by Tom Goodwin
Kids will struggle to communicate if they can’t spell at all, but when spell-checkers auto-translate and software handles voice-to-text, maybe it’s not something to take up much time. Maths and the logical thinking that we gain from understanding it is essential, but perhaps we need to think of it more philosophically and get to grips with reasoning more than memorizing processes.
These are not changes we have to make, but they are principles and assumptions that we should question. The future is less about what to remove, but rather what to refocus on. I believe that there are six key attributes to develop; both at school and also in the workplace these are values at the core of who we are. This is an inside-out approach to developing robust, happy, balanced people fit to embrace the modern age.
The core characteristics are typically developed while we are young and typically shaped by educational establishments, but it’s vital that these values are imbued both in parenting as well as beyond school and for longer. These values and approaches not only will serve people well long into their careers, but should be nurtured, supported and recruited for in all companies.
The workplace will change more in the next 10 years than it has in the last 50, and roles that once relied on physical work will increasingly be automated. Roles demanding data input, routine calculation and Excel are likely to be replaced most quickly by algorithms. Customer service roles in many sectors may vanish, but roles in luxury customer service, requiring different skills and attitudes, may grow. We need to think imaginatively. Coding will soon be done by code itself, but creative problem solving may be more vital than ever. Increasingly, the world of employment focuses away from doing, and more towards thinking. The knowledge economy will need people armed with the following core skills to thrive.
Relationships
The reality of the modern working world will, for many, exist not as an employee, but as a creator of value through relationships. I don’t need to know how to code or shoot in 360 degrees or buy rights to music, but I do need to know the very best people who can. Education for the future needs to focus on ways to ensure people can build lasting, trusted, human relationships. The current environment where text messaging replaces phone calls, where e-mails replace meetings, where a generation stare nonchalantly, lonely and in isolation into phones needs to be curtailed by a focus on relationships. We need to learn how to listen, how to converse again. Leaders and managers will succeed in the future by establishing a combination of two things. Firstly, it is key that they build strong, trusted relationships with a select number of key vital connections. A quick glance at LinkedIn shows an overwhelming abundance of people. People need to know how to filter out those who are less helpful and then how best to build deep, trusted relationships with the people that really matter. Secondly, at the same time people need to go wide. Progress happens from connecting dots in new ways, in linking subject matter expertise from disparate areas in new ways. A key skill will be in building broad networks across varied disciplines, and establishing a reputation to help this network grow. I personally don’t enjoy the current climate of ‘the personal brand’, but having a personality and being consistent and charismatic with how you think and act, being known and trusted and top of mind are always going to help futureproof your career.
Keeping curiosity alive
Two of the best attributes about being young are, first that we don’t know any better and will take risks and not fear judgement, and the second is a relentless and unwavering curiosity. We don’t need to learn to be curious, we need to nurture it in our children, and, as adults, continually remind ourselves of its importance.
When smartphones access everything, what enhances our knowledge and depth of thought is curiosity. It fuels our interest and forms the need for relationships with experts. If there is one attribute that we are born with and yet dies as we mature, then it’s our innate human thirst to know more. We must embrace this. The people who open Wikipedia to get tips on their holiday abroad and end up somehow looking at the world’s longest rivers or runways, or the people for whom every browsing session ends up with 23 tabs open, are those who still feed this curiosity. Curiosity is exhausting and wonderful, and rarely discussed.
From schools to employers, teachers to parents, I’d love to see people get behind great questioning, wonderful listening and eccentric interests. We think we show the world how smart we are with the things we say, whereas most often it’s great questions that reveal who we are. Too often in life people ask questions to take it in turns to speak; they use the time between them to think of what they will say next. We need to get better at loving to listen and doing so properly. We need to listen to what people are saying in order to understand, not, as is often the case in modern social media life, to reply.
More than anything else organizations on all sides need to really digest the power of curiosity. Curiosity is not eccentricity. It’s not a side aspect to our personalities that seems fun and frivolous. It is the engine of progress, central to the accomplishment of everything we do. The first step is to ensure that organizations of all kinds understand its importance and systematically find ways to recruit it, promote it and benchmark for it. We need to celebrate people with odd interests. Put people’s talents on display and be inspired. We need to promote self-learning, especially learning that does not involve certificates and documentation. I would love to see KPIs (key performance indicators) based on outside interests and side projects. It is vital that those who show curiosity in all forms are supported, whether financially or emotionally. More than anything else we need to have curiosity agendas, programmes to bring in outside speakers, group trips to strange museums, team away-days in fascinating locations and with wonderful stimuli.
As we learned earlier, disruption happens when different ways of thinking come together, when people question things based on a new viewpoint. In the future, it is companies and leaders who have a breadth of passion, knowledge and skillsets, and the adaptability that results from it who will be most successful.
Fostering agility
We can’t begin to imagine a career in 2020, let alone 2030. We’ve no idea what skills will be needed, what jobs will exist. It’s a bold person who thinks that life will be slower. We’re all going to have to get better at being more malleable and adept at change. It’s not beyond the realms of imagination that even a 25-year-old today may have 30 different jobs in several different careers in their life. They may earn money from 10 companies at the same time. We need to get better at this flexibility.
In today’s world we tend to find that algorithms and society shield us from the unknown. We unknowingly seek out people we most easily get on with, we read the news we find most comfortable and hang out in bars where people like us go. We don’t think we are doing it but we do. At this time social networks reinforce this. We read opinion pieces that are the most palatable, most agreeable, our news diet becomes fast food, quickest to hit the pleasure receptors and most easily digested. We need to get better at working mental muscles, moving our bodies and minds to new positions.
Equally, in work, we talk about ‘fluid’ structures, of ‘scrums’ and agile teams and it all makes sense. But what if it wasn’t about this?
Decisiveness
In addition to being more comfortable with the new, I think we need to get much better at making decisions.
We need the courage to make more decisions, more quickly and with more commitment. I see companies paralysed by the fear of bad choices, living endlessly in indecision. I see companies needing to make informed decisions swamped by data. I see the result of decisions leading to inaction. We live at a time when making terrible decisions, based on bad data and bad understanding of data, isn’t punished because it was data-supported. We think data will light the way but increasingly it’s blinding us.
At the same time, the reward for moments of genius, based on superb ideas, founded in a spark of creativity and deep empathy are zero because many think of it as fortunate a
t best, and reckless at worst.
All of the time we undermine the quality of feelings. If you ask a world-class cricketer to explain how they know when to swing, they look confused. They can’t explain why, they can just feel it. Yet on further analysis they are analysing subconsciously far more data than they know. The bounce of the pitch, the humidity, the bowler’s body language, the shape of the wrist. We can easily dismiss what is innate because it’s unknown and unexplained.
More than any other attribute, indecisiveness is rooted in culture. Companies often have a culture of insecurity, of blame, of the need to appear safe in the role by not being noticed. I would love to see organizations embrace those who seek not to reduce risk, but to maximize the progress they make. A culture where people at all levels are empowered to make appropriate decisions will be faster. Companies should celebrate people who take risks, we should reward those who learn fastest, indecision should be a bigger crime than well-intentioned decisions that turn out badly.
In this environment meetings will be used less as places to share information or social bonding and more as key points in a process to get people to discuss and then decide en masse. Jeff Bezos is a master at creating a workplace based on smart choices. People get to speak, listen, disagree but commit. He talks of the need to understand differences between decisions you can easily go back on and those you must stick to. Jeff talks about the need to make decisions with the right amount of information: 90 per cent of the information needed means you are likely to be running too slow, less than 70 per cent means you don’t know enough to be informed (Bezos, 2017).
With all this we need a vision of what we are trying to accomplish, but we need to be flexible. We need to be certain at all times of our mission in our role, but always uncertain of the route there. But that journey always starts with walking, even if not always in the straightest line.
Building empathy
We need to know what it’s like to be different, how to relate to each other, and how to exceed the expectations, hopes and ambitions of others. In a world more divided and polarized than ever, we need to build bridges and commonalities. Empathy is our tool to do so.
Empathy is hard. It’s relatively difficult to put yourself in someone’s position, but this isn’t true empathy. True empathy is not about moving yourself into their position: it’s imagining that you are them in their position, in the sense that you are taking into account their values and life experience, and the whole of what makes them unique – not attempting to do that while still hanging on to what makes you and your experiences unique. Real empathy is understanding their very make-up, the things that make them who they are, the reason they do and choose what they do. It’s extremely hard. We quickly ascribe stupidity to those people who choose very different things to us. We see people who are worried about immigrants and presume it’s hate, when it may be they are worried about their own futures. We are quick to draw lines, to make generalizations, judgements, to be snobby. People who are different to us destroy the world that we want to see, one that we can understand most clearly and that makes sense to us.
In pragmatic terms we will see why parents in shopping malls don’t want AR experiences on their phones; they want their kids to stop smacking each other in the face. We will see why the results of the satisfaction survey are skewed. We will notice that asking for an e-mail address to get content won’t get real e-mails and why people won’t read the great content we’ve made on mattresses or upload their haircut to a website.
Empathy is the strongest tool we have for predicting the success of marketing, businesses and ideas. It helps us form relationships, feel happy and be part of something. It’s hard to develop, but vital to foster.
We really need to somehow foster tolerance and understanding, imagination and mental agility, such that we are better able to understand what others feel. It will help society but also help business. Firstly, I think business needs to elevate the importance of empathy. We focus so much on what is said and not what is understood, we tend to value extroverted behaviour not introverted, we like seeing the most material manifestations of what is done, not what was sensibly decided to not pursue.
We need to ensure that companies are diverse in their talent. Empathy comes from understanding the wonderful variety and depth of people, different cultures, races, classes, ages, and personality types. We tend to want to recruit and retain people who are easiest to get along with, who most readily like our ideas and think the same. This is a terrible way to make any worthwhile progress. In the search for the smoothest way to do business, we miss out on what is most useful for progress: friction. Disagreement is the energy that drives creativity; diverse thinking brings about improvements because it makes things hard, not in spite of doing so.
We need to get better at observation, take time to create processes and systems that allow people to get input properly. We have a passionate need to feel as if we are correct, so we view the world as it fits into our preconceived ideas, rather than the objective reality, which makes us feel odd, different and as if we don’t understand it. We have to get better at the discomfort true empathy brings.
And my final thought is creativity, a subject I care about so deeply I want to bring it out separately.
The power of creativity
‘It’s much easier to be fired for being illogical than being unimaginative’ (Sutherland, 2017).
Each and every one of us is born curious and creative. Schooling, friends, and ‘proper jobs’ somewhat dilute that, or (more realistically) it is metaphorically beaten out of us. We get told off for thinking too differently, for gazing out the window, for having the audacity to dream or being naive. Creativity when you’re young is easy to maintain, but modern life tells you it’s cheating, or not correct, or indefensible.
In the real world we get paid to solve problems or make or do things. It’s never to remove steps or decide it’s not right, or solve a problem a simpler way. The greatest lever of value that we’ve ever known is the power of an idea. Great design rarely costs much more, but it can unleash greater savings or increases in revenue than anything non-design based.
If Balfour Beatty is told a bridge needs to be built and asked to come up with an estimate of how expensive it will be, the answer isn’t going to be a ferry or getting people to just drive around to another bridge and make the journey fun, or a far cheaper cable car or a way to charge people at peak times more to lessen the burden on the existing bridge.
We need to give paramount importance to creativity and ideas in the future, but my big worry is that we don’t tend to think because thinking is cheap. It’s unmeasurable and it’s unknown and most people prefer certainty and spreadsheets and wasting money in a boring and defensible way. Most people do their jobs not to maximize the chance of something wonderful happening, but to minimize the chance of something bad happening.
I’ve a feeling that companies with vast resources rely on assets, processes and efficiency, rather than having to dig deep into the last resort, thinking or creativity. Which is odd because process and efficiency is a sure-fire way to get tiny incremental gains, where paradigm shifts in improvement come from innovation.
The comfort of properness and expense
Generally, very big problems are assigned very big budgets. After all, they are important. Big budgets allow every type of solution, from small fixes to huge constructions. Big budgets lead to an environment of fear – after all, something big is also serious. They lead to large teams, format processes, big decisions, pressure on shoulders. And it’s precisely this culture and way of thinking in which creativity suffers.
Thinking is too cheap to be taken seriously, ideas seem flimsy in such an objective and formal atmosphere, creativity is too personal and any one of these outputs doesn’t feel tangible enough to be taken seriously.
Can you imagine the courage you must have to suggest to a CEO or prime minister or president that the answer to your massive transport problem with a $10 bill
ion budget is a $50,000 app? That the solution to education isn’t billions on construction but a new aggregation engine? That the best way to deal with global warming and extreme weather could be to adapt to the effects, not trillions on stopping the problem? Can you imagine how vulnerable you’d feel?
Creativity needs constraints
The problem with money is that it creates too much comfort, too much process, too much conservatism, too much to lose. Have you ever noticed how successful some companies are despite limited funds?
Creativity comes from constraints, from people using ingenuity not power, thinking not construction, from people having to make something worth talking about, not paying people to spread the word. More than ever before it seems that the high cost of advertising in the modern era, as Robert Stephens, founder and chief inspector of The Geek Squad said, is the price you pay for an unremarkable product (Stephens, 2008).
I’ve never seen anyone fired for making a sub-standard product, spending a fortune trying to market it in a traditional way, and it not succeed. Yet I’ve seen many people fear for their jobs when saying something isn’t good enough. I’ve been in countless corporate meetings where compliant people tell the boss what they want to hear, not what’s most likely to lead to better outcome.
Having worked in advertising in the good old days – the long boozy lunches, the extravagant holiday parties, the nice shoots on beaches – the one thing I miss from those times isn’t that laid-back attitude and money that swirled around, it’s the confidence we had. We used to be there, paid to tell the client what to do. We were there as a trusted partner to save $100 million on launching a product that wasn’t good enough. Our value was and should still be today in marketing to understand the consumer landscape and suggest creative ways to launch products.