Note: We use AI transcription so there may be some inaccuracies
Danielle Cobo: An ever-evolving market and fast-changing technology, the onus on business leaders to stay ahead of what's next. In this episode, we explore how you can future-proof your organization so that it's ready for whatever lies around the corner from implementing innovative technology to preparing your teams for future growth.
Danielle Cobo: Today's guest is technology strategist and certified futurist Crystal Washington. Crystal takes complex social media app and web topics and make them easy to understand and accessible to everyday people. As one of Forbes 50 leading Female futurists, she appears weekly on season two of the MA Nominated Show, life 2.0, and she's impaired in numerous publications, including Entrepreneur and Bloomberg Weekly.
Danielle Cobo: Crystal. I am excited and thrilled to have you on the podcast. We had the pleasure of meeting at our National Speaker Association, and you have a unique position in the areas of topics that you speak on being a futurist. But before we go into that conversation, will you share with us your career journey?
Danielle Cobo: Where did you start and what led you to where you're at today?
Crystal Washington: I started off in the hospitality industry, which is not where I planned on. I was top of my class in high school. I was gonna get a
Crystal Washington: business degree, but then the Conrad in Hilton, college of Hotel and Restaurant Management contacted me at the University of Houston, said, we'll give you a free ride and some extra money if you choose this major.
Crystal Washington: And so I understood not having, student. it's basically a business degree where you have to like people. I went off into that industry afterwards. I was always sales and marketing. It's something about the psychology of people and the psychology behind guiding people to make decisions, which was interesting to me.
Crystal Washington: But during the time when I was in there and I was great at sales, I was great at revenue management, I had all those different roles. , but there's this little thing called social media that was just kind of popping up on the landscape. And this is when Facebook was only open to college students. MySpace still existed.
Crystal Washington: Twitter was at its infancy. And I remember at this time I'm in my early twenties, I'm over a department of people old enough to be my parents and grandparents. Danielle, I wouldn't even tell them my real age cause I knew they'd eat me for lunch. Right. but I went to my boss. Older baby boomer gentleman and I said, Hey, I have a feeling this social media thing is gonna be big.
Crystal Washington: Can you imagine if companies start using this? And of course, Danielle, now we're like, duh. But at the time, it hadn't happened yet. And I said, imagine. Someone drinks a Coke. I said, Coke can have a conversation with their biggest consumers that love them and they can actually like build a relationship in a weird way.
Crystal Washington: my boss, Daniel looked at me and he said, look, kid, you're cute and you make us a bleep load of money. Stick to what you know. Wow. I did something that was so millennial before it was a millennial thing to do. I quit my job, I quit my job because everything in me said that was gonna be huge, and I started a digital marketing firm.
Crystal Washington: And the speaking came from the fact that I started with small mom and pops, got up to British Airways, Google hired me as clients, Microsoft, but everyone's a member of professional organizations and they would say, crystal, you and your team are so great and you explain what you're doing along the way.
Crystal Washington: You're not just getting us more business. Can you come speak it? Whatever. I kept doing these as favors to clients, Danielle, and tell, I realized it was taking up too much time and I was like, I can't keep doing this. It's not billable. And when I made the decision, the first organization that contacted me said, that I said no to.
Crystal Washington: After that point said, but we'll pay you. And I said, oh, I didn't know that was a thing. So when I googled it and I looked at professional speaking, I was like, I'm doing the wrong thing. that was the beginning of my speaking career. But the foresight, which is the study that futurists. Came from the fact that I was applying a lot of the thought process that goes being a futurist, before I knew what a futurist was.
Crystal Washington: I'm very good at scanning landscapes, seeing what's coming, and then either bastardizing the technology, using it in a way it wasn't intended. Or sometimes seeing future innovations and how things can be combined, and then helping people prepare for the possibilities. And then later on I went and got certifications and did courses and all that stuff so that I'm officially a fut.
Crystal Washington: But that's the journey. And so that's how I'm met where I'm at right now, full-time professional speaker and uh, futurist. And before we jumped on, we talked about the time and dedication that you take to do market research on what the trends are in the workforce, in the general economy, so that you are always on top of the trends as well as, as you had mentioned, projecting into the future.
Crystal Washington: there's been a lot of changes in the workforce most recently, within the past couple years. Mm-hmm. , You talk about future proofing the organization. What does that mean? a futurist is someone who organizations bring in who scans the horizon,
Crystal Washington: And basically they help organizations plan for possible futures. There's a future that we all expect generally, but then there's two to three alternative futures that are very plausible. For example, I live in Houston. I'm expecting to have a nice hot, normal summer. However, it is very much plausible that a hurricane could hit where I live and there could be mass flooding and I could have no electricity and all these different things.
Crystal Washington: then how do you prepare against that other possibility? Many of us, we might have had parents that, talked about always have plans, A through C or A through D, right? all this is, is taking it up on a professional level. future proofing an organization is when. The organization as a whole or individual department start to look at, yes, this is what we're projecting will happen, but what if this thing happens?
Crystal Washington: Or what if this thing happens? And it's not just random stuff, Danielle, like, I wouldn't prepare. I talked about the Houston Hurricane's a possibility. I'm not going to prepare for a vampire attack, right? Because while technically I guess it could be possible, the chances of that happening are low. So you're looking at, uh, high probability alternative future.
Crystal Washington: That you prepare against. And oftentimes when we prepare against alternative futures, what happens is, is that even if those futures don't occur, it usually strengthens our businesses for other things that do occur.
Crystal Washington: what trends are you seeing right now in the workplace and how can organizations and leaders futureproof going into the. I think one of the bigger trends that I'm seeing is what I like to call pants on fire. Everybody right now is trying to figure out what's happening. The world has shifted dramatically in the last three years, and the rate of change has increased to a level unlike anything we've seen in living human history.
Crystal Washington: it's very hard to plan against when you don't know what the economy's going to do. , what? You don't know what's happening, in terms of socioeconomics, global issues. There's so much labor market. on one hand we're hearing about quiet quitting. The next day we're hearing that this company's laying off 10,000.
Crystal Washington: This other company's laying off 12,000, right? there's all of this massive shifting. what's happening is, is we also live in a highly consumable society where there's this pressure to constantly innovate, I think what I'm seeing is with a lot of organizations is people they know they need to innovate.
Crystal Washington: They know they need to adapt to change, but they don't even know where to start because it's just so much and it's overwhelming, and their teams are overwhelmed. even, the leaders themselves, they're having a hard time getting their footing and their people don't know what's happening either.
Crystal Washington: There's a lot of confusion and fear is what I'm seeing. And then when you start introducing some of the newer technologies, like people talk about, chat, G P T, which is built on G P T three technology, right? When you start looking at the increase in robotics, we see, like,
Crystal Washington: Boston Dynamics with some of the robots, the humanoid as well as the one that reminds of like, of an attack dog. People are freaking out about all of the stuff, . I'd say that's probably one of the bigger workplace trends that I'm called in to help. And anytime that there's new technology in our everyday lives, there's an element of excitement because we get to see how might this improve the processes, the automation provide more resources to help us succeed.
Crystal Washington: But then there's also the element of. The uncertainty around it. How is the probability in the future of how it might affect, there's big conversations about chat. Pt. Pt. And I've been using different programs for a long time and I see the benefit, but I'm also seeing the potential problems that it may cause with copywriting, with possible.
Crystal Washington: They're talking about students and writing their papers, and now they're talking about possibly going into using the old school composition workbooks, when it comes to some of the innovative technologies that you are seeing in the workforce right now, are there any technologies where you're saying, yeah, this would be really beneficial, or are there any technologies where you're going, I might see the concern if we implement this into the organization.
Crystal Washington: I honestly, because I'm as pragmatic as I am, any piece of technology for. Has benefits and drawbacks. That's just how I think. For instance, Oven is great, right? We get to warm food with it. Oven is not great if you put an animal in it, right?
Crystal Washington: Like that's a live animal, that now someone did something horrible and weird. as with anything, there's positives and negatives and for me, technology is neutral. just like money is neutral. If you hand somebody who's responsible and has a kind heart money, they're going to find ways to be a blessing and an asset to their community using that money.
Crystal Washington: If you find someone that has poor money management skills and tons of issues, guess what? They're gonna create more problems with that money. technology is often the same way. And a lot of the newer technology, part of the challenges, and no one's talking about this, is that when we think of leadership within organizations, you know, in the 1980s, even the nineties, technology really wasn't introduced into the workplace until the kinks were worked.
Crystal Washington: you got something, it came to you, was already prepped. It was ready to go. There might be part two or a newer version in three years, but it was pretty much worked out. Now we have this issue of not only. Leading up until this point have, we had technology that was introduced in an agile fashion, meaning it's changing as they're putting it out.
Crystal Washington: But now we have technology, so we'll go back to like the G P T three and some of the blockchain technologies and things like that where it's being created as we're starting to use it. And so we are playing the game as the rules are being written. . Now,
Crystal Washington: The benefit to that. Is that as leaders, we have the opportunity to drive the technology. We have the ability to drive the usage. when you have some of the companies that are developing some of these things, giving them suggestions, starting to call in if your company's looking at using something that's brand new, developing a relationship with the developers and the company behind it, which is something most people don't think about before drilling ready for commercial adoption is brilliant because you can drive.
Crystal Washington: You can tell them what's working, what's probably not working, where there's some challenges, where your legal team would tell you you wouldn't be able to use it, and you suspect that other companies would have the same challenge. And so this new world requires leaders to take ownership of more than just their own companies, but the tools they wanna take and drive them in the direction they want them to.
Crystal Washington: And I wanna add to that cuz it's a great concept that what you're talking about is taking the lead in ownership and partnering. When I was working for an organization, we had what were called advisory boards. Mm-hmm. and part of these advisory boards. With an open dialogue, communication as to saying, what's working within the organization, what's not working, what are some solutions, ideas that you have to take it to this next level?
Crystal Washington: And when we were integrating new technology within our organization to help our sales force, I was part of the advisory board for a new program that we are integrating in. And I like you, love technology, love to dig in and to say, okay, well, I need these reports, but these reports aren't working. Here's how we can improve it.
Crystal Washington: But at every level within the organization, People can step into these leadership roles. leadership is not a title. It's stepping into these roles and providing feedback because often the people that are on the user end that are using it day in day out provide the greatest perspective into what enhancements can be made in the future and maybe what's not working to just overall provide a better outcome and how you can use this technology in your everyday.
Crystal Washington: Oh, for sure. And then think about this as leaders, oftentimes we're not the ones implementing, it's our team members, right? And so what that means now is that we have to empower our team members and give them a voice. So that we can then use their words to drive the technology. Let them know, no, no, don't just grumble because something's not working a certain way, or it doesn't integrate properly.
Crystal Washington: Tell me, give me your feedback. I'm going to share this with the company and it will cause shifts so that we can get what we need. So it requires. To really empower their frontline people or their people they're dealing with the technology or the customers that it's presenting issues with. And, and just really encouraging them to use their voice.
Crystal Washington: And then when things are changed because of their feedback, giving them credit, telling the other company it was this person that was frontline that told me this, that helped you telling the other team members, ah, thank goodness that George said this or that Sarah said this because of.
Crystal Washington: Now they release this. Let people feel good about using their voice. They're more likely to do it again, and all those people that are watching are more likely to do it as well. and when you involve people from your team into being part of the solution, you talked about quiet, quitting. Mm-hmm. . When you involve people in the solution and coming up with the innovation and the ideas to take that organization to the next level, with the technology that's being integrated in, it's going to increase employee engagement.
Crystal Washington: and when you increase employee engagement, Then you're gonna be taking that next step and increasing.employee retention and also it's a part of ownership. And when you have part of the ownership, that's also gonna have a positive impact on the culture as well. what do you do possibly when you see companies implementing change or technology? they're met with resistance. Cuz a lot of times people don't like change. we tend to resist it. So what might recommendations you suggest for some of those? I want to offer a slightly different perspective because we've often heard that people don't like change.
Crystal Washington: And there's some biological reasons for that, which we don't even have time to get into. But most people perceive change as danger and that's part of the reason why we exist right now, because our ancestors understood that the smallest little change in a berry could mean the difference between it being something edible like grapes or something deadly like moons seeded.
Crystal Washington: They look very similar, I have to honor the fact. There's a reason we think that way, but most people, it's been my experience, are not resistant to change. They're resistant to change that they didn't have a part. before you implement some sweeping change, because all of us probably have been a part of an organization where the suits decided that we should just implement this thing and it, was a stupid decision because they didn't know, they weren't frontline.
Crystal Washington: Anybody that knows any teachers will say that administration will say, oh, we're gonna do this, and the teachers themselves are like, it's not practical, it's not going to work. So we've all been in those situations. And so what that means is that the smart. need to sit down with their team and say, okay, what are the challenges we're seeing?
Crystal Washington: All right, we're seeing these challenges. What are the holes that we have that we need to fill to make us serve our customers or our purpose better? And to make this a good working environment while we're doing it? Because oftentimes, With many organizations that are larger, they're silos. Now, once you get them in on it and they start talking about their suggestions and what they need, okay, now if you find a technology that addresses those things, and then you come back and say, all right, we heard you.
Crystal Washington: You said this, and this. What we're gonna do is we're gonna implement this over here because this answers those issues. And. Sarah, you said this, George, you said this. We'd love you to take the lead on being the first to learn the technology as we roll it out so you can see how it relates back to those original suggestions.
Crystal Washington: Well, now you don't have resisted team because they were a part of the change, and they see the technology as an answer to their being heard and addressing their concerns. Now, people are intelligent, so you can't use a technology that doesn't address those things and just pretend, let's, treat people with some.
Crystal Washington: But you're going to find far less resistance when people are a part of designing the change versus just dropping something on people and saying, go, especially since not a small amount of organizations try to implement technology, oftentimes that really doesn't solve like the issues they already have.
Crystal Washington: Sometimes things are just shiny and everyone says this is industry standard. So they. Or the other challenge is, is it doesn't meet their company culture. if you're using a technology that doesn't really blend with the culture you already have, your people are not gonna do it or they're going to do it begrudgingly, which means they're going to half do it.
Crystal Washington: I can think of two specific examples where change has gone wrong and when change has helped the organization go to that next level and improve efficiencies within the organization. The first one was we were going through a new product launch and we're in the manager's meeting and we're, the marketing team comes up with this marketing plan and it's.
Crystal Washington: Yep. Now this beautiful marketing plan, but it's taking a shift on our approach on, we were a very science-based, company, and we were going a little bit more fluffy in our language. I'm gonna use that word because that's the word that we typically, that we had said. But that product launched for this particular product.
Crystal Washington: It failed and it failed miserably because when the marketing team came in, 90% of what they had created was already baked. And so now I have learned where anytime that there is a new, uh, Marketing initiative, any strategic initiative within the organization? The first question I always ask is, okay, how much of this plan has already been baked ready to go, and what percentage of feedback do you wanna hear?
Crystal Washington: Because that sets the tone on how deep of the feedback that I'm gonna provide. And then I've also seen, as you had mentioned, an organization. When they were implementing new technology within the organization, they had what was a pilot team. they would roll it out to maybe 10%. In this particular example, it was a Salesforce.
Crystal Washington: They roll it out to that 10% of Salesforce. They provide the feedback, they make any adjustments, and they might do that for a couple months before they roll it out to the whole organization. and to take that a step further is the people that were part of the pilot program. Taught everybody else how to use the technology, and it was a peer-to-peer basis, they were really able to get the buy-in from everybody else.
Crystal Washington: Very smart. I mean, at the end of the day, as again, if people are a part of the change, They're less likely to resist it. And the last example you gave was brilliant because now it's their peers that are helping them. And so they've already bought in and the, I'm guessing the organization chose some of the top players probably.
Crystal Washington: And so these are people that have the respect of the people that they're training. So that was brilliant. Yeah, and that's exactly what it was. It was the people that had been with the organization, the people that were also in their career development plan, they maybe wanted to step into a marketing role and maybe there was a partnership with the marketing team on a particular initiative or a program that we were gonna be integrating into our sales force.
Crystal Washington: it really does, as you had. It gets people involved, it gets people part of the implementation process, part of the solution, being able to share ideas. And anytime that we're more involved in integrating any changes within the organization, any products, technology within the organization, when we're part of that, we're gonna take more ownership.
Crystal Washington: And then as you had shared, that peer-to-peer interaction was probably the most impactful. Oh, for sure. That was brilliant. Anything else that you wanna leave our listeners with? Maybe they're in a leadership role, they're going through some changes within their organization. any other words of advice that you wanna leave with our listeners?
Crystal Washington: I'm a big fan of giving people actionable things that they can implement. And so I would love to leave them with a framework. they can help them future-proof their organization. So they might have to listen back to this a couple times to really go through it, but I just wanna give them a basic framework because sometimes it's hard to know what you should be implementing so that you're staying competitive and.
Crystal Washington: These are my suggestions. when you think about what you're expecting to happen in your organization, I think it's really smart to think about three alternative scenarios over the next couple of years that could happen. So for instance, I know what I expect to happen, but maybe hurricane is one of my alternate scenarios.
Crystal Washington: Maybe another one is a resurgence of Covid, or whatever. I'm just giving an example, Three things that you do not want to happen, but that could plausibly happen, So write out those scenarios on a piece of paper. These are three different sheets of paper. At the top, you write out what the scenario is.
Crystal Washington: How would that impact you? How would that impact impact your clients? How would that impact your team? Next up, you do a SWAT analysis. For each and every one of those three scenarios. And you wanna do them separately, Danielle, because what something that might be a strength in one scenario might be a weakness in another scenario,
Crystal Washington: So you do your SWOT analysis in all three, and then the second to last step is come up with three things that you can do right now that would protect you or help you get through each scenario. So there's gonna be three for each one, and you do that after the SWAT analysis, cause that gives you some. The very last step.
Crystal Washington: So now you actually have three action items per set. So that's nine total. Last step, when you're looking at scenario one's. suggested action items. Does this first one help with either one of these other two? If so, if it helps with more than one, circle it. If it doesn't, cross it out. Do that for all three action items and those action items that'll help you through multiple scenarios.
Crystal Washington: Those are the things you should be implementing right now. That is how you future-proof your organization. And even if none of those scenarios happen, I guarantee you that the actions you're taking. Will protect you against other scenarios you didn't see and even help you better prepare for your desired future.
Crystal Washington: that's how you know what you should be implementing. That is great advice, excellent advice. And what I'm hearing from you is go in with the plan. think of all the different possibilities that could possibly happen, what action steps to take, what pitfalls may happen.
Crystal Washington: , maybe what part of your organization, the team members within your organization you wanna bring in to support any of the changes that you're making within the organization. But overarching, what I'm hearing from you, Go in with the plan. Yes. and be ready. Because then if those things do happen, guess what?
Crystal Washington: You've already prepared against it. Your team is already ready. And then can I share one last thing, Danielle? Absolutely. I'm going to encourage everyone that's, watching and listening to us right now, Danielle, to keep an open mind because they're gonna hear my next statement through the lens of their own bias, but I need them to walk through it.
Crystal Washington: the last thing I want to say is, Diversity is key to future proofing an organization. Now again, when people hear diversity, they all have different thoughts. I wanna be very clear. I'm not a D E I expert. I'm a futurist. But here's the reason why I say that. When you have people that have different languages of origin, right, so maybe English is their second language, what you'll notice if you've studied languages or anyone that knows multiple languages, knows that there are some concept.
Crystal Washington: In one language that are impossible to translate. That's because there's some things that are taboo. In one culture. People look at things differently in another. If you do not have diverse perspectives at the table, actively working on future proof in your organization, you are leaving yourself open to disasters.
Crystal Washington: PR issues and lawsuits. You need moms. You need some younger people. Yes. We need the standard folks that we've seen. Maybe they happen to be Caucasian baby boomer men that have been in the industry. We need them too. We need people that have English as a second language from a few different countries. The more diversity you have.
Crystal Washington: The more different perspectives, seeing the possibilities and for sure the greater number of suggestions for potential action items that can help you future proof. So for me, again, I'm not a D e I expert. This isn't about the cool kids inviting the other kids to sit at the table. I have no opinion on that one way or the other.
Crystal Washington: I'm talking about this purely from a planning standpoint. The more diversity you have, the greater pool of ideas. You cannot have diversity of thought without diversity of life experience. I wanna add another element of diversity, cuz I agree with you a hundred percent anytime that you're integrating anything within an organization.
Crystal Washington: You want, the people that are very experienced have the expertise you want, but you also want as much diversity as you can. And what I found to be extremely helpful when I was leading a team was the people that were completely new to my organization. . Often when I see advisory boards it's always these people that have been with the organization for a long time and I want that.
Crystal Washington: That's valuable cuz they know the culture of the organization. They have the history of possibly working with the customers, but the new people to an organization come with a very curiosity approach. They don't have that mindset. Well, that's what we've always done, or that's not gonna work cuz we haven't tried it before.
Crystal Washington: They're taking ideas from different organizations of, how they have approached their business that they could possibly integrate into the company that they have just joined. They're always gonna be possibly asking questions. So when you say diversity, it is truly integr. Different perspectives. People that have been with the organization for a long time, people that are brand new to the organization, people that have different backgrounds within their own upbringing.
Crystal Washington: The more diverse, the more innovative ideas that you're gonna have. And to take that a step further, think about it, our customers are diverse. Yes. So we need to ensure that the, people that are making the decisions, mm-hmm. almost mirror the people that we are customer. Yes, and actually I would say even greater diversity and make sure that it's different people of different abilities too.
Crystal Washington: I love the fact you talked about fresh voices. I had an a very interesting experience in high school, so I was part of a NASA competition where they brought in high school students the kids with the top grades all over, the city. and they brought us in to, the Houston campus.
Crystal Washington: We were in the areas where the astronauts were, so it wasn't the public facing areas. They brought us in, they did this whole competition about us designing a mission to Mars. And they gave us things, how much weight we had to carry, all these different things. So we were all kids that. Brilliant at calculus and physics and all those things, and so they broke us into teams and I'll never forget that the c e o of my team paired with one adult and a lot of different kids, I was president of my team, but the c e o of my team was actually the c e o of a company that made in inflatable housing for Mars.
Crystal Washington: This was in 1999. This is before people were talking about it. Yeah. So even us, we were like, what? So these are the people we're with. as we're developing all these ideas, they had all these NASA scientists that were giving us feedback, going over our notes. And I'll never forget when we presented our projects, So that they could be graded. And we saw who won, and my team won. By the way. They got copies. They said, wait, before we give this back, we need to get copies of everything you all have. And so they copied all of these high school students work, and we all had to do releases. What was NASA doing? NASA was farming high schoolers for new ideas.
Crystal Washington: Did we have the same knowledge set as their scientists? No. Did we have the same training? We hadn't even gone to college yet, but our minds were still open and so they knew they could get fresh idea. Now if this is good enough for NASA to go to 17 year olds, certainly as leaders of our organizations, we might say, you know what?
Crystal Washington: there might be some interesting data points for some people outside of the set that we normally listen to. That is a great story, and talking about really leaning into diversity and hearing. And being open-minded to other perspectives and thoughts. Well, for our listeners out there, there's a lot to unpack with this episode, but a lot of valuable vice because The areas that we're focusing here is how can you futureproof your organization in helping you succeed in the future, which can be valuable for every single organization out there. So truly thank you for taking the time to join the podcast. I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. It's been an honor spending time with you.