 Welcome. Hi Agile India. Sorry I couldn't be there in person and or present virtually I needed to pre-record these these presentations and due to personal conditions. I hope you're all having a great conference. It certainly looks like it was going to be an awesome experience. So I want to talk about unleashing the resiliator within. We all have a resiliator within us and the reason we need to unleash it is because change as you guys will gales will know in the world of agility and every other world change is getting faster. Change is constant and it's increasing in velocity. So how are we going to be prepared to embrace constant change? Embrace the uncertainty. Embrace the fact that we cannot often cannot predict what changes are coming our way. Just like we can't control the weather we can't control change. We were not able to control this pandemic that we're all in at the moment. We certainly did not see it coming and whatever industry we're in that can change at the drop of a hat. The introduction of a new competitor, new product, new service, technology disruption, new customer consumer and constituent demand can all make changes to our organisation and I don't care what industry you're in change is constant and we all need to get ready to change. Some organisations we often think of as the ones that are changing faster and faster like the Googles and the Amazons and the apples of the world but even if you're in government then there's somebody it could be a government administration there's someone out there ready to do what you do faster, better, cheaper and they will come in and do it. So it's in our interest as an organisation as an individual to be ready to embrace constant change. So for the next 40 odd minutes what I'd like to talk to you about is why we need to stop talking about resistance to change. We hear a lot about resistance to change and you know I believe people generally don't resist change when it's done with them, they resist it when it's done to them. So let's stop talking about resistance, start doing change with people and making them resilient in the face of it. We are going to unleash the resiliator. So before we get into it I'm just going to show you a short animation to set the scene. Constant, volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous change is now our reality. As competition, customer and consumer demand and digital disruption increases, resilience is paramount to the endurance of you as an individual and your organisation. So how can you become resilient? Simple by unleashing the resiliator within. Within us all are superpowers that we may have unknowingly used in the past to help us through various challenges in life. To become the resiliator however we need to become aware of these superpowers and nurture them so that we can use them on demand depending on the situation. Some situations may require only one superpower while others may require multiple. Practice makes perfect and the more you use them the faster you'll be able to identify which superpower to use and the better you'll become at using them. Luckily we don't have to become experts in all of them. We just need to know what they do and when to use them. Once you learn how to unleash the resiliator within you'll be able to achieve better physical and mental health, perceive life as a series of challenges not problems, thrive in situations of high demand and ongoing pressure, view failures as learning opportunities and bounce back from setbacks, unconquered, triumphant and undefeated. So welcome to the resiliator. Before I carry on I'll just put it into context. So that video you saw there that little animation was talking about superpowers for individuals and they were shown on the screen and we also have 20 superpowers as well as for individuals 20 superpowers for leaders and I'll talk about that a bit later. So what resilience brings us and resilience can be learned. Let's break that myth straight away. Let's break the myth that resilient people have suits of armour, they don't, they have setbacks like anyone else, it's just the way they respond to them that's different and I often say they don't bounce back, they bounce forward having learned from a situation. So they have good days and bad days just like all of us but they deal with them in a way that makes increases their resilience. So when resilient we have both improved mental and physical health. Resilience will reduce stress, anxiety, depression, trauma and burnout and none of us want any of those things and just to clarify when I talk about stress there is good stress and bad stress. What we need to avoid is the bad stress. Good stress is when you're going to speak between before an audience or you're going to lead a team meeting, you're stepping out of your comfort zone, the skin is tingling, the adrenaline's going and that's good stress. It doesn't feel like it at the time but it is. Bad stress is when you are into the terrorism. So that's when you just can't cope with the amount of change, the pressure it's bringing etc. I want to share some facts and figures with you briefly just to get a sense of what this actually means. Now last year the World Health Organization recognised burnout as a thing. So it's now on the International Classification of Diseases, ICD-11, but it actually recognised it as a syndrome that needs to be addressed. So these are some statistics I managed to find for those of you who are in India. I've presented this in the UK, in the US, in New Zealand. So I try and find statistics relating to the country in which it's been presented. So according to Opdom in 2016, 46% of the workforce in organisations in India suffers from some or the other forms of stress. So the stress, 42.5 of corporate employees suffered from depression. These are scary figures. 48 are respondents that they feel fatigue on a regular basis just due to anxiety. This isn't overwork or long hours, this is anxiety. And 27% in another survey said they suffer from regular headaches. And the World Health Organization last year stated that India will suffer economic losses amounting to a staggering $1.03 trillion from mental health conditions between the years of 2012 and 2030. These are figures that should make individuals and organisations sit up and take notice. And I'll talk about why in a moment. And only 15% of Indian adults are on need of active intervention for mental health issues. 29% of Indian companies, only 29%. So only a third of companies had a mental well-being action plan in place, even as mental health continues to deteriorate across the country. And another report last year from the Economic Times said one in five employees in India is suffering from workplace depression. Now what happens when we have mental health issues in the workplace or lack of resilience is that it's costly. You have increased absenteeism, increased presenteeism. You have decreased productivity, decreased engagement that all affects the bottom line. You have increased attrition. When people know that organisations look after the mental well-being of their staff, you will attract talent and you'll retain your talent. There are many, many reasons to do it. Let's look at that return on investment. So here in Australia, back in 2014, a charitable organisation working in the area of mental health commissioned PricewaterhouseCoopers, the name of the charity was Heads Up. And they asked PricewaterhouseCoopers to do some in-depth research, in-depth study, which they did, to say what is the return on investment for organisations that invest in the mental well-being of their people. They said on average for every dollar that you spend, the return is 2.3. Every dollar, you'll get 2.3 back. So it is well worth the investment. And that's because your productivity goes up. Therefore, your profitability goes up. You don't lose people. It's expensive when people leave organisations. And last year, the World Health Organisation said that that one dollar investment on a global basis is generally worth $4 return. So every dollar you spend, you're going to quadruple your returns. So it really should be a no-brainer. Unfortunately, there are not many organisations that are doing this and doing it properly. They will say to me, we have mental health offices in place. And I'm like, well, there's still a stigma about mental health in the workplace. People generally may not want to reach out to that mental health officer and admit that they're struggling. They'll say, oh, we do have mindfulness on a Monday. Not everyone wants to do mindfulness. These are not enterprise-wide initiatives. And when I say enterprise, it could be organised over 10 people, 100 people, 10,000 people. But we need resources that everybody can access at any time that will help them increase their resistance. So I mentioned at the beginning about change being constant. And I'll put this acronym in it up. Many of you will have already seen this. Volatile and certain, complex and ambiguous is how we describe change in the workplace today. It's volatile. It's constant. It's significant. It's uncertain. We can't predict it in many situations. It's complex as many into many moving parts and variables and ambiguous. There's a lack of clarity. There's no precedence. There was no precedent for COVID-19. So we have to recognise there's unknown unknowns. And we'll only be able to deal with it once it's happened. And that can be a scary situation to be in, which is why we need resilience. And the organisations that are going to survive this pandemic and come out the other side stronger for it are those that have invested in the resilience of their workforce. And the companies that are going to survive, if companies want to survive, they're going to have to do this. They're going to need a resilient workforce in the face of constant change. So we have to make sure we have an enterprise capability to support our employees. So what does resilience look like? What do I actually mean about it? And I always have this slide, but it's more important now because resilience is actually a word because of COVID that's just been banded about. And I think the significance of the word and its meaning is getting lost. So that's the definition from the Collins dictionary, recover strength, good humour, etc. Quickly buoyancy. I don't want to be buoyant and just keep bouncing along in the storm. I want to actually make some progress. So as I said, resilience to me is not about bouncing back after a setback or facing a challenge or whatever it might be or a problem. It's about bouncing forward. We have to learn from the situation and be better because of it. And that's what resilience is about, about making the best of situations because of the way we think about them and look at them. So we need to understand the behaviours of ourselves and others when we're under stress. What are our triggers? And you can only change what you know. And this is all about emotional intelligence, self-awareness and self-regulation. We need to embrace the fact that constant change is the norm. We can put our head in the sand if we want, but it's not going to make a difference. It is here to stay and it's only going to get faster and harder and more disruptive. So we need to be able to adapt. We need to be able to continually change. Being agile is being adaptable. We change direction as we need to. We flex according to the situations. And we analyse situations and say, okay, this is what I'm being faced with. How do I want to respond? Because we have a choice of how we respond. We're flexible. We use problem solving techniques to overcome things as opposed to letting them overwhelm us. We anticipate change. We need to sense and respond. We need to keep our eyes and ears open about what's going on. We need to try and be proactive. And we need to change before we have to. So we always need to be ahead of the change, if you like, in the best way we can. And we do that through being resilient. So the key thing to remember as well is resilience can be learned. So it's time to unleash the resilience within. When you do that, you will thrive in the face of constant change. So let's look at what that looks like. So in the animation, you saw some of these superpowers. Now, these are the 20 superpowers that individuals have. I also have 20 superpowers for leaders. But we're just going to look at the ones for individuals. And that's everybody including leaders. But leaders have additional ones because they need to create an environment in which resilience can thrive. And as the animation said, you do not need to be an expert in all of them. You need to know what they are. So we know that the solver is about problem solving. The observer is about self observation. The revealer is about being your authentic self. And when you get to know the superpowers, you'll know which one or two will meet your needs in a given situation. You know, you think of some of the superheroes that, you know, from any of the, you know, Marvel or wherever. And they have lots of superpowers they can pull on at any time. They don't necessarily use them all. They might use their X-ray vision for one situation they're in. And they might use their ability to morph into a different shape in another situation. So it's always going to vary. So you'll need to understand what you're facing and which is the best superpower or superpowers to utilize at that time to overcome the challenges that you're facing. Excuse me. So we can use them in the workplace. We can also use them in our personal context. And this was a situation in which I used some of the superpowers, probably without realizing it at the time. So back in 1998, I made one of the biggest changes in my life. And I've ordered a plane from the UK to Australia to start a new job and what turned out to be a new life at the same time. And it was a massive move for me. You know, if you think for those of you old enough to think back or you know what the British are like, you know, they didn't travel very much when I was growing up. You know, they might go to an adjacent city, but they didn't go very far. Probably the furthest they would go is to get on a plane for a couple of hours to go to Spain. And which I did was like a two-hour flight. And when the plane landed, everyone would cheer and clap like it was a big event. I can't imagine any Australians who fly all the time ever clapping and cheering. Ooh, it landed in Sydney. It was a very different experience. And, you know, we didn't have things like gap years. We weren't encouraged after school to go and travel and then go to university. It just didn't happen. And, you know, if we got in the car to go for a two-hour drive, you know, one would pack a lunch and hot drinks, you know, just in case. I'm not sure what the just-in-case was, but we just didn't travel. So this for me having that experience and that upbringing was a really big deal. This was a really big deal. And it was probably the first time ever I'd been on an aircraft on my own. And the only saving grace, I guess, was that they spoke English in Australia. So that sort of eased my anxiety and stress, I guess, but it was absolutely big. I knew nobody in Australia when I got on that plane. So the superpowers that I used were three of them, the adapter, the believer, and the futurist. So I used the adapter to, you know, adapt to the situation knowing that I was going to have to change the way I thought of things. I'm going to have to change the way I think about travel and going to change the way I think about working or existing without family right by me and what changes I needed, I needed to make as a result. I also needed to believe that I was doing the right thing. I needed to have self-belief that I was going to be able to do this job. I was going to hell of a long way for it. That I was going to be able to do this job that I was only able to survive the early months when there's probably going to be homesickness, lots of unknowns. So I wouldn't, if I didn't have the self-belief, I would never have gotten on that plane. And I had to be the futurist as well. I had to look ahead beyond the initial, this is a massive journey. I don't know what it's going to look like when I land. I don't know what my boss is going to look like or be like. We hadn't, we'd only talked on the phone. I don't know what my colleagues are going to be like. I don't know what the first organisation I'm going to go in as a consultant is going to be like. There were so many unknowns, but I had to look beyond that and say, okay, let me put myself into the future and as a successful career in life in Australia, then those concerns suddenly didn't look too bad. So the adapter, the believer, I believed in myself and I had to look to the future rather than the immediate issues. So these are our superpowers. As I said, there's 20 of them here. So what I am going to do is look at, not look at all of them. I'm going to look at as many as I can within the time that I had. I've set the scene about why we need resilience. We can practice it. And the aim of these superpowers, and I say there's two books which I'll point out at the end, is that they can be accessed at any time that you want to. So let's start off and let's look at some of the superpowers. So the first one we're going to look at is the revealer. And the revealer is about being your authentic self. The revealer tends up to the workplace as themselves. Often we try, and people call this sometimes imposter syndrome now, but sometimes we try and be what we think other people want us to be. The person other people will like, the person other people will look to, the person other people will respect. And we have a skewed idea that if we do have a particular persona, then we will get people to like us. But I can tell you now, there is nothing more tiring and fatiguing to hide behind a mask, to not reveal your true self. And that doesn't mean you have to be, you know, totally viewing about everything that's going on in your life. But it's about being true to yourself and your values. If you don't agree with something, be able to speak up. If you don't have all the answers, say so. If you say you don't understand, say so. So don't pretend to be someone you're not. And one of the reasons, and I'll call it out now, because this is where it makes the most sense, and excuse me, I've got a terrible itchy nose. The reason there's also superpowers for leaders is that if I said to someone, you need to be your true self. And if you want to question or ask questions about to your leader in a meeting, you should do so. And then that person comes back to me the next day and says, Karen, that really didn't go very well, because I was put, they were put down or reprimanded for questioning. And of course that one obviously then wasn't a leader, it was probably a boss, a bad boss. But so we need people on the other side, the coin that will create an environment in which you can be your authentic self, that you can feel free to say, can I ask a question about that? So being authentic might make you feel vulnerable, but vulnerability is a sign of courage, not weakness. So it is a strength. And if you are authentic, other people around you will also be authentic. And it will boost your stress and your anxiety, and you will be stronger because of it. The next superpower is the regulator. So the regulator, this is all around emotional intelligence. So being self aware and being able to self regulate your emotions. We often react to situations, what we need to do is respond. Understand what it is that are your triggers, the things that set you off, the things that make you stressed, things make you anxious, and then be able to respond accordingly. So the regulator can regulate their emotions and they don't turn a drama into a crisis. So as I said, emotional intelligence, understanding what triggers you, things that distract you, and we need to try and restrain our reactions. And once we know that, then we can re-regulate. And Daniel Goldman, some of you may know, his book Working with Emotional Intelligence is a really good go-to piece of work about emotional intelligence. So he talks about being self aware, so assessing yourself and understanding yourself. And then self-regulation being about self-control, your consciousness, your adaptability, and also your ability to innovate. But it's really important to understand your triggers, because then you can deal with them. You can't manage what you don't know. And there's a lot of depth to emotional intelligence. I'm just touching the surface here to sort of introduce you to some things that we can look at to be better and be resilient. The Empathiser is one of the cornerstones of emotional intelligence as well, as explained in the publication from Daniel Goldman I just mentioned. People often say that when you empathize, you put yourself into another person's shoes. I disagree. I think when you empathize, you are understanding how that other person feels in their shoes. But without understanding other people and their feelings and concerns, it's very difficult to work alongside those people. And to be resilient, we need to do that. And we need to be able to help others be resilient as well. Because it's all right saying, well, I will be resilient, but you're the only resilient person in the workplace. You'll very soon not be. I assure you. So empathy is about understanding and being able to sense how other people are feeling and reaching out to help and being able to listen. Listening is a prime trait of people who are empathetic. Because when you empathize, you don't have to have all of the answers to whatever concern or need that person may have. You just need to understand where they're coming from. And if anyone's interested in empathy, I highly recommend seeking out the Brené Brown video on empathy versus sympathy. It's only short. It's humorous, but it really makes the point. So it's Brené Brown on empathy. So yes, we need to be empathetic and to do that, we need to be able to listen to what other people are saying. Listening in itself is a skill. The reframer is a great superpower to have to be resilient. So when we look at a situation, generally, we look through a frame, or you might say a lens, we see situations in a particular way. We make an initial assumption and we interpret it. That is the frame. When we reframe, we look at it from a different angle. So we take the situation observed from one angle and view it from another to give it more contact text. That's when we reframe. So the reframer is looking at a situation and saying, how can I remove the negativity from my perspective? So looking through a different lens and how can I increase the positivity by looking for the positives and the opportunities this situation might bring me? We know that we can't often control what happens to us, but we can control how we respond to those situations. So when we reframe, we're more focused, we're more creative, we're more innovative and more resilient because we're removing the stress and the anxiety because now we see the opportunities and the positives in the situation. The believer, as I mentioned, was one of the superpowers I talked about when I moved to Australia, about having confidence in your own abilities and when you're confident in your abilities, you're resilient as a result. And believing in yourself is at the heart of being resilient. And self-efficacy, self-belief, is having the strong and positive belief that you have the capacity, the competency and the skills to achieve what you're setting out to do. And there was a psychologist called Albert Bandura and he defined self-efficacy as one's belief in your ability to succeed in specific situations. And he said, those people with high self-efficacy, self-belief, are those that believe they can perform well and they're more likely to see difficult tasks as something to be mastered rather than something to be avoided. So they embrace the situation. And he named four types or four sources of efficacy. One is mastery. So one is practice, if you like. So it's actually keep trying, keep trying, keep trying it to master a task. And it's about small steps going forward. If I wanted to master the piano, I'm going to have to practice. And I'm going to have to practice a lot. And then I have to practice regularly. But my self-efficacy tells me I will achieve that. And therefore then I will put in the hard jobs to do it. Also, he talks about vicarious experiences. So watching other people succeed. How did they go about it? What were the outcomes when they achieved it? What setbacks did they have? And how did they overcome those? Verbal persuasion, he also talked about. So in a nutshell, that's getting other people to support you. To cheer you on from the sidelines. And strengthen your belief that you can do it. So reach out and get support as well to strengthen your belief. And it's also remembering. And this is key to well as well as being the believer, but the key to understanding resilience is that recognizing that you're emotional and your psychological state will have an impact on your self-belief. So when you've had a bad day for whatever reason, and your emotional psychological state is a bit wobbly, that's not a medical term, is a bit wobbly, your self-belief will probably go down or could go down as well. Or you tried something and you had a bit of a setback. And as well as being resilient, you know, resilience is a point in time. I could do a resilience assessment today and, you know, my meter could be there. I could do a resilience assessment tomorrow and my meter's there. Because something happened. I had a really bad night's sleep. I woke up and the coffee machine broke. I went to put the dishwasher on and that didn't work. That has changed my emotional and psychological state and that in turn will impact my resilience and my self-belief perhaps. So we need not to beat ourselves up when that happens. Remembering it's a point in time. I've mentioned the superpower of the listener. And effective listening is so important to building and maintaining resilience. Because when we listen effectively, we avoid misunderstanding, which in turn leads to avoiding conflict. And there's nothing worse than misunderstanding and conflict in the workplace because it will decrease your resilience. So effective listening means we don't jump to assumptions or unfounded conclusions. And if we're going to be resilient, we need to fully understand the situation we're finding ourselves in, the problem or the challenge we're facing, and the options that are available to us. You know, if we make assumptions, we're going to be off kilter and make the wrong decisions. So listening is about really hearing what the person is saying to you, giving them time to actually say it without you interrupting. You need to be looking them in their eye and watching body language as best we can virtually. But watch body language. Listen to tone. Because that can tell you things as well about what they're saying. Watch their eye movements. You need to avoid distraction. You have to be in the moment with that person. Encourage them to keep talking, nod. And when there's a pause, don't automatically think you've got to fill the silence, the vacuum. You haven't. The person probably just stopped to think. So let them think. And when they do pause, it's a significant pause, then you interject and say, from what I'm understanding, this is what you're telling me. And you play it back. So you make sure you have understood and you have really heard what they're saying, so that you're both on the same page. It's absolutely so important. And if we can't do that, how can we be empathetic? How can we collaborate? How can we problem solve with other people? So listening is really so, so, so important. And the adapter as a superpower, adaptation means that you're resilient because you can be flexible and agile when change and uncertainty is there. It's if you are fixed and you're going in that direction and then as a change comes along as is not, we're not going in that direction anymore. We're going over here. The change in that direction is probably not because it's incompetence on the seventh floor in the corner office in the C-suite. It's because something has happened that has forced the organization to change direction, competition, technology, startup, whatever it might be, customer demand. It's like, we can't go down that path anymore. We've got to go over here. And it could be a slight adjustment or a major adjustment like the pandemic causes to do and get most of our employees to work from home. So, and the reason we did that successfully was our ability to adapt. And most of us adapt because we knew there was a burning platform. But we need to be able to do that all the time, however large or small the change is. Non-adaptive behavior will kill an organization because they need to respond rapidly to change. We cannot spend lots of time managing pockets of resistance in the organization. We need people to say, I understand the why of the change. I get what the burning platform is. I get what's in it for me. And I'm resilient to embrace it and say, bring it on. So, you know, any organization going any change, whether it's becoming more agile, whether it's digital transformation, whatever it might be, we need to make sure our people are resilient to get through that. Now, as you can see there, I haven't gone through all of the 20 superpowers. What I wanted to do was give you a sense of some of the behaviors and the traits that will help you be more resilient in the face of constant change. As I said, there's a handbook for individuals that introduces all of these superpowers, gives examples of case studies, if you like, of how they're being used, and then actions that you can take to increase resilience in that particular superpower. The idea being to go in and find out what they are and then knowing which ones to use when you need some help. And there's also, as I said, a handbook with 20 superpowers for leaders, such as the caretaker, making sure the psychological safety in the workplace, the connector, making sure we manage to get everyone to connect cross-functional and breakdown silos. So, the two handbooks that go hand in hand. There's also a program of work that introduces the superpowers, works with leaders to identify signs of low resilience and take appropriate action and help in every individual in the organization utilize these superpowers to be more resilient in the face of constant change. So, there's a picture of the two books. As I said at the beginning of Karen Ferris, check out Karenferris.com. There's lots of blogs and videos and stuff about resilience. You can get the books there, but you can also get them from Amazon. If you order the books from Karenferris.com, you're going to pay Australian shipping. So, I encourage you to go to Amazon, Booktopia, the Book Depository. All of those good online stores have those books available. If you want to reach out to me, there's my email address. I'll be happy to answer any questions that you might have. So, wishing you all a great Agile India 2020. Hope to see you in the future. Bye.