The quest to fortify antifragility in organisations has never been more urgent. The global operating environment is evolving from being VUCAH (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous and hyperconnected) to BANI (brittle, anxious, nonlinear and incomprehensible). Managers need to unrelentingly seek ways to develop the most valuable asset they are charged with – human capital – to engender a culture, discipline and space where people are inspired to think to thrive through workplace coaching.

Coaching can powerfully unlock human potential. In the workplace, a manager who can coach their subordinates can generate enormous benefits for self and team. Think. Coach. Thrive! introduces a distinctive coaching framework: the Pearls Coaching Framework. It offers people leaders a powerful business model that unlocks human talents and develops antifragility.

In essence, antifragility refers to a characteristic in people who thrive in spite of stressors. This means they bounce back even stronger when under stress. Within the workplace context, the Pearls Coaching Framework strengthens self and teams by unlocking purpose, mastery and autonomy. This generates the necessary motivation and positive energy towards key outcomes by developing productive high-performing teams.

Antifragility

The concept of antifragility is applicable to individuals and teams. For individuals, being antifragile means consciously embracing one’s humanity while having the courage to be authentic in the face of stressors. It frees the individual to practise gratitude live their life purpose from “back to front” – uncovering personal destiny rather than discovering it.

When antifragility is extended to teams, the whole is greater than the sum of its members. Tension in the workplace often results in team members focusing on what they do not want to happen (avoiding the “bad stuff”) and being stuck in problem-solving mode. When the energy of the team is sucked into perpetual and endless fire-fighting, it is impossible to achieve extraordinary results.

The antifragile approach instead seeks to turn the negative stress into eustress – a positive form of stress – by encouraging a curious mindset and focusing on what the team can create collectively through a generative orientation. This can potentially release new energy for the team to achieve new breakthroughs. To coach teams for antifragility, focus on unlocking team confidence through higher-level collective thinking and create space for safe experimentation.

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At the organisation level, coaches can bring antifragility a notch higher by encouraging leaders to pay attention to random and uncoordinated actions across teams. Workplace coaches can help leaders think about redundancy so there is no single point of failure. This is where the thinking principles of Pearls become the foundation in which workplace coaching for growth takes place.

Workplace coaching and Pearls

Workplace coaching refers to coaching conversations between supervisors and their staff within the work environment. It can be defined as the continuous two-way feedback between the staff and the coach with the intention of activating self-autonomy, increasing confidence, and improving mastery in work areas. It is strengths-based and about exploring possibilities in service of the employee’s performance across multiple workplace-related topics while aligning to the organisation’s vision.

Developing coaching skills provides supervisors with the mechanism to communicate effectively and has been proven to increase team engagement because they feel involved, and thereby working better together and achieving higher goals. This is consistent with leaders’ desire to inculcate growth mindset, openness and strong teamwork. Coaching is also positively correlated with an increased sense of gratitude and taking ownership of personal development and motivation for skills upgrading.

Pearls Workplace Coaching help coachees by opening up different pathways in the mind, making new connections in thinking and effecting lasting change that is self-directed. The acronym Pearls stands for:

• P: Creating purpose and meaning

• E: Building expertise from experience

• A: Changing attitudes and mindsets

• R: Increasing resilience

• L: Letting go and learning anew

• S: Stepping out and fulfilling dreams and visions

Purpose represents the fundamental choice of the organisation. When the purpose is well-defined, organisation-wide strategies can be developed so teams have a defined purpose of their own. In other words, the team’s purpose must find its place within the organisation’s strategic intent for optimal alignment. This is fundamental in any team coaching; team leaders need to know that their own fundamental choice and the team’s priorities, contribution and deliverables serve the collective whole.

Every team is made up of individuals and each team member brings a unique set of experiences and perspectives. A key benefit of coaching using the lens of experience and attitude is that it allows the surfacing of different mental models for reflection and engaging in the process of change. This strengthens resolve and the fuel to achieve breakthroughs in mindset shifts. By co-creating interventions between coach and coachee through the aligning of purpose and vision, transformational change becomes a possibility for individuals and teams.

When it comes to resilience and learning, uncovering the underlying systemic structures that create the patterns over time to understand current reality is key. Resilience is mostly anchored in the quality of relationships within the team. Consider the reinforcing loop of the relationship quality driving the level of collective thinking. Robust, high-quality collective thinking will result in effective actions, which naturally result in better outcomes for the organisation. Having positive and generative orientation allows for higher quality collective thinking and action that can increase the “resilience quotient”, thereby activating the deep learning cycles within organisations to build new awareness and sensibilities.

Learning and stepping-out represent the “last mile” where decisions are made, and actions agreed upon. The goal here is to instil the value of ownership and active responsibilities in individuals and teams, not only for personal growth but also to support each other and the team’s overall development. To have sustained change that lasts, stepping-out requires the action to be rooted in purpose and nurtured through regular coaching. Affirmation and working on motivation levels are essential in the antifragility journey.

Double-loop learning

We thrive when we engage in deep reflective thinking, thinking about our thinking and questioning assumptions. This is termed double-loop learning. Many employees today are stuck in single-loop thinking where they respond to inputs to make adjustments to achieve set outcomes. Double-loop learning is the seat of self-mastery and the main reason why people and organisations are resilient and thrive. Antifragility takes the concept of resilience and push it further. It represents the power of breaking forth, just like how a seed might need to emerge from the soil and sprout from the ground. Antifragility is generative and the concept can be extended from individuals to teams to organisations.

Systems-thinking approach

Organisations are a system of systems. Therefore, at the enterprise level, a systems-thinking approach is required to deal with “wicked-mess” issues. Often, functional units and geographical demarcations make it hard to achieve synergy due to siloed departments. However, it is not uncommon to have multinational customers demand service across their global network, and the organisation can come under stress if it does not have a systemic view of its business operations. Antifragility can come in the form of shoring up a “team of teams” to create new structures to deliver holistic global solutions.

Having a systems-thinking approach and understanding complexity that is aligned to organisational aspirations is critical. This allows for generative conversations to take place by tapping into double-loop learning. Ultimately, at the systems level, antifragile units are made up of antifragile team members who live out their life of purpose, taking many small risks and constantly learning. Teams with such a growth mindset are instrumental in building organisations that do not falter in uncertain times under stress.

In the end, to thrive in the VUCAH and BANI environments, every people leader needs to embrace enduring principles and pillars – a compass that intuitively harnesses the pearl of every workplace – i.e. people. Only then can employees be impelled, and in the process, trust built, goals crystallised – moving organisations bravely towards their visions.

Dr Henry Toi and Thomas Lim are respectively the Managing Director and the Dean of Thrive Consulting, and co-authors of Think. Coach. Thrive! Fortifying Antifragility in Organisations Through Workplace Coaching. The book, published by Write Editions, has been launched in partnership with The Rice Company Limited (TRCL), in support of The Business Times Budding Artists Fund (BT BAF), with the aim of giving every child, regardless of personal circumstances, the opportunity to pursue the arts.

Think. Coach. Thrive! Fortifying Antifragility in Organisations Through Workplace Coaching (Write Editions, 2023) is now available at all major bookstores. eBook edition will be available from December 2022.