Industry news

British Airways (BA) has cancelled plans to outsource hundreds of call centre jobs in the north of the UK and committed to investing millions of pounds in new technology, according to reports this week. Over 750 staff in Manchester and Newcastle will remain in place after BA and provider Capita failed to agree a deal “after nine months of talks” over taking on the airline’s global customer contact set-up, according to the Manchester Evening News.

BA’s chairman and chief exec, Alex Cruz, told the press that he was “pleased that following a very detailed review, we are planning to retain both of our long-standing UK call centres in Newcastle and Manchester… We have highly experienced and knowledgeable teams in both cities, and by modernising how we work as well as introducing new technology we can ensure we offer the very best service to our customers.”

The news was greeted with delight by trade union Unite, which referenced the current anti-outsourcing backlash in its response: “I think there is a new mood across business and other organisations in the UK that, following the recent Carillion debacle, outsourcing is not necessarily the best option if you wish to develop your business successfully,” said Unite officer Oliver Richardson.

BA also announced that it will keep 900 more staff in-house in centres in Germany, Hong Kong and India, but is also looking at setting up another centre in Cape Town which would be run by a third-party supplier.

“Capita is continuing to work with British Airways about elements of global customer contact transformation and support. This includes discussing a potential new contact centre site in Cape Town,” a Capita spokesperson said.

With less than two months before the new European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into force, concerns are growing that India’s leading IT firms are underprepared for the changes involved, with press reports this week claiming that “only a third” of the country’s providers are in line to be compliant by the May 25th deadline.

“Only 30%-35% of all IT/ITeS companies have started their journey to work towards GDPR compliance,” Jaspreet Singh, Cyber Security Partner at EY, told the Economic Times on Tuesday.

With fines for breaches of the new regulation potentially reaching four per cent of global turnover (and with data protection in the public eye as never before thanks to the ongoing Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal) the consequences of failure to observe GDPR are enormous – yet analysts are concerned that some Indian firms may not be taking their obligations seriously enough. Some observers are also highlighting the extra cost burden and its possible impact on current and future deals: NASSCOM chairman Raman Roy suggested Monday that “IT services providers will have to rework the contracts and they will see a cost increase. But the cost impact depends on the incremental work (due to GDPR compliance) that needs to be done.”

In an interview with the GSA, DLA Piper partner Kit Burden said that “there remains a huge amount of work to be done on GDPR; in fact, there is too much work now than could possibly be done in the time available. There are still organisations amazingly enough which are only now waking up to what needs to be done. Equally there are more savvy organisations which did realise that they needed to do something, who are still coming to terms with the sheer scale of how much that ‘something’ actually is, and are therefore still running up against the deadline in terms of completing all their remediation activities in time to be ready by May.”

The UK government has come under fire after the announcement that new post-Brexit British passports are to be made in France by Franco-Dutch printing firm Gemalto. The decision to send the work offshore, taken in accordance with EU procurement rules, has been lambasted in various media channels by pro-Leave commentators including former cabinet minister Priti Patel, who described it as “disgraceful”, and is being appealed by the incumbent supplier De La Rue, which immediately issued a profit warning following the announcement.

However, the Home Office said on Wednesday that the new contract will save taxpayers in the region of £100m-£120m. A spokesperson said: "The preferred bidder has been selected following a rigorous, fair and open competition and all bidders were notified of the outcome last night. The chosen company demonstrated that they will be best able to meet the needs of our passport service with a high quality and secure product at the best value for money for our customers and the taxpayer. It's been the case since 2009 that we do not require passports to be manufactured in the UK. A proportion of passports have been made overseas since then with up to 20 percent of blank passport books currently produced in Europe with no security or operational concerns."

De La Rue CEO Martin Sutherland expressed anger at the decision to the BBC on Thursday: "Over the last few months we have heard ministers happy to come on the media and talk about the new blue passport and the fact that it is an icon of British identity. But now this icon of British identity is going to be manufactured in France…I'd like to ask Theresa May or Amber Rudd to come to my factory and explain to our dedicated workforce why this is a sensible decision to offshore the manufacture of a British icon."

The news that new UK passports would revert to a traditional dark blue colour was greeted with enthusiasm by many Britons who believe it represents a symbolic break with the past after 2016’s Brexit vote; since 1988 British passports have been burgundy in line with EU norms. Anti-EU campaigner Nigel Farage described the decision as “the first real, tangible victory” since the referendum. Others, however, have taken a rather different view: entrepreneur James Caan tweeted that “a country that would spend £500m to change the colour of a passport while children sleep on the streets is a country whose priorities are wholly out of whack”.

Tiago Catarino is the CEO and Co-Founder of Lisbon Nearshore, a technology company based in Lisbon, Portugal which offers customised software development and IT staffing services to clients worldwide. We spoke with Tiago about his company, the attractions of Lisbon as a sourcing delivery location, the ongoing war for talent, and what makes a true leader...

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Tiago, thank you for joining us today. Let’s get a bit of background: can you tell us a little about yourself and your career thus far?

Tiago Catarino: Over the last 11 years my main focus has been to develop and implement processes which drive and improve outsourcing agreements. I lead a team of professionals, responsible for developing, selling and delivering differentiated, innovative, and operationally excellent services to clients seeking outsourcing or nearshoring solutions to help them achieve high performance. As a senior leader, I help clients experiment with new structures, incentives, and processes in order to meet their strategic goals. My day-to-day job involves consulting and helping clients to address complex challenges related to innovation. It was the complexity of these challenges that led me to obtain a Certified GSA-UK Diploma in Strategic Outsourcing.

Innovation is one of the biggest problems we have in the outsourcing industry. I am passionate about how technology and people combine and drive organisational changes. From 2007 onwards, I developed a “people first” leadership approach to merge technology and processes, helping clients to unlock the potential of innovation in new outsourcing service models.

What does “people first” mean specifically for you?

TC: For me, a "people first" approach entails the developing of a company culture that puts the employees' well-being at the core of the business processes.

Lisbon Nearshore is a relatively young company: what was your thinking behind its foundation? Why was this a good time to set up such a venture?

TC: Nearshore has boomed in Portugal over the last two years. Before that, it was a relatively small market on this side of Europe for mainly one reason: companies pursuing nearshore models were only focused on price and cost-cutting. Now the focus has shifted towards the quality of the work produced, keeping in mind that it must still be affordable.

Portugal is a country which boasts a highly qualified workforce - I believe our best developers and engineers do not lag behind their counterparts in Central and Northern Europe - and significantly lower labour costs than the EU average; however, it cannot compete in price with Eastern European countries such as Bulgaria or Poland. As Portuguese, we have always strived to push our boundaries further and that still stays true today. We are pushing the boundaries of technology to new frontiers, and that is exactly our value proposition, what’s in our DNA: the desire to excel, the quality of our talent and our willingness to discover the new.

Can you give us a little insight into the kind of work you typically carry out for your clients?

TC: Our setup implies a true business partnership: we don’t do individual project deliveries. We set up a development centre with our clients, in Lisbon, that can be scalable according to their needs and which includes software engineers, web developers, project managers, software architects, etc. Our aim is to develop our client’s Lisbon tech hub. We are not just a service provider: we are your partner in Lisbon.

So without giving us any confidential details, what would that entail – what kind of work do your clients send over to you that they don’t or can’t do in-house?

TC: Our clients reach out to us, not just because they have a need to outsource parts of their business processes, but also because they simply are not able to find and attract quality talent. In this industry the talent gap, the gap between the available talent and the industry's needs, is widening every year. It is becoming increasingly difficult to attract and maintain qualified IT professionals; the turn-over rates are increasing. A client comes to us because they know they will get a highly qualified, highly motivated team without needing to worry if they will be able to scale the team or if it will be cut in half due to its members going to find work somewhere else.

Answering your question more directly, we can do several kinds of work with our clients, from applications, front and back-end development, to ERP development (SAP and Oracle, for example) and IT infrastructure management.

Lisbon’s got a pretty interesting value proposition: what makes it a good place to do business right now? And how does it differentiate itself from other service delivery locations?

TC: To be honest, we as Lisboetas have always seen that value proposition and felt the world was just mistakenly looking at other places [laughter]. As I stated before, Portugal boasts a high-quality education which translates into highly skilled professionals. Not only that, but the country possesses a world-class telecommunications infrastructure, a mature market economy and several government incentives to companies wanting to invest in the country. Couple all that with a positive relationship of quality/price/talent and you can’t get a better bang for your buck.

How are you working to stay at the cutting edge of technology at a time of such great change in the industry? Do you find yourselves having to work with a broader spread of partners, for example?

TC: I believe that the key requirement for anyone working in tech, whether as a developer or in management, is to never stop learning. This is a fast-paced always-changing industry and you need to get your feet on the ground and be aware of its global dynamics if you want to stay relevant. At Lisbon Nearshore we are technology-agnostic and, therefore, we work with a broad spectrum of tools. We always look for the best tech to fit a specific project and try to be on the lookout for new tools that can help us improve our work. We also have a Learning Centre where our developers can further improve their skills. Besides that, we also offer them the possibility of attending international conferences and events related with technologies they are working with. Just last month, we had a few of our developers in Paris for the ng-Europe Angular Conference.

What are the key skill-sets and characteristics you look for when hiring?

TC: At Lisbon Nearshore we only hire experienced and seasoned IT professionals. Even though the self-taught engineer has been glamorised in this industry, the first thing we look at when we evaluate potential candidates is their education. Did the candidate continue to hone their skills after getting into the job market? Is the candidate from a reputable university? We believe that a quality education and a willingness to keep improving are the cornerstones of good developers.

The second thing we look for is their soft skills: are they team workers, honest and able to work in a fast-paced environment?

Are you finding yourself in a “war for talent” in a fast-growing market such as Lisbon?

TC: Yes and no. In this industry, no matter what, you are always competing for talent. However, when you have interesting international projects, you provide full benefits and a dynamic company culture, the fight for talent becomes an easier one. We are able to differentiate ourselves from our competition by the amount of energy we place in making sure our staff is happy and well taken care of, finding meaning in the work they do.

Conversely, what do you think are the most important characteristics of leadership in this space right now?

TC: I believe in a leadership approach that puts the well-being of your employees at the core of everything you do. I strongly believe that if you treat your employees well, they in turn will take care of your business. In a space as challenging and competitive as this one, if you push your employees to the limit of their physical abilities, you’ll end up with poorly executed work and a turnover rate that will go through the roof. Leaders shouldn’t be authoritative, but cooperative and point the way. Leaders should inspire and protect.

Finally, what’s the secret to the perfect sourcing arrangement?

TC: To be honest, there is no secret to sourcing arrangements. It is actually more straightforward than most people think, but it has to be supported on a few key principles: honesty, transparency and cooperativeness. If these key principles hold, then, for an agreement to be optimal, it is only a matter of specifying correctly a few technical aspects: well-defined needs by the organisation pursuing nearshoring services; well-communicated scaling abilities and challenges by the nearshore service provider; tried and true communication and work methods; and so on.

I believe that, at the end of the day, if there is an alignment of both organisations’ cultures and ethical principles, the technical challenges of each sourcing arrangement are more easily overcome, and both organisations are able grow and develop together.

The game is on. Artificial intelligence (AI) is pretty much the hottest topic right now. Many would argue that we’ve reached the point of maximum hype in AI discussions.

Here we draw on key messages from our recent book Beyond Genuine Stupidity – Ensuring AI Serves Humanity to highlight five of the most critical issues and resulting choices facing governments, businesses, society, and individuals as we prepare for the full impacts of AI on the economy.

As futurists, it comes as no surprise that we are arguing for analysis, policy experimentation, and, in some cases, pre-emptive action to prepare for what could be the most disruptive changes that most people of working age will have experienced.

1. Don’t Believe What You Read - Technological Unemployment and The New Jobs Landscape

The AI technology vendors are struggling to hold a consistent line. On the one hand they are selling the return on investment case for AI – predicated on headcount reductions. However, as this has become a contentious issue they are now arguing the “augmented intelligence” angle. The new line is that AI will free up people from routine tasks to do more creative work and focus on problem-solving. Whilst this is attractive, in reality, how many employers are going to follow that path? The evidence to date suggests most are going for cost base reduction.

Some evangelists argue that AI will create a host of new jobs and that the new industries that emerge will generate new employment. Whilst this is a possibility, in both cases, the majority of those jobs will require at least degree-level education. These businesses will also be highly automated from the start, and there could be a major time lag between bank staff and truckers being made redundant and the new jobs being created.

The challenge here for governments is to model a range of scenarios, including extreme ones. From this, they can start assessing the tax implications of different levels of unemployment, explore policy options they might pursue under different scenarios, and identity necessary immediate actions they should be taking because they are valid under all scenarios.

2. Reskilling the Workforce and Transforming Education

For adults, in most countries, the provisions for retraining and lifelong learning are at best woeful. However, the facilities already exist in schools and colleges, and there is no shortage of people who can deliver the training. Exponential change requires an exponential increase in provision for retraining – the cost of inaction will manifest itself in higher unemployment costs, rising mental health issues, and skill shortages across the economy.

At the school level, we need to take a hard look at the assumptions that govern current curriculums. In practice, it is impossible to know what jobs a nineteen-year-old entering university today might be doing in three to four years’ time, let alone what career path an eleven-, seven-, or two-year-old might pursue. Indeed, for those aged under eleven, the bulk of the jobs they’ll do probably don’t exist yet. Hence, we need to be equipping them with the skills that will allow them to take up these new opportunities when they arise. This means a far greater emphasis on social and collaborative skills, conflict resolution, problem-solving, scenario thinking, and accelerated learning.

3. Universal / Guaranteed Basic Incomes

There will inevitably be employment casualties from the process of automation. The question also arises as to how people will be able to afford the goods and services now being produced by the machines if they no longer have jobs. Many have argued for provision of a guaranteed basic income (GBI) across society – at a rate typically higher than unemployment benefit. Countries from Canada and Finland to India and Namibia have been experimenting with different models for how this might work.

Simply exhorting people to find work won’t solve the problem or feed their dependents. This is where governments need to work together to try different experiments and see the impacts on funding costs, economic activity, the shadow economy, social wellbeing, crime, domestic violence, and mental health. There will be strongly polarised political views on such an option. However, doing the experiments is not committing to the policy, but will provide evidence on which to base policy decisions when the need for action arises.

4. New Employer’s Responsibilities - Robot Taxes, Total Employment Responsibility, and Deferred Redundancy

A lot of the potential issues around the introduction of AI and other disruptive technologies will arise from the choices made by employers. Will they retain the staff freed up by technology or release them in order to make higher profits? Whilst there is no wish to hold back the process or pace of innovation, questions are being raised about how to address the social costs. If unemployment costs rise, or GBI schemes are introduced – who will pay for them? One option is the introduction of so-called robot taxes, where firms effectively pay a higher rate of taxes on the profits they derive from increased automation. This has already met with opposition from business circles but has some support from technology pioneers in Silicon Valley.

Opponents of GBI schemes and robot taxes have yet to offer substantive alternative policy options. Two options that have surfaced are firstly the notion of a total employment responsibility. Based on turnover in the previous year, your firm would be responsible for a total level of employment in the economy. So, if your turnover was one-millionth of national GDP, you’d be responsible for ensuring the employment of one-millionth of the workforce. This might be through direct employment, subcontractors, suppliers who work solely for you, or new businesses you support.

Another unpopular option is deferred redundancy: workers staying on your payroll at full pay until they find another job. It is easy to oppose all the ideas but large employers and governments need to be thinking now about viable policy alternatives for a world in which we might need a smaller workforce.

5. Ethics, Governance, and Ownership of the Technology

Arguments are surfacing which suggest AI is too important to leave its evolution to the private sector. A proliferation of voluntary ethical charters is starting to emerge to govern the development and application of AI and robotics. The challenge is that AI is recognised as a critical future technology by leading industrial nations such as China, Korea, Taiwan, and the USA. It has become an economic battleground, and ethics may not be a prime consideration in the race for AI superpower status. In response, there is a growing argument for state regulation and oversight of AI. This would probably require the capabilities of a regulatory AI to conduct such a governance role as, in the relatively near future, the capabilities and reasoning of most AIs is likely to outstrip humans’ abilities to monitor them.

Given these challenges, there is also an argument being made for governments to nationalise the ownership of AI intellectual property and then licence it back to firms. In this way, governments could regulate the deployment more effectively, and raise revenues to cover the expected social costs. Such moves are likely to prove hugely unpopular in some quarters, while others will argue they are the inevitable consequence of technologies that could ultimately be beyond human oversight and control.

The reality is that the pace at which AI is advancing has far outstripped the ability of governments, businesses, and individuals to identify the potential impacts, assess the possible implications, and try out potential solutions. A genuinely stupid strategy here would be to cover our eyes and ears and hope the problem goes away, never arises, or simply gets resolved by omnipotent market forces. A more enlightened option is to undertake serious assessment of the most radical possible outcomes, developing policy options for the worst-case scenarios, and implementing actions now which will be beneficial however the game plays out.

About the Authors

Rohit Talwar, Steve Wells, Alexandra Whittington, April Koury, and Helena Calle are futurists with Fast Future - a professional foresight firm specialising in delivering keynote speeches, executive education, research, and consulting on the emerging future and the impacts of change for global clients. Fast Future publishes books from leading future thinkers around the world, exploring how developments such as AI, robotics, exponential technologies, and disruptive thinking could impact individuals, societies, businesses, and governments and create the trillion-dollar sectors of the future. Fast Future has a particular focus on ensuring these advances are harnessed to unleash individual potential and enable a very human future. See: www.fastfuture.com

Beyond Genuine Stupidity – Ensuring AI Serves Humanity

The first book in the Fast Future series explores critical emerging issues arising from the rapid pace of development in artificial intelligence (AI). The authors argue for a forward-looking and conscious approach to the development and deployment of AI to ensure that it genuinely serves humanity's best interest. Through a series of articles, they present a compelling case to get beyond the genuine stupidity of narrow, short term, and alarmist thinking and look at AI from a long-term holistic perspective. The reality is that AI will impact current sectors and jobs—and hopefully enable new ones.

A smart approach requires us to think about and experiment with strategies for adopting and absorbing the impacts of AI - encompassing education systems, reskilling the workforce, unemployment and guaranteed basic incomes, robot taxes, job creation, encouraging new ventures, research and development to enable tomorrow’s industries, and dealing with the mental health impacts. The book explores the potential impacts on sectors ranging from healthcare and automotive, to legal and education. The implications for business itself are also examined from leadership and HR, to sales and business ethics.  See: http://fastfuturepublishing.com/main/shop/bgs/

Facebook’s links with controversial British research firm Cambridge Analytica – used by President Donald Trump during his election campaign - have come under intense scrutiny this week after reports the latter harvested the personal details of up to 50 million Facebook users. Damian Collins MP, chair of the Digital, Culture, Media & Sport Committee, said on Monday that he “will be writing to Mark Zuckerberg asking that either he or another senior executive from [Facebook] appear to give evidence” before that body.

On Tuesday morning it was announced that a warrant to search Cambridge Analytica’s HQ has been requested by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) following the news of the apparent data breach, and in the wake of an ongoing Channel 4 investigation apparently showing the firm’s senior management claiming expertise in questionable tactics – including “honeytraps” and bribery – on the part of its political clients. The firm issued a statement saying that the programme had “grossly misrepresented” its activities.

Meanwhile Facebook – already experiencing one of the most difficult periods in its short history thanks to its apparent exploitation by elements looking to interfere in the 2016 US elections, and under intense political and media scrutiny both in the US and abroad – has suspended Cambridge Analytica’s account and announced it is hiring a digital forensic team to investigate the situation.

“This is part of a comprehensive internal and external review to determine the accuracy of the claims that the Facebook data in question still exists,” Facebook said in a statement on Monday.

LONDON, MARCH 12, 2018:The Global Sourcing Association (GSA), the industry association for strategic sourcing and outsourcing professionals, is calling for the outsourcing community to come together and help to reshape and improve the industry in the face of media and political opposition in the aftermath of the Carillion collapse, and ongoing technology-driven disruption.

The GSA is inviting any and all interested parties to an extraordinary meeting taking place March 26th 2018, 4pm-7pm, at the London office of law firm Eversheds, where GSA Council members will present their thoughts on the state of the outsourcing space and some of the challenges facing it, and will invite attendees to share their own ideas and to participate in formulating a year-long programme of action. The outputs from the meeting will form the platform for that programme, with attendees’ contributions defining the agendas of new working groups tackling specific challenges identified by the community.

Ahead of her appearance before the Public Administration & Constitutional Affairs Committee in Westminster on March 13th, GSA UK CEO Kerry Hallard said that the conditions created by the Carillion crisis and reactions thereto have created a “burning platform” for a “reshaping” of the industry in the UK and beyond.

“Outsourcing is and remains a critical part of public sector service delivery,” Hallard said, “and of the economy as a whole – and while recent attacks on the model have often been extremely wide of the mark it’s clear that the industry’s standing in the public eye needs urgent improvement. This is an opportunity for those of us involved in outsourcing to stand up and be counted, to celebrate our successes, and to demonstrate the almost incalculable value that we deliver every day. However, it’s also a chance for us to take a root-and-branch look at the entire space and ask where we might be able to make genuine changes for the better – and whether we need a wholesale reshaping of the industry to ensure our ability to deliver on our value proposition remains unimpeded.”

Any professionals working in or around outsourcing are invited to join the extraordinary meeting on March 26th to add their efforts to the GSA’s programme. For more information please contact Jamie Liddell, Head of Content, GSA, at jamiel@gsa-uk.com or on 07432 266306 - or see the event listing page here.

RPA specialist UiPath has secured $153 million in Series B investment, valuing the company at over $1 billion, the company announced this week. The funding – led by previous investor Accel Partners along with newcomers CapitalG and KPCB – is intended for R&D in the company’s machine learning and artificial intelligence product development, according to a UiPath announcement. UiPath will also open six new offices across Europe, Asia and the USA this quarter, the company said.

“I am thrilled to have such a strong set of investors and thought leaders supporting UiPath, and I am especially grateful for the continued support of Accel,” said Daniel Dines, UiPath CEO. “RPA is proving to be an unrivaled technology for driving real digital transformation and delivering better business outcomes incredibly fast. With our tremendous growth in 2017, it is now clear that every organisation in the world can benefit significantly from RPA. With the substantial commitment today by Accel, CapitalG and Kleiner Perkins, we are deepening our resolve to accelerate the delivery of AI through the UiPath platform, helping organisations and workers quickly become more sophisticated in everything they do.”

According to tech news magazine TechCrunch the new investment is something of a slamdunk: UiPath is now growing at over 500% annually, with one source telling the publication “I’ve never seen an enterprise company grow so fast!”.

Is it time for all leaders to become futurists? Certainly there are futurist principles that can be applied to help create the “futurist mindset” for successful decision-making and leadership.

This means being able to look over the horizon on a continuous basis, and constantly adjusting our present-day actions in response to what we see. It also means trying rapid change experiments through which we can learn and evolve. This is necessary if we are to be able to act quickly in response to new opportunities and risks.

In The Future Leader’s Handbook, our forthcoming guide for thriving at the helm, we aim to help address these challenges with practical thinking. Let us share some of the key principles for leading successfully into the ever-evolving future.

1. Shape a Forward-Looking Culture

Look at the dominant behaviours and stories around the organisation. Who do we make heroes of? Are we celebrating and rewarding those who scout out emerging change and seek to pioneer new ideas? How are we using public spaces: are staff surrounded by constantly changing images, icons, and questions of what’s next – or charts of past performance, safety notices, and policy statements? How is our appraisal and bonus system designed: are innovation and challenging the “system” encouraged and rewarded?

2. Continuous Foresight and Experimentation Cycles

The old planning model has been overturned, an annual or bi-annual long-term planning exercise to guide strategic leadership just won’t cut it, when sectors are being disrupted on an almost quarterly basis. The emerging best practice model is to scan continuously - looking far, wide, and into the shadows for what might be coming towards us. These insights need to drive at least a twice-yearly update of scenarios of how our world might play out in the near, medium, and longer terms. These scenarios and scanning insights should help us iterate our way towards the future using rapid idea testing experiments around possible new products and services, processes, channels to market, business models, and customer engagement approaches. The goal here is to help us learn key information rapidly, develop new knowledge and capabilities, fail fast when appropriate, and progress quickly.

3. Hire a Futurist

Alongside learning and development, and managing your digital ecosystem, continuous scanning and evaluation of the future will be a critical core function for future-proofed organisations. Like it or not, the organisation needs constant prodding to ensure it is looking at new potential threats and opportunities early enough to address them before they create a crisis. Many leading companies are hiring futurists or directors of strategic foresight or other job titles that denote a role involved in continuously thinking about the future. Well-known organisations that have created positions for in-house futurists include Google, Intel, Volkswagen, Hersheys, Ancestry.com, and even the City of New York.

4. Learn Something New Every Day, Then Watch it Grow

Don’t leave scanning just to the futurists. Allocate at least a couple of hours a week to exploring what’s coming next. Good future leaders learn quickly to establish the habits of a trendspotter and seek out new information at every possible turn. Subscribe to newsletters, follow thought leaders on social media, join webinars, and work daily to widen your media diet to include information that broadens your mind. Seek out diverse information sources and cultivate your findings on a link-sharing or social media page of your own. Watch and learn as your observations go from fringe to mainstream.

5. Rebalance Technical and Soft Skills

If we accept that in the past our success as leaders has been based on our technical knowledge, then acknowledging the pace and scale of emerging change should lead us to conclude that softer skills will become increasingly important. Presuming that automation takes away the need from some technical know-how, perhaps future leaders will be required to demonstrate a tolerance of uncertainty, the ability to cope with complexity, to exhibit empathy within our organisations, and to value collaboration and relationship development.

6. Take a Sustainability Perspective

Sustainability has often been talked about in the context of the environment; climate change, wildlife protection, and natural resource consumption. Increasingly, we see organisations taking a much broader view of sustainability that includes economy, business, and employment, eradicating inequality, developing ethical business practices, our communities and ecosystems, education, and personal fulfilment. Perhaps we should be posing questions about how our businesses and our business practices support sustainability, rather than damaging it.

7. Define and Redefine Organisational Identity

Fluctuating conditions in the business environment impact organisations in different ways. Being attentive to unexpected shifts in society gives future leaders an innate sense for when company culture, identity, and values should evolve. A future leader inspires others with a consistently positive attitude towards change.

Never has it been more important for those leading organisations to demonstrate a) a deep understanding of the forces, trends, developments, and ideas that could shape the emerging future; and b) a commitment to ongoing dialogue with key stakeholders. This is the most natural way for data gathering: talking constantly to customers, prospects, suppliers, partners, shareholders, competitors, industry associations, business networks, advisors, industry analysts, commentators, journalists and - most importantly – their own staff.

Future leaders need trend-spotter habits, the ability to bring people together around new ideas, and the ability to remain attuned to connections between ideas. We believe that being a future leader is a learnable skill. All human beings have within them the innate tendency to look ahead. We have the capacity to learn and experiment. Tapping into these traits will enable some to be the successful future leaders.

About the Authors

Rohit Talwar, Steve Wells, Alexandra Whittington and Helena Calle are from Fast Future which publishes books from future thinkers around the world exploring how developments such as AI, robotics and disruptive thinking could impact individuals, society and business and create new trillion-dollar sectors. The latest books from Fast Future include: Beyond Genuine Stupidity - Ensuring AI Serves Humanity, and The Future - Reinvented: Reimagining Life, Society, and Business. And their forthcoming book is 500 Futures. See: www.fastfuture.com

Fast Future’s forthcoming book, The Future Leader’s Handbook - A Guide to Leading With Foresight, is a resource for those at the helm of business who want to use insights on what’s next to ensure better decision-making today. The book explains how to apply futurist perspectives and applied foresight approaches to future-proof decision-making in business, government, NGOs, non-profits, and academia. The book lays the groundwork for understanding and acting on the critical trends, forces, ideas, developments, issues, and forecasts influencing the next decade. The Future Leader’s Handbook - A Guide to Leading With Foresight is aimed at professionals at the sharp end of decision-making, who are preparing organisations, communities, and their own lives for the arrival of a future that does not resemble the past.

The shock waves from Carillion’s collapse continue to reverberate through businesses across all sectors. Its demise will have a knock-on impact in a whole host of ways: from those who had pensions with the construction firm, to those they banked with. It goes without saying that those who used Carillion as a supplier will be looking for a speedy solution to plug the gap.

Businesses and policy-makers alike have come forward to offer solutions. From introducing new codes of conduct, to “living wills” setting out what should happen in the event of a supplier’s insolvency, to a complete overhaul of public sector contracting, ideas abound as to how to ensure history is not repeated.

Sadly, a series of high-profile stories, from Carillion’s failure to Capita and BT Global Service’s financial difficulties, has served to dent the reputation of the outsourcing sector as a whole. These episodes have ignited a discussion about the balance of value and risk involved in contracting out portions of business. Many of these debates have been one-sided and ideologically driven. Outsourcing provides businesses with capabilities they don’t have in-house, and the ability to flex and scale those capabilities as it suits them. In many ways, not outsourcing can prove riskier – investing capital in property, skills and equipment that may not be needed in 12 months’ time can greatly expose an enterprise.

Nonetheless, many businesses will be asking whether their contracts are on safe ground. To those, I say that the key takeaway from these unfortunate episodes is not to abandon outsourcing, but that organisations must identify, manage and mitigate their risk.

First, conduct a review of your existing contracts. The modern sourcing landscape is complex, with organisations often managing multiple suppliers to deliver numerous niche functions. By revisiting these contracts, organisations will be able to gain a better understanding of which functions may be exposed. This doesn’t stop at a one-off or annual audit – there should be a continual process of reviewing and managing risk and exposure.

Once risk has been identified, it's a case of mitigating it. A key part of this is to put together a disaster recovery plan. What will you do if the worst happens? Would you transfer the outsourced functions to another supplier? Would you move it back in-house? Businesses need to understand their options.

Beyond the worst-case scenario, there are a host of other considerations. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), for example, has become a key focus for those who advise organisations in this space. Enterprises must now understand who is responsible for protecting their data in an outsourcing relationship and that the arrangements are GDPR-compliant before ensuring that this is baked into contracts.

Finally, unfortunately, some outsourcing contracts do fail. Situations like Carillion are rare. More often, they fail because they’re unable to meet their original ambition. Advisors reduce that risk – independent consultants can monitor the health of relationships and providers and raise a red flag at the first sign of trouble. Getting this external, expert perspective is something that should be carefully considered by all organisations who outsource.

From revolutionising back-end business processes, to delivering a better service to customers in the front end, getting the right partner to tackle a problem is important. When contracts work, they can have transformational effects. The experience of Carillion shouldn’t deter businesses from outsourcing, but we can all learn lessons to defend against enterprise risk and build healthier, more fruitful supplier relationships.