Lynda Gratton - The Future of Work

9 Reasons Robots are Distorting our View of the Future

There are acres of books, innumerable conferences and endless press speculation about the rise of the robot. We first witnessed IBM’s Big Blue defeat Jeopardy contestants and then go on to beat chess masters. But, we thought, robots can’t do easy stuff like walking up stairs – until we sat bewitched by the Boston Dynamics Big Dog robot which can positively scamper over obstacles. And to cap it all economists are reminding us that within the next decade up to 60% of jobs could be lost to advances in machine learning and robotics.

So it’s no surprise that when we let our minds speculate about the future we become fixated by the rise of the machines. We imagine that over the coming decades those wizards in Silicon Valley will be pumping out a continuous supply of technological products that will perform tasks we didn’t even know we needed and, as a result, we frame the future in terms of our consumption of these delights.

Speculations about the future are something I have been transfixed by as Andrew Scott and I have written our book The 100 Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity. When we all live longer, then the context of these longer lives becomes fascinating.

But as we imagine the future, should we let technological developments be the major framing? It seems to me that this obsession about our robotic future is missing the point, and at a lecture given this week by Judy Wajcman, Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics, I began to understand why – summarised here in nine bite-sized thoughts:

1. It’s a geek's view of the world. Those wizards in Silicon Valley and other technological hot spots around the world are a homogenous bunch. They are mostly male, in their 30s, deeply into gaming and technology from childhood and often introvert. So as with any homogenous group, they are likely to view the world and the future through their own lens.
2. It’s hard technological determinism. The result of this is the notion that somehow technology just develops and we humans have little impact on the velocity or speed of this development.
3. It’s myopic. This single lens perspective leaves a great deal of the story untold. Five hundred years ago Thomas More wrote Utopia in which he described an imagined island community. He described their practices of engagement and marriage, their celebrations of life and death, and their laws and ways of living. His was a much richer and interesting view of the future.
4. Images of the future leave women out. Well not quite – would the technology films Ex Machina or Her work if the robot or operating system was a man? So this technological future casts women in a certain role. But as inventors or creators or imaginers of the future - women are almost absent.
5. It is ambivalent about time. So here is the paradox. Most machines are there to provide us with the gift of time and yet the technologies we create are the very same that seem to rob our time. Is the future really 300 emails a day, and is the only way out of this a cleverer machine?
6. It takes away human resolve. Rather than imagining we are the central players in this vision of the future, we seem instead to be playing a walk on part unable to make our needs and hopes and aspirations felt.
7. We see ourselves as hostages to the machines. And by doing so we focus on what we have lost (jobs, peace of mind) rather than what we could gain in the future.
8. It reduces the big questions. As we try to frame the future and prepare for it, it seems to me that Thomas More was right – the big questions are about how we want to live with each other, what our communities could look like, what it is we value, how we might think about what we want to tell our children. So surely our questions about the future should center as much on this as on the technology?
9. It makes us less human. In a world where technology has reduced some of our more onerous tasks (imagine life without a washing machine) surely our conversations should be about what makes us more human – how the future could be about creativity, innovation, intuition.

Perhaps now, in the year of the anniversary of More’s Utopia, it is time to re-imagine our future in its totality, embracing families and communities, work and rituals.

Davos 2016: Time to Learn About Learning

As an educator I am fascinated by the way that learning will be re-shaped over the coming decades. Here are some of the far-reaching questions debated at Davos this year and the experiments discussed.

1. Shouldn’t craft-based apprenticeship be encouraged?

Historically the returns to higher education have been significant: Graduates have earned more than non-graduates. But as more executives are bemoaning the lack of job-related skills in graduates, will this trend persist? Or, should apprentice learning be encouraged, particularly at a time when artisanal endeavours could well be a growing sector of the workforce?

During the industrial revolution the craft-based apprenticeship systems in many countries were destroyed. Is it now time to re-invigorate this system of creating opportunities for young people to learn a craft in a working environment? And if they are to be re-created, what form could they take? What role could public/private partnerships play? Alain Dehaze, CEO of Adecco Group, Switzerland, talked of how he is chairing a global coalition to bring together the many stakeholders involved in this. My own view is that apprenticeship learning will be one of the most significant growth areas in the coming years.

2. What will be the valuable skills of the future?

This is not a new question, but embedded within it are three broad issues each of which will become ever more curial. The first issue is, what are the valuable skills that can be augmented by AI and machine learning?

In the debate about AI and machine learning it is becoming clear that ‘soft skills’ – curiosity, empathy, compassion, collaboration - will become crucial. But what is less clear is the learning infrastructure that supports and encourages these skills. The CEO of Lockheed Martin, Marillyn Hewson, described how in an industry focused on technical skills they have created a package for ‘soft skill’ development that is being rapidly rolled out into schools and colleges.

Second, what is the best balance between science and liberal arts, and specialist and generalist? An Asian delegate remarked to me that just at the time when the West has decided that STEM subjects are more important than liberal arts, Asia - where STEM skills have always been highly valued – is questioning whether liberal arts should now become more central to the curriculum. And there is more: should people specialise deeply in one subject or should they have a foundation of general knowledge? I think fundamentally these are questions of balance and context and they will continue to be debated as education and industry tries to create an equilibrium.

Third, how can entrepreneurial skills be encouraged?  There is no doubt that the issue of entrepreneurship will become more crucial as the creation of small businesses and the support of individual producers becomes the powerhouse of employment in countries with historically high youth unemployment. What does it take to support someone in building their own business – financial acumen, alliance building skills, perhaps even network augmentation?

3. How will life-long learning be achieved?

From my own research on the implications of the 100-year life what becomes clear is that to continue to be productive into our 80s we will all have to up-skill, re-skill and re-learn. That means being prepared to invest in learning whilst we are at work, or using weekends and holidays to learn, or taking dedicated time out. This has fundamental implications many of which are positive – it will break the ‘age segmentation’ which is so much an aspect of current education; it will encourage partnerships between educators and corporations as they attempt to shape life-long learning environments; and it will provide opportunities for people to re-shape their potential throughout their life.

4. Shouldn’t education institutions use outcomes as a measure of success?

There are those, like Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School who argue that education is ripe for innovation and disintermediation. Whilst traditional education has certainly changed little over the last century, the forces of change are gathering: there is growing evidence of the skills gap between the needs of the workplace and the skills of graduating students; traditional education is seen as elitist and simply serving to reinforce the status quo. And as the Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore Tharman Shanmugaratnam remarked, there is concern that this is an industry untouched by the need to measure outcomes and performance. It seems inevitable that over the coming years these forces will result in a profound reevaluation of learning and education.

What genocide can teach us about change

My partner and I went to Rwanda a couple of weeks ago. Our mission was to trek up the country's highest mountains to see the mountain gorillas that inhabit these bamboo forests. 

People had told us that this would be a "life-changing experience" and indeed both of us came back changed. But it was not seeing the gorillas that changed us. It was being in Rwanda. 

Most people will have a vague recollection of the terrible genocide that ravaged the country 20 years ago when people, often neighbours, turned on each other during 100 days of bloodletting. More than a million people died. 

Yet now people appear to live in peace with each other and the country is prospering. How could this happen and what might we learn from it? 

I realise it's trite to make any comparison between the terror of a genocide and the organisational life and change that I study. Yet I feel I've learnt a great deal from my experiences in Rwanda and wanted to share them because it seems to me that there is a great deal to learn. Here are four insights: 

- Facing up to the truth. The truth in the genocide was beyond imagination. Yet painstakingly and courageously, families and communities faced up to what had happened. First in courts and then in community groups the truth of what happened was openly discussed and confronted. 

- Removing negative symbols of the past. The hatred between groups prior to the genocide was fuelled in part by cattle owning. Some groups had more cattle than others and their superiority was demonstrated through cattle ownership. After the genocide the government stopped the grazing of cattle on public ground - all cattle had to be kept in domestic yards. They also ensured that every family - however poor - owned a cow. 

- Creating pride. Rwanda is spotless - not just cleaner than any African country, but cleaner than London. Every month the whole community get together and clean their space. It's an act of enormous pride. What ever their past, this is a community capable of competence, they can keep their street clean. 

- Creating a sense of the future. Almost every young person we spoke to felt positive about their future. They did not want to describe themselves through their tribal grouping but rather as 'Rwandans'. They felt positive about the future of the country and trusted their leaders. 

These are four lessons that anyone involved in corporate change knows. What the extraordinary change that Rwanda tells us is that it's possible - by following these four lessons relentlessly - to turn around from even the darkest of moments.