Lynda Gratton - The Future of Work

Davos 2018: the imperatives for job reskilling

The mood at Davos 2018 was more upbeat than last year. Recall that in January 2017 those gathered on the snowy peaks were confronted by two unforeseen events – Brexit and President Trump. This year both events are in play – in fact PM Theresa May in her address hardly mentioned Brexit and President Trump gave a conciliatory pro-business speech (accompanied by a marching band). With the central banks and the IMF predicting growth rates of 2% and beyond, Davos man (and woman) are feeling the worst is behind them.

Instead much of the focus was on the impact of AI – ministers and Prime Ministers and Presidents (Emmanuel Macron and Theresa May in particular) worried about big data and issues of privacy; CEOs fretted about how they could transform their companies to make the most of digital capabilities; and there was a general concern about the impact of technology on job loss.

My own focus was on work and education. This year I am a Steward of the WEF Council on Work, Education and Gender and so attended a host of meetings with politicians, non-governmental groups (such as the ILO) and CEOs. Here are my six takeaways about that:

No one knows …

There is an understanding that many tasks will be automated and jobs will be lost, and that new tasks and new jobs will be created. In general, those lost will be routine work, and those gained will be either jobs that are hard to automate (caring work for example) or jobs that rely on creativity and innovation. But right now no one can be specific about the reach or the speed.

AI in the ascendance

What is clear is there is much excitement about AI – Theresa May for example name checked DeepMind in her speech and shared a vision of London as the AI capital of the world, and there were many sessions on AI with long queues to get in. The excitement was palpable about the speed of development (witness for example the computer and analytical power of DeepMind), and the breadth of impact (for example on computing healthcare outcomes). Words like ‘super human’ and ‘artificial general intelligence’ became common parlance. Some said AI would exceed human intelligence within 20 years – others thought earlier.

Disruptions and transition

There was a consensus that we are at a point of major disruption and transition between a past of job security and stability – and a future of flex and continuous learning where ‘combinations’ of art and science would be particularly valuable and where STEM skills would be in the ascendance. Yet many acknowledge that whilst this is a major transition, few governments or companies are prepared. An undercurrent conversation was ‘what is it that humans can do?’ Yes, we can be creative, innovative and inquisitive – but are our corporations and the way we live our lives creating space for these high functioning human capabilities?  And, if work goes, what then brings purpose and meaning to our lives, and are conversations about Universal Basic Income simply sticking plasters on a much deeper issue? 

Partnerships

In gatherings of social groups, governments, educators and companies there was a clear agreement that no one group could solve the challenges of job loss. Who should support employees to make the shift? Could governments step in with financial support, should corporations be ‘nudged’ to do more, should educators finally take the plunge into ‘lifelong learning’, or should the risk be taken by the individual employee who must assume more responsibility for retraining throughout their lives?

Some early movers

We heard of places where governments, educators and companies are moving ahead. I was in sessions with ministers from both the Netherlands and Denmark as they described the initiatives they are taking. Some, like Germany and Singapore, are focusing on apprenticeships as a way to ensure job-ready skills, others like Denmark are creating ‘roadmaps’ to show employees how their jobs will evolve and what they will have to do to make the transition. Similarly, companies like Westpac, TCS and AT&T are trying to bridge the gap by creating a map of the future and putting significant resources aside to motivate, guide and support employees; whilst companies like LEGO are focusing on educating parents to better understand the potential job future of their children. Westpac CEO Brian Hartzer spoke to me about the importance of honesty about job change and creating a context of learning. And a ‘tech pioneers’ group I led spoke of how new technologies in job matching, individual profiling, and learning could significantly reduce the current friction in the job market.

But the truth is …

This transition will create enormous flux that we are not prepared for. So the need for action is crucial. The WEF is working hard on this and the reports published during the week on skills and jobs are important.

There was a clear agreement for rapid and immediate action. Employees need a great deal more clarity about how the job market will shift, what the new and valuable skills will be, and how they will be supported to transition to these new skills. Governments, educators and corporations must step up. Without these actions, the revenue from the growth that are being predicted over the coming year will simply exacerbate the growing inequality between the rich and educated, and the poor and uneducated – a point make forcibly by both Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau.

The 100-year life: reframing longevity as a gift

Sometimes the future doesn’t turn out as you had predicted. Whatever happened to Second Life and the avatars that I – and thousands of others – created? And let’s face it, Uber caught most of us by surprise – and yet now we have no qualms getting into a stranger's car. Sometimes the future hurtles in unexpected directions, and we just have to learn to catch up.

In some cases, however, the signs are there for all to see. Yet we just don’t notice them, or we misinterpret them. The future creeps up on us. For me, longevity falls into this category. 

Longevity: a creeping curse?

I’ve been studying the trends that will shape the future of work and living for decades. I’ve written about technology and societal trends and the impact of globalization and have certainly always been peripherally aware of demographic trends. I’d seen the inverted age pyramid of Japan and knew that more than a quarter of the country’s population is over the age of 65. Initially, I interpreted this primarily as an issue of ageing, the last decade of life, and of pension provision. I’d seen this demographic data as a curse – when life elongates surely that just means more years of ageing diseases such as Alzheimer’s? It was not something I particular wanted to think about, to study or to write about.

What changed, was that my colleague Andrew Scott and I began to talk more about these demographic trends – and as we did so, we began to reframe the trend data. In fact, rather than looking only at the last decades of life, we began instead to see that longevity impacts on every stage of life. Once you reframe in this way the trend data is extraordinary. Imagine that for every year of life, life expectancy increases by three months. Most of us will live significantly longer than our parents, and right now many babies born today are expected to live for at least 100 years.

The implications are that across the space of the next two generations, individuals, institutions and governments will have to accommodate to two, possibly three more decades of life – and that’s what really caught our attention.

Reframing longevity as a gift

Andrew and I are both academics – he an economist, I a psychologist. The way we normally study the world is by looking at it closely. But how many people currently have lived to 100 years, and can their life experience really tell us much about the future?

So rather than observing what we can see around us now, we decided to project into the future. To do this we took one young woman, whom we called Jane, and built for her a series of scenarios about how she could live the rest of her 100-year life. As we built Jane’s life story, we began to reframe longevity as a gift rather than a curse, focusing on how she could live in a productive and happy way. Our aim was to explore what her possible future lives could be and to play out the consequences of the decisions she might make at various points in her life.

Building these scenarios was fascinating. It taught us a lot of things, which we were eager to share. That’s why we wrote The 100-year Life: living and working in the age of longevity. We believe the conversation about longevity is crucial - and that every one of us needs to re-learn how we plan our lives and our careers.

To learn more about what it takes to live a long and productive life, visit our website at www.100yearlife.com and pre-order the book.

Related articles

The Future of HR: Preparing for Longevity

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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.

Davos 2016: My Three Take-Aways

So here is what has got me thinking after a week at the 2016 World Economic Forum meeting in Davos:

1. The rise of the scientists.

The dominant Davos talk last year was of the Greek crisis and the possible break up of the Euro - this was a time when politicians and bankers were centre stage as they were called into action to solve the crisis of the moment. This year, whilst bankers and politicians were still around in abundance, now at centre stage were AI scientists, robotic experts, neuroscientists, medical researchers and authorities on the science of climate change. The questions they debated are just as challenging as the economic questions of 2015, though less likely to be resolved any time soon. Questions like: ‘What will be the impact of AI and machine learning on jobs?’; ‘How are humans different from the robots already present at the forum?’; ‘When will we understand the human brain?’; ‘Will a cure for Alzheimer’s be found in our lifetime?’, ‘What role can science play in mitigating climate change’. It seems to me that we should forget the rise of the robot – what we are watching is the rise of the scientists.

2. Questioning the status quo.

What caught my attention was not grand theories – it was the questions that were being asked, and the small experiments that were being described. Here are three I’m still pondering: First, a question from Tharman Shanmugaratnam the Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore in a session I ran on the skills gap “Why aren’t education institutions measured on their outputs – for example their ability to create productive skills and knowledge?” He is right, why aren’t they? Next an experiment described by Yasuhisa Shiozaki, the Japanese Minister of Health, Labour and Welfare, in which tax breaks are being created in families where three generations are living together. That’s an interesting experiment in a country where the isolation of older people is a national challenge. Or the question posed by Thomas DeRosa the CEO of Welltower, USA, “We have ‘bring your babies to work’ initiatives – why not ‘bring your ageing mother to work’?” Hmm – why don’t we bring our ageing mothers to work?

3. The individualised future.

I’ve been thinking and writing about the future for a decade now. But what is really beginning to strike me is that there are no ‘grand theories’. The forces that are shaping our future - be they the forces of technology, demography or resources - are playing out very differently across the regions of the world and are impacting areas and communities in unique ways. There is no one grand theory of the future – instead there will be multiple futures. What that means is that shaping positive futures will come from the experimentation and social change that individuals, families, communities and cities embark on as they try to navigate their own way through this highly volatile environment.

My guess is it will be these experiments and questions that will increasingly shape the global conversations that take place in groups like the World Economic Forum.

Anticipating the future through weak signals

Ten years ago I took my son to East Africa to stay in a Masai village. I reasoned that time with these mighty warriors would be a good anecdote to his rather cosy suburban life.

On the second day at the village, our Masai guide walked with us into the surrounding countryside. Then something surprising happened. The silence of this picturesque place was pierced by a strangely familiar sound. From his belt pocket the warrior took his ringing mobile phone. This was not something I'd expected. 

Four years ago I had been asked by the female students at London Business School (LBS) to speak at their annual Women in Business Conference. I spoke for around 30 minutes on the way that large corporations could make a positive difference in the world - a topic I had explored in a recently published book. In the Q&A session that followed I expected to be asked about corporate social responsibility. Instead, I was quizzed about how I had managed to be a mother and also build a relatively successful career as a professor and business woman. This was again something I had not expected. 

Yet these unexpected experiences had something profound in common. They were both 'weak signals' in the sense that they both alerted me to something I had not really or deeply considered. They also heralded something that would become more important in the future. 

I had not realised the scale with which mobile phones were being rolled out across East Africa and indeed that they contained the possibility of transferring money. And I had not realised how deeply worried young women were about the life choices they face. 

Both these weak signals had a profound impact on my thinking. The first led to the creation of my Future of Work Research Consortium - dedicated to analysing the impact of trends in technology, demography and society on corporations and the people that work for them. The second helped me understand the huge impact that Anne-Marie Slaughter’s piece in the Atlantic would have when she wrote about her personal challenges in 'having it all.' 

I'm not sure it's possible to actively seek out weak signals - often times, serendipity seems to play a key role. But here are some ideas: 

- Don't turn your back on what seems hard to comprehend. Frankly I was amazed by the questions at the LBS event. What was wrong with these women that my personal life was so interesting to them? Yet as I reflected on what had happened I began to realise that I had inadvertently tapped into a deep seam of anxiety. I began to realise that young women are genuinely concerned about their future, and as a commentator about the future I needed to understand this and indeed learn more about it. I've learnt to be very sensitive to people or ideas that don't fall into my way of thinking. 

- Be prepared to get off the beaten path. I had not expected to learn about technology through a family visit to East Africa. Yet by getting out of my normal routine I was faced with new experiences that presented me with weak signals and new insights.

- Mix with different people. It's easy in a busy life to spend lots of time with people similar to ourselves. Yet often the 'weak signals' are found in unexpected conversations. So these days I try to spend time every week with people who are different from me. People who don’t necessarily walk the paths that I do, and whose experience of the world is profoundly different from mine.

Looking ahead is such a wonderful thing to do - and weak signals can be just the way to do this. 

Can Paul Ryan move the needle on work/life balance?

Last week, Republican candidate Paul Ryan was confirmed as the new Speaker of the US House of Representatives. However, his acceptance of the post was on the condition that he would travel less than previous speakers in order to preserve valuable time with his family. Of course this type of demand from such a high-profile man garnered a lot of press attention, as notions of family time and flexible working remain rooted in the ‘working mum’ domain in many countries, industries and companies. It’s still (sadly) rare to hear as may working dads negotiating school drop offs with busy work schedules, as working mums. So, will Mr. Ryan’s bold statement be a catalyst for change?

My work at the Future of Work Research Consortium highlights time and again the importance of role models when it comes to shifting an organisation’s culture. No matter how many policies and practices HR may devise around flexible working and work/life balance, if those at the top aren’t using them, then those attempting to climb the ladder will take this as a signal that they shouldn’t either.  Having leaders simply avail of flexible working options isn’t enough either. They need to use the options in a way that is visible to the rest of the organisation. One of the most interesting comments I heard recently from leaders at a Professional Services firm was that they were working flexibly and assumed that others in their teams were doing so as well. However, this was not the reality. Their teams were often unaware that they were taking this approach as the leaders weren’t communicating about it and hence the signal that this kind of autonomy in working style was accepted and, lo and behold, normal was not being received. Mr. Ryan’s very visible commitment to work/life balance will hopefully act as the cue to his team that making time for family is not a barrier to success.

That is the implication for his own team, but what about the wider American and Global audience? What impact can this action have on a larger scale? These are tougher questions. While Mr. Ryan has the bargaining power to make such demands, the average American worker does not. Moreover, he has previously voted against providing paid family leave for federal employees, which has made him an unlikely advocate for a cultural shift in favour of work/life balance. It’s promising to see signs of his change in views on this and we will have to expect that as a matter of course, he will now work for these rights to be extended broadly so that it is both socially acceptable and financially viable for all dads – and not just those in powerful political positions – to exercise the same choices.

So, can Paul Ryan move the needle on work/life balance? My view is that he can certainly change one important aspect of the dialogue. We need more male leaders to demonstrate their desire to be actively involved in their children’s upbringing and highlight the challenges they face in juggling responsibilities – and of course the flexibility they avail of in order to strike a balance. Making this a conversation that managers have with all employees, rather than a request working mums submit to HR, will be a significant step in achieving work/life balance and gender parity.

What if money was no longer the most valuable asset a company could offer an employee?

What is the most valuable asset a company can give an employee?

Historically the answer was simple – money. That’s why the HR function of most companies goes to such extreme lengths to design pay packets (bonuses, team-based rewards, stock options and so on) and to decide through antiquated performance management systems who gets paid what. Indeed, it’s why they’ve been persuaded that senior leaders really are worth up to 200% more than the pay of an average employee.

Yet we have known for sometime that although pay might indeed be a valuable asset for an employee, it’s unlikely to be the driver for their motivation. Indeed years of research have shown that this valuable asset turns out more often to be a source of dissatisfaction rather than a motivator. Most people don’t work harder, or more creatively or cooperatively because they are paid more.

So recently the search has been on for more ‘intangible assets’ that could be really valued by employees. Perhaps it’s the opportunity to work more flexibly, or the chance to work for a boss that likes you, or to work in a convivial open plan office that employees value. And indeed, perhaps it’s this combination that results in employees being engaged rather than disengaged.

I think – to use a simple metaphor – we are barking up the wrong tree. Let me explain. Over the last couple of years my colleague, the economist Andrew Scott, and I have been asking a simple question ‘What happens when most people live to 100 years’. It’s been a fascinating exploration. One undeniable truth is that if you live to 100 then you will probably need to work into your 80s. Now there is no doubt that over the course of a long working life money is indeed crucial – no one wants to look forward to an old age lived in poverty. So money is a valuable asset that a company can give to an employee.

However, across a long life this tangible asset, whilst important, has to be balanced by equally important intangible assets. It seems to me that chief amongst these crucial intangible assets is the type of work an employee is given to perform. Work that is valuable both now and as a hedge against the future has three crucial elements:

• It is interesting and allows workers to engage their mind and creativity
• It has developmental potential – particularly to in terms of capabilities that are ‘portable’ in the sense that they can be used beyond the current job
• It is non-routine so is unlikely to be substituted in the short term by robotics or Artificial Intelligence

For the sake of simplicity lets call this ‘good work’. Now lets play a mind game. Let’s assume that a leader in a corporation acknowledges that the intangible asset of ‘good work’ is as valuable to an employee as the tangible asset of money. If this were the case, what would we expect to see happening within the corporation? Here are five ideas:

• We would expect jobs to be analysed with regards to the extent that they are composed of tasks that are interesting, developmental and non-routine. We could even imagine that these job characteristics are rated against a common currency – lets call this unit a ‘tang’.
• So when an employer is advertising a job, they are able to show both the financial assets the job is valued at (salary, bonus, stock options etc) and also its ‘tang’ assets (interest, developmental potential, non-routine)
• When an employee is deciding on whether to take a job, they can balance the tangible and intangible assets it creates. They can decide, for example, that they are prepared to take a higher ‘tang’ rated job at a certain point in their career, even if the salary is lower. Or indeed take a higher paid job whilst acknowledging that the ‘tang’ value is low.
• It could be that managers who are particularly skilled at designing jobs for their team that have a high ‘tang’ value are celebrated for this sculpting skill.
• We might expect that if the ‘tang’ value of a job falls below a certain level then the whole job has to be re-designed to increase the ‘tang value’ by adding tasks that are interesting, developmental or non-routine. This re-design could be initiated by the manager, or indeed by the worker who is performing the job and who is encouraged to broaden the scope of the job to envelope more ‘tang’ rich activities.

Right now it is still money that dominates the negotiated relationship between an employee and employer. Let’s widen the conversation to include an equally important asset – good work. Perhaps by understanding the value of work with as much finesse as we currently understand the value of reward systems, we can begin to give employees a better choice about the deal they want to strike.

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What will artificial intelligence do for work?

What will artificial intelligence do for work?

It’s my fourth visit to Davos and it’s fascinating how many more of the academics here are scientists rather than economists or management theorists. What is it that scientists can tell us about business? I had an opportunity to understand this when I led a debate with four professors from the University of California, Berkeley, who are experts in artificial intelligence (AI), neuroscience, and psychology.

The question we debated was “Will machines make better decisions than humans?” Of course this is a crucial question for anyone like me who is interested in the future of work. What impact will machines – be they computers or robots - have on the way we work? There are those that argue that up to 60% of the work we currently do will, within the next couple of decades, be replaced by machines. Of course this is already happening. The ‘hollowing out’ of work has already seen much medium skilled work disappear as executives’ thumbs and their smartphones replace secretaries, whilst assistants are being replaced by a combination of Wikipedia and automatic filing.

I started the debate by asking the audience what they believed: “Will machines make better decisions than humans?” About 50% agreed and 50% disagreed – it seems that even this auspicious group at Davos has no consensus. So what are the issues?

The first is well known to AI scientists.  It is best described in Moravec’s paradox. This is the paradox that right now computers are really good at some things we humans find tricky - solving mathematical equations, playing chess, winning jeopardy, and even driving cars. These are tasks that require speed and precision.  But here is the paradox. Machines are bad at other tasks we find easy  - like clearing the coffee cups from a table or being creative. The psychologist Alison Gopnik studies babies and for her it’s clear: machines are not as smart as a two year old. Why? Well perhaps a two year old cannot play chess or drive a car, but they can do lots that a computer cannot do. They can create theories, make hypotheses, figure out how things work, imitate – and most importantly they learn and can be creative. Moravec’s argument by the way is that computers are great at reasoning, but the often unconscious, sensorimotor knowledge that has evolved in the human brain over billions of years is impossible to imitate.

The second issue, one we debated at length, was values and morality. We humans make decisions on the basis of our values. But do computers have values? The AI expert Stuart Russell argued that it is already possible to programme computers on the basis of utility in terms of gaining the highest value outcome. But whose values and how can the constant changing of consensus on values be programmed? And what of morality? As Bob Knight observed, human decisions are about emotions and we make decisions cognitively and viscerally. This comes from the evolution of the frontal cortex that took place over the last two million years.

Perhaps it’s just a matter of time? Computers cannot make decisions better than humans right now, but what about in 30 years time or a 100 years time? Or will it take another two million years for machines to become moral? Certainly with regard to sheer computing power, the technology is developing fast – recent developments in cloud computing are enabling the connection of millions of devices and that has enormous potential for amplification.

Or perhaps it’s not about time, but more about combinations? Ken Goldberg, an AI expert, believes it is in the combination of computers and people that real progress will be made. And, as I am learning in my own study of open innovation, it is the combination of diverse minds that bring forth the ideas that can be the basis of innovation.

What I have learnt from spending time with scientists is that they have much to tell us about how the world of work and organisations will develop. And even if there is no consensus on timeframes, the direction is clear: there is a great deal more to come in the human/machine interface. 

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How improving job design can secure the future of your business

If you could name a single factor as the biggest enemy of employee retention in your organisation, what would it be? My guess would be job design – specifically, the availability of career customisation.

You might think your organisation already offers career customisation and improved job design, but let me make my point clear: improving job design is not that same as bringing flexibility into work. Many – if not most – large corporations have flexible working arrangements. But when it comes to improved job design – by which I mean initiatives such as phased retirement, job share schemes and, on- and off-boarding ramps, they are lagging far behind. I estimate that such companies have a period of three years at most to introduce these elements of job design before the lack of them starts to have a serious impact.

This is becoming an urgent issue. As things stand, when people want to customise their careers they do so by leaving the company. The most valuable people are building their career elsewhere because companies are not providing what they need.

This talent drain is just one reason why companies need to ramp up their experiments and pilots in the field of job design: and it’s about to get worse. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, life stage is becoming an increasingly important factor in people’s career choices – and people reach these stages at vastly different ages. For example, some employees will choose to become parents in their 20s, while others do the same in their 40s. As people start to live longer, we will see more and more people rejecting traditional linear career paths and opting for careers that move sideways, downwards, or even pause for a while. It is the companies that are dealing with these issues already – and the ones that act now to start handling them more effectively – that will prove resilient over the coming decades.

The importance of scale

So why are so many companies, many of whom have already invested heavily in flexible working and job design, failing so miserably in this respect? One reason is that companies have for too long associated the idea of career customisation with motherhood. Often because when women in particular leave an organisation, there is an immediate assumption they are doing so to start a family. In fact, what I’ve noticed about my MBA students at LBS is that often when they leave a company, it’s to start their own business. And a key reason for this is that doing so empowers them to take charge of their own job design.

A damaging side effect of associating career customisation with motherhood is a lack of scale. You may have some great improved job design initiatives but failing to scale them beyond the concept of maternity leave means that employees will continue to achieve career customisation by moving on.

The solution to this problem is to make career customisation fluid, mainstream and transparent. Healthy, loyal employees have control over how, when, where they work and can manage their careers in tune with the rhythms of their life. To enable this, employers need to let workers know that the design of their job can change according to their circumstances and that customisation is available to everyone, not just mothers. Above all, they need to know what their options are at each stage of their life and career, so that they can make the appropriate choices.

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