Podcasts

Episode 39- Decoding AQ with Ross Thornley Feat. Gary A. Bolles - Chair for the Future of Work at Singularity University - The new rules for work

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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 the next edition of Decoding AQ. I'm very honored today to be joined by Gary Bolles. He's the chair and for the future of work at Singularity University. In fact, that's where we first met. He's also the co-founder of E-parachute, and speaker and writer. So welcome.

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Gary  

Thank you for the conversation.

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Ross  

I'm going to hit straight between the eyes with the first question for you, Gary. Before we go into any background, any your story. And it's the question, whenever I asked someone to come on and be interviewed, is what's the one question you want me to ask? Normally I get to it by the end, but I thought I'm going to start with it Gary. So what's the single most important issue we need to focus on when it comes to the future of work?

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Gary  

Absolutely, so the most basic that I come back to again, and again, the anchor that I use is how will we ensure that no human is left behind? That's kind of it is the robots and software are going to be fine. Our technology seems to just doodle along just great well on its own. It's the human part, and especially our skills and our capacity for being able to solve the problems of today and tomorrow. And so I think, if there's one issue, I want to encourage everyone to keep coming back to it's work has changed constantly throughout human history. And it's going to continue to change constantly, as we've found quite recently. But I think one of the greatest challenges and opportunities for us is to figure out, how do we ensure that absolutely every human on the planet has access to meaningful ,well paid stable work, and lots more beyond that. But those are the major issues I think that we need to address.

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Ross  

I couldn't agree more, and it's our MTP, our massive transformational purpose is to ensure no one's left behind. And I think the reality of identifying the issue and asking the right question is one thing. The second part is then how? And how do we start to begin to figure that out? And do we even need to figure it out? Or do we just need the next step? What's your view in, okay if that's the most important issue, what's next after we've identified them?

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Gary  

So what I urge people to do is to sort of go through their own process of thinking about, well what does this mean to them and what is their role? Now, for many of us, what we care most about is our role as individuals, and how do we as individuals continue to thrive? And that's not only appropriate, but that's sort of like the table stakes, baseline deliverable. So I urge people to go through their own process of determining some kind of self-inventory, how do you know what your own skills are? How do you know what you'd love to do? What's your own North Star Southern Cross that guides you in the work that you do?

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And if that signpost or that guide is simply to feed your family and put a roof over their heads, that's awesome. But those, that's what I call the old rules of work, and in what I call the next rules of work, really I think it's a different calculus, it's continually growing and changing as an individual. It's finding purpose in the work that you do, helping others to find purpose in their work, finding purpose in organizations, and as much as possible, trying to figure out what you're, how you can deliver on the way that you can have your own meaningful, well paid work. So that's sort of like table stakes, like you as an individual. And then there's often your organization, the organization you're working in. And how can that become more of this platform for how we can have more inclusive work and ensure that everybody is solving problems that matter?

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And then sort of the next step beyond that as your community, your family, the people around you, and then finally it's your country. So these are what I call the four domains of the next roles of work individuals, organizations, communities, and countries. And each of us has to determine what's our role, like are we here to just do better on our own and that's great, or are we about trying to enable more inclusive organizations, communities in which everyone can thrive? And countries that can have as inclusive economies as possible?

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Ross  

I love the concept and this idea and this is your next book, right in terms of The Next Rules of Work. What's your definition of work? And do you think that will change?

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Gary  

Yeah, that's an excellent question. And I'm glad you're doing this sort of step back today. Because I think what ends up happening is we've gone through these phases where we just sort of accept what the rules of work are, right? And so many of the rules, and I live in Silicon Valley, we don't like rules, we break rules. But the truth is, there are rules and a lot of them are unwritten. But a lot of them come from the industrial era, showing up to the same place all the time and producing something over and over again and having horrible commutes, and having, these are all things that we had to live with before the pandemic. And then along came a virus.

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And we started to question some of them. Well, if you can't go into an office, then what do you do? Now, some people, a lot of people didn't have that luxury, what they did was play space, they worked in a hotel, they worked in a restaurant, or in a hospital, and so that not everybody has that luxury, but where people's work allowed it, we started to question some of those rules, then we had to make up new ones. I had imagined, remember all the time with the first Zoom calls where everybody's figuring out and, what are you working on? And what am I working on? And do I have the right? Can you hear me? What's this? How does this work? We've adapted pretty quickly. But the truth is, we were following these old rules for quite some time. And so the reason I focus on the next rules is I really do believe we as humans, we are reinventing work as we as we go along. I mean, right now, so much of the discussion is, are we going back in the office or we're going to do this hybrid work, which is not my favorite phrase. How are we going to do all that? We're making up the rules as we go along. And I believe that's the new abnormal that we're gonna keep on doing that for quite some time.

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Ross  

I read a quote, I think it was Dan Sullivan today. And it was something like, If you can't win at the game, change the rules. And the reality for many organizations, whether it's at an individual level, organization, community, family, country, some of the playbooks aren't working anymore. And it takes a number of factors to exist, there's going to be sense of loss when you like to doing certain things, but that might be taken away from you, or certain things you did provided value that now no longer is providing value.

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So that transition that people go through, is I guess a lot like grief, from denial to acceptance, all of the different phases that people go through. I wonder what you're experiencing. I want to switch the conversation a bit back to your childhood and understand what it was like growing up in your family. And for those who might not know, your father is a pretty famous guy, right? Certainly in this whole career field. And I'm just fascinated as to the moments that might have shaped your thinking and your concepts of career. And just give us a few stories. And then perhaps we'll get into a little bit more of the meat of how that might have shaped who you've become.

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Gary  

Yeah, absolutely. So and I appreciate your asking. So I've got a couple of stories in the book but I'll tell you what’s not in the book. And so any perception that I might offer that I've ever had a linear career path, hopefully I can destroy immediately because when I barely graduated from high school, I had zero interest in college and which was quitely ironic given not only that my father went to MIT and Harvard and my mother went also to Harvard. But my father as you say, well he was a recovering minister, he’s a minister who lost his job, went to go read a pamphlet to help other ministers who had lost their job, and became eventually became the World's Career Counselor with What Color's Your Parachute?

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Ross

And Gary is that 10 million copies sold?

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Gary

It’s about 10 million copies in print. It's in 17 languages around the world. My father passed away four years ago, but he left behind an amazing legacy and we've brought a lot of his work online. We've built some online tools, I just recorded in a video course, free parachute on his method, which he called the Flower Exercises to help do that self-inventory that I was talking about, but when I was 19 I have no interest in college. So I sort of fell into the family business. And the family business at the time was and my parents had split up. But my father was traveling around the country and around the world doing workshops. And so I became trained in his methods. So imagine you're 19 years old, and you're trained to do career counseling with people in their 40’s and 50’s.

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Well first off, there's a little cognitive dissonance here, like what could you possibly tell me, but it turns out that that decision-making process for each of us about how we identify that North Star, that Southern Cross, it's a process, it's a set of steps, it's a set of techniques and exercises and anybody can do them. We've done them as with people as young as fifth grade, and as old as in their 90’s. And the basic premise is that there's a whole bunch of information to learn about you and your preferences and what makes you unique, because you are absolutely unique. But here I was a 19-year-old teaching people in their 40’s and 50’s. You know how to go through this process. And they're complaining about their dead-end jobs and how they wish they'd changed long ago.

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Well, there's no, there's only one takeaway you can have. And that's you should do what you love. That is you should that Northstar that Southern crosses, and you should continually readjust your understanding of what that is because it can change. But that guidance, the driving force to either use particular skills that you love using or solve particular problems that you love to solve, or working with specific populations that you care the most about whatever that is, that becomes this driving line for you in your career choice. And so how could I not get that takeaway, that I should do what I love. And what I loved was technology. I've got all these, remember this Blackberry?

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I fell into Silicon Valley in the early 80’s. And I thought, “Oh, it's all done. Microsoft's a big company, Apple's a big company, what could you possibly do with a computer that hasn't already been done in the 1980’s. But Oh, you know what, I'll just go. And I'll work on a quality software test team or something like that. And I'll just learn about this stuff.” And it turns out, we haven't figured out everything about computers. As a matter of fact, there were a lot of things left to do with computers. And so that's how I found what I love, which is just about everything I've done is that some underpinning with high tech since that.

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Ross  

And in terms of that realization of when we observe something thinking, “Oh, all has already been done, what can be left?” The same as you were talking there, I was thinking about reflection points on oneself. The difference of reflecting when you're at 19 to when you're at 40, when you're at 90, about thinking what's bigger, my past or my future? And this concept of work and career and for many who are entering many phases of work that they might not have envisaged when they were 19. What kind of processes have you observed or you go through or maybe even part of a parachute? Help people go through those various moments of reevaluation and maybe reimagination of what could be possible for them?

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Gary  

Yeah and I think reimagination is a great, great way to think about it, right? Because you actually do want to spark someone's creativity in helping them to think of the range of different options. So and I'll give you two different ways to approach it. Because there's lots of different people, lots of different kinds of ways to think about these things. So the underpinning is and my father was very good about this is that there's sort of three major decision areas when you think about careers. The first is what, that's what's unique about you those skills and other attributes I was talking about. There's a where, like where could you use those skills? What are the different scenarios for where you could solve different problems, if you're good at analyzing, you could be analyzing people, analyzing software, analyzing numbers, lots of different ways to be able to use those skills.

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And then finally there's the how, the mechanics of either finding or if you become an entrepreneur creating that kind of work. And so what, where, how. And so I heard people a lot if you already know what you want to do, “Oh, that's great, you can jump to the how part.” But in a lot of cases we don't and so you have to question those assumptions about yourself. And so those exercises you can go through and use Parachute and the Flower or you use what we have on a Parachute, it's called Jump, if you use Strengths Finders. I mean, there's tons of different ways to be able to develop that self-inventory. And then to build ideas for different scenarios. And to really dream, think of different ways that you could be able to use all those different skills and capacities.

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Now the challenge for young people is that they don't have a lot of experience. So there isn't a lot of fodder for understanding what's unique about them. And so you have to use proxies, you've got to help them to understand what they did in school there. And unfortunately, I mean, most teenagers they either think that they know everything, or they know nothing. And sometimes on the same subjects. And so the ones that think they know nothing, you have to help them to be able to develop an understanding of their own skills and develop self-esteem. And the ones who think they know everything, well, you got to help them to be able to explore because it turns out, once you do that, you find out “Well, I maybe I don't know everything I thought I did.”

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And older people, it's sort of flipped, you have all this experience but you might think then “Oh, you can't teach an old dog new tricks, you can't,” it's harder to make those changes. And so instead, we say, “You have all of this experiences, you can look back on,” and but you need to have more permission. But think of something completely different to take all these different elements that you have, and to be able to reassemble them into something very new.

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And so those are just two different ways to think about it. When you're young, you want to be thinking about exploring, you want to be thinking about testing and trying out. And when you're older, you want to be able to think about different ways to reassemble. I think of skills as being recombinant like genes, you can reassemble all those in different ways and solve new problems in ways you might not even have envisioned.

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Ross  

I love that sort of visual analogy of reassemble, and it reminds me a little bit of Keith Ferrazzi’s talk about Lego blocks, and thinking about tasks or skills as Lego blocks, and deciding about which ones you want to build. And I have five grandchildren, my wife has an, the Lego block bucket is made up of the same pieces, but every time they play with it they make different things, right? So this permission to reassemble, to recreate and imagine. And perhaps as we get older, our imagination gets maybe limited. And maybe some of the work that we can do in this future of work is give permission again for people to imagine, to dream, to think that something else is possible because as a child, you're naive. You just think “Oh, well, anything's possible.” But slowly over time, you might get reduced to that if you haven't been in the right environments. If you haven't been with the right people, maybe your imagination might be challenged. 

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Gary  

Yeah. No, absolutely. That’s why I use the word permission. There's circles of permission. The first circle is giving yourself permission. You have to give yourself permission to dream and if you keep on thinking that you, there's all these shoulds and woulds and cant’s and you've got to make the rent and you've got, then you're not going to give yourself permission. And then there's the next concentric circle is if you've got a spouse or close family and friends. And then the next concentric circle is society, some people think they need society to give them approval, well you're never going to get society's approval. So let's just forget that circle even exists.

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You've got to give yourself permission. And then you've got to be able to collaborate and co-create with the people around you to help them to support you, to go through that transition. Now the one thing when people are older that we find that I just urge over and over again, from a mindset standpoint, I mean in The Next Rules of Work, I say that sort of the three legs of the stool are mindset, skill set and toolset. So but the mindset, especially when you're older, is unfortunately, a lot of the framing that older people often uses, they look back and they see so much behind them, and they look ahead and they see less. And that is to my mind the wrong mindset or rather, that's the mindset that won't be helpful to you. Instead, yes, absolutely. 

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Absolutely. Instead, if you want a good Bible for this, read Carol Dweck’s book, Mindset. And she talks about a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. And a fixed mindset looks back and says “No, I have to keep on doing all I've done in the past.” And a growth mindset says that “No matter what age, I can continue to grow and develop and change, I can do new things. There are tremendous possibilities that are open for me.” And lo and behold, if you have that mindset, then those possibilities appear.

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Ross  

I've got a question around the, so these three legs of the stool of mindset, skill set and toolset that the concept of acquiring those things, put them in your backpack, right so I put my mindset in there I put the skill set or put the toolkit in If I go, so I would have gone to somewhere to acquire them a education, a place of education be that college, university or maybe apprentices, those kinds of things and say, Okay, I've got these things. Now I'll go and sweat them. Now I'll go and utilize them. And in a linear world that might have led us to generate value in work for a long period of time. Whereas now, because of the pace of how quickly things are changing, how much we have to learn on the job, as it were, so the Lifetime Learning, and we there's a lot of talk in organizations about continual learning, lifetime learning, all of these sorts of things where it's still working on those three stall legs. we've got to continually develop our mindset continually develop our skill set, and our toolkit, that what kind of organization environments do that really well? And how do you see maybe the new these next rules of work, providing that environment where that continual learning can thrive? If Gary, you believe continual learning is an essential part of the future of work.

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Gary  

So absolutely, so a couple of things. So first off back to the old rules of work. By my father, after he wrote Parachute, he wrote a book called The Three Boxes of Life and it's a concept that's been around for a while, but he put great language around it. And he basically said, look there's three boxes that you go through, you got a big chunk of education, and then you're thrown with zero preparation into a big chunk of work. And then you're thrown with zero preparation into a big chunk of leisure in what I call the period formerly known as Retirement. And that was it, education, work and leisure.

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And what I talked about now is a portfolio of work and a portfolio of learning and a portfolio of leisure that is a young person comes out of high school, vocational school, trade school nowadays, and sure they might get a day job, but then they take a gap month with their friends. And then they start working in another job but they're driving for Uber at night, and they're working on a startup with their friends. And it's a constantly changing landscape of work and learning and leisure. And I call that a portfolio of work, because in the same way that your investment counselor would advise you to have a range of investments from very safe, that's your day job, a very high risk, a little bit of high risk, that's your startup.

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Young people nowadays are trying to factor for what you've already called it in a world of exponential change. The world is changing so rapidly, we have a perfect example, when this virus came along about how rapidly the world can change. But suddenly half the world was having the same experience of having to work in place. And so that's likely to continue, we're likely to keep on seeing these shocks to the system, these wax to the side of the head, what I call the Great Reset from an article that I wrote a year ago. And so what I urge people a couple things. So first off, if you don't think of yourself as having a growth mindset, it's just going to be harder. It isn't that you can't find a job that's very static and stable, and you can't get a safe degree. Now, I don't know what that is. Maybe used to be law or medicine. It's not those things anymore.

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But maybe it's plastic surgery, I don't know. But you might still find your “safe jobs” and safe degrees to have that sort of thing. But it's unlikely, it's likely that the world's just going to keep changing, we're going to need to continually learn how to adapt. Now, the whole idea of lifelong learning, which sounds a little bit scary or actually it could be distasteful to people who hated school originally, they said, what's happening as you develop a portfolio of work, if you watch young people, what they're doing is they're actually learning far more frequently what I call just in time, and just in context. So rather than I use the example of a young man who he went to work at a family's business, and he saw that there was nobody doing the IT work, so he just sort of stepped into it. And he didn't tell the office manager, I'm going back for a four year degree. And IT degree and then I'll come back and you can hire me. No, he just started looking online and looking on his digital distraction device for how to solve different problems and installed new technology in the office and became the IT guy overnight.

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And so that's what young people are doing nowadays is learning just in time and just in context. So learning what they need to solve the problem directly in front of them. And they're learning as they do it with real world problems. And so that's how work is going to shift more and more to problem centric and project centric and our learning will be more and more just in time and just in context. Now, that doesn't mean that I want my brain surgeon to have watched a YouTube video and walk into the operating theatre. But a tremendous amount of learning is going to be in the context of trying to solve the problem that's directly in front of us.

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Ross  

I think that's really insightful in the reality even if my life. When we just had a conversation before we went live, I was telling you about my father and I building the building in our garden for a home office. And some of these things, “Oh, let's have a check out YouTube, oh that's how we do the tiling for the roof,” and you learn and then you learn by doing some of these things. And that situation, whether you're going to a center of knowledge would be that YouTube or a university to acquire some information that you will then utilize at some point, and you're talking about shrinking the time between the learning and the doing from a college till three years later. Now, I've got to use that thing and try and remember it to right there.

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How will that work when it's something that we haven't done before? When it's a role, or a task or an element? What do we need to shift to in our thinking, and maybe there's an indication into the legacy of your father and things where methodologies and principles are grounded and can maybe outlast certain in the moment executional skills of those things. So I'm just curious as to this roller coaster that we're on, that's speeding up? How do we provide value for things that we don't know what the value is, and we don't know what the problem is or even how to solve it as we go forwards? What's the kind of world like that, Gary?

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Gary  

Yeah, absolutely. So I'll give you a couple of just quick anchors for it. So the first is, across the board mindset, the mindset of a problem solver. If you are approaching a novel problem, you've never seen this before, the workman is not available to help you install the building, so now you and your father have to figure it out. If you didn't think of yourselves as able to solve that problem, then you'd either going to be standing around just looking at each other, or you're going to immediately go on your digital distraction device and find somebody to solve it for you because you can't figure it out, right? So first off, if you think of yourself, you have the mindset of a problem solver, then you're going to deconstruct the problem. And you're going to figure out, you're basically you're going to do trial and error, right? We don't call it trial and success, we call it trial and error, you're gonna make mistakes, and you're gonna figure it out, right? The second is, you often are going to do it collaboratively. That is you have certain superpowers at the intersection of what you love and what you're good at doing. Other people have superpowers, and you might be the one to be able to hang the door, but your father might be the one to be able to do the painting.

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And so everybody's got different skill sets that are already optimized. And figuring out how to align those skill sets is going to be one of the deliverables for tomorrow. Now there are rod different categories of skills, and I think that's important to call out is and this is research going back to the 1950’s, an old friend of my father's by the name of Sid Fine, but basically, there are skills that are anchored in a field or industry. And we often call those no skills or knowledges. And there are skills that are usable in a range of different situations. And those are flexible skills, they’re transferable skills.

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Now, unfortunately, we call these hard skills and soft skills. But the truth is, these flex skills, these skills that are usable in a range of different situations, everything from problem solving, to analyzing to communicating to collaborating, they all end in ing, those are skills that are quite trainable. And those are on the top list of everybody's 21st century skills. There's skills that are not often explicitly taught in our schools. Our schools are often optimized for those no skills, getting a bunch of knowledges into your head. Well,  that world's evaporating and you're going to get more and more of your no skills from these, you're going to get more and more of those flex skills from learning just in time and just in context.

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Ross  

And you mentioned, it's called trial and error for a reason, not trial and success. How do organizations really, truly improperly embrace trial and error? Because there's so much pressure to perform, there's pressure on results. There's pressures on just survival, let alone thriving, and therefore, I've got no time or space for error. I need results. How do they create an environment in which it does foster trial and error to allow for those opportunities that weren't seen before, those breakthroughs that were lurking in the dark corner. What are the sort of environments or processes or policies or things that an organization can put in place where trial and error becomes a happy, brother and sister to have in the room, not one that you try and lock out and keep out of the room?

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Gary  

Yeah, so we keep coming back to some of the core legs of the stool, but mindset again is the, mindset of the problem solver is that you basically you do trial and error, you fail fast. It's the Silicon Valley mantra, and unfortunately is move fast and break. Well, it's also move fast and break things. And we've broken a variety of things, including oh I don't know some aspects of society that I think we need to need to fix. But the basic premise is you're talking about a mindset shift for an organization, where people feel that they can be problem solvers, they can take risks, and they can fail fast, and they can iterate. And all of that can be done in a very problem-centric and project-centric way. Now these are not, for organizations that have much more of sort of an old rules of work and fixed mindset, these are very challenging transitions. I talked about a number of the techniques for doing that in the book. But the basic premise is that you have to help every individual. You go back to some of the basics, I was talking about understanding their own skills, understand the kind of problems they most want to solve, build the flexible environment inside the organization where people can, as teams dynamically bind around problems come together to solve a problem, finish that project move on the next one, manage multiple projects simultaneously, the organizations that have done this are ones that leverage flexible technology infrastructure that have become very digital.

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I know of one organization, It's got I think 300-400 employees, within 36 hours of realizing the impact of the virus, they were a completely virtual organization. That’s just stunning. And yet there are other organizations that are still trying to figure it out, and figure out how do we do this hybrid work thing and how-to, and so this I think the challenge and the opportunity for those who lead in organizations is to help people to develop this mindset of the problem solver to allow people to make mistakes but to fail fast that is iterate quickly. And I talked about a number of techniques in the book, rapid design thinking, rapid prototyping, all these things that allow you to be able to help people from across the organization, very diverse teams, to come together to solve problems very flexibly and dynamically and then move on to the next one. It's all doable, but it takes a new mindset.

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Ross  

And it takes bravery to actually have a feedback loop that's also opened. One where those learnings aren't just in that little silo of that team that “Oh, yeah, we fell, but we're not going to tell anybody,” is to actually be open and rapid in the feedback loop as well. I want to circle us back to the beginning. Something that for both of us really matters, the world we want to live in is one where no one's left behind. And you have a great ability to envision futures, and to think about how you might go about creating them and get people thinking whether that's self reflection, having processes and things in place to do that. How might technology serve and help us in a world where no one's left behind? What are the sort of aspects that you foresee of a future world that you'd like to see come manifest? What kind of roles does technology and play specifically not in just the concept of future of work, and it's all expansiveness, but in leaving no one behind? Where does that show up in technology serving that problem and challenge for you?

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Gary  

Yeah, absolutely. So first off, I want to be sure, with a lot of the things you and I've talked about in terms of the disruptive technologies, and Singularity University and Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil, the founders have been very fond about talking about these massive, disruptive impacts and all the positive results that can come from them. I think we have a lot of information now that the technology by itself can generate a ton of good but it could also generate a ton of bad as well. That is if we don't design for a more inclusive world of work and learning that you can get some very negative consequences. And our official intelligence machine learning software is a good example. So there's a lot of the pressure that you were talking about especially for businesses is around things like meeting shareholder needs, and quarterly reports and profitability and performance and all that sort of stuff. And the challenge, unfortunately, in that world is that so much of the design of the use of those technologies is then around efficiency.

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And so we've got this old model, that again goes back to the industrial era, where technology is about replacing human tasks. Like every time we can find a human task that can be done better by a piece of software or a robot just do it. And if we left some humans behind,  “Oh we had to lay them off, no big deal,” we go hire some new humans, some smarter ones because those old ones clearly weren't too smart. So that is the negative side, the negative externality side of the ledger. That is we bring these technologies in, we automate a whole bunch of human tasks, and we don't help people to be able to continually adapt.

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What we can do is completely flip that entire equation and say that our technologies are about augmenting human capacity, helping us to understand our superpowers, develop these superpowers, collaborate with others on their superpowers, and enhance our superpowers. All of those capacities that we're developing with these technologies, have the ability to help humans be able to solve problems so much more effectively and better and to do it together as part of a team sport, and a global team sport. That if we just shift that calculus, if we invest in those technologies that help humans to be able to do better work, it's gonna work out a lot better. It's the dystopian calculation, a lot of the robots and software taking jobs mean that unfortunately develops cand that's how we leave humans behind. But the truth is, robots and software don't take jobs. Robots and software just automate tasks. It's a human's decision if a job goes away, and we can make different decisions.

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Ross  

I came across him in one of my interviews, the concept and phrase of task redundancy, not people redundancy. And to think of it in that way in how do we provide that adaption roadmap for everyone to discover their new value? And that technology should be in service of that expansion and pursuit not as an afterthought, and “Oh, yeah, c’est la vie. Well, someone else's problem or they'll deal with it, or they're left on their own,” to this vision and view of ethical employee mobility, and to take responsibility of whether that is in your current arena of your organization or in your community and society in which you've allowed someone to have a future that's better than the past.

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And I think, this is, for many it's exhilarating, it's motivating, it's something they can feel an emotional connection to. But each conversation I have, it takes these little collaborations, these little moments of where collective individuals who have half the jigsaw pieces that aligning together in this new imagination of work, where we're less about competition and more about collaboration. And again, that's going to take an incredibly different shift of society of work, and the difference between scarcity and abundance, right in these things.

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As a last piece, Gary. I wonder if you would share, you've been at Singularity University for three, four years now, which is kind of the fringe edge of the mantra of abundant technology going to solve every challenging problem. You've been in your own world dealing with people's careers, and their career portfolios, from your early days as Workshop support at 19 for the 40 year olds of what their next career paths would be, to writing and speaking on the subject. If there were some things that I could do tomorrow, that would help me ensure I wasn't left behind, or my brother or my colleague or people weren't left behind. What could I do tomorrow in the way that I'm thinking or a practical piece or reading your book or whatever it may be? What could I do within the next 24 hours-48 hours that would start me on that right path to making sure myself and the people I love and care about aren't left behind?

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Gary  

Absolutely so I'd love it if people read the book that's marvelous, but I don'tclaim to have all the answers but hopefully I'm hoping that it can be catalytic for people. But a couple things and again, I'm going to come back to the sort of the four anchors and of individuals, organizations, communities and countries. So as individuals, what we found in fit for literally 50 years of Parachute is that people need to learn a process that is, you can get somebody to walk you through what your next job could be. And but that's, you know my father was a fan of the old aphorism of give me a fish and I eat for the day teach me to fish and I can eat for the rest of my life.

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So you need to learn how to fish and teach others how to fish. So if you figure this out, if you go through that, what, where and how, self inventory scenarios, and then finding or creating that work. Once you crack that code, help others to do it. And this is not rocket science. These are completely learnable techniques. Exactly. So that's one. The second is if you have any power, if you hire, if you have people that work for you, if you work in an organization with other people, the more inclusive and aligned you can be, the more impact you will have. So the research is very, very clear, the most effective teams are those that are psychologically diverse, and have psychological safety. That is a lot of different people that look different, and think different and act different in the room. And they're all safe, they can make come up with crazy ideas, they can do trial and error together.

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So if you hire, hire somebody from a non-standard profile, don't hire somebody that looks pretty much like the same person looking back at you in the mirror, hire somebody with a very, very different background or experiences or somebody with transferable skills, flex skills that you might not have chosen before because they came from another industry or from a completely different school you never went to. Do those things that include people who might not have been included, otherwise, you can have an amazing impact. And then if you are someone who leads in a larger organization, a larger context, who leads in your community, you have the capacity to build more inclusive ecosystems, you can build processes that ensure that others will be more inclusive. You can put in place the way that people align the work that they do so that they're all trying to solve problems together, whether it's in your organization or in your community.

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And believe it or not, if you do all those things, what that will eventually help the roll up and influence is what happens in your broader region or your country. These are all quite doable activities, every one of us can do these things. They're not hypothetical, you can start today.

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Ross  

And to finish off before we say goodbye for now. And you go back to one of the workshops when you were 19 that you were in. And you can tell 19-year-old Gary some of the things you've learned along the way of the years since. With all of the knowledge all, of this thought that you've got. What piece of advice would you give about your own career to your 19 year old self of a snippet, a nugget, a thought a question? What would you say?

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Gary  

So I've actually got two answers. So I love this question. Because my wife and I, we produced this program for Google Science Fair, where we interviewed amazing change makers around the world and everybody from Peter Diamandis to Kurtzweil to Mark Keller, the astronaut, I mean, just unbelievably Dean Keyman, the inventor. And we asked them that, what would you, what advice would you give to your teenage self? And so and I can tell you what their answers were. But I'll just tell you mine is.

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And mine is, I think, a little bit unique. Which is that I wouldn't advise that teenager to do anything differently. And I'll tell you why. I'll tell you, I can give you advice for others who you may have 19-year-olds that they advise, that they talk to but for myself, I just have a different calculus, which is I believe that every decision that we have made in our lives, good, bad, indifferent, positive outcomes, negative outcomes, contributes to who we are. And I can't go back and tell that 19 year old me to do anything different, because sure I'd be a different person, but I am who I am.

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And so my calculus is I've got lots of things to tell people, simple things, but to tell 19-year-olds nowadays and hopefully that parents will do in giving their children permission to experiment and explore and that sort of things. And to do what they love, those are typically the two things I'd suggest. But I believe that each one of us has to not just honor that past, but own that past. And look at all that is contributed to the kinds of problems that we can solve today. You couldn't change that, so instead, what's the advice you would give yourself today? And I hope it's the same advice you'd give that 19-year-old. Give yourself permission to dream and do what you love.

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Ross  

I love that. Thanks, Gary. It's been a real joy to learn and discover your insights and wisdom. And I'm sure our community can benefit from what you've shared with them. So thank you very much. If they want to get in contact with you, or your book or various pieces, where should they go?

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Gary  

GBolles.com G B O L L E S.com I've got all my lectures and articles and a link to the book on that.

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Ross  

Fantastic. Thank you very much.

Gary  

Oh, it's been marvelous thanks.

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Voiceover  

Do you have the level of adaptability to survive and thrive in the rapid changes ahead? Has your resilience got more comeback than a yo-yo? Do you have the ability to unlearn in order to reskill, upskill, and breakthrough? Find out today and uncover your adaptability profile and score your AQ visit "AQai.io" To gain your personalized report across 15 scientifically validated dimensions of adaptability for limited time enter code "Podcast65" for a complimentary AQ me assessment. AQ AI transforming the way people, teams, and organizations navigate change.

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Outro

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