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Ways of Working (and Being, and Doing)

Peter Thomas, director of FORWARD — The RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation — writing with development partners Pete Cohen, Jane Howie, Sally McNamara, Inder Singh and Kate Spencer — on how we work.

FORWARD — the RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation — has been established within RMIT’s College of Vocational Education.

Our role is to build an innovative learning ecosystem at scale, create new collaborative applied research and invent next-generation skills solutions that will catalyse workforce development.

We do this through leading collaborative applied research on future skills and workforce transformation, building and scaling the evidence and practice base to support Victorian workforce planning and delivery. We act as a test lab for future skills and develop and pilot new skills training approaches through digital transformation and pedagogical innovation.

‘FORWARD’ is a purposeful identity that communicates our vision of looking forward to future workforce upskilling and reskilling needs and stepping forward to the technologies that will shape how and what we learn.

Exploring the future of skills and the transformed workforces of the future requires a different way of working.

We are not a research centre, although enquiry is at the heart of what we do. We are not a futures institute, although our minds are constantly on how where we are now will become the future. We are also not an innovation lab, although invention is an activity we are engaged in every day.

Instead, our role is as a system catalyst, leveraging RMIT’s multi-sector advantage, which facilitates the translation of research insights into identifying workforce requirements and co-designing practice-based approaches with industry.

We have assembled a team of development partners — Pete Cohen, Jane Howie, Sally McNamara, Inder Singh and Kate Spencer — all seasoned and experienced multi-sector professionals with experience in fields as diverse as technology, innovation, the creative arts and the legal and consulting industries.

Our development partners negotiate their portfolio of activities, working flexibly and with purpose and prioritising early and consistent delivery of value, focusing on creativity, authentic collaboration and accountability with a shared vision of excellence from anywhere. Together, we actively shape and share the vision and evolution of FORWARD, operating as an agile, flexible team that values outcomes over rigid ways of working.

We work within a series of frameworks that allow us to move from inspiration (where we capture insights that are the result of intense, free-flowing discussion and enquiry); through ideation (where we elaborate, prioritise and decide on projects that will become part of our portfolio); and finally implementation (where we assemble people, resources and ideas to bring projects to life and monitor their progress, impact and lifecycles).

To do this, we use a suite of tools, including Miro to capture, surface and elaborate on project ideas, concepts and directions and create synergies between them; Notion, a flexible collaborative text workspace where we elaborate on, detail and workflow projects; and Slack, our communication backbone that handles our messaging and hybrid video and audio meetings.

Many discussions about ways of working right now are about flexible or hybrid working.

But what’s on our minds is not where we work or when we work but the foundational and persistent themes that underlie all work — collaboration, transparency and trust. These existed long before hybrid working, will be a part of whatever comes next, and underlie and transcend processes and tools.

But more accurately, we are concerned with more than just ways of working, but ways of being and ways of doing.

Ways of doing are actions that we take to work in new, adaptive ways. That’s anything from the ways we organise meetings, communicate, craft our vision, or make sure that what we do is transparent.

Ways of being are more about mindset. How we think about taking responsibility, how we think about providing feedback and criticism, how we are empathetic or nurturing or curious or how we think about issues like creating the psychological safety that’s necessary to move beyond blame, shame, fear and retaliation. Ways of being are essentially ways to show up to achieve our purpose, create a better workplace and be better as humans.

We thought we would elaborate on what these themes mean to us in practice, so here are some of the things we believe in:

• All feedback is valuable. We constantly seek feedback and do something constructive with it. If we don’t agree with the feedback, we have an obligation to say that we don’t agree, too.
• We keep promises and will learn more about how not to make promises we may inevitably have to break.
• We avoid slowing down performance with process wherever possible.
• We believe that it’s the intelligent, systematic and effective use of time that creates a high-performance culture, not just more hours worked.
• We welcome the diversity of thought and experience we each bring.
• We are more interested in being curious rather than being expert.
• We acknowledge our blind spots and seek the views of those who don’t have those blind spots so we can learn from them.
• We recognise that we don’t all work the same way or at the same cadence, and our goal is to work together to collectively optimise what we do.
• We aim to run on a run on a heartbeat — an operating rhythm that helps us get things done — rather than a calendar of meetings.
• We try to identify leverage points, let people own them, and create — often unconventional — organisational structures to support them rather than assume the organisational structure is “just what it is”.
• We individually and collectively generate our own sense of urgency.
• Even if some aspects of transparency are negotiable, we try to share everything we can, and what we share is true.
• “I have no idea right now” is an acceptable answer to any question because it shows we are thinking about it.
• We believe that we can be proved wrong, accept that we might fail publicly, and need to change when these things happen.
• There is no such thing as perfection. There is only reality, and that shapes how we make decisions.
• We don’t rule out goals because they seem to be unattainable.
• Leaders are not the star of the show. They should work to become dispensable, and the best metric of success is whether the team continues and grow regardless of who is leading.

FORWARD is the RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation.

Our role is to build an innovative learning ecosystem at scale, create new collaborative applied research and invent next-generation skills solutions that will catalyse workforce development in the future-oriented industries crucial to Victoria’s economic renewal.

We lead collaborative applied research on future skills and workforce transformation from within RMIT’s College of Vocational Education, building and scaling the evidence and practice base to support Victorian workforce planning and delivery and acting as a test lab for future skills to develop and pilot new approaches to skills training and education through digital transformation and pedagogical innovation.

We leverage RMIT’s multi-sector advantage to translate research insights into identifying workforce requirements and the co-design of practice-based approaches with industry.

Contact us at forward@rmit.edu.au