What skills do you need for the future?

What skills do you need for the future? We moved from lizard brains to monkey brains, to a human brain and now we are moving to the 4^th brain, which is Google, the cloud, Wikipedia, the Technium. A shared artificial brain. We are linking biology with machines, and machines with humans. We are moving from the industrial age into the robotic age.

Copycats

We are in an age where everything can be copied. The only thing that cannot be copied is originality. We are on the crossroads of destruction and creativity. The problem is that we are still applying industrial age thinking to a robotic age world. For example, it is pointless to compete with machines. You need to focus on where you can win, which is originality and creativity.

Meaning

Gross National Product as a case in point. Are we an economy or a society? As in “The second machine age”, there is a plea for Gross National Happiness or Gallup-Healthways Well Being Index. And what makes people happy? Meaningful work! Purpose! Passion! The joyful fulfilment of one’s potential. Which was beaten out of us in the industrial age.

Renaissance

We are going back to the Renaissance man or women. Going back to the universal, holistic human being. Going back to true mastery. Going back to combining knowing and doing. Recombining our hands with our brains. Our hands allowed us to evolve, but in the industrial age and the following education system, we cut the ties between the two. With education putting too much emphasis on the brain and not enough on the hands. Chris Anderson in “Makers” would agree.

Our education system is wrong

Many of our policymakers believe if we just double down on testing standards and push harder on STEM subjects—science, technology, engineering, mathematics—we’ll revive the economy and compete better with countries that are taking our jobs. This is not a strategic direction for any developed country. The world doesn’t want human robots. It wants creative people with exceptional imagination and vision—and standardized testing won’t get us there. 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

Be original

Originality is the key. Therefore the sills we need in the robotic age are:

1. Feeling
2. Seeing
3. Dreaming
4. Making
5. Learning

Five key skills. None of these skills has anything to do with computing.

FEELING

The interesting question is why evolution has not pushed us to start thinking like computers? It is possible. Savants can do it. Which means science will find a way to make that available to everyone.

I feel, therefore I am (Aristotle)

Feeling is important. The more evolved the species, the more emotions become important. Because it allows us to “feel” our way through situations that are too complex to think through. Our feelings are central to our learning, our intuition, and our empathy. They allow us to make sense of rich data sets that our rational brains are not equipped to comprehend. Emotion is not a substitute for reason, but a partner to it. If our rational brains were deprived of emotion, even the most banal decisions would become.

Emotion

Why would emotion be so important? Because it allows us to “feel” our way through situations that are too complex to think through. Our feelings are central to our learning, our intuition, and our empathy. They allow us to make sense of rich data sets that our rational brains are not equipped to comprehend. Emotion is not a substitute for reason, but a partner to it. If our rational brains were deprived of emotion, even the most banal decisions would become impossible. Feeling is a prerequisite for the process of innovation. It feeds learning, fuels intuition, fosters empathy, and powers creativity.

He goes on:

• Thinking without thinking
• Conscious brain (easy problems) versus emotional brain (complex problems)
• Feeling your way through
• Reflection in action (doing)
• Empathy (essential when you share with 7 billion people)
• Psychopaths (when the left brain goes wrong)

The brain

We have done a lot of work with executives on their decision-making. Our biases, delusions, Eastern philosophy versus Western philosophy, our intellect, integration of mind, body and environment, our talents and the way we handle information. We receive 11 million bits per second, our consciousness can only deal with 16 bits per second and can only hold four items (thoughts or sensations). To fully understand a human being you need 40 bits per second. You only have the capacity for 16. It is the plight of our consciousness.

Focus

Which is why we invented focus and attention. That is why “The Shallows” is such a scary book. You are what you think. So, therefore, you are what you focus on. The difference between life instinct and true existence. With experience as the starting point and purpose as the filter. Living a rich life. Which brings us back to the Renaissance.

Arts

Arts and science as two sides of the same coin. With terms such as intuition, beauty, drawing, harmony, memorability, surprise, rightness, elegance, aesthetics and design. It is not business, it is personal.

The business rationale for feeling

• The way a customer “feels” about a product or company is, by definition, its brand. A brand is akin to a commercial reputation. And while it’s built by the company, it’s defined by the feelings of customers.
• Design accounts for 80% of the purchase decision.
• 80/80 rule. 80% of the economy is service, 80% report bad service
• People pay for beauty
• Feeling is branding
• 30% of companies are intangible assets
• Empathy needs to be at the heart of technology
• Empathy sells

SEEING

Seeing and thinking are related. Because we only have 16 bits per second available, everything we see is filtered. You see what you believe. You need to override that. You need to slow down, stop going for the one answer, look at the whole. Forget either or, go for and open. Forget straight-line thinking. Start drawing what you see. Start reframing what you see.

Complex problems

With complex problems and systems, things are not what they seem. Cause and effect are confused. There are latency problems, which is the mother of all system traps. That causes conflicts in the brain. Logic looks for the short term, emotion looks for the long term. Solving wicked problems is about seeing the big, long picture.

Purpose

One of the key lessons is that purpose is the overriding influence on system behaviour, which is straight from “The connected company”. In a complex adaptive system, purpose sets the direction and sets the rules for behaviour. Provides feedback about performance and addresses problems as they come up. Does culture eat systems? Adaptive might be the operative word. And purpose is branding. Purpose is the drive for happy staff. Purpose is how you connect to your customers.

DREAMING

Imagination is closely linked to dream state. Disassociated patterns in the brain are similar to what happens in REM sleep. The word for dreaming in French is rever, to rave, to slip into madness…..

Innovation needs you to move from the known into the unknown and you need to practice dreaming:

• What could be
• Attributes of success or wouldn’t it be great if……..
• Abduction (the non-logic of what could be)
• Wonderment (I wonder, I wish, what if)
• Be a contrarian (Steve Jobs was one)
• Be an entrepreneur (an entrepreneur is someone who dives into an empty swimming pool and invents water on the way down)

Flavours of time

The ancient Greeks understood that time came in two flavours: objective time called Chronos; and subjective time, called Kairos. If you are in Kairos you are in the right frame of mind. When ideas flow, the music of chance plays faster.

You can do it

You can learn this. Here are ten strategies that can trigger new ideas.

• Think in metaphors
• Think in pictures
• Start from a different place
• Arrange blind dates
• Poach from other domains
• Find the paradox
• Give it the third degree
• Be alert for accidents (serendipity)
• Write things down
• Dream together
• Swarm

MAKING

What Leonardo DaVinci understood is that imagination without experience is weak. Originality without craft, to a Renaissance artisan, would have seemed like marriage without sex—lofty but Platonic. Mastery by Robert Greene talks about the importance of an apprenticeship as the starting point for reflection-in-action was “knowing-in-action,” a dynamic way of knowing that stands in stark contrast to the kind of static knowledge we’re taught in school.

Reflection in action

Reflection-in-action goes a long way towards describing what we mean when we speak of a practitioner’s artistry. “Do not fear mistakes—there are none.” Every step or misstep is provisional or correctable, a mini-lesson in the practice room of mastery. You go in not knowing so you can come out knowing.

It’s a capacity to combine thinking and doing in the middle of performing. It is the no process-process, it is failing fast, it is the Do! By Kevin Kelly. It is making better decisions by making no good decisions. It is drawings, models, prototypes to illuminate the problem. It is including.

It is design. It is beauty, simplicity, meaning, simplexity, harmony, longevity, depth and is as simple as it should be?

LEARNING

Ken Robinson has said it before. The economic crisis is chicken feed compared to the education crisis we are facing. Today’s school reward students for shallow learning and punished for deep learning. We are still sacrificing the kids to the gods of mass production. We need to move from educational factories to education gardens.

Practice X Passion = Skill

The same principles that make happy staff, make happy students. Purpose and meaning. Passion. When you are focused on a mission, your mind becomes magnetized.

Emotion drives attention

It makes them better students too. Emotion drives attention. Passion X practice = skill. Attention drives learning. We need to create joy zones for students. We need to allow students to hack their own education.

Follow your heart

Allow them to follow their bliss, their heart. Allow them to learn by doing on the subjects they like. With the fourth brain at their disposal. A quote from the book, “If you read two books on a subject written by knowledgeable people, you will know more than 95% of the people in the entire world know about that subject.”

Happy

Allow them to build a bridge of craft knowledge, domain knowledge and universal knowledge. Making them happy, holistic people. And happiness is contagious. When one person is happy their friends have a 25% chance of being happy themselves.

A happy world……….