The Adaptation Advantage: Let Go, Learn Fast, and Thrive in the Future of Work Heather E. McGowan, Chris Shipley
Jobs once depended on muscles, they now depend on brains, but in the future, they’ll depend on the heart. The authors envision a time when people collaborate and create rich work environments.
The unexplored human skills in demand
Mental agility, feeling safe admitting ignorance, and monitoring self-awareness are no longer optional in a world where “the pivot is the new business model.” Workers must have social and emotional intelligence, as well as creative thinking, communication, and decision-making abilities, as well as “sensemaking” ability and empathy.
The Three Learning Generations
Open and connected systems assist learners in recognizing and responding to changing signals. These systems have three organizational learning generations.
- The first is concerned with acquiring and storing knowledge.
- The second takes into account product life cycles and optimizes for efficiency.
- The third is the autonomous learning loop, in which the learning rate accelerates and new efficiencies and iterations are created in real-time.
The job requirements of the upcoming era
Soft skills, such as working well with others, are required in the new work environment. Employees must also have less obvious skills, such as a willingness to learn and an understanding of their role within the larger organizational framework.
Understanding capacity: the brain of the company
A company’s capacity is its ability to take advantage of opportunities. Contextual changes enable organizations to identify their biases. Companies can benefit from, and take advantage of, these bias-busting moments by cultivating a work environment that builds capacity. In the past, you had to learn how to use technology to perform your job. People and technology are increasingly learning from one another.
Culture and capacity define the workplace
Consider the circumstances in which you create and produce rather than what your company produces. These circumstances are influenced by culture and ability. Companies can either intentionally or unintentionally create a sense of mission and value known as culture. Benefits that reflect company values are offered by workplaces with intentional cultures.
Upskilling and Reskilling for the Future
Work in the modern era is driven by three forces:
- Automation: This work is cheap, simple, repetitive, and of lower value.
- Atomization: This work is predictable and discrete, costs a fair amount, and is of average complexity and worth.
- Human and Augmentation – This work is more difficult, complex, expensive, and valuable.
The rise of algorithms
Computers have changed how people interact with physical labor.
Complex tasks will be “unbundled” by algorithms into their component parts. They can atomize or automate these components after which they can distribute them to the cloud, where people will vie for them.
Not jobs, but skills
In their lifetimes, recent graduates can anticipate holding 17 different jobs.
Ask a child what they want to do instead of what they want to be when they grow up. Children must be taught how to adjust, develop resilience, and foster agency. The desired career may no longer exist or may have undergone significant change by the time students graduate from college.
The big change
The environment, the market, and technology are all undergoing three “climate changes” that are forcing people to become better at adapting.
Your current job might not exist in 18 to 24 months due to the rapid change in the labor market.
In the next ten years, artificial intelligence (AI) will most likely completely transform all jobs.
The job posting ad
A good job posting should start with a description of your company. Describe the ideal candidate rather than the job. Describe how you want the applicant to approach the job. Creating adaptive teams necessitates the use of adaptive hiring strategies.
Adaptive teams
Create adaptive teams that are purpose-built to address a specific challenge or goal. A team, for example, could have rotating specialists—engineers, designers, and project managers—as well as a research group that looks for new opportunities.
While leaders raise the bar to meet new expectations, your teams require “clear eyes focused on an uncertain horizon.”
Robots Vs Humans
“Silicon cognition” cannot take the place of humans’ “organic cognition.”
Humans are capable of constant learning and disruption, which help them adjust to shifting conditions.
Humans are imaginative, produce ideas, connect seemingly unrelated events, and adopt various viewpoints.
Leaders must adapt to the new world
Any business should avoid basing its long-term decisions solely on quarterly profits.
More consideration needs to be given to where and how leaders take their followers. The notion that a leader’s responsibility is to derive value from people and processes is gradually giving way to the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s emphasis on adaptability and learning at a faster rate than your rivals.
Children are learning in a different way
Children require foundational knowledge to help them put data into context. They also necessitate basic literacy in traditional reading and quantitative skills, as well as digital intelligence, creativity, and collaboration.
For example, the popular online learning site Khan Academy organizes students by independence rather than age.
The future of jobs
Businesses that were once “containers” for jobs will change into “platforms” that combine technological and human expertise.
The Five Talent Types Needed In The Future
- “Foundational” – Those in charge of running a business.
- “Rotational” – People who work are only occasionally needed.
- “Contingent”: People who carry out tasks designed to meet a specific demand.
- “Transformative” – Individuals who support a business in navigating change or developing a strategy.
- “Executives” are those who coordinate the skills of others for a business or an occasion.
Experiment 1: The Cookie Monster
One person is randomly selected to lead a group of three people.
They are given four cookies to share. Each person takes a cookie. Almost always, the leader takes the last cookie.
When a person feels powerful, he or she loses interest in what other people think and loses empathy, fairness, and collaboration.
Leaders must learn to let go of the cookie.
Experiment 2: The Super Chicken Paradox
Finding the “best” candidates from the “best” universities and forcing them to compete for the top positions ensures unproductive conflicts.
By grouping the best laying hens in one cage, an evolutionary biologist tested a method for getting the most eggs out of the best laying hens among nine flocks. Only three of the nine top producers lived after pecking the others to death.
The better choice is to disperse all of the hens from the cages with the highest production rates. Egg production increased by 160 percent over a few generations, and no hen ever killed another.
Don’t hire people exactly like you
The best leaders hire for mission and mindset, but they can be wary of people who think differently than they do. Value opposing viewpoints; they add cognitive diversity to your organization.
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