business simulations

Learn how BTS Business Simulations can help with your initiatives.

Fill out the form below to have a BTS representative contact you.

‍