Here's how to scan for missing skills within your team

The world has learned plenty of lessons from its pandemic, but one’s clear: crisis can hit anytime. To be ready for the next, we need systems in place, especially in our own teams, groups, and companies. Organizational awareness—a company and its employees’ ability to see itself honestly, own its potential, and address its limitations—helps us be capable of building those systems. And when we strengthen that awareness, we can better navigate times of volatility.

One way to do that: scanning, an idea put forward by authors Erica H. James and Lynn Perry Wooten in their book The Prepared Leader. James, dean of The Wharton School, and Wooten, president of Simmons University, look to migrating animals for a key lesson in preparedness. “Scanning the environment, seeing the signs, interpreting cues, and making sense of them is something so completely innate in nature,” they write, “that it prompts the question: why do human beings so frequently fail to go higher?”

There are plenty of limitations. “Our natural tendency to focus on the present rather than the future and to cling to first impressions can make this challenging,” they tell Quartz. But luckily, they have plenty of advice on strengthening this skill. James and Wooten suggest four key ways for us to start scanning—and use it to be ready for when the unexpected hits.

“Every team needs a couple of scanners who are constantly looking at the environment and sense-making up that next crisis, and it’s a skillset we need to teach,” said Wooten in an interview with Brené Brown. Being able to scan your environment is key to achieving short and long-term goals, let alone ones amid rapid change.

To build your reputation as a scanner, try two tactics from James and Wooten:

Many grew up in a time where specialists held power, and the deeper you went in your expertise, the more valuable you were. But in a specialized world, it’s generalists who hold a unique skill: those with a broad view help stabilize strategy and routine during times of turmoil.

By widening your view, you can strengthen the way you make sense of it. To start:

With all the talk about listening to your employees, most companies struggle to find the right cadence and approach—and too often, they listen to the same people. But you won’t simply need other perspectives: you’ll need a diversity of them, representing different backgrounds, functions, and approaches.

Consider these two ways to get and use that range of views:

The lack of time and capacity inside organizations is a big part of why teams don’t consider what just happened before moving on to what’s next. But to not repeat the same mistakes over again and ideally enhance the effort and impact it takes to achieve our goals, we have to.

Try two steps for learnings, as James and Wooten write them:

“The ability to effectively scan the environment for threats is a key component that helps leaders anticipate, and in some cases, prevent a crisis,” James and Wooten say. But it’s also useful for all of us: to become more aware in our own work, prep for change, and be ready to meet what’s next.