The Adaptation Advantage E-Book

Heather E. McGowan

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 428

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

A guide for individuals and organizations navigating the complex and ambiguous Future of Work Foreword by New York Times columnist and best-selling author Thomas L. Friedman Technology is changing work as we know it. Cultural norms are undergoing tectonic shifts. A global pandemic proves that we are inextricably connected whether we choose to be or not. So much change, so quickly, is disorienting. It's undermining our sense of identity and challenging our ability to adapt. But where so many see these changes as threatening, Heather McGowan and Chris Shipley see the opportunity to open the flood gates of human potential--if we can change the way we think about work and leadership. They have dedicated the last 5 years to understanding how technical, business, and cultural shifts affecting the workplace have brought us to this crossroads, The result is a powerful and practical guide to the future of work for leaders and employees. The future can be better, but only if we let go of our attachment to our traditional (and disappearing) ideas about careers, and what a "good job" looks like. Blending wisdom from interviews with hundreds of executives, The Adaptation Advantage explains the profound changes happening in the world of work and posits the solution: new ways to think about careers that detach our sense of pride and personal identity from our job title, and connect it to our sense of purpose. Activating purpose, the authors suggest, will inherently motivate learning, engagement, empowerment, and lead to new forms of pride and identity throughout the workforce. Only when we let go of our rigid career identities can we embrace and appreciate the joys of learning and adapting to new realities--and help our organizations do the same. Of course, making this transition is hard. It requires leaders who can attract and motivate cognitively diverse teams fueled by a strong sense of purpose in an environment of psychological safety--despite fierce competition and external pressures. Adapting to the future of work has always called for strong leadership. Now, as a pandemic disrupts so many aspects of work, adapting is a leadership imperative. The Adaptation Advantage is an essential guide to help leaders meet that challenge.

Leseprobe

Praise for The Adaptation Advantage

Heather McGowan and Chris Shipley are prophets of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Their extraordinary insights and tools challenge and empower organizations, leaders, and people across society to thrive in a future marked by exceptional technological and societal change.”

—Major General James Johnson, U.S. Air Force (ret), former Director of Air Force Integrated Resilience

The Adaptation Advantage brings sense to the sometimes confusing and scary world of change. McGowan and Shipley give us permission to be entrepreneurial by exploring the nature of opportunity and a natural pathway to engagement. Ambiguity is our friend in a world that understands change as a chance to improve lives. The authors beautifully weave macroeconomic phenomenon with a prod for introspection. Their book is a “self-help meets personal empowerment” treatise. Reading this book is a therapy session with motivational power. You'll want to reread it again and again.

—Stephen Spinelli Jr., PhD., President, Babson College, co-founder of Jiffy Lube

The Adaptation Advantage is fueled by the power of an elegant idea: our ability to learn and adapt is inseparable from our sense of identity. And as automation driven by machine intelligence remakes our world, the need to continually transform our identities becomes the very foundation of human growth—and how we thrive. McGowan and Shipley have wrapped a vivid and immensely readable narrative around this idea. My advice: read it!”

—Randy Swearer, PhD., Vice President of Learning Futures, Autodesk

In The Adaptation Advantage, McGowan and Shipley deliver a powerful message for corporate leaders about success in the future of work. Learning and identity are not only intertwined but fundamental to any organization's ability to adapt and create value. How exciting to read a book built on the core premise that learning unleashes our human potential while also driving competitive advantage.

—Sean Gallagher, PhD., Executive Director, Centre for the New Workforce, Swinburne University

The Adaptive Advantage needs to be on every educator's bookshelf, preferably dog-eared with highlighted pages, guiding their efforts to reorient the education system into continuous and future-focused learning. McGowan and Shipley's advice is both simple and profound—our students— competitive advantage is their exponential and expansive capacity as humans to adapt, advance, and add value, rather than to compete with artificial intelligence that mimics their genius.

—Tonya Allen, CEO, Skillman Foundation

The Adaptive Advantage lays out a clear, compelling case to stop defining ourselves by our jobs, to extend formal education into lifelong learning, and to let curiosity lead us through the arc of our working lives. That way we remain resilient no matter how forceful the waves of change become. Most books about the future of work put automation at the center of the story. McGowan and Shipley put humans at the center—as well they should. Many essential capabilities can't be replaced…creativity, collaboration, judgment, sensemaking, empathy, and other forms of social and emotional intelligence are uniquely human. And while technology will continue to evolve the way we work, we have immense agency to determine and design what we do and why we do it.

—Sandy Speicher, CEO, IDEO

The Adaptation Advantage tackles head-on the most critical challenge facing all of us in the near future: Where do we find purpose and prosperity in a world that increasingly feels beyond anyone's control? The extent to which we adapt to a radically shifted concept of “work” will inevitably be determined by our ability to rethink learning – away from a fixed-term preparation for employment, to a continuous way of living. Accordingly, this vital book offers a road map to the oldest question of all: How, then, should we live? Among a growing cadre of dystopians, it's refreshing to hear a much-needed optimistic analysis from McGowen and Shipley.

—David Price, OBE, Best-selling author of Open: How We Will Work, Learn, and Live in the Future

An insightful comprehension of the velocity and force of the multi-tiered and numerous elements of change offer leaders the insight and capability to creatively lead transformations. Resilient and adaptive learners will be the change-makers of the future. How thrilling to read the book that potentially allows us to embrace change as a propellant versus a weight.

—Lynne Greene, Former Group President, Estee Lauder Companies

McGowan and Shipley's The Adaptation Advantage nails it. Adaptive identity requires letting go – letting go of a job or skill set identity in order to thrive in a world of rapidly changing societal norms and technologies. This is required reading for all students of service science, such as myself.

—Jim Spohrer, PhD., IBM Director, Cognitive Open Technologies

In a world of exponential change, we all need strategies to help us continually adapt. With The Adaptation Advantage, Shipley and McGowan have given us the user manual.

—Gary A. Bolles, Chair for the Future of Work, Singularity University

Heather McGowan and Chris Shipley have crystalized what the future of work looks like and it is good news for us humans, providing we embrace change, get comfortable with the unknown, and keep adapting and learning. That last bit bodes well for the business events industry, which is the ideal vehicle for professionals to develop and maintain an agile learning mindset, to retool and retrain, and to hone the uniquely human skills—like creativity, empathy, and communication—that will ensure our future success, individually in our careers and collectively as a species.

—Sherrif Karamat, President and CEO, Professional Convention Management Association (PCMA)

Twenty years of research have shown me the importance of bringing humans to the forefront of the future of work. By recognizing the centrality of human potential, The Adaptation Advantage illuminates the value of resilience, adaptability, and the qualities that make us uniquely human in the future of culture, work, and self.

—Vivienne Ming, PhD., Theoretical neuroscientist, founder, Socos Labs

The Adaptation Advantageis the clearest, most compelling, and most original examination of the present and future workplace. Packed with powerful data-driven insights and provocative examples, this book is a masterclass in how individuals and organizations can and must develop the capacity to change fast and learn faster. McGowan and Shipley offer sage advice and wise counsel on every page, and it's imperative that you take their lessons to heart. But the big surprise in this book is that it's not about learning to live with more robots, but rather learning to become more human. Whether you were born digital or born analog,The Adaptation Advantageis your indispensable resource for thriving in a world that is transforming as you read this.

—Jim Kouzes, Coauthor of The Leadership Challenge and Executive Fellow at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University

This book is an essential guide for anyone who seeks to understand what it means to be human in the age of intelligent machines. The sources of advantage in the future of work have shifted to our uniquely human capabilities. Heather and Chris urge us to go on an inward journey to uncover who we are and consider how we manifest our passion, character and collaborative spirit as our most enduring and sustainable means of making positive progress as people, leaders, and institutions.

—Dov Seidman, Author of HOW and founder and chairman of LRN and The HOW Institute for Society

This book will change the way you see yourself within the future of work, give you very practical ideas for leading in that new but unknown world, and leave you genuinely inspired about what the future holds.

—Peter Sheahan, CEO, Karrikans Group

The paradigm of pursuing higher education is shifting. For example, American workers are now getting a job to go to college versus going to college to get a job. In this must-read, Heather and Chris effectively describe these and other trends that are playing out across corporate America today. In a world where rapid learning and adaptation are essential to prepare for the future of work, we need leaders across industries, disciplines, and functions to work together to become champions of human potential.

—Rachel Carlson, CEO and co-founder of Guild Education

In a world where we are drowning in information, and misinformation, clarity is power. Many jump on the fear bandwagon around the future of work, but Chris and Heather have done their homework, the thinking, and crafted a vision for how humans can adapt and thrive, with supreme clarity. They tackle this subject with original thinking and substance.

—Annalie Killian, Vice President Strategic Partnerships, sparks & honey

Speed is the only constant in today's world. That much is clear to all of us. We read tomes upon tomes deploring it or analyzing it, but most of it is opinion and editorial whereas Heather and Chris break it down into clear, actionable concepts and better yet, anchor them with science and examples so plentiful that this book will become your absolute go-to when you mean to school others in the potential perils and opportunities of VUCA.

—Duena Blomstrom Author, co-founder, and CEO, PeopleNotTech Ltd.

The digital revolution is overturning careers as well as companies. This book will be an essential guide to the future of work for both individuals and organizations.

—Mark Bonchek, Chief Epiphany Officer, Shift Thinking

The Adaptation Advantagepaints a vivid and compelling picture of a future of work in which the most successful and fulfilled participants will be those who continually learn and relearn in order to adapt to accelerating social, economic, and technological change. As a result of these changes, our current system of higher education is being presented with exciting challenges and opportunities to evolve to support that increasingly dynamic societal and work force future.

—Russell L. Moore, PhD., Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, University of Colorado, Boulder

Microchips cannot and will not replace relationships. Your next job starts where the robots stop. Learn to embrace that handoff. The best way to do that, Heather and Chris argue, for both individuals and organizations, is through rapid learning, unlearning, and adaptation. Heather and Chris's book is an indispensable guide to how to navigate this new era in the workplace.

—Thomas L. Friedman, Foreign Affairs Columnist, New York Times

LET GO, LEARN FAST, AND THRIVE IN THEFUTURE OF WORK

theadaptationadvantage

HEATHER E. McGOWAN ANDCHRIS SHIPLEY

Cover image: Wiley

Cover design: © ambassador806/Getty Images

Copyright © 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, [phone], fax [phone], or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, [phone], fax [phone], or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

Trademarks: Wiley and the Wiley logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

For general information on our other products and services or for technical support, please contact our Customer Care Department within the United States at [phone], outside the United States at [phone] or fax [phone].

Wiley publishes in a variety of print and electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some material included with standard print versions of this book may not be included in e-books or in print-on-demand. If this book refers to media such as a CD or DVD that is not included in the version you purchased, you may download this material at http://booksupport.wiley.com. For more information about Wiley products, visit www.wiley.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Names: McGowan, Heather (Consultant), author. | Shipley, Chris, author.

Title: The adaptation advantage : let go, learn fast, and thrive in the future of work / Heather McGowan and Chris Shipley.

Description: Hoboken, New Jersey : John Wiley & Sons, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020001497 (print) | LCCN 2020001498 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119653097 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119653059 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119653172 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Labor supply—Effect of technological innovations on. | Work—Forecasting. | Manpower planning. | Organizational change.

Classification: LCC HD6331 .M34 2020 (print) | LCC HD6331 (ebook) | DDC 650.1—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020001497

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020001498

For my wife, Pat, from whom I learn every day; for my family, who supports my learning adventures; and especially for my brother Jonathan, who models persistent adaptation every day. —Heather

Nancy Latta has always understood that identity and joy come from work well done and so very much more. Shirley Shipley embarked on life-changing learning when most mothers of five would have opted for a well-deserved nap. My work on this book is for them. —Chris

CONTENTS

Cover

Praise for

The Adaptation Advantage

Foreword: From Flat to Fast to Smart to Deep

Introduction

Breaking with Identity to Seize the Adaptation Advantage

So What's Changing?

How Did We Get Here?

How Big Is the Challenge?

The Adaptability Gap

Amid Rapid Change, Keep Calm and Adapt On

So What's in This Book?

Who Is This Book For?

Notes

Part I Adapting at the Speed of Change

1 The World Is Fast: Technology Is Changing Everything and Planting Opportunity Everywhere

Wait a Second

Technological Climate Change

Environmental Climate Change

Climate Change of the Market

The Force of Three Amplifying and Interlocking Climate Changes

Notes

2 The Only Things Moving Faster Than Technology Are Cultural and Social Norms

Shifting Ground Beneath Our Feet

From Linear and Local to Exponential and Global

Race

Religion

Age

Family

Gender Identity

Truth and Trust

Consent and Power Shifts

Death of Distance Reshapes Human Relationships

So, Who Are You? Occupational Identity and Expertise

Notes

3 You're Already Adapting and Not Even Noticing

We've Already Begun to Outsource Our Memory

People Aren't Horses

Atomization, Automation, and Augmentation

Atomization in Action

Automation in Action

Augmentation in Action

Putting Atomization, Automation, and Augmentation Together

Notes

4 Getting Comfortable with Adaptation: The Slowest Rate of Change Is Happening Now

The Power of Pause

From Scalable Efficiency to Scalable Learning

From Stocks to Flows of Knowledge

From Learning to Work to Working to Learn Continuously

Identifying Patterns to Build Bridges

Notes

Part II Letting Go and Learning Fast to Thrive

5 What Do You Do for a Living? The Question That Traps Us in the Past

The Questions That Limit Our Identity

The Identity Trap

How Identity Is Formed

Narratives Can Trap Us in the Past and Limit Our Future

Gender, Narratives, and Identity

The Confidence Gap

Identity Is Never Done

An Occupational Identity Crisis Isn't Limited to Job Loss

Notes

6 Finding the Courage to Let Go of Occupational Identity

What Does the Parable of the Three Stonecutters Have to Do with You?

The Day 1 Mindset: You Are a Prototype; Start with Why

How Job Loss Can Be a Gain

Modeling Vulnerability: We Share Our Hard Lessons

What Do You Do Now?

Notes

7 Learning Fast: Why an Agile Learning Mindset Is Essential

Learn Fast—What Does That Even Mean?

What Do We Mean by Learning? First-, Second-, and Third-Generation Learning Organizations

The S-Curve of Learning: Explore, Experiment, Execute, Expand

The Curse of Expertise: The Challenge of Unlearning

The Iceberg: The Substance Beneath the Surface

Identity: The Core of the Adaptive Mind

The Agile Learning Mindset

The Enablers: Uniquely Human Skills

Why We Need the Agile Mindset: The Broken Education-to-Work Pipeline

ABL: Always Be Learning

Notes

8 Rise of the Humans: Developing Your Creativity, Empathy, and Other Uniquely Human Capabilities

Play Is the Way Forward

The Uniqueness of the Human Drive to Learn and Create

The Predictive Markets Declare Future Skills Favor Humans

Understanding Uniquely Human Skills

Chasing STEM at Our Peril

The Skills Battleground: Humans Need Apply

The Return on Being Human

Return on Humans for All Jobs: The Special Power of Empathy

Evolving Beyond Shareholder Value: The Purpose of a Company

To Maximize Human Potential, Place the Human in the Center

Notes

Part III Leading People and Organizations in the Evolution of Work

9 Leading in Continuous Change: Modeling Vulnerability, Learning from Failure, and Providing the Psychological Safety that Builds Trusting Teams

You Are at the Wheel

Leadership, Power, Cookies, and Chickens

What Makes a Modern Leader?

Transformational Leadership

Transformational Leadership and Change Management Models

Leading with Fear: The Burning Platform

Putting It All Together

Notes

10 The Adaptive Organization: Creating the Capacity to Change at the Speed of Technology, Market, and Social Evolution

What Should We Measure?

The Power of the Culture and Capacity Focus

Culture at the Core

Capacity: Culture's Partner

Capability and Context: The Scissors Metaphor

In Accelerated Change, Focus on the Inputs Rather Than the Outputs

Becoming a Learning Company

Notes

11 Capability Is King: Looking Beyond the Resume to Design Your Adaptive Team

No More Little Boxes

The Job Description Is History

Job Descriptions Become Traps

Fire Your Job Description

Hire for Cultural Alignment

Hire Adults and Let Them Do Their Jobs

Turn the Right People into Great Teams

Embrace Cognitive Diversity

Get Comfortable with Failure

Live in a State of Continuous Learning

Manage a Multigenerational Workforce

How Do We Get from Here to There?

The New Leadership Imperative

Notes

12 Getting Ready to Seize Your Adaptation Advantage

Note

Additional Resources

Books

Videos

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Illustrations

Introduction

Figure I.1: The Old Economy

Figure I.2: The New Reality

Figure I.3: The Leap from Old Economy to New Reality

Figure I.4: The Rise of Nonroutine Work and the Fall of Routine Work

Figure I.5: The Fourth Industrial Revolution Reshapes Work

Figure I.6: Bersin/Deloitte's Productivity Gap

Chapter 1

Figure 1.1 The Fourth Industrial Revolution

Figure 1.2 Age and Adaptation

Figure 1.3 Human Adaptation Is Linear, Technological Change Is Exponential

Figure 1.4 Top 10 Populations in the World

Figure 1.5 Friedman's Three Climate Changes Reshape Our World

Figure 1.6 The Velocity of Change Requires Adaptation

Figure 1.7 The Fifth Era in Human History

Chapter 2

Figure 2.1 Outdated Questions Set Traps

Figure 2.2 The Difference Between Linear and Exponential Progress

Figure 2.3 Dimensions of Societal and Cultural Change

Figure 2.4 Shifting Population and Aging Trends Worldwide

Figure 2.5 Membership and Trust

Figure 2.6 Women and Work: Educational Attainment, Workforce Representation, and Leadershi...

Figure 2.7 How We Meet Our Mates

Chapter 3

Figure 3.1 The Atomization, Automation, and Augmentation of Work

Figure 3.2 Upskill and Reskill Regularly

Figure 3.3 The Unbundling of a Job

Figure 3.4 Five Types of Talent

Chapter 4

Figure 4.1 Speed-to-Product Peaks and Life Spans

Figure 4.2 The Rise and Fall of the Camera

Figure 4.3 Top Five Companies by Market Capitalizations at 50-Year Increments

Figure 4.4 From Stocks of Knowledge to Flows of Knowledge

Figure 4.5 From I to T to X: The Transdisciplinary Imperative

Figure 4.6 The Job Corridor and Pivot Score

Figure 4.7 AT&T Career Intelligence Job Outlook

Chapter 5

Figure 5.1 How We Build Competence and Close the Confidence Gap for Girls and Women

Chapter 6

Figure 6.1 Amazon's Why, How, What

Figure 6.2 Purpose First, Job Last: Your Why, How, What

Figure 6.3 Steve Jobs

Chapter 7

Figure 7.1 The Value Creation S-Curve: Explore, Experiment, Execute, Expand

Figure 7.2 Old Economy S-Curve Gives Way to Shorter and More Frequent S Curves

Figure 7.3 The Iceberg: Layers Required for Learning and Adaptation

Figure 7.4 The Agile Mindset

Figure 7.5 Agency Is Rooted in Understanding Your Purpose and Superpowers

Figure 7.6 Future of Work Skills Peak with Age and Wisdom

Figure 7.7 Technology Skills Slip as Behavioral Skills Rise (IBM)

Figure 7.8 Bonchek and Steele: What Kind of Thinker Are You?

Chapter 8

Figure 8.1 Mickey McManus's Ray-Pray-Play

Figure 8.2 Routine Tasks—Human versus Machine Abilities

Figure 8.3 Future Work Skills: Institute of the Future and World Economic Forum

Figure 8.4 Deming: Changes to Employment Based on Task Intensity

Figure 8.5 Deming: Changes in Hourly Income Based on Task Intensity

Figure 8.6 Gallup: Engagement and Disengagement in Education

Figure 8.7 PricewaterhouseCoopers: Skills Battleground

Figure 8.8 The Premium of a Liberal Arts Undergraduate Degree in the Legal Profession

Figure 8.9 Shareholder Value and Human Value Eras

Figure 8.10 Your Job Is Moving: Reskill and Upskill Every Day

Figure 8.11 The Fourth Industrial Revolution Requires Heart

Chapter 9

Figure 9.1 Leadership Shift from Driving Productivity to Inspiring Human Potential

Figure 9.2 Who Gets the Extra Cookie?

Figure 9.3 Emotional Intelligence and Job Title

Figure 9.4 In Search of Super Chickens

Figure 9.5 Soccer: An Interdependence Sport

Figure 9.6 Leaders Make the First Leap of Faith

Figure 9.7 Racing Takes Great Situational Awareness

Figure 9.8 Complicated to Complex

Figure 9.9 Become Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable

Figure 9.10 Beware the Burning Platform

Figure 9.11 From Burning Platform to Burning Ambition

Figure 9.12 Phase of Value Creation and Protection and Burning Platform versus Burning Ambi...

Figure 9.13 Old Paradigm versus New Reality and Scalable Efficiency versus Scalable Learnin...

Figure 9.14 Learning Tours to Increase Capacity

Chapter 10

Figure 10.1 Focus on the Inputs: Culture and Capacity

Figure 10.2 Unreasonable Group Manifesto

Figure 10.3 Value Created Becomes the By-Product of Increasing Capacity

Figure 10.4 Hierarchy of Business Intelligence

Chapter 11

Figure 11.1 From the Value You Bring to the Value You Create

Figure 11.2 Accelerated Change Can Eclipse Long Hiring Timelines

Figure 11.3 Types of Talent

Figure 11.4 Workforce of Yesterday versus Workforce of Tomorrow

Figure 11.5 The Shape of Your Network Matters

Figure 11.6 For Accelerated Learning, Seek Cognitive Diversity and Psychological Safety

Figure 11.7 Five Generations in the Workforce

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Foreword

Pages

i

ii

iii

iv

v

vi

vii

xiv

xv

xvi

xvii

xviii

xix

xx

xxi

xxii

xxiii

xxiv

xxv

xxvi

xxvii

xxviii

xxix

xxx

1

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

63

65

66

67

68

69

70

71

72

73

74

75

76

77

78

79

80

81

83

84

85

86

87

88

89

90

91

92

93

94

95

97

98

99

100

101

102

103

104

105

106

107

108

109

110

111

112

113

114

115

117

118

119

120

121

122

123

124

125

126

127

128

129

130

131

132

133

134

135

136

137

138

139

140

141

143

145

146

147

148

149

150

151

152

153

154

155

156

157

158

159

160

161

162

163

164

165

166

167

168

169

170

171

172

173

174

175

176

177

178

179

180

181

182

183

184

185

186

187

188

189

190

191

192

193

195

196

197

198

199

200

201

202

203

204

205

206

207

208

209

210

211

212

213

214

215

216

217

218

219

220

221

222

223

225

226

227

228

229

230

231

232

233

234

235

236

237

238

239

240

241

242

243

Foreword: From Flat to Fast to Smart to Deep

There are a lot of snappy, shorthand ways I could summarize Heather and Chris's book, but my favorite is this phrase that they use to encapsulate the essence of what they are saying: the abiding cliché and dominant news headline in the workplace these days is that the robots are going to take your job. What you learn from this book, though, is that, yes, indeed, robots can take your job. But if we're smart, they can also guide you to and define your next job. Because whether it's robots or automation or digitization, two things are true and always will be: there will always be another technological advance that will devour existing jobs—and, yes, those advances will be coming faster and faster. But we will always need humans to translate and augment the latest technology and we will always need humans to make meaning, joy, and connections that entertain us, inspire us, and connect us the moment we put our technology down. Microchips cannot and will not replace relationships. Your next job starts where the robots stop. Learn to embrace that handoff.

The best way to do that, Heather and Chris argue, for both individuals and organizations, is through rapid learning, unlearning, and adaptation. These skills are the new normal. Rapid learning, by the way, is not just about how to augment machines as they spin off new jobs, but how to augment humans as they stay the same, always craving meaning, joy, and new forms of entertainment and connections in every new epoch.

Rapid unlearning and adaptation are both about how we embrace and absorb new skills and how we let go of old ones. To be able to do both effectively and constantly, they argue, requires a mind shift and an identity shift—a letting go of “who we think we are” and a regular reinventing of yourself. I find this the most original aspect of their book—the important role that identity plays in how and how much we can learn and adapt at the steady pace demanded by this age of acceleration.

Heather and Chris argue that those who do it best will be those who allow themselves to be vulnerable, forcing themselves to be more open to the new and to the other. And that is not always easy under any conditions, but it is especially challenging when social norms are rapidly changing, or new immigrants are arriving with greater speed and numbers, and your identity—your sense of home, work, and norms—feels like it is under assault. That people today all over the world are reaching for walls to slow down the pace of change and protect their identities is not an accident.

I will let them tell you the rest …

If there is anything I can contribute from my own research and writing, it's the conviction that the technological forces that are requiring such rapid learning, unlearning, and adaptation—this new normal—are not going away. Indeed, they just keep getting faster and touching deeper into more areas of daily life, commerce, governance, and science. Why?

The short answer is that technology moves up in steps, and each step tends to be biased toward a certain set of capabilities. Around the year 2000, for instance, a group of technologies came together that were biased toward “connectivity.” Because of the dramatic fall in the price of fiber-optic cable, thanks to the dot-com boom, bubble, and bust, we were suddenly able to wire much of the world and, as a result, connectivity becamefast, virtually free, easy for you, and ubiquitous. Suddenly I could touch people I could never touch before and I could be touched by people who could never touch me before. I gave that moment a name. I said it felt like “the world is flat.”

Around 2007, another set of technologies came together that had the effect of making the world “fast.” This was also driven by a price collapse—a collapse in the price of computers, storage, software broadband, and smartphones. This enabled us to do a huge number of complex tasks on the cloud with just one touch on a mobile device. We took friction and complexity out of so many things. Suddenly, with just one touch, on an Uber or Didi app, I could page a taxi, direct a taxi, pay a taxi, rate a taxi, and be rated by a taxi. With just one touch! Complexity became fast, virtually free, easy for you, and invisible.

Indeed, the year 2007 was a remarkable year. In 2007, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. Facebook opened its platform to anyone with a registered email address and went global in 2007. Twitter split off onto its own platform and went global in 2007. Airbnb was born in 2007. In 2007, VMware—the technology that enabled any operating system to work on any computer, which enabled cloud computing—went public, which is why the cloud really only took off in 2007. Hadoop software—which enabled a million computers to work together as if they were one, giving us “Big Data”—was launched in 2007. Amazon launched the Kindle e-book reader in 2007. IBM launched Watson, the world's first cognitive computer, in 2007. The essay launching Bitcoin was written in 2006. Netflix streamed its first video in 2007. IBM introduced nonsilicon materials into its microchips to extend Moore's Law in 2007. The Internet crossed one billion users in late 2006, which seems to have been a tipping point. The price of sequencing a human genome collapsed in 2007. Solar energy took off in 2007, as did a process for extracting natural gas from tight shale, called fracking. Github, the world's largest repository of open source software, was launched in 2007. Lyft, the first ride-sharing site, delivered its first passenger in 2007. Michael Dell, the founder of Dell, retired in 2005. In 2007, he decided he'd better come back to work—because in 2007, the world started to get really fast. It was a real turning point.

Today, we have taken another step up to another platform: now the world is getting “smart.” And it is being driven by still another price collapse—the collapse in the price and size of sensors. Now we can put sensors—“intelligence”—into anything and everything. We can put intelligence into your refrigerator, your car, your lightbulb, your toaster, your front door, your golf club, or your shirt. And with that intelligence, we can make your car drive itself, your refrigerator stock itself, and your shirt talk to your doctor and then tell your grocer which healthy foods to deliver to your home. And we can do all of that now with “no touch.” It all just happens by sensors talking to machines and vice versa. The other day I got a text message on my cellphone that said I had an appointment in my office in 30 minutes, but I was still 35 minutes away by car. It made me smart—or at least aware—with not even a touch, because it was sensing from my smartphone and GPS where I was, how far I was from my next meeting, and who that meeting was with when.

So what's the next platform? I believe that when the world gets this flat, fast, and smart, what happens next is that it starts to get deep. How so? Well, when your shirt has sensors in it that can measure your body functions and then tell your e-commerce grocery store what foods are right for your particular body type and DNA and then order them for you at Walmart and have them delivered by an autonomous vehicle or drone to your refrigerator and restock them when the refrigerator announces that you are running low—that's “deep.” And that's where we're going. Deep is the ability to hit that precise target you are looking for—no matter how small or hidden—in the precise context you are looking for it and then impact that target—heal it, fix it, track it, extract it, illuminate it, fake it, or destroy it—with an accuracy that a decade ago would have been dismissed as science fiction.

And that is why, in my opinion, deep is the word of the year. Have you noticed how many things we are now describing with the word deep?—deep mind, deep medicine, deep war, deep fake, deep surveillance, deep insights, deep climate, deep adaptation.

We discovered that we needed a new word, a new adjective, to describe the fact that “deep technologies” have two qualities that we could tell were a difference in degree that was a difference in kind. One is physical. Deep technologies literally get imbedded deep inside your neighborhood, your home, or your bedroom. Having Siri or Amazon Alexa in your bedroom is deep. Having 5G wired into the streets of your neighborhood is deep. Having a shirt that monitors all your key bodily functions is deep.

The other quality is existential. Deep technologies can reach into places so deep and produce outcomes, insights, and impacts so profound and accurate that we also needed a new adjective to describe them. Deep technologies are almost God-like in their powers to hit precise targets in medicine or war; to find the right needles in the right haystacks of data; to manipulate the right atoms and cells in science; to create machines that can defeat any human in chess, Jeopardy, or Go; or to fake any face, voice, or image—always with an accuracy or at a depth that was considered science fiction just 15 years ago. And that is why deep technologies also need to be governed in new ways, because they can be used for so much more good or evil in so many new ways.

As the world has gone from flat to fast to smart to deep, it is overturning and melting traditions, foundations, and bonds in every realm of our lives—how we work, how we communicate, how we learn, how we educate, how we conduct business, how we conduct trade, how families communicate with each other, and how governments control their people—to name but a few. In my opinion, this inflection point may in time be understood as the single biggest and broadest inflection point since Guttenberg invented the printing press. And you just happened to be here. And it's not over—in fact, it's just getting started.

Heather and Chris's book is an indispensable guide to how navigate this new era in the workplace.

—Thomas L. Friedman

Foreign affairs columnist, the New York Times

Introduction

Breaking with Identity to Seize the Adaptation Advantage

“Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished,” psychologist Dan Gilbert famously observed in a 2014 TED Talk viewed by more than 4.5 million people.

It's in that space, between work in progress and finished, that workers find themselves today. We are incredibly well prepared for the past, and woefully unready for a future of work that has yet to be defined. This in-between space can be—and is—unnerving when the future is so difficult to see. “Most of us can remember who we were 10 years ago,” Gilbert says, “but we find it hard to imagine who we're going to be, and then we mistakenly think that because it's hard to imagine, it's not likely to happen. When people say, ‘I can't imagine that,’ they're usually talking about their own lack of imagination, and not about the unlikelihood of the event that they're describing.”1

But change is happening, and happening at a rate that is only getting faster. The good news is that we can change, too. And while that might seem like a scary proposition, it's important to realize that we are already very, very good at changing. Again, from Gilbert's TED Talk: “The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting, and as temporary, as all the people you've ever been.”

Read that again: As all the people you've ever been. There is hidden wisdom in Gilbert's assurance, a wisdom that finds itself at the heart of this book. Each of those “people you've ever been” is a version of a personal identity that has evolved over your life—a child, a student, a partner, an athlete, a traveler. Yet, when it comes to work, we cling to a professional identity to direct our understanding of work and career. We are executive or entrepreneur, teacher or technician, politician or plumber. We are boss or crew, leader or team member, foreman or lineman. That identity plays a critical role as a social signal and is, in many cases, the basis for self-esteem.

It's also an anchor that makes the necessary reimagining of work much, much harder than it needs to be. It is the barrier to making the crossing from the past of work to the future of work. But cross we must because the future is coming at us faster than we can understand it. If we're going to keep up, we'll have to adapt. Indeed, the ability to adapt is our key advantage.

The first step to seizing that advantage is letting go of professional identity, and in that letting go, tapping into our imaginations to reimagine ourselves and our work.

So What's Changing?

In a word: everything. In his eloquent foreword, Tom Friedman made the case that we are moving from flat to fast to smart to deep because of the exponentially expanding capabilities of technology. To his list, we add two more, seemingly at odds, elements of change: invisibility and visibility. On one hand, we can see things now that were hidden before. The data that flows like water brings insight into just about everything. On the other hand, we no longer see the working of everyday things that have been made invisible through automation. Our thermostats jumps to our preferred temperature when we walk into our homes. Already our phones and computers download and update software without our intervention. Driverless cars, one day soon, will automatically arrive to whisk us to our scheduled appointments, and groceries will be delivered to our doors from orders placed by a smart refrigerator that senses we are out of milk or need eggs.

With all this visible and invisible technology coming at a rate that is fast and only getting faster, what is a person to do? Who are we in the context of a rapidly transforming digital revolution?

In truth, we are all works in progress and we need to imagine, or rather reimagine, work. In order to do that, though, we're going to have to confront who we think we are, at least professionally, so that we can reimagine, and reimagine again, and again, who we are in the context of a changing future of work.

That's a tall order. And that's why we wrote this book: to help you better understand what is happening to work and why it matters to you. In doing so, we hope you'll gain the adaptation advantage.

How Did We Get Here?

The old model that parsed life into sequential steps of education, career, and retirement (Figure I.1) is blurring. Once, we were “educated” early in our lives enough to get us on a 40-year career ladder that we climbed until we retired and then, by design, soon after died. Today, considerable leaps in human longevity have stretched that career phase out a decade or longer.

Figure I.1: The Old Economy

A single dose of “education”—a process that infers an end state of being “educated”—isn't sufficient for a career arc that looks more like a spiral. Instead, we need to swap education for learning, a continuous state of discovery and reinvention. Work, then, leverages that learning and the work itself becomes another form of learning. And retirement? Societally, we neither planned for nor funded the 20 or 30 years of retirement that is the reality of our longer lives. Simply, we need to imagine a different model that blends these three bands of life, mixing learning, work, and retirement in an iterative cycle that spans 50 or 60 years or more (Figure I.2).

Figure I.2: The New Reality

We've talked about this old economy/new reality dichotomy in hundreds of talks, workshops, and conversations, and something finally struck us. Many listeners accepted the old economy as their reality and assumed the new reality existed only for their children or grandchildren. Not so fast, friends. The truth is that many of us will have to leap from the old economy into the new reality, and with that leap we'll have to navigate from a professional identity bestowed by degree and experience into a new identity we create for ourselves (Figure I.3). In short, we will all need the adaptation advantage. This is something we'll talk about in detail throughout the book, but especially in Part II.

Figure I.3: The Leap from Old Economy to New Reality

How Big Is the Challenge?

In a 2019 report, IBM projected that 120 million people in the 12 largest economies alone would need to retrain in the next three years in order to keep pace with rapidly changing technological capabilities impacting work2. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 2019 Employment Outlook predicted that 14% of jobs could be lost and 32% transformed through automation and that 60% of all workers lacked the necessary information and communications technology (ITC) or computer skills for that new work.

And this isn't just a future state. The labor market, the OECD determined, has already transformed, resulting in a profound loss of middle-skill jobs. Specifically, the 20 years between 1995 and 2015 saw a 20% decline in manufacturing jobs and a 27% increase in service jobs that do not require little training or education.3 The greatest shift thus far has been in technology's ability to consume routine work, giving rise to nonroutine work (Figure I.4). This shift has restructured the physical labor market and very soon it will upend the knowledge labor market as well. In short, the OECD describes a world of work rapidly transforming while most of us are flat-footed, unprepared to respond, let alone proactively adapt.

Figure I.4: The Rise of Nonroutine Work and the Fall of Routine Work

Note: The bands indicate recessions as defined by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey.

In 2013, the famed but flawed Frey-Osborne model predicted that 47% of work tasks in the United States could be automated. Some argue that the numbers in the Frey-Osborne model are not entirely reliable because the formula did not account for the cost of labor or capital, the impact of political resistance, or whether replacement technology could actually free workers to focus on other tasks,4 which are all criticisms that the framework's authors acknowledged. Even so, the report caused a bit of panic, as people saw a future that evaporated their jobs. Automation does replace some jobs, but mostly automation alters jobs. IBM CEO Ginni Rometty puts a fine point on this distinction: “I expect AI to change 100% of jobs within the next five to 10 years.”

Rometty isn't alone in this prediction. The World Economic Forum places the value of digital transformation to the Fourth Industrial Revolution at $100 trillion over the next decade.5 A 2018 survey of 10,000 workers in the United Kingdom conducted by Barclays LifeSkills identified a significant employability skills gap. In the report “How Employable is the UK? Meeting the Future Skills Challenge,” Barclays found that nearly 60% of adults lack all the core employability skills needed for the future world of work, notably among them proactivity, adaptability, and leadership.6

It should be no surprise, then, that our old measure of potential success—IQ (intelligence quotient)—has given way to EQ (emotional intelligence quotient) and is shifting yet again to AQ (adaptability quotient). In the 1980s, skills learned in a university or on the job held their relevance for nearly three decades, about as long as a typical career arc. Today, skills have a shelf life of less than five years, according to researchers at the World Economic Forum.7

The First Industrial Revolution was marked by the steam engine and the Second Industrial Revolution brought electrification and the division of labor; together, these first two revolutions created tools that supplemented muscle. The Third Industrial Revolution delivered tools, in the forms of computer technology, that assisted our mental labor. Now, we are entering the Fourth Industrial Revolution, steeped in advanced software and real-time data and offering tools that augment, and in some cases even replace, human cognitive labor (Figure I.5). Unlike the capital-intensive machines and robots that replace manual labor, the tools of this economic transformation are relatively cheap. They will scale very quickly and be incredibly cost effective. Are we ready? The answer is decidedly no.

Figure I.5: The Fourth Industrial Revolution Reshapes Work

The Adaptability Gap

Even as advanced tools and data become increasingly available, we are failing to harness the potential of that technology. Technology is growing exponentially, yet business productivity grows linearly (Figure I.6). The management consulting firm Deloitte first noted this divide in its Deloitte Human Capital Trends report. “Data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and other sources,” the report noted, “show that productivity growth remains low despite the introduction of new technology into the business environment. In fact, since the 2008 recession, growth in business productivity (gross domestic product per hour worked) stands at its lowest rate since the early 1970s (1.3%).”8

Figure I.6: Bersin/Deloitte's Productivity Gap

Source: © Deloitte University Press | Dupress.Deloitte.com | Josh Bersin.

Why the gap? The Deloitte report attributes it to “human capital strategies—how businesses organize, manage, develop, and align people at work.”

That gap does not appear to be narrowing. At IBM, for example, the company reported that the average of 4 days of training needed to close the skills gap in 2014 had jumped to 36 days by 2018. That works out to between 14% to 16% of all working hours now required for skills training just to stay current.

Amid Rapid Change, Keep Calm and Adapt On

The future of work need not be a dystopian nightmare. Rather, with careful planning and some essential policy interventions, this future could unleash the potential of humanity to create more and more meaningful work for everyone. The key is preparation for rapid cycles of adaptation and learning.

In order to better understand how to optimize adaptation, we began looking deeply at the questions surfaced by an unknowable future of work nearly five years ago. Finding the answers has taken us around the world (literally) to talk with hundreds of people who work by every definition of the term “job.” Whether “experts” in economics, psychology, design, or human factors or just “experts” in doing amazing work every day, these individuals have shed a bright light on the challenges we all face when the world moves faster than we're accustomed to.

Dr. Jeffery LePine, professor and PetSmart Chair in Leadership at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, studies organizational behavior, specifically of teams and adaptability. Professor LePine helped us see the difference between two concepts often conflated: flexibility and adaptability. LePine told us, “Flexibility is the ability to pivot from one tool in your toolbox to another or from one approach to another. Adaptability requires you add something. Adaptability may require you to drop that tool and forge a new one or drop that method, unlearn it and develop an entirely new one.”

That insight became our guide for this book, and we hope this book will be your guide to becoming more adaptable and to thriving in the future of your work. The book is designed for easy reading. Each chapter begins with several key points, and we've included dozens of figures that we hope make concepts easier to understand. Skim them from chapter to chapter and you'll be off to a good start.

If you take away nothing else, please absorb these three key points for the book itself:

The future of work, for both individuals and organizations, relies on rapid learning, unlearning, and adaptation.

To successfully learn and adapt, we have to be willing to let go of “the way we have always done it” and equally, if not more difficultly, “who we think we are.”

Navigating a world of rapid learning, unlearning, and adaptation requires that we become comfortable with ambiguity and vulnerability, allowing us to become champions of human potential in learning tours filled with unknowns.

Or as Peter Senge first wrote in The Fifth Discipline, “The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage.”9

So What's in This Book?