The Adaptation Advantage

Let Go, Learn Fast, and Thrive in the Future of Work

Heather E. McGowan, Chris Shipley

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119653172
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

A guide for individuals and organizations navigating the complex and ambiguous Future of Work

Foreword by New York Times columnist and best-selling author Thomas L. Friedman

Technology is changing work as we know it. Cultural norms are undergoing tectonic shifts. A global pandemic proves that we are inextricably connected whether we choose to be or not. So much change, so quickly, is disorienting. It's undermining our sense of identity and challenging our ability to adapt. But where so many see these changes as threatening, Heather McGowan and Chris Shipley see the opportunity to open the flood gates of human potential—if we can change the way we think about work and leadership. They have dedicated the last 5 years to understanding how technical, business, and cultural shifts affecting the workplace have brought us to this crossroads, The result is a powerful and practical guide to the future of work for leaders and employees. The future can be better, but only if we let go of our attachment to our traditional (and disappearing) ideas about careers, and what a "good job" looks like.

Blending wisdom from interviews with hundreds of executives, The Adaptation Advantage explains the profound changes happening in the world of work and posits the solution: new ways to think about careers that detach our sense of pride and personal identity from our job title, and connect it to our sense of purpose. Activating purpose, the authors suggest, will inherently motivate learning, engagement, empowerment, and lead to new forms of pride and identity throughout the workforce. Only when we let go of our rigid career identities can we embrace and appreciate the joys of learning and adapting to new realities—and help our organizations do the same.

Of course, making this transition is hard. It requires leaders who can attract and motivate cognitively diverse teams fueled by a strong sense of purpose in an environment of psychological safety—despite fierce competition and external pressures. Adapting to the future of work has always called for strong leadership. Now, as a pandemic disrupts so many aspects of work, adapting is a leadership imperative. The Adaptation Advantage is an essential guide to help leaders meet that challenge.

Part I
Adapting at the Speed of Change

Key Ideas

1. In the midst of the greatest-ever velocity of change in technology, climate, and markets, we must become adept at adapting.
2. Dramatic shifts in cultural and social norms are challenging our sense of personal and professional identity, and our ability to navigate the identity crisis is dependent on our ability to define, own, and embrace the fundamental aspects and values of our complex selves.
3. The impact of technology on work can be alarming, but we have already begun to adapt. Our ability to continue to adapt with agility and without fear is fundamental to our future prosperity.

1
The World Is Fast: Technology Is Changing Everything and Planting Opportunity Everywhere

Key Ideas

1. We are in the midst of the greatest velocity of change in human history at the same time we are experiencing the greatest leaps in human longevity.
2. Three “climate changes” are happening all at once, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman tells us. These changes are happening to technology, the climate, and the market, and they are reshaping politics, geopolitics, community, ethics, and work and learning. This book focuses on work and learning.
3. When everything starts shifting so quickly, we have to become adept at adapting.

Wait a Second

Change is coming at us with the greatest velocity in human history.

In the single second it took you to read that sentence, an algorithm executed 1,000 trades. Computers at the credit card network Visa processed more than 1,700 transactions, no doubt a few of them providistockng payment for the 17 packages that robots helped pack and ship from Amazon warehouses. Right now, 76,000 Google searches are returning tens of billions of results links. Nearly 9,000 tweets and 930 Instagram photos have been added to an already overwhelming cloud of content. And at this very moment, more than 2.8 million emails are being sent, not all of them by actual humans.

Technology is accelerating the pace of business at unthinkable speeds, so much so that the job you have today, the workforce you currently manage, or perhaps the job you are training or studying for now is changing as quickly as you read this page. In the next 18 to 24 months, the job you have today—if, indeed, it still exists at all—will be very different from what it is today. While technology experts from many different disciplines offer widely different views of the jobs gained or lost in a newly automated economy, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty captures the impact succinctly: “I expect AI to change 100 percent of jobs within the next five to 10 years.”¹

Despite this reality, our contemporary views of education, career, workplace advancement, and even retirement continue to plod along at a horse-drawn-carriage pace. If we can barely imagine a one-second's-worth digital deluge, how will we get our heads around the implications for so much change, let alone adapt to it?

While it's true that we are in the midst of the greatest velocity of change in human history, speed is only part of the problem. Change is coming at us from all sides. It's not just technology that's changing work; dramatic shifts in society and global economics are shaking up our worlds. And we've got to deal with them all at once; we've got to become adaptive.

We are entering the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The First Industrial Revolution was marked by the steam engine, the Second by electrification and the division of labor for manufacturing, the Third by computerization and the beginning of automation of physical labor, and now the Fourth by the merging of biological and cyber systems into a fully digitized economy. In this push to a digital world, any physical or mental task with a predictable, repeatable outcome will be handled by an algorithm. Objects will contain sensors connected to networks where data drives decisions in real time. Many aspects of the biological world will be augmented by robotic and cognitive technologies. In this world, our relationship to work is no longer a monolithic career based on a single dose of early learning and compiled experiences. Instead, our careers will be defined by a state of constant learning and adaptation as new technologies, applications, and data alter the current state (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 The Fourth Industrial Revolution

Celebrated New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman perfectly captures this moment in history in his most recent book, Thank You for Being Late. In it, Friedman argues that we are being buffeted by three simultaneous and interlocking “climate changes”: technology, the environment, and the global economy. These changes, he suggests, are rapidly reshaping our world.

Technological Climate Change

In 1965, semiconductor pioneer Gordon Moore posited that the capacity of a silicon processing chip would double each year, writing in the journal Electronics that “there is no reason to believe [the rate of change] will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years.”² A decade later, Moore revised his forecast, predicting that processors would double in capacity every two years throughout the next decade.

Moore, it turns out, was not nearly far-sighted enough. More than 50 years later, Moore's Law continues to hold, even as the price of these now high-capacity processors continues to drop relative to their capabilities.

It's difficult to imagine the impact of Moore's Law, but consider this: the smartphone you no doubt carry everywhere has 100,000 times more computing power, 1,000,000 times more memory, and 7,000,000 times more storage than was aboard the Apollo 11 spacecraft that carried astronauts to the moon. Yet even that comparison doesn't fully capture the impact of exponential change in computing technology, so imagine this: if the Volkswagen Beetle progressed along the same trajectory as semiconductors, that car today would be able to travel 300,000 miles per hour, get 2 million miles per gallon, and cost just four cents.

There is yet another way to understand the impact of technological change, however: the change that we are absorbing at work. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, professionals entered a workforce where the Internet had little commercial impact, software came on floppy disks, a mobile phone was the size of a brick, social media was an evening book club, and artificial intelligence was science fiction. These people could expect to climb a corporate ladder, be paid a 401(k), and retire comfortably after 2030. If that sounds like you, and you are reading this book as it was published a full decade before that milestone, you know that work has changed, and that you will need to change with it. You will need the adaptation advantage.

A Note about Artificial Intelligence

From sci-fi depictions of autonomous robots with a “mind” of their own to Apple's Siri answering our most basic questions, artificial intelligence (AI)—in pop culture and reality—has endured more than 30 years of hype, yet still comes up short of the bold promise of a broadly “intelligent” computing system.

Artificial intelligence is not one but dozens, if not hundreds, of component technologies. Throughout this book, we use the term “artificial intelligence” to discuss computing systems that are able to execute well-defined cognitive tasks. When a problem is specific and bounded, artificial intelligence techniques can solve it rather well.

In truth, a general AI—one able to fully mimic the complex thinking and manage the rapid context shifting of the human brain—is far from realized with today's technology. Rather than AI, we tend to think of...