Session Speaker: Cat Barnard, Working the Future
Theme: Future Facing: Technology and Operations
Date: Summer Trimester, July 2026
At this Magma retreat session, Cat Barnard of Working the Future brought a foresight perspective to how the world of work is changing. Members and their team colleagues tested that thinking against the realities of running SMEs, where the implications can look very different from those in large organisations. This article focuses on what matters most for SME leaders: how to build businesses capable of learning and adapting as the environment around them changes.
Most SME leaders are used to operating without perfect information.
A customer changes direction. A competitor enters the market. A technology that seemed peripheral suddenly becomes useful. A role that was difficult to recruit for becomes almost impossible. Something that worked reliably for five years stops producing the same result.
The temptation is to look for certainty. What will AI actually change? Which skills will we need? How will people's expectations of work develop? What should we be preparing for next?
But perhaps that's asking too much of forecasting; a more useful question is whether your business can respond when the answer turns out to be different from what you expected.
Cat's starting point was that leaders need to pay attention to the forces reshaping work.
Her framework identifies ten meta-trends, ranging from Industry 5.0 and geopolitics to changing attitudes towards work, new talent models, attention disruption and the reskilling challenge. Alongside them sits a six-stage process: assess how your industry is evolving, understand the trends, revisit your purpose and vision, identify risks and opportunities, create a roadmap, then review and recalibrate.
The important part isn't trying to predict all ten trends correctly. The key is to learn to identify the trends that matter to your business and then adapt accordingly.
Adaptation matters because foresight can easily become another annual strategy exercise. Leaders gather information, decide what they think is coming and build a plan around it. But when the environment keeps changing, the ability to reconsider the plan becomes as important as the plan itself.
This thinking led to one of the strongest statements of the session:
“All organisations must become learning organisations.”
For an SME, that is a more useful way to think about future-readiness than trying to forecast every change ahead.
Smaller businesses have an interesting advantage here.
They don't have to move information through layers of management before changing direction. An owner can spot something on Monday, discuss it with the team on Tuesday and test a different approach by Friday.
But smallness doesn't automatically create adaptability.
Experience can become habit. A close leadership team can develop assumptions that nobody thinks to question. Knowledge can sit in the heads of two or three key people. New recruits can quickly learn how things are done rather than asking why they're done that way.
This is where another element of Cat's session becomes particularly relevant: harnessing diversity of thought to accelerate innovation.
The commercial value of different perspectives isn't difference for its own sake. It's what those perspectives allow a business to see.
Someone earlier in their career may question an accepted practice. Someone who has worked in another sector may recognise a solution that is commonplace elsewhere. A freelancer, supplier, customer or external peer can challenge an assumption that has become invisible to the people inside the business.
The breakout discussions also highlighted that collective intelligence doesn't come simply from assembling people with different experiences. Leaders have to create conditions in which those differences can actually influence the decision-making. Otherwise, the most experienced or confident voices continue to determine what the organisation knows.
That changes what developing people means.
Cat described a “reskilling emergency”, but the most useful part for SME leaders wasn't predicting precisely which technical skills will become obsolete. Her argument was that change is happening too quickly for businesses to rely solely on teaching today's knowledge for tomorrow's jobs.
Instead, she highlighted what she calls Vital Skills.
These include critical thinking, complex problem-solving, curiosity, creativity, resilience, flexibility, leadership, social influence and learning agility. The wider Vital Skills model also includes capabilities such as communication, collaboration, empathy, self-awareness, imagination and a growth mindset.
These aren't soft extras to technical competence. They determine what happens when technical competence is no longer enough.
Can someone confront a problem they haven't seen before?
Can they question the first answer, including one produced by AI?
Can colleagues with different expertise work through ambiguity together?
Can someone discover that the way they've always performed a task is becoming obsolete and respond with curiosity rather than defensiveness?
And can leaders do the same?
This aligned well with the previous day's retreat conversation with James Holden. The emphasis on human capability carries an important consequence for leadership. Developing those capabilities can't be confined to occasional training. They have to be exercised through the work itself.
And that can be difficult because, as Cat explained, learning agility requires allowing people to make mistakes while learning. Innovation, by definition, takes a business into territory where the answer isn't already known.
For an SME leader, there's a genuine trade-off here. Mistakes cost money. Time spent learning is time that isn't immediately billable or productive. When resources are stretched, giving the problem to the person who already knows how to solve it can look like the sensible decision.
Repeated often enough, however, that creates dependency rather than capability.
A business becomes very good at exploiting what a handful of people already know, while remaining poorly equipped for the moment when what they know is no longer sufficient.
Becoming a learning organisation therefore isn't primarily about buying more training. It's about deciding where knowledge sits, how it travels and what happens when somebody challenges it.
The most useful contrast in the session was between hard skills and learning agility.
Hard skills matter. Businesses need people who can do the work in front of them today, but leaders can't know with confidence what every role will require three or five years from now. AI alone makes that difficult, before considering the other forces Cat identified.
So perhaps the question shifts.
Instead of only asking, “Do our people have the skills we need?”, leadership teams also need to ask:
“How good are we at acquiring capabilities we don't have yet?”
That's a much harder question, but it's also one that an SME can do something about more readily.
The future of work can quickly become an abstract conversation dominated by forecasts, statistics and predictions about technologies or labour markets.
For SME leaders, the more immediate challenge is closer to home.
Look at how your business responds when it encounters something it doesn't know.
Does information travel? Are assumptions challenged? Do different perspectives change decisions? Can people experiment and learn without every unsuccessful attempt being treated as failure? Is expertise being spread, or becoming concentrated in the same indispensable people?
Cat's ten trends will continue to evolve. New ones will emerge. Some will matter enormously to individual businesses and others barely at all.
The objective isn't to predict all of them correctly.
It's to build a business that can keep learning when they arrive.