- I'm here at UNLEASH today, speaking with Gary Bolles,
Chair for the Future of Work at Singularity University.
Welcome, Gary.
- Thank you.
- So, Chair for the Future of Work
at Singularity University. - Yes.
- Can you tell me a little bit more about this?
- Absolutely.
So, Singularity University is a global learning platform.
We've got about two dozen partners around the world
that use our brand.
We've got over 300 adjunct faculty, who are brainiacs
on everything from artificial intelligence
to next-generation medicine.
And we've got about a million people
that have come through our programs, in one form or another.
- All right, and so, what are you training these people in?
I mean, I hear, obviously, that you've got all kinds
of brainiacs, and I imagine different kind of programs,
but what are the main things that you're training people on?
- So what the founders of Singularity, 11 years ago,
Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil realized,
is that there are these exponential technologies
that are transforming our industries, our organizations
and our lives, and we need to be able to help people
to understand the mechanics of those technologies,
and not just to see them as disruption,
but to actually see them as tools that we can each use
to be able to read that change.
- Yes, so, it's about changing people's mindset, in a way,
I guess, and looking at technology as something
that is going to make their lives easier,
and is going to enable them to work differently?
- So, talk about mindset and skillset.
So, the whole idea behind an exponential mindset
is that, as Ray Kurzweil plotted, there's a continuing,
exponential curve for so many technologies,
originally for microprocessors, but again and again
in a range of different arenas, where the pace of change
is only going to continue to accelerate.
And so, the mindset that says that's pretty inevitable,
and whether it's good or bad kind of doesn't matter,
it is what it is.
And so how do we help people to be able to understand
that it's a mindset shift?
How do you realize
that there's going to be continuous change?
And how do we put the strategies in place
so that we can continually adapt?
So that's the mindset, and then the skillset is,
well, what are those actual skills?
I typically talk about four, what I call sort of
the skills for tomorrow, or exponential skills.
PACE, problem solvers who are adaptive, creative
and with empathy.
Everybody's got their different models of what is needed
for that skillset, but the basic premise is that
if it is a world of continuing exponential change,
we need to all have a completely different new tool set
in our, or tool kit, that we have access to,
that allows us to be able to, not only adapt
to those changes, but to be able to drive those changes.
- Yeah, I was actually, when I heard you talking about that
I hear some soft skills, obviously, going through all this.
- Well actually, they're all what we would,
so there's actually research, believe it or not,
going back to the 1950s, that breaks down skills
into two, sort of, big bins.
One is what we often call knowledges, which is information
that's sort of anchored in an arena,
and another are our skills that are transferrable,
that are usable in a range of different situations.
And unfortunately, we call those hard skills
and soft skills.
The PACE skills that I talk about, they are all
what would typically be classified as transferrable skills.
And the truth is that, what's increasingly becoming clear,
is that so much of our traditional education institutions
were focused on knowledges.
I mean, that's where we kept the information in the past,
was in the brains of teachers
and in the books on the shelves in the schools,
and today we keep the world's information
in our digital distraction devices.
And so, increasingly, what we've got to do
is realize that knowledge is we're going to get
just in time and just in context, that is,
we're going to solve a problem right in front of us.
But the transferrable skills,
the skills usable in a range of different situations,
when you explicitly train people to be able to use those,
I've got nine courses on LinkedIn Learning,
where I talk about everything from the new roles of work
to building adaptive managers
and building adaptive employees,
and the whole premise is, we must explicitly learn
these skills, so that we can use them
in a range of different situations,
because we can't possibly anticipate the problems
of tomorrow that we're going to need to solve.
- Exactly, and that's what I wanted
to talk to you about, as well.
How do you prepare your workforce, maybe not for 10 years,
but how do you prepare your workforce
for five years from now?
You already mentioned, of course, these, well,
let's say soft skills, transferrable skills, better.
That's a very important part,
but if we look at other ways organizations can prepare
themselves for this, do you have any advice?
- So, quite a bit.
(laughter)
Yeah,
don't ask chair for the future of work
on advice on the future of work,
you're going to get lots of advice.
So, I'll give you some of the basics.
So the first is that, the rhetoric around
that there's all of these jobs
that we haven't even envisioned,
and the rhetoric around that robots and software
are going to take all the existing jobs,
so suddenly we've all got to be able to do those
new jobs of tomorrow, it turns out that the research
doesn't actually really, fully support that.
What is says is that, the tasks that so many of us perform,
are going to change.
That more and more automation
will perform some of those tasks,
and increasingly what'll happen is,
if you think of it in terms of a Venn diagram,
if this is the work you're doing today,
this is the work you're doing tomorrow,
there's still a significant amount of overlap
in the tasks, the problems that you're solving,
and the skills that you're using,
but the nature of the work continually changes.
And so, the context of work will change.
I talk a lot about what I call a portfolio of work.
It's no longer one person, one job,
but it's increasingly a range of different projects
and tasks, and I talk a lot about how organizations
need to, what my friend John Hago calls, unbundle.
That is, they need to think completely differently
about the way that they channel human energy,
to solve a different set of problems.
In the past what we did is, we created these things
called organizations, and we had hierarchies.
And, as I'll talk about today, we treated that as a box.
There's abundance outside the box.
My friend Peter Diamandis, the co-founder of Singularity,
talks a lot about abundance,
and there's scarcity inside the box.
What organizational leaders, and especially HR need to do
is, to have a completely new mindset.
Not think of it as a box, where you basically try to manage
this scarcity internally, but instead to think of it
as a network, that is, unbundle the box,
soft edges of the box, everything from a problem
and project-centric way of managing inside the organization,
teaching managers to become,
what my friend Esther Wojcicki calls, the guide on the side,
rather than the command and control manager,
to mentorships, apprenticeships, project work, gig work,
platform work, all the above.
All of those unbundle the organization
and create what I call the new network.
And so, that's a completely different mindsets change,
and, especially for HR people,
who are used to the very process-centric work
of the past, of getting people into the box
and managing them inside the box.
It's often a failure of imagination.
We can't actually picture what that more exponential
organization is going to look like.
- Gary, when we look into the future of work,
how does your ideal future of work look?
- Well, I'm very consistent on this.
The most positive future of work for me,
is one that's a future of work for humans.
If we take the whole rhetoric that, basically,
robots and software are going to take all the jobs,
I always say robots and software don't take jobs,
humans give them away.
If we're going to continue to automate a whole bunch of tasks,
to try to reduce costs within the organizations,
and we don't think in terms of the ways
that we're actually helping to channel human energies,
then it's a failure for all of us.
Instead, what the organization needs to become,
is a platform on which those energies are channeled
in the most effective way possible,
where humans come together to collaborate,
to be able to channel their particular skills
and knowledges and experiences, to be able to work together
to solve the problems of tomorrow.
And so, that is a completely different way of thinking.
It's a new mindset, it's a new way of thinking
about the organization as a platform
for channeling those energies.
And if we can do that, and then we can leverage
more and more technologies to allow humans
to be able to do that.
To use AI to help us to uncover our own abilities,
to be able to collaborate on using our abilities together,
then that's a more positive future of work for humans.
- Definitely.
Beautifully said.
Thank you very much, Gary.
- Any time.
(gentle music)