What role does maritime HR play in meeting the challenges in the maritime industry? A Q&A with K D Adamson

maritime people and culture conference

Ahead of the 2022 Spinnaker Maritime People & Culture Conference we sat down with our keynote and special guest, shipping’s most famous futurist, K D Adamson.

One of the most sought-after futurist speakers globally K D Adamson’s keynotes have been likened to a TED talk on steroids.

With a stellar client list K D has advised organisations in multiple industries from the largest companies to start-ups, and is expert in ESG, agility, leadership, technology, digital and organisational transformation, and the Blue, Green and Circular Economies.

As the world’s foremost maritime futurist her client list spans the ocean industries, and she is renowned for combining visionary thinking, foresight and insight with sharp, straight-talking commercial and business acumen & expertise.  

As futurist-in-residence at Futurenautics she works with ship owners, operators & managers, maritime suppliers, policymakers, regulators, technology companies, charities, class, NGOs, banks, VC, port and logistics groups.

In the second part of our conversation, we asked her about the role that she saw maritime HR playing in meeting future challenges?

K D Adamson: For a very long time business has been organised, or rather divided, into line and staff functions, and broadly speaking that translates as the functions that make money and the functions that spend it. HR along with IT, procurement, legal, technical, HSEQ etc. has been very much a staff function, basically just a cost centre. But just like IT has done over recent years, HR is transitioning to become a core driver of future business value creation. And that’s for a couple of reasons.

Firstly because the way that we measure value in companies is changing. Up until very recently the only metric which really mattered to a business and its stakeholders was profitability, but that calculation, how the value of a company is measured, is becoming far more complex and far more nuanced.

As ESG reporting really kicks in then a whole range of metrics which have traditionally been considered pretty unimportant and are often invisible, are suddenly becoming core to profitability. So whether that’s diversity, equality and inclusion, whether it’s executive pay, governance, the ability to attract and retain talent or the introduction of agile ways of working, all of these things are beginning to have a material impact on how profitable the company is. So in many respects HR has been thought of as an Ugly Sister, when in actual fact it’s Cinderella.

And Cinderella is a good metaphor because there’s another reason that HR is going to play a critical role going forward, which is probably even more profound. And that is that future sustainable growth and value creation will depend on successfully transforming the way our businesses operate, so we can capture that value.

Now we’ve heard a lot about digital transformation but the reason so many digital transformation initiatives failed was because of cultural issues. The ability of a company to transform – it’s Transformation Quotient as I describe it, its TQ – is determined by its culture. So underpinning successful innovation, decarbonisation, digitalisation, all of it, is people, culture and mindset.

Changing the culture and mindset is a massive challenge on its own, and HR is going to be indispensable in leading the way to wireframe new working practices, mechanisms, and processes that will support the culture and mindset in a practical way. That will operationalise the culture and really enable sustainable transformation.

Pulling that off is going to require a deep partnership between HR and C-suite leaders, but it’s key. Because adopting new technology will never give you a sustained competitive advantage, because someone else can always buy it too. Whereas a holistic transformation of a company’s core and culture, is a sustainable transformation. It is a source of sustainable competitive advantage that will continue to deliver you returns.

You can watch the video to accompany this interview with K D Adamson by following this link

The conference takes place on Thursday 26th & Friday 27th May in the City of London, so follow this link now to view the full agenda and book tickets.

What are the biggest challenges on the horizon for the shipping and maritime industry? A Q&A with K D Adamson.

final challenges

Ahead of the 2022 Spinnaker Maritime People & Culture Conference we sat down with our keynote and special guest, shipping’s most famous futurist, K D Adamson.

One of the most sought-after futurist speakers globally K D Adamson’s keynotes have been likened to a TED talk on steroids.

With a stellar client list K D has advised organisations in multiple industries from the largest companies to start-ups, and is expert in ESG, agility, leadership, technology, digital and organisational transformation, and the Blue, Green and Circular Economies.

As the world’s foremost maritime futurist her client list spans the ocean industries, and she is renowned for combining visionary thinking, foresight and insight with sharp, straight-talking commercial and business acumen & expertise.  

As futurist-in-residence at Futurenautics she works with ship owners, operators & managers, maritime suppliers, policymakers, regulators, technology companies, charities, class, NGOs, banks, VC, port and logistics groups.

With such a broad view of the business future we asked her what she saw as the biggest challenges on the horizon for the shipping and maritime industry?

K D Adamson: Shipping is what’s described as a ‘harder to abate’ industry so when it comes to the energy transition it’s facing some specific challenges, and they are very significant. But shipping is also going to have to deal with a set of issues which have the potential to fundamentally reshape business itself, not just the shipping and maritime industry, and actually the fact that these issues are affecting every type of business gives you a steer about how we can solve them: the mindset we need to adopt in order to address them, which is to collaborate across our ecosystems.

That’s because whatever business you’re in the expectations of your stakeholders are broadly changing, so that could impact pretty much everything from how products and assets are designed, how materials are sourced, how we manufacture and build things, where we build them, how we recycle them, and of course how we transport them, because in future businesses are going to have to start pricing in the externalities of their operations, how they produce their products and services, quantifying the impacts they cause on stakeholders, societies and the environment etc., in order to make their profits,

And that’s never happened before, so I think it’s hard to overstate just how far-reaching this shift is going to be for businesses generally. But there’s an added layer of complexity for multi-national organisations, global industries like shipping, because they operate across national jurisdictions. I know many people aren’t fans of IMO, but the one thing it has managed to do for fifty-plus years is create a global compliance regime which has allowed ship operators and their vessels to trade anywhere in the world. Now when we talk about stakeholder expectations changing, it’s important to remember that those changes aren’t happening uniformly around the world. There are very different views within national and regional stakeholders about how companies should and should not behave, and that’s already filtering through into new legislation, which is really fragmenting the operating environment.

So, for those businesses which have global operations, which are part of global value and supply chains and critically, have globally and culturally diverse employees, securing what we refer to as a societal license to operate, is going to be a moving target. That’s because they will be faced with increasingly conflicting expectations and priorities from everyone from governments and political movements, environmental groups, lenders and insurers to customers, end consumers and employees. And in order to manage that successfully shipping and maritime companies must have a very comprehensive understanding of where and how they are going to transform their businesses to create sustainable long-term growth and value in the future, and, critically, a very clear roadmap for how they’re going to implement that sustainable transformation.

You can watch the video to accompany this interview with K D Adamson by following this link

The conference takes place on Thursday 26th & Friday 27th May in the City of London, so follow this link now to view the full agenda and book tickets.

Getting Fired Up!

ashes to flames

At this year’s Maritime People & Culture conference we are looking firmly at the horizon with our must-see keynote, futurist K D Adamson whose keynotes are described as a ‘TED-talk on steroids’.

The 2022 Spinnaker Maritime People and Culture Conference is now only a couple of weeks away and as the programme reflects, the industry finds itself facing a growing set of future challenges.

So, who better to invite to be our keynote speaker and special guest for the conference than K D Adamson, one of the world’s leading futurists and definitely shipping’s most famous, whose keynotes have been likened to ‘a TED-talk on steroids’.

But while as a futurist K D is expert in all sorts of technologies from AI to synthetic biology to quantum computing, don’t expect reassurance that the tech industry will ride to the world’s rescue, or solve the challenges faced by our businesses.

The message of K D’s keynote, The Ashes and the Flame is very different. Challenging the technology-defined future that the ‘Tomorrow Factory’, has been selling everyone, she argues that what comes next is not an AI apocalypse but a societal discontinuity. She describes the period the world is entering now as a liminal space, a threshold of the future where old certainties have been dismantled but what will replace them is still uncertain.

Pointing out that during liminal periods individuals and organisations have outsized opportunities to create truly lasting change, she encourages us to reframe the challenges ahead as societies and businesses and reject the technology narrative that disempowers individuals and companies, by de-emphasising human qualities of resilience and adaptability.

At a conference for people-people it’s a message that some might consider to be long overdue. After two years struggling to support our people at sea and ashore when many industry structures failed us and with critical industry-wide and global goals still ahead to be tackled, the importance of maritime HR, people, culture and mindset cannot be overstated.

Fire may have been the first technology, but K D Adamson says that the time has come to stop worshipping it and the tech industry that has hi-jacked the future. Instead, she warns that the only way to build the future we want is to focus on the core priorities of culture, human autonomy, purpose, and adaptability, to create ecocratic not technocratic leaders and to embark on a fundamental recalibration of what we value.

Sure to be delivered with her signature energy and dynamism, The Ashes and the Flame is a must-see keynote, and will be followed by an in-depth session with Spinnaker Chairman Phil Parry, where he will also be posing some burning questions.

The conference takes place on Thursday 26th & Friday 27th May in the City of London, so follow this link now to view the full agenda and book tickets.

In the run up to the event please also look out for a series of video Q&A’s with K D such as this one here.