rewiring work

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“Machines that learn (limited AGI) will obsolete ‘jobs’ FASTER than entrepreneurs can make them and people can retrain to fill them.” – John Robb

We need to rewire how we work. The machines are getting much better at the old world of work than we can ever be. Automation is the driver. Offshoring and outsourcing are temporary conditions until all routine labour gets replaced by software and machines.

“Since the processes of automation and offshoring will most likely continue, it is expected that the disappearance of routine jobs in the U.S. will also continue. Understanding the impact of polarization on the labor market is important and remains an active topic of economic research.” – Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis

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learning and leadership thoughts

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.” ― Leonardo da Vinci, via @gfbertini

“Millennials: the landless peasants the founders warned each other would happen.” – @girlziplocked

“Blessed are the weird people …  for they teach us to see the world through different eyes.” – @JacobNorby

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leadership in an age of pervasive networks

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Leadership can be examined from the perspective of Marshall McLuhan’s famous media tetrad. Using the tetrad, explained by Derrick de Kerkchove, co-author of McLuhan for Managers — every technology has four effects:

1. extends a human property (the car extends the foot)
2. obsolesces the previous medium by turning it into a sport or a form of art (the automobile turns horses and carriages into sports)
3. retrieves a much older medium that was obsolesced before (the automobile brings back the shining armour of the knight);
4. flips or reverses its properties into the opposite effect when pushed to its limits (automobiles, when there are too many of them, create grid lock)

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sense-making with social media

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“Tweeting during a conference helps me consolidate my thoughts and capture key insights. Facebook helps me share resources. LinkedIn is a useful professional tool. However, it is blogging, such as this post, that is by far my strongest form of learning, as it involves a number of things that are all supported by researched learning theory, and which improve memory and recall:

  1. Reflection
  2. Generation
  3. Elaboration
  4. Retrieval
  5. Interleaved and varied practice
  6. Spaced practice
  7. Imagery
  8. Archiving”

—Donald Clark

What do you do to make sense of your learning? As Donald notes, sharing and posting on social media are weaker forms of learning than longer form blogging can be. However, low utility activities like retrieval and archiving can provide the fodder for higher utility sense-making skills such as generation and elaboration. Mastery comes through varied and spaced practice, supported by reflection. Using social media for learning requires an understanding of how each tool or platform can support your own sense-making.

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social learning for complex work

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“Carnegie Mellon’s Robert E. Kelley … says the percentage of the knowledge you need to memorize to do your job is shrinking rapidly:

  • 1986: 75%
  • 1997: 15-20%
  • 2006: 8-10% estimated

Knowing how to get the answers you need is more important than storing those answers in your head, especially with the shorter lifespan of knowledge these days. What you find when you look something up is probably current. What you already know is more and more likely to be out of date.

A vital meta-learning skill: how to find the answer you need, online or off.”

—Jay Cross (2006)

Where are we in 2016? How do we find the knowledge we need? Is it in our organizational filing systems and intranets, or rather on the Web or in our professional social networks? It’s a question of complexity.

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a half-baked idea

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“I’m thinking of doing some coaching in a few years and helping people make decisions around food and nutrition”, I was told the other day by a young man working in a shop. My advice was to start a blog: now. While he had no intention of freelancing for the near term, he needed to get his thoughts in order. A blog is a good place to do this over time. You can start slow. The process builds over time. My early blog posts were pretty bad but they helped me see what ideas I could revisit and build upon. And it took time.

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the future of human work

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People can never be better at computing than computers. We cannot become more efficient than machines. All we can do is be more curious, more creative, more empathetic. The fact that automation is taking away jobs once designed for people means that it is time we focus on what is really important: our humanity. Service delivery will gradually improve as machines take it over. Accidents will diminish with self-driving cars. Errors will be reduced with robotic surgeries. Many human jobs will fade away.

Just as few people do work that requires pure physical labour today, soon few of us will do routine, procedural, standardized knowledge work. As DeepMind beat the world Go champion in their first three games this week, we should take a serious look at what this means for the long term. Machines that can teach themselves may be better teachers for humans as well.

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organizations are people

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@Goonth – “Our so-called leaders will not create our futures for us. That is entirely up to us. Nothing to concede.”

8 Symptoms Of Organizations On The Cusp Of Change by @MarkRaheja

“In theory, organizations are meant to enable us — to make us faster, stronger and more effective than we’d be on our own. And yet today, in listening to my clients, it feels as if the exact opposite is true — as if the organization is actually getting in their way. The symptoms of this are many and may sound familiar: Siloed teams with misaligned incentives; bureaucratic processes governed by inflexible policies; paralyzed decision-making strewn across way too many meetings. The list goes on.”

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What is connected leadership?

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Connected leadership is an emergent property of a network in balance and not some special property available to only the select few. This requires leadership from an intelligent and engaged workforce learning with each other. Connected leaders practice the discipline of personal knowledge mastery which comprises working and learning out loud as well as critical thinking and active curiosity. By seeking, sensing, and sharing, everyone in an organization can become part of a learning network, listening at different frequencies, scanning the horizon, recognizing patterns, and making better decisions.

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temporary, negotiated hierarchies

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Hierarchies in Perpetual Beta

A Post-Job Economy

The job was the way we redistributed wealth, making capitalists pay for the means of production and in return creating a middle class that could pay for mass produced goods. That period is almost over, as witnessed by 54 million self-employed Americans. The job is a social construct that has outlived its usefulness. Freelancing may be a replacement but often lacks a safety net, and many of the self-employed become pawns of the platform monopolists. We are entering a post-job economy. Our careers will be shorter as our lives get longer. Companies and institutions are no longer the stable source of employment they once were, as even the Fortune 500 companies now have an average lifespan of 20 years, as opposed to 60 years in 1960.

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