Metaskills- Five Talents for the Robotic Age

by Marty Neumeier

  As the 21st century deepens, robots and algorithms will move into every area of our lives, and even into our bodies and brains. The current obsession with drugs and plastic surgery shows a willingness—even eagerness—to alter our biology with technological interventions. But the main reason this trend is likely to continue is that at every stop on the Robot Curve, new value is unlocked. In fact, you could argue that the Robot Curve has been the engine for growth over the whole course of evolution. Today, the company that doesn’t get ahead of the curve is the one that’s stranded on the wrong side of the innovation gap.

  So what does the Robot Curve say about jobs? Not surprisingly, it says that the best jobs will be at the top of curve. The top jobs determine all the other jobs down along the curve. The lower you are on the curve, the less autonomy you have, the less money you make, and the less adaptable you are when the marketplace demands new skills. In the jargon of the jobs world, lower-level skills are “brittle.”

  The Robot Curve also shows that pushing capabilities down the curve produces profits. Every time a new idea becomes a professional practice, or a professional practice becomes a rote procedure, or a rote procedure becomes a robotic operation, there’s a chance for someone to profit. For example, the IBM Watson experiment led to a large contract with WellPoint, giving its doctors a powerful new tool for analyzing symptoms and choosing the best treatments. When stock photography began to take business from custom photography, it opened up a vast online market for commercial photographers who could figure out which images the media most needed. Where most photographers saw only doom, some saw opportunity.

  After his Jeopardy! experience, contestant Ken Jennings shared his fears: “Just as factory jobs were eliminated in the 20th century by new assembly-line robots, Brad and I were the first knowledge-industry workers put out of work by the new generation of ‘thinking’ machines. ‘Quiz-show contestant’ may be the first job made redundant by Watson, but I’m sure it won’t be the last.”

  True. And this continuing pattern of destruction and creation is exactly the way the world evolves. The Robot Curve is a waterfall of opportunity that flows endlessly from the creative to the automated. If we can’t find valuable work, it’s not because we’re in a recession; we’re in a recession because we can’t find valuable work. We’ve been confusing cause and effect. We’re still trying to apply Industrial Age ideas to Robotic Age realities, and the result has been a creative and economic vortex.

  According to research by ManpowerGroup, 52 percent of companies in the US report difficulty in filling jobs. Yet even when we worry that twenty million jobs are missing, three million jobs are going unfilled. The talent vacuum is not confined to America, the company says. One in three employers around the world say they can’t find skilled workers to fill their jobs. Meanwhile, a record 210 million people are out of work.

  Kathy Smith, human resources manager at a manufacturer of airplane parts, said: “A tremendous gap exists between the workers that are available and the jobs we have open. Before, you could be a sheet metal mechanic and all you had to know was how to shoot rivets. Today, you need to do that, but also know how to inspect for quality, understand lean business principles, be able to do repairs, and be willing to continuously improve your processes and keep on learning.” In other words, workers who offer more than clock time.

  Where will the best jobs come from? Not from rich people. Giving rich people more money will not produce the jobs we need. Instead, the best jobs will come from creative people—rich or not—who put societal contribution ahead of salary and stock options.

  Employers in the Robotic Age don’t want employees to be robots. They have robots. What they want are people who think for themselves, use their imagination, communicate well and can work in teams, and who can adapt to continuous change.

  We have an unfounded fear that machines will someday start thinking like humans. What we should really fear is that humans have already started thinking like machines. Machines can be tremendously useful for storing and recalling billions of facts, for repeating complex operations at high speed, or for working tirelessly for little money and no praise. Humans who try to compete with machines will find themselves, like Ken Jennings, out of a job.

  For Final Jeopardy, the category is “Evolution.” This creature’s three-pound, massively parallel processing computer will always search for deeper answers.

  Question: What is a human?

  A crisis of happiness

  Sometime during the Great Depression, Americans began to blame their unhappiness on a lack of manufacturing growth. Sound familiar? If we could only get the factories moving again, we could put people back to work and our incomes would go back up. Then surely we’d be happy.

  So the government enlisted a panel of economists to put metrics in place to gauge our progress toward this all-important goal. The result was the national income and products account, which had as its chief feature an indicator called Gross Domestic Product. GDP measures in dollars the market value of all products and services produced during a given period, and it soon became the yardstick for the national “standard of living.” With this new measurement in place, the nation could simply focus on making money, and happiness would follow like day follows night.

  The leader of this commission, Nobel Prize winner Simon Kuznets, had no such illusion. He understood full well that other measurements were needed to assess our progress. “The welfare of a nation,” he said, “can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income.” He was echoing the voice of Thomas Jefferson, who, in developing the constitutional Bill of Rights, replaced the right to “property” with a right to the “pursuit of happiness.”

  But since happiness is hard to measure, we use GDP. Unfortunately, not only is there little correlation between happiness and a nation’s total throughput of goods and services, there may be an inverse relationship. By creating policies that favor the biggest producers of goods and services, we’re exacerbating the Hourglass Effect, transferring more of the country’s wealth and power to the top while squeezing the middle class down to the bottom. Today, GDP could be seen as a significant driver of unhappiness.

  What if, instead of measuring income, we were to measure evolutionary progress? What if we could measure increasing fairness, freedom, peace, and creativity? Wouldn’t these be more precise indicators of happiness than GDP? Better yet, why don’t we try harder to measure happiness itself?

  This is exactly what the people of Bhutan have been doing since 1972. Gross National Happiness, as they call it, has set off a global effort to adapt the measurement for international use. Nicolas Sarkozy established a commission to study it in 2008, led by Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz. American economist Jeffrey D. Sachs and British prime minister David Cameron are both strong proponents. So are epidemiologist Michael Pennock from Canada, who helped Bhutan design its original GNH instrument, and Dr. Susan Andrews, who spearheaded a series of formative events in Brazil.

  In the United States, the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index has struck a chord with workers and economists. Every year since 2008, Gallup has phoned a minimum of one thousand adults at random to inquire about indicators such as eating habits, stress levels, wellness records, emotional states, and job satisfaction. They estimate that disengaged workers are costing the country a whopping $300 billion each year in productivity losses. They found that American workers are increasingly unhappy with their supervisors, apathetic about their companies, and disengaged from their work. As you might imagine, job satisfaction is a leading indicator of job performance. Unhappy workers are unproductive workers.

  In The Progress Principle, authors Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer report that their study of 64,000 specific workday events, drawn from electronic diaries of 238 professionals across seven companies, brought them to a surprisingly pointed conclusion: “Of all the events that engage people at work, the single most important—by far—is simply making progress at meaningful work.” What mak
es people happiest, then, is not money, nor incentives, nor status, nor titles. It’s getting where we want to go. As we begin to question the productivity goals of the Industrial Age, our desire to have more is giving way to our desire to be more.

  So where does the Gallup-Healthways index say we should look for hints of 21st-century happiness? California District 14, otherwise known as Silicon Valley, a well-known bastion of workaholism. A not-uncommon workweek in District 14 is 80 hours, and it’s mostly voluntary. There are no job descriptions that specify an 80-hour week, or even a 50-hour week. What causes people here to invest so much time in their jobs is “making progress at meaningful work,” as Amabile and Kramer suggest.

  But there’s even more to it. Silicon Valley thrives on passion. People there have a vision of themselves toiling at “the burning point of history,” as science historian James Burke described it in his BBC series Connections. They’re out to change the world, and they have the freedom to contribute to the mission as they see fit. “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me,” said Steve Jobs. “Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful…that’s what matters to me.”

  In 1943 psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote a paper called “A Theory of Human Motivation.” It was based on a pyramid called the hierarchy of needs. He theorized that human beings tend to work their way from physiological needs, such as air, food, and water at the bottom of the pyramid, up to self-actualization, including spontaneity and creativity, at the top of the pyramid. Self-actualization is a privilege that must be earned, according to this model, by working up from the bottom. The term self-actualization is related to what the Greeks called eudaimonia, the joyful fulfillment of one’s potential, or the pursuit of higher-order goals.

  When eudaimonia is blocked, either by companies or society, human creativity goes underground. That’s what happened during the Industrial Age. The demands of the assembly line produced not only uniform products, but uniform people as well. There was virtually one kind of education, one sort of social behavior, one basic religion, one acceptable gender orientation, and one view of work. Those who didn’t fit in were stamped “defective” and discarded. In the headlong pursuit of productivity, the Industrial Age managed to take most of the joy out of work, the humanity out of business, and the beauty out of everyday life. Yet it also built the self-esteem layer of the pyramid, to which we can now add the soul-enriching pinnacle of self-actualization.

  There’s a new world struggling to be born. It’s a world of greater creativity, higher purpose, and deeper fulfillment. To bring it into being, we’ll need a new set of abilities that goes beyond what sufficed in the 20th century—higher-order skills that our schools have yet to prioritize.

  The workplace of the 21st century is a massive fulcrum for change. If we can transform the way we work, we can transform the way the world works. In the process, we’re likely to find something more than money in our pay packages.

  The obsolete industrial brain

  The operating metaphor of the 20th century was the factory, so it follows that the goal of education was to assemble graduates as efficiently as Ford assembled cars. We’ve been alarmingly successful at this. Education today is now a streamlined process based on maximum throughput (the highest number of graduates), extreme efficiency (the fewest number of instructors), and reliable metrics (easy-to-grade standardized tests).

  Streamlined education produces the type of graduates who excel in measurable areas of intelligence such as memorization, math, logic, and language. Unfortunately, this comes at the expense of hard-to-measure areas such as creativity, interpersonal abilities, emotional maturity, and resilience, which have been de-prioritized in the interests of efficiency. As researchers are quick to point out, it’s precisely these hard-to-measure areas of intelligence that make for great leaders and successful human beings. Therefore we shouldn’t be surprised if we’ve created a society of oddly unimaginative and uncultured people. As educational activist Ken Robinson put it, “Complaining that graduates aren’t creative is like saying, ‘I bought a bus and it sank.’”

  There’s nothing inherently wrong with fact-based knowledge and rote skills. These are useful and necessary tools for success. But in an era of massive change and daunting challenges, we need more than rote skills. We need the ability to think and act in new ways to ensure our long-term survival.

  Socrates once told a story about King Ammon of Egypt. Ammon had an argument with the god Theuth about the new invention of writing, saying it would destroy society. “If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they will rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by a means of external marks.” This, he said, “will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they will know nothing.”

  King Ammon’s fear was partially borne out. In the two-and-a-half millennia since Socrates walked the earth, the spread of literacy has clearly reduced our reliance on memory. To be fair, that was part of the deal. If you could easily pull a farmer’s almanac down from your shelf, you didn’t have to remember the exact rainfall probabilities for June. If you could walk to the public library, you could borrow a book on the Peloponnesian War rather than tracking down an expert who had memorized every battle. And, today, if you can access the Internet, you can look up the spelling of Peloponnesia, and find out a great deal more about it besides. (Did you know that Athens was ruled by thirty tyrants after losing to Sparta? That’s a lot of tyrants!)

  Whether or not Wikipedia will implant forgetfulness in our souls is hard to say. But one thing’s for sure: The amount of knowledge we’ve accumulated since the invention of writing is too big to fit in a biological brain. We need Google and Wikipedia and other organizations to collect, store, and organize our knowledge, not only to access it, but just to make sense of it.

  Psychologist Carl Jung proposed the collective unconscious as a way to understand our inherited, unconscious memory of human experience. Today the Internet seems to be creating a collective conscious, a shared memory that exists outside of our physical brains. It might be even argued that the collective conscious is a fourth brain that we’re adding on top of the three brains we already have.

  The three-brain model, or “triune brain,” was popularized by neuroscientist Paul McLean in the early 1990s. He theorized that evolution equipped us with three brains, one grown over the other, which he labeled the reptilian brain, the limbic brain, and the neocortex. The reptilian brain, or “lizard brain,” first appeared in fish about 500 million years ago, and reached its apex in reptiles about 150 milllion years ago. It works well at a simple level, but tends to be somewhat rigid and compulsive. Around the same time, on top of the reptilian brain evolved the limbic brain, or “dog brain.” This is the seat of value judgments, mostly unconscious and emotional, that have a powerful say over how we behave. The third brain, which grew over the limbic brain, is the neocortex or “human brain.” The neocortex showed up in primates two or three millions years ago, and gave us the flexible learning abilities that allowed the building of sophisticated technologies and complex cultures.

  Yet we’re restless. Evolution moves too slowly for us. So we’re taking evolution into our own hands, so to speak, building ourselves a shared artificial brain. And just as our hands had been freed to make tools when we emerged from the trees, our minds are now being freed to think in more creative ways as we come out of the factory.

  Wanted: Metaskills

  Today’s robots are primitive. They can do certain kinds of repetitious work fairly well, but their brittle skills cause them to fail if changes are introduced to their routines. This is not unlike our own Industrial Age skills, which have been mostly job-specific and not easily transferable to other tasks.

  When I worked the night shift at an aircraft factory, my job was to mold parts with a huge hydropress. But that skill was not transferable to a small drill press. S
o I had to learn to use the drill press the same way I learned the hydropress, by being shown each operation, one step at a time, by a senior person. If I’d had a general understanding of factory tools, plus a general understanding of how airplane parts were made, I could have mastered these skills rather quickly and gone on to invent shortcuts and improvements that might have become best practices for the factory.

  This higher-level understanding is the realm of metacognitive skills, or metaskills for short. They act more like guiding principles than specific steps, so they can be transferred from one situation to another without losing their effectiveness. Metaskills determine the how to, not the what to. They form the basis of what Americans call know-how, and what the French call savoir-faire, “to know to do.” They’re adaptable, not brittle.

  Skill-based knowledge, unlike fact-based knowledge, can only come from doing. Sure, you can read about the theory of a golf swing, but until you master it in practice, you won’t have anything worth knowing. It’s not just about the mechanics of the club head arcing through space, it’s the feeling of the club in your hands, the way your body moves with the swing, and the state of your mind as you tell yourself where you want the ball to go. These things can’t be understood from a manual. You have to experience them firsthand.