Metaskills- Five Talents for the Robotic Age

by Marty Neumeier

  Now imagine being presented with an idea that’s guaranteed to turn your actual world upside down. It could be a radical new business initiative, a sweeping organizational change, or an unexpected proposal of marriage. Your first reaction might easily be resistance. You might cast around for logical arguments against it. You might even shoot the messenger. The truth is, most people love change until it affects them. Scott Berkun says, “The secret tragedy of innovators is that their desire to change the world is rarely matched by support from the people they hope to help.”

  What often happens when a new idea hits strong resistance is on-the-spot compromise. The presenter simply “sells out” in order to salvage some of the work or avoid conflict. Yet discounting the integrity of an innovation is like buying an airline ticket halfway to China—you save some money, but you never arrive. A better idea is to take your audience on the same journey you went on, but without the detours and discomforts.

  The first step in selling a concept into an organization is to understand what geneticist J.B.S. Haldane knew when he charted the “four stages of acceptance.” Whenever a game-changing idea is presented, the first reaction of colleagues is to call it “worthless nonsense.” As it begins to slowly take hold, the same colleagues label it “interesting, but perverse.” Later, when the idea is all but proven, they admit that it’s “true, but unimportant.” Finally, after success is assured, they’ll claim it as their own: “I always said so.” This pattern is so common that you can almost use it as a test for promising ideas. Extreme resistance can be a portent of extreme success.

  The second step is to condense the four stages into a shorter time span. If you can take your audience on the journey from “this is worthless nonsense” to “I always said so” in a few minutes or days instead of a few months or years, you’ll be able to keep the integrity of your idea and still launch it in a timely fashion. The best way to condense the journey is with a story. The story can take the form of a fable, a comic strip, a children’s book, or any other narrative vehicle. The main thing is to keep it simple. Fact-laden PowerPoints will not win hearts and minds. Dr. Spencer Silver spent five fruitless years trying to persuade 3M of the value of his adhesive because he couldn’t tell a simple story about what would later become Post-it Notes. If he had imagined this particular use of his adhesive, he could have turned the prototype itself into a vivid story vehicle.

  When your goal is to describe a vision for the future, information is not enough. People are up to their necks in information. What they need is a way to imagine life after the change, and compare it with life today. That’s why it’s called a vision and not a plan. Managers get frustrated when employees say their company has no vision. “Of course, we have a vision,” the manager sputters. “It’s to be a $5 billion company in five years!” Actually, that’s not a vision. A vision is an image, a picture, a clear illustration of a desired end state. When Microsoft started up, the company’s vision was “a computer on every desktop and in every home.” That was something everyone could visualize.

  When you lead people from what is to what could be using a simple story, they can more easily visualize themselves playing a role. And if you give them a clear illustration of the happily-ever-after moment, they’ll carry it in their minds as they forge onward. Where there’s a way, there’s a will. A clearly articulated story inspires people to volunteer for a mission instead of waiting for orders.

  The final challenge in selling into an organization is to shepherd the concept through the “valley of death.” This is the bog between the original vision and its commercial deployment, where many a promising idea has met its untimely end. New ideas are fragile. They can be trampled by a word, a glance, or a noncommittal shrug. The job of the shepherd is to shield the idea until it becomes strong enough to fend for itself.

  One way to deflect the sticks and stones of naysayers is through a deft use of metrics. When you can counter doubts with concrete numbers, you’ll find it has a calming effect on people’s nerves. Conventional wisdom says that innovation is difficult to measure. But that’s only true if you believe measurement must have an exact value. A more practical approach is to look for “quantified uncertainty reduction,” a handrail for the faint of heart. Bayes’ Theorem is one such approach. It’s a mathematical formula that expresses how a belief should change to account for new evidence. While Bayes’ Theorem and other formulas are guesses, they can remove enough doubt to make room for courage.

  Another way to keep the naysayers at bay is to find a powerful sponsor. The leaders of organizations usually aren’t the innovators. But they can be influential in shifting the norms of the group. In the words of social psychologist Deborah Prentice, “leaders are high-status superconformists, embodying the group’s most typical characteristics or aspirations.” They’re in a good position to support an innovative concept if they can see its value to the goals they’ve set.

  What leaders and designers have in common is a shared interest in positive change. If design is the process of changing an existing situation to an improved one, then in a sense all leaders are designers, and all designers are leaders. Even politicians long for positive change, but the way the political system is set up, they aren’t free to promote unproven ideas. They have to wait until ideas gain traction at the grassroots level before they can embrace them.

  Dreams don’t become innovations overnight. They require visualizing, nurturing, refining, protecting, proving, improving, and selling in. Even smaller dreams—such as writing a great app, filming a taut documentary, designing a new product, creating an iconic ad campaign, inventing a new dance—must go through the same stages. Lawrence Summers, a former president of Harvard University, said that a good rule in life is that “things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then happen faster than you thought they could.”

  To me, launching an innovation is like giving birth: it’s painful, it seems to last forever, and afterwards you don’t get much sleep. Of course, I’ll never know for sure. I can only imagine that giving birth is like launching an innovation: you wonder what you were thinking, you wish you’d never started, and when it’s over you feel very proud.

  The big to-do list

  Recently a group of astronomers in Geneva announced the discovery of a promising Goldilocks planet. What’s a Goldilocks planet, you ask? Well, it’s one that’s not too big, not too small, not too hot, not too cold. One that’s just right. It’s a planet in the so-called habitable zone, orbiting at the right distance from its sun, with earthlike temperatures, liquid water, a rocky surface, and a decent atmosphere.

  This particular Goldilocks planet (with the endearing name of HD 85512b) is 3.6 times as massive as the earth and circles its sun at about one-fourth of the distance that our own planet does. It takes only 58 days to complete one orbit (so you could celebrate your birthday six times as often). Its sun is orange and only one-eighth as bright as ours. But the good news is this: It’s only 36 light-years from Earth, located in the constellation Vela. That means if we could figure out how to travel at the speed of light, then find our way to Vela, we could reach the surface in less than four decades (“Dad, are we there yet?”).

  When I was eight years old I led a neighborhood effort to build and launch our first rocket ship to Mars. It ran into technical difficulties almost immediately. We finished the hull on the first day, but we were lacking a means of propulsion, a guidance system, and a way to make the ship spaceproof. At this point it was just wood with an open-air cockpit. We put the project on hold until we could crack the few remaining problems.

  Is this the same kind of project? Why would we need a list of Goldilocks planets anyway? Is it because the world’s scientists are, at heart, only eight years old? Or is it because enough people believe we’ll need to move?

  Around two million years ago, at the time of Homo erectus, the planet Earth played host to billions of animals, but only a few thousand of them were humans. The human population stayed fairly s
table—until approximately fifty thousand years ago when Cro-Magnon man launched the first cultural revolution, a steady acceleration in the use of tools, fire, bipedal walking, and, most important, spoken language. The population began to surge, and, armed with these new skills, humans began to venture up from Africa to Europe and around to Australia. It was the Cro-Magnons who left us the cave paintings.

  The second surge began about ten thousand years ago. First we figured out how to produce food using a predictable system of agriculture, then we invented writing so we could pass our knowledge down and across to others. This was a tipping point at which “our ability to modify the biosphere exceeded the planet’s ability to modify us,” says Kevin Kelly. In other words, our technology was evolving faster than our DNA. By the year 1 AD, the population had grown to 300 million.

  The third surge coincided with the Industrial Revolution about 200 years ago. The mass production of books, starting just after the Renaissance, had begun to democratize science and technology. By the year 1800 we had grown to one billion human beings. Only 127 years later, two billion. We hit three billion in the next 33 years, and four billion in only 15 more. Today we’re at a teeming seven billion.

  This exponential population growth lies at the heart of our fears about the future. How many humans can the earth support? Are we good for the planet, or just a virus that will eventually run its course and leave the damaged biosphere to recover on its own? This sort of runaway population growth is known as a Malthusian crisis. Thomas Malthus was the economist who, in 1798, wrote “An Essay on the Principle of Population.” In it he warned, “The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.” He imagined a cascading failure in which widespread famine led to the spread of disease and the decimation of the human race.

  Today’s Malthusians have generalized the problem of feeding an outsized population to include all natural limits, such as using up our fossil fuels, exhausting our forests, compromising our air, contaminating our water, shrinking our biodiversity, and stripping out our minerals. In their view we’re like children who, given a priceless collection of gold coins, spend them all in gumball machines. It took the earth 4.5 billion years to accumulate the resources we now enjoy, yet we’re tearing through them like there’s no tomorrow. “We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors,” says the proverb. “We borrow it from our children.” Unfortunately, most of today’s talk about natural resources revolves around whether we can extract them. One wonders if the earth will collapse when it’s finally hollowed out. Clearly, if we go on as we are, we won’t be able to sustain our evolutionary progress.

  “But we won’t go on as we are,” says Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist. “That’s what we never do.” He says we’ll try to invent new technologies and new systems and new philosophies to take us to the next level. Just because we don’t know how doesn’t mean we won’t know how. We’ll muddle through.

  Let’s start by compiling our to-do list. What are the grand challenges facing us in the 21st century? Which problems, if addressed, could unleash a new wave of health and prosperity?

  For one, we could slow the extinction of animal and plant life. Losing a species is not only sad, it weakens the overall resilience of our ecosystem. Biodiversity is a key factor in sustaining a healthy planet.

  We could make cities more livable. Researchers predict that 75 percent of the world’s population will live in them by 2050. Cities offer huge advantages, including the sharing of resources, knowledge, and talent. But does that mean we have to give up trees, quiet streets, and clean air?

  Let’s get a handle on our food problem. Half of the world is growing obese while the other half is going hungry. We don’t seem to know how to feed ourselves. Figuring out the food situation is not only worthy work, but urgent work.

  Global warming is nearing condition red. Despite the naysayers, we have cause for alarm. Rising oceans and the loss of animal populations are bad enough—we shouldn’t compound the problem with denial. We need to act.

  Energy. The fuel that drove us here won’t get us where we’re going. Everyone knows that, but it’s still a challenging problem. Wouldn’t it be sad if we poisoned our own atmosphere with fossil fuels, then discovered we didn’t have enough to get us to a Goldilocks planet?

  On the subject of pollution, we need to clean up the oceans. The thing that makes our own planet the best possible Goldilocks planet is our water. It’s the envy of the universe.

  We also need to reduce the waste stream. If we’re really smart and determined, we should be able to design our products so they can be recycled instead of downcycled or thrown away. Of course, nothing can actually be thrown away. There is no “away” in a closed system.

  Let’s democratize medicine. This is more than a humanitarian cause. As long as medicine doesn’t reach every corner of the planet, the human race is in danger of fast-moving viruses and other contagions. As we become more connected, we become more exposed.

  Then there’s war. While war is generally on the wane, we need to outgrow it entirely. War is the very essence of entropy. Under the strain of seven billion people, we can no longer afford the wholesale waste that comes from large-scale, mechanized violence. It’s a drain on resources and a drain on the human spirit.

  These are a few of the urgent items. Once we cross them off the list, we can tackle the really advanced ones, such as how to get around the speed of light. Then traveling to those Goldilocks planets will be more than a fairy tale.

  Obviously, huge challenges like these are beyond the reach of a single person, no matter how many metaskills he or she masters. So-called wicked problems can only be addressed through collaboration. Yet the people who will make the most difference in tomorrow’s groups are those who can foster a shared vision, then pursue it with a passion, using a combination of feeling and seeing, dreaming and making. If this sounds like you, there’s one more metaskill you’ll want—learning, the opposable thumb of the five talents.

  LEARNING

  Impossible is nothing

  Our school system was built on the belief that education is a form of programming. It presumes people will need to follow standardized modes of thought if they’re to contribute profitably to society. So the game that guidance counselors play is one of prediction. They ask themselves, In the near future, which jobs will be most abundant?

  This leads to the kind of advice we received at my college-preparatory high school: Aim for a degree in accounting or law, since these are prestigious, high-paying professions. Guess what? A large number of graduates ended up in accounting and law. The rest of us drifted off into nonsanctioned roles and workaday jobs, or simply fell off the grid, resigned to the view that we weren’t very valuable.

  Okay. It was the ’60s. But the pressure to conform is still palpable a half-century later. I often hear students make statements like, “I guess I’ll be going into social media, since that’s where the money is.” Or, “It looks like economic power is shifting to China, so I'm learning Mandarin.” Or, “Biology is the new black.” There’s an air of fatalism about these pronouncements, a sense that one’s future is both determined and limited by the job market du jour.

  The future doesn’t belong to the present. And we don’t belong to our education. It belongs to us. We need to take responsibility not only for what we learn, but how we learn. As Howard Gardner said, “We need to be able to formulate new questions, and not just rely on tasks or problems posed by others.” More importantly, we need to be able to transfer learning from one context to another and not settle for rote answers.

  “If you answer questions on a multiple-choice test in a certain way,” he says, “or carry out a problem set in a specific manner, you will be credited with understanding. No one ever asks the further question: But do you really understand?” The unspoken agreement is that a certain level of performance is adequate for this pa
rticular class. Gardner’s view is that even honors students suspect that their knowledge is fragile, which contributes to the uneasy feeling that they—and even the educational institution itself—are somehow fraudulent.

  Today’s students are not only rewarded for shallow learning, they’re punished for deep learning. Genuine learning requires going “offroad,” spending as much time as necessary to really understand a subject or a discipline. Traditional schools are simply not set up for this. If an ambitious student decides to buck the system and seek a genuine level of understanding, the outcome is likely to be a bad scholastic record.

  Here's my advice for serious students: Instead of expecting traditional schools to do what they can’t do, take your education into your own hands. Use traditional courses for what they can do—introduce you to what’s broadly known—and use other vehicles to explore what’s not broadly known, what’s special to your own deep interests, and therefore more valuable to you. These vehicles might include apprenticeships, workshops, special projects, noncredit classes, online tutorials, or self-prescribed reading regimens. When you shift your focus from getting grades to gaining understanding, you set yourself on the road to mastery. You begin learning how to learn.

  Self-directed learning, or autodidacticism, is a powerful practice because it lets you build a new skill on the platform of the last one. Learning to learn is personal growth squared. It gives you the ability to move laterally from one skill to another by applying deeply understood principles to adjacent disciplines. The faster the world changes, the more fluidly you need to adapt. “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write,” said Alvin Toffler in Rethinking the Future, “but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”