Podcasts

Intro

Hi, and welcome to Decoding AQ, helping you to learn the tools mindsets, and actions to thrive in an ever-changing world. 

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Ross

Hi and welcome to Decoding AQ. We've got a really very special guest with us here today, Heather McGowan, welcome.

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Heather  

Hey there, thanks so much for having me.

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Ross  

Great. So I'm gonna give a little tiny bit of an intro, but then hand it over to the best person who can talk about themselves. And that's themselves. So from my perspective, you've written a number of books, you've got a new one that was just out only, not very long ago, April 14, is that right? Your "The Adaption Advantage". And I think that's really exciting. So we'll get to dive deep into there.

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But a speaker, internationally future of work, and really looking at what's coming down the pike? And how do we prepare humanity in order to adapt and survive to thrive in a world that we create? That's hopefully one where no one's left behind, which will be a wonderful world that we can do. So yeah, why don't we dive in and just give us a little bit about yourself some of the highlights that you'd like to share, perhaps.

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Heather  

I love the way Steve Jobs once said that dots don't make any sense connecting them forward only backward. And I think nothing could be more true for me. My undergraduate degrees in industrial design, I worked in product design, doing everything from baby products, to surgical products, to tennis sneakers, to working in boutique investment, bank banking for socially responsible businesses to design strategy, consulting, and management consulting, to working in higher ed for a decade.

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And from all of those pieces, I started realizing that the reason I had so many jobs and had so many experiences- I started working when I was 13, I got working papers, so I could have more jobs, I was just obsessed with experiencing new things. And I think now looking back on it, that I was really interested in work, and how we attract people into it and how we engage people into it and how it's rapidly changing. So I spent the last 10 or 12 years working for both corporate and academic clients until about three years ago when I went out to just speak and just write. Helping them try to create better workforces for the world that's out there. And since then, I feel like I won the lottery because now I get to write and speak all the time about all these experiences that I've had, and all these conversations I have with you that I get to have.

Ross  

That's interesting, tell me about that transition from work and corporate. And then I think it might have been stimulated from an article you wrote, perhaps? But that kind of transition that led you to this chapter in your life of learning in terms of directing around speaking and writing and those sorts of things. So what happened, what triggered that for you?

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Heather  

So it was about 2013-2014, I started seeing all these people out there speaking, writing books about the future work. And all of them were from the standpoint that the robots were coming. And we were creating a useless class of humans. And at the time, I was on my third tour, I think in a university, a different university. And higher ed trying to help them prepare college graduates for the workforce. And they were not doing a great job. Honestly, a lot of higher ed institutions are preparing people for jobs that were, you know, gone 20 years ago. And I thought there's such a disconnect. There's a disconnect with my corporate clients who are not getting the talent they need. There's a disconnect with my university clients who are preparing people for jobs long gone or soon to be gone. And then the only voice out there talking is talking about "Don't worry about it, because technology is going to take over everything".

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I am deeply optimistic about humans. I think humans are driven to create, driven to improvise, driven to innovate, if you just let them. And I think what we were doing is disengaging students, I mean, Gallup's proven that from grade school to high school, our level of engagement drops dramatically. Well, what happens during that period of time we go from, what are you interested in and discovery and self-awareness to what are you good at what you get on the standardized test, that's disengaging.

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And so I wrote my first major article, it was actually a four part series called "Jobs Are Over: The Future is Income Generation". And I was really just trying to create this provocation that we need to stop preparing people for jobs that once existed, and prepare them to be continuously learning and adapting and entrepreneurial. And the second part of that article went viral and 100,000 people read it, and I think 24 hours or something like that. And I started getting speaking requests from all over the world, people saying, We've been waiting for someone to talk like this about humans. And the first one was in Australia, I spoke for AMP. And then that led to there was a video that that went on YouTube. And that led to more speaking requests. And then fast forward. Now I have all these agents who represent me and I speak all over the world and I write for Forbes and I have a book that just came up.

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Ross  

And it's interesting, isn't it about how we communicate a thought, you know? Lives in our minds first, and then it comes out in some way. Hopefully, it doesn't stay in there in a in a dark corner of our minds. When we then share it that can either repel or attract, you know, it can resonate, as you said, you wanted to propagate a perhaps a different train of thought about humans and the future of how we engage in value creation. And you picked up a point there, and I've listened to a number of your pieces talk about this challenge of identity, and where throughout our education, and some of the first questions people ask are "So what is it you do?" you know, after our name. And the interconnection and how related those things are our identity and our roles and work. And perhaps we're facing a real danger of what that represents? Do you want to just expand a little bit on some of your some of your thoughts around identity and the challenges in adapting that for the future?

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Heather  

Yeah, so I don't have children myself, but I'm really close to my nieces and my nephew, my two sisters, both have two kids and three kids. And so I talked to them all the time. And one day my niece Izzy called me up and sit down together. It's career day tomorrow at school. She was four at the time. So it's career day, tomorrow. Yeah and I want to be a unicorn. So that's fantastic, loves unicorns. And she said, Yeah, so my teacher told me it wasn't realistic, I had to pick something more realistic. So at the age of four, we're telling kids to be more realistic and pick the future self.

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And the world never moves more quickly. So then I started to question why are we asking young kids what they want to be when they grow up? I like what comedian Paula Poundstone said, and we're asking kids because we're just looking for ideas. I think she's right.

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Ross  

I like it, yeah.

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Heather  

Then we start asking, then with my work in universities, we start asking students to pick a major, before they used to step foot on campus, now maybe dial into the Zoom that was the campus. And that's picking a future self based upon a very thin slice of life. So in high school, they tell you what you're good at, and more importantly, what you're not good at. And then you never avoid, you avoid those areas for the rest of your life.

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And we look around at the people around us, mostly our parents and our parents' friends, and maybe if we have some older friends, and we think those are the possibilities for us. Like for in my instance, my undergraduate degree is in industrial design. I didn't know that field existed at all, by chance I get into round school design. And so lucky I did, it was the best experience one of the best educational experiences of my life. And I discovered it there. But if I had gone somewhere else and declared a major, I might have been stuck in a dead end track. And we do this to students, and we tell them not to take anything outside their major.

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The only real study I've seen on this was out of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York that said, only 27% of people ever work in the field of their undergraduate major. Well, guess who was 47% are? Faculty- will tell you not to take courses outside your major! So we're locking people in to this sense of identity. A job that's probably over or dramatically different than before you picked it. And then huge social mobility implications, because you're only going to pick what you see around you, even though your capabilities are probably much beyond that you haven't explored it. And then we ask each other what do you do, and studies out of the UK and some studies in the US have found parts of a job can take twice as long to recover from than the loss of a primary relationship. And many people never fully recover. And right now in the US, we've got 26 million, and I would bet a whole bunch more from people who just lost their jobs, going through a massive identity crisis.

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So we address that head on in the book, the center chapter, the first part of it is on accelerated change pre-virus, but the same principles apply. Just faster now. The middle part of the book is how do you deal with your identity? How do you adapt? How do you get in touch with your purpose and your passion and your curiosity and your skills? And then the third part of the book is for leaders. And it was designed so that leaders could use it with your teams. How do you lead in this new normal?

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Ross  

I find it fascinating. I don't know if you've come across a writer called Ben Hardy. But he was for a number of years, the number one most read writer on Medium on the blog platform. And he's a doctor of organizational psychology. One of his first books was called "Willpower Doesn't Work". And his one just coming out is called "Personality Isn't Permanent". And it's a very interesting kind of view and take and it's got a lot of similarities to this identity fixation that we have. And the danger of seeing it as a fixed or anchored in things that are outside of our control so that when that external factor comes in and changes it, we have an internal crisis, you know, if we lose a job, for example, how we recover from that, and yeah. 

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I think we're gonna face the largest unemployment rates we've ever seen, you know, even beyond the "1934 Big One", and equally our personality. So is our personality part of our identity, part of our occupation at work. And where does this crossover between our identity and personality being orientated around a goal, or an around a dream or an imagination or part of purpose, right, some assigned senex work of more about our why. And then how we show up evolves. According to the environment, according to technology, according to what it needs of how we create and execute that purpose in value creation.

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So I'm interested in kind of that third part that you talked about in the book. So if the first part is all around, just getting people confident with they're able to adapt, maybe now it's speeding up. And for some, they will have seen it, but not felt it. But maybe now everyone's feeling that because we've had this catalyst event. And then about how our identity, we need to unlock and unshackle from that. But in terms of the leadership, tell us a little bit more about what you mean by that? Is it leadership of oneself or as a role in work? What's the kind of aspects in those parts?

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Heather  

Well, probably both, but we explicitly speak about it in terms of how do you lead your teams. And, you know, we're coming out of what John Hagel from Deloitte calls "Scalable Efficiency Era" is also the era of shareholders for everybody suddenly started treating humans more like machines. We started treating them like dehumanized units of productivity. And how much could you just squeeze out of them and we measured everything by KPIs around productivity. Give us a really good at stirring the pot intent at innovation, improvising, we can't help ourselves.

If technology can do more and more of the efficiency stuff. Hegel says we're moving into the world of scalable learning. How does everything at work become part of us sort of learning adventure learning tour, and I definitely buy into that. So leading a team on a learning tour is different than leading a team to maximize efficiency. First, you have to establish trust. Dr. Amy Edmondson from Harvard Business School says you have to establish psychological safety. Google found that when they studied across 180 different teams over two years that the number one determinant of team's success in accelerated learning is psychological safety. What does that mean?

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That means you got to make an environment that's comfortable for people to say, hey, I need help. Or I didn't get that or, you know, I have a question about that. Because I'm not sure I agree. Cognitive diversity, is also very important. Dr. David Lewis and Dr. Allison Reynolds out of London Business School found that the teens that learn the fastest have a combination of psychological safety, and cognitive diversity.  Leading these teams, you also have to establish a sense of trust, and you have to be willing to be vulnerable. Because if you as the leader says, "Hey wait a second you guys know something I don't know, I need to understand that better". And increasingly, that's true as skills knowledge come into the workplace. And leaders are suddenly in charge of teams where people in their teams have knowledge and skills they don't have, and requires an entirely different style.

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You know, I spoke with Jim Kouzes, from The Leadership Challenge extensively for the book, particularly leadership chapter. And he said, "None of these things are actually new. They're just more important. They're just more intense". He's got, you know, 30 or 40 years of studies on leadership. And so he said, "Everything's just moving faster now. It's like, you're on the racetrack. And you're going 50 miles an hour, now you're going 70. But so is everybody else around you". So it requires this focused attention on some of these factors in a way that's never been there before. And especially in this moment with the virus. I mean, how do you establish psychological safety? How do you inspire your teams right now, when they're in unprecedented stress levels, and their different locations, it becomes the leaders that are going to emerge out of this, there's going to be the leaders of the future.

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Ross  

I think that's a really interesting aspect in terms of, in order to lead we have to learn, in order to learn, we have to say we don't know. And therefore we've got to be comfortable in the uncomfortable. And that opportunity to almost provide this space an environment that the leader should, you know, encourage to happen is vitally important. And I remember one of your quotes in terms of those who learn lead, you know, and I think it's those who learn and adapt lead, in that sense.

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And another piece I picked up was just the extent of learning that's gonna take place at work. And you shared some stats in a previous piece about the percentages of our time, each day that we might attribute to historically being efficient and creating value, and therefore a focus on technical skills. Now, a shift to human skills, imaginary, discovery, ideation, innovation, those sorts of things and learning. Can you share perhaps just a little bit more some of those parts of what you discovered and what you see?

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Heather  

Yeah, so Dr. David Eagleman says that our brains work in two modes, we have exploration and exploitation. So if you think about us, like, you know, as animals, we explore to find a source of food, and then we go, okay, we know the Uber is over there. And we'll exploit that source until it's depleted. And then we'll explore again. Exploitation allows us to save some energy, exploration is always, you know, hit or miss. Works that same way in value creation, if you think of the S curve, you know, the beginning of the s curve, when you're below you, and it's costing you something you're exploring, you're not sure what's going to happen, and then you ramp it up when you exploit it.

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Now, when products or services, business models, and entire companies lasted longer. Research from Innosight says, you know, they used to be 35 years, something like that. Now, we're going towards 12 years along a company last on the S&P500 as a proxy for how long a company exists, business models. So suddenly, you need people more people working in exploration mode, not just an exploitation mode. Also, technology consumes more and more routine and predictable tasks. That's a lot of the stuff on the exploitation side, we need more people comfortable with ambiguity, more vulnerable, comfortable exploring, you need leaders who can feel comfortable being vulnerable. And when we talk about learning and adaptation, sometimes people confuse adaptation and flexibility.

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Flexibility is reaching down in your toolbox and picking the tool you've used before probably for a job you've had before, you're sort of moving between skills. Adaptability requires you to reach in the toolbox, pull out a tool, it's not fully formed yet, forge it for the task at hand, create a new process is usually some letting go or some unlearning in that process. So adaptability requires this vulnerability, as does learning. And one of the other things that we get to in the in the book, I mean, this is in the first section on the change stuff, is we've all talked about the technological change, we've talked about globalization.

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There's something else that's happening and happening much more quickly. And that societal and cultural change. And I have 14 dimensions of it in there. It's from racial composition, which had been decades if not generations in the making. In developed countries, particularly in the US going where white majority may not be a white majority, any longer changes in religion, from more atheist to a plurality of religions, changes in the family unit, changes in gender. Gender was fixed in binary five or six years ago. "They" was the word of the year for Oxford and Webster last year, it's to indicate a non binary person. To leadership to what's permissible in terms of sexual harassment, to what populations are the top 10 populations in the world right now, only two of them are countries, the rest are social media platforms.

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Ross  

One of the challenges is this multifaceted change. So we're, we're required to adapt in so many areas, I was healthy. Now I'm not healthy. I was, you know, married now not married, you know, all of these things that happen either in our social lives or in work, I was employed. Now I'm not employed, I had this role now have this role. And each of these aspects we might be able to deal with in isolation. So it's like torture, you know, death of a thousand cuts, that what we're facing now is the adaption of a thousand requirements. It's very different space for us to deal with.

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Heather  

Right. And when all those factors, those societal and cultural change factors, the reason I mentioned them, it's not just those adaptations, it's some people feel they've got a freeze. Their place in the world is not clear, they're a little uncomfortable. I gave that part in a talk to a group of educators in the Midwest. And this guy sat in the front row, his arms crossed, he was glaring at me. And I thought, Oh, no. And he came up to me afterwards. And he said, I've been feeling that for almost a decade. I'm a white, straight Christian man in the Midwest, I don't know where I fit. I don't know how to behave anymore.

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I lost my role in a company. I'm now in another role, and asked me a little frozen. He's like, You got to keep talking about it. And I think that we all have to say, when I do it on, I do virtual keynotes as well. I do virtual keynotes, I do polling. And when I get to that part, if I use it in the talk, which I usually do, people are anonymous, and I okay, almost 20% of the people who say, You know what, I this stuff makes me feel uncomfortable. And I don't know where. Now if I was in a live audience, I wouldn't be able to get that reaction. So there's one upside of the virtual.

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Ross  

It's interesting, you covered about exploitation, and exploration. And those are particular factors that we measure in our adaptability quotient, and there is a lacking in the exploitation. And I think what we found from our research and results is that some of this comes back to the fundamental kind of culture and environment, particularly resilience. So they might explore once but if you get burned, how quickly can you bounce back to go and do it again. And so all of these factors that are maybe these combinations of abilities or characteristics or the environment that is created, allows us to lay this sort of muscle to be able to face as you talked about ambiguity or uncertainty.

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So it's not about trying to predict what it's going to be, and then train exactly for that moment, but be comfortable for whatever that moment has to offer. You know, you see all these big statistics about how many people have got to rescale or upskill? How many jobs don't exist, you know, 40% of the jobs we're going to have in a few years time don't even exist yet. So how can we train for that specifically, what we need to look at is the capacity in which to respond to uncertainty in a pace that is quick enough, and where there's little emotional or physical or psychological damage to get through and survive so that we're in a state of thriving. I'm interested in perhaps some examples and stories of where you've seen teams or organizations rapidly adapt to what's going on. I remember one thing recently you shared about just how quick with this catalyst of Coronavirus organizations of people are collaborating? Perhaps the piece around MIT elaborating a good share of that story and maybe some other stories of where you've seen it really happen at speed and well.

Heather  

So we have no maps for where we are right now. I mean, we can we can blame it over, there's lots of places for blame and what we'll find them and when we do the post mortem on on this whole experience. But along the way, we're responding so quickly. A friend of mine owns a trade show company, that business has been, you know, she makes very large, she's the CEO of the company, founder the company, and she said to me, we stopped and we said, "What are we good at? And where's the need? And let's capitalize on that". And so they've figured out how to make face shields and they've figured out how to make booths for test rapid testing centers and that sort of stuff.

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And they rapidly pivoted with within like a week or two. The example you're talking about from MIT, a hundred different scientists got together and designed a face shield that can be rapidly produced for $3 when the industry average is $5. And they did it in something like 10 days. And now they've got manufacturing center in Massachusetts is showing 100,000 of them a day. Can't remember if it was Ford or GM, it's probably both of them. I heard the other day on the news. They haven't made a car in like a month.

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But they quickly in two weeks ramped up to make ventilators, distilleries making hand sanitizer, perfumeries, making hand sanitizer, fashion houses making PPE I mean, all over the place before sort of figuring out what is it we're good at? Where's the need? How quickly can we ramp up and give it to me a sense of purpose, like we don't want just universal basic income without any obligations, we may need that as a safety net. But people want to feel a part of something. And I think those stories are tremendously empowering to the people who are doing that work. And then also to the rest of us who appreciate the speed in which people are pivoting and collaborating.

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Ross  

I'm interested in your thoughts around the difference when it's on fire? No, when we have a burning platform, humans can respond to that. Right? So we have this crisis, we have this call, and suddenly people are able to go, I'm gonna pivot, I'm gonna adapt, I'm gonna look where the need is see what we're good at and create something that we haven't done before. It's that horizon three innovation, you know, it's often the hardest stuff to do.

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And I think without this catalyst of Coronavirus, the sort of sneaky things that were providing just enough value, it might have been a product or service or a process that was okay. And we haven't had the stimulus to unlearn that to say this is not good enough anymore. And that to be an intentional, proactive choice to desire a betterment, rather than being disrupted by somebody else. How might without or maybe post this catalyst? How can we maintain that sense of discovery of thinking what might be possible rather than just to, "We've got something let's exploit it as long as we can". To continually keep that pace of innovation and collaboration? How might we do that? Well, what would be your advice on that? Even if you think that's a good thing?

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Heather  

I don't know that we could recreate the pressure we have right now, nor should we. It's probably not good for humans long term. But it's encouraging how we've responded. My friend Peter Sheehan says don't create a burning platform create a burning ambition. And a lot of that I think comes from when we start talking to Izzy when she's four years old to when we start talking to university students and high school students and we start tracking talent. Instead of telling people what they're good at and not good at that just pushes you into an exploitation role. 

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If you light the fire in people, it helped them understand or help them understand for themselves, what they're curious about, what they're purposeful about what they're passionate about, and you align that with a company culture. You can go on these sort of unending learning tours, we probably won't get the pace of innovation that we're going to get right now, but we'll continue at a pretty high pace.

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The other thing is to remind people is that we're a highly adaptive species. Look what we've done. We live in environments that were previously uninhabitable. We've made them habitable. In the last seven years, we've got 5000 years of recorded history. And the last seven years, we've taken more people at a global extreme poverty, lifted more people into literacy, and connected half the world now to the Internet. In like 25 years, we've done more to improve the human condition in this last 70 years than we did. And all of the 5000 years before that, if we can do that this virus is no match for us. I'm confident of it. But we continue to keep the pace if we have the right leaders.

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Like I think right now we're standing in front of a raging river, and all people can see because all they're hearing in the media is the swirling eddies that are going to catch to them the death toll, etc. Instead of looking up across the river and seeing what's on the other side, seeing the rocks that are going to help us get across and realize that we've already started going across, you know, we flatten the curve in so many places, we've collaborated scientific breakthroughs that are going to come out of this, there's a lot, we need leadership that can help people understand, okay, we may have 60 more days of this, we have 90 more days, and we have three more months of this.

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But look at what we've done. And let's look at the other side, we are improving the planet right now. This is the third existential crisis of our lifetime, the planet income inequality. Now, this pandemic, in this pandemic, we're pausing things, and how we decided to restart the economy could be more inclusive, could be better for the planet, and could unleash tremendous amount of human potential.

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Ross  

I think that's a really, almost this gift we've been given to redesign. What's next. So we've had a pause, neither of us want to downplay the reality of this is affecting people in a very bad way. But that shouldn't be at the forsake for designing a better future for those that are left. And there's gonna be loads of people that are facing something so profoundly different to everything they had before, from their identity, to the business they worked for, to the role they even had. And whilst there's a bank on the other side of that river, I think the reality of living in an exponential world is there's many rivers, the one at the moment happens to be this crisis. But then there's also a technological river that's coming along, that will disrupt our sense of what is static and what is in motion.

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And so being good swimmers to navigate that, you know, having resilience, building these things of like you said that I loved that term of light of fire ambition versus a burning platform. And it made me think of something we look at, which is motivation style, in relation to adaption. So this is the- "You play to win or play not to lose". So whilst the change exists, how are you communicating that change to an individual to rally a response is a response saying, oh, there's a fire - Oh, great, that's a nice ambition. I'll go over there and have some smores on it, or there is a bit fire over there, we need to run in the other direction, still a fire.

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But the communication to get somebody to move either towards or away from, I think is really powerful that we can look at to get the outcomes that we're wanting. In terms of these learning loops, and multiple engagements and almost portfolio careers that we will be creating in the future by the design of job tenure periods of not just your own choice, but the industry is shifting so quickly. What are perhaps some of the tips maybe people or teams could start looking at and adopting to build that lifelong learning and the learning culture, what's shifting what's changing what's existing, and how might they make sure they're not left behind?

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Heather  

Yeah, so I wrote an article and I threw out a provocation, I gave a talk in Paris that learning is the new pension. So we've focused on sort of like, How much money am I making? What's my bonus? What am I putting away for retirement? All good stuff. But we need to start thinking about learning in the same way. So I tell young people, when they're looking for their first job, anyone looking for a job, pick a boss, not the job, the job is going to change. Pick a culture and a boss, because that person is going to be your mentor that's going to help you until another one comes along and look to be a mentor, leaders forming teams, stop filling with people just like you.

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There are enough people just like you start filling them with people who question you, and not in a negative way or disruptive way the person gives you that essential criticism that makes you see a blind spot you didn't see before is going to be a really valuable member of your team. So looking for that cognitive diversity when you're hiring when you're filling your company, you want cultural alignment, but you also want kilter addition. So somebody is always sort of checking that and they come from a capacity standpoint. 

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You're looking for people not who have the skills or the last job you needed, which is how we do it. But the people who are looking to constantly add and shed skills like we add and delete applications on their phone. So we start focusing on not what did I do in my job today? Or what did I earn today? But what did I learn today? And how am I going to think about it differently. So you start thinking, like, I say, your jobs moving, if you're not moving with it, it's moving away from you.

They're doing a constant reskill and upskill assessment and working on it every day working on your team. So we're constantly focused on culture and capacity. Adding to nurturing your culture, increasing your capacity, because I'm one of the examples I use in some of my talks is Netflix 1997, they ship DVDs by mail, if they focus solely on the capacity for that they would get stuck in a supply chain situation, which became irrelevant by about 2007, they switched to streaming 2011, they started doing original content, as of 2019, that was 44% of the revenues. That's three pretty big pivots in under 30 years.

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So maybe you're with the company the whole time or maybe you have learning journeys that allow you to have that many experiences to pivot across business models, because gone are the days where you can just simply say, "So this is my job, I have no idea how my company makes money". You have to understand your company's business model, you have to understand your own business model. You have to understand their value creation, and how you connect to that value creation. Because when their method of value creation changes, either by the market or technology replacing some of the tasks you do, you have to pivot, you have to upskill, you have to rescale. So you either become a continuous part of that company, or you pivot to somewhere else.

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Ross  

I really like that story. And I think one of my coaches and mentors is Dan Sullivan, Strategic Coach. And a lot of his work is all around getting us to think about our thinking as entrepreneurs. And there's a couple of pieces. One is we've fallen in love with the problem, not with the solution. How? So if you take Netflix, I'm not really sure what their purpose is in detail of how they might articulate it. But for me, it's to entertain audiences. And so they're "how" was through shipping DVDs, then their how is streaming and now there how is through original content. They're still looking to delight and entertain an audience.

And so what we might have grit for, you know, the passion and perseverance over the long term might be more connected to our purpose, our why, and those kinds of things, but where we might have mental flexibility and experimentation, and the resilience to keep going is much more in the how. How that value shows up. And that itself will stimulate us to do new things that we need a commitment need the courage to build those new capabilities of that continual learning. And I radically believe that the largest organization in perhaps the next decade, doesn't currently exist. And what it might be is an education, business.

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And we can imagine the titans of today of our Googles, of our Apple of now something x y zed that has enabled us to educate on a continual basis that is personalized in the learning style curriculum, all of these sorts of things that is hard to scale at the moment of those types of material. So I'm excited about that. In terms of the book itself, what was your motivation for writing it? You'd written one before, you know, a book about disruption and innovation. So what was the sort of stimulus behind writing this particular one about adaptability and what's going on right now.

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Heather  

I had ideas about writing a book in about 2014. And it mostly it was around the response to the articles that there was a need for that to get out there. But then I put it aside for a bit and I wrote some articles, and I did talks. And after every single one of my talks, I do about 100 a year, I'm sorry, 50 a year and 100. And last two years. In one of my talks, people come up to me and they're like, I just wish I could record that and play it again. Do you have it written down somewhere? Because you know, I give a lot of information at once.

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And so they wanted to just have it in a different way. And so my co-author and I Chris Shipley met at that first talk I did in Australia. And so we talked about it for about four years. And we got it down to what needs to be in there. How do we tell the story? What are the important elements? Who is this for? How are they going to use it? So we thought about it very much with the audience members in mind, what they were asking for. And so it because it's sort of it's a very conversational book, very easy to read, I think a high school student could read it. It's got 78 graphics in it. So it's easy to flip through its color graphics in there and stuff.

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So it's a very simple kind of approachable thing that can I think, help everybody in some form or fashion, somebody can get something out of it. It's, it's like 25 bucks or something like that. So it's easier. 24 bucks. It's affordable, too. I just wanted it to be approachable, affordable, and impactful.

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Ross  

I love it. And I'm not sure if this is in the book, but it's certainly in a lot of your talks about the skills we require for the future. So as opposed to thinking about a particular job, and we train for that job. And we need these sets of skills, and that there's been a big shift in the last five years, 10 years of the types of skills we need. So rather than maybe that IBM study of all the different studies. What do you see as the skills we need to thrive? In this pace of change in a exponential world? You said you don't have children? But if you did, or if you know, you were advising and working with it, was it your niece who wanted to be a unicorn? And she's four? What are the skills that we should be focusing on? Perhaps within youth?

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And then also, as a secondary part of the question, for those who are finding themselves in a crisis situation of loss of identity, loss of job, we're at 26 million, we're going to be increasing that. So let's start at the beginning. Get it right for future generations. What are the skills we need to train our children and our younger generation? And then is that different or is it the same for those that are facing a chapter in their life that they haven't faced before?

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Heather  

For Kids today I think and for all of us, I think this goes for all of us. We do need digital skills, you need to understand how technology works, you understand what is codable, or computable doesn't mean everybody needs to code differently. Understanding what can be coded helps you understand where humans play best. So that digital literacy needs to be there. But I think we've mistaken and just lunged at digital skills, like if you just learn this, or you just learn that you're going to be robot-proof. But probably more important than that, is we have to connect to what is it you're interested in? What's your why? What's your purpose? What's your curiosity? Because you're going to have to learn on the depth for life and we need to figure out how to connect to that internal motivation, that internal fuel source, and then a constant exploration of your whatever your superpowers are.

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So I do have two nieces who are in a university right now. They're going into their senior year, both of them, they have so many messages to them, pick a good major, don't take anything outside your major, you can't you know, this is who you are, even though they are in early stages of it. I'm like, “What do you guys really interested in?” One of them, switched majors, really good switch for her much more natively interested in what she's doing now, the other one is in a field of science, they were trying to funnel her into a very specific job, like, get this degree because you'll get this job, but it wasn't general enough, she didn't like that job to be stuck in it.

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So if I encourage her to get a more general degree, she probably get a graduate degree as well. So for university students, and for K-12 students, it's getting connected to what you're interested in, constantly scanning the horizon, adding to your skills based on your internal drive, you will find your way. If I found my way, you'll find your way. You'll find your way, I mean, you're just going to have a lot of experiences. Your first job will probably not be your last job. So take it for the learning journey. That is take it for what you're getting out of it. Think about what you're learning, pay attention to what you like and don't like. So you can job sculpt your next opportunity, or engagement or whatever be.

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For the people out there who have been laid off. Give yourself a break. First of all, it's a really hard thing to go through. I've lost my job before, I'm lucky it happened to me when I was young. And I couldn't make sense of it. I have friends who have lost their jobs, some of them after 25 years in a company and they just got a zoom call and said sorry, it's over. Those folks are dealing with massive identity crisis. You know, give yourself the space to grieve, you just lost something just lost part of who you are. And when you're ready, start thinking about what you're interested in, stay connected to your network, reach out to people, there are lots of people on LinkedIn, who can share information and share articles. Stay relevant, stay engaged, stay active. You will find your way back, I promise you, you will be okay. This is really really hard. And it hurts like hell, I know it, but you're going to be okay.

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Ross  

I like that, you know, sense of everything's changed, but nothing's changed in terms of being curious, crafting what we want. Some people I talk to, you know, they knew what their interest was early on, and others are still on that discovery. And it's okay, you know, go and do things for the first time and see, do they stick to want to do them again? Did they give you energy? Is it creating value, and allow ourselves to go and discover that and think of it as chapters in a book, you know, in that kind of sense. And so for many that lost, say goodbye to it, have some grieve of that role of that job and thank it, their sense of gratitude to be able to say I'm grateful that I had that, now I have an opportunity to do something else, that will take time. It will definitely take time.

As a final kind of questions and insights from you, so you do 50 talks a year, you're writing books, you're thinking about new concepts, new, visual articulations of things. So taking thoughts, putting them into icebergs, doing all these sorts of things to help information become accessible. If we were to have a conversation in a year's time, what would have happened for you, for you to say, that was the best year yet- for me. What are some of those sort of key aspects to your year ahead? That you would think that was a great year. Is it more speaking or the same? Is it new things? Is it you want to go bungee jumping? What is it in your world of the next year that you think that would make me in a year's time if we were having a conversation? It was a wicked good year.

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Heather  

Well, since we're in the middle of a global pandemic, and my live speaking has paused. I'm going through my own adaptation. So how do I become good at virtual talks? Or is there another means of expression I don't even know about yet. I want to have an impact. I want, I feel like I have a message of hope that can rally humans to be more than they've been in the past, by their own drive, by their own self expression.

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I'd like to see more of that happening by some metric, I do hope we can be face to face. You and I can, I don't know that we'll ever shake hands again, but be in the same space, have coffee or be or whatever. I hope we can, we can do that. And we get on the other side of this with a better world in front of us. But for me, I've got I've got an uphill battle of adaptation just like everybody else. If we can't meet in 5000 people in a room for me to do a talk. What am I going to do, I'm doing for some virtual stuff. Now I'm doing a virtual book, I'm doing some other things like that. Maybe there's another medium I haven't gotten on to yet that I need to learn.

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Ross  

So you've either maintained or increased your level of impact and engagement with humans, but found new ways of doing that. 

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Heather  

And learned along the way, and probably failed multiple times. But important failures through learning is what it's called.

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Ross  

I didn't know if you come across, who wrote the book on learning, but he was on one of our previous podcasts. And it is that thing I don't know, to be able to get a breakthrough to learn something new. And you touched on one of my most favorite words there in terms of hope. That's a fundamental baseline is to cultivate and protect our hope, collectively, as people. I want to say thank you. It's been a real pleasure to have this conversation with you, share your amazing insights and visions and views for the future, and how we might create one better together. So thank you very much, Heather.

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Heather  

Thanks so much for having me. It's my pleasure.

Voiceover  

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Outro

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