Positive Deviance: A Bright Spot Intervention

“At the core of a Positive Deviance intervention is the recognition that significant innovation cannot come through reliance on outside experts who, from their hierarchical command and control position, tell the insiders what to do. Such a tactic in no way evokes the natural capabilities of the system in leveraging the already effective practices of positive deviants within the system.”  -Goldstein, Hazy, Lichtenstein Complexity and the Nexus of Leadership

While the term “familiarity breeds contempt” may be too strong an example for the purpose it is trying to provide here, in some ways it most fitting. We have this tendency not to honor and value the thinking and work of those closest in proximity to us. We are often unable or unwilling to see the expertise sitting amongst us. We like to believe that the answers to the most difficult problems we are trying to solve, are always beyond us and our current circumstances. We don’t like to believe that those among us are able to solve the issues that we ourselves seem to find unsolvable, at least in our current circumstances. It is an issue that we see playing out all the time, all around us in our teams, organizations, systems, and work…

• We have a problem in our organization, let’s hire an external expert.
• We need to build more capacity and engage in professional learning, hire a consultant.
• We’re having a conference, we need to find an outside keynote.

Which is not to say that we don’t need to be tapping into external networks for greater, more expansive learning and idea flows, but not at the cost of continually devaluing the ideas and expertise that surrounds us in our teams and organizations. Especially when that outside expertise does not come equipped with the same understanding of the context and access to which these problems have arisen and continue to preside and plague us and our organizations.

Unfortunately, for this very reason, we continue to fail to spread and scale the insights and ideas that can actually lead to solving the most difficult, stubborn and often intractable problems that afflict our leadership and organizations. By remaining aligned in our thinking to an attitude that “no one can be a prophet in their own land,” we constrain the capacity for our own people and organizations to solve our own problems, in ways that are already working.

And yet, it is that very thinking which keeps us from noticing the positive deviants or bright spots that exist, often unnoticed and unrecognized in our organizations. Those individuals who have access to the same resources and supports as everyone else, but who are actually pushing the needle, moving those mountains, and getting positive results towards those very problems that the organization has found to be too difficult to solve.

While they may not be prophets per se, for they often don’t even recognize or even notice how their actions and behaviors are progressing them positively against the odds, they are our greatest resource for solving many of the adaptive challenges we are facing. In recognizing these bright spots, and in taking the time to watch and learn from them with a much more empathetic lens to determine what they are doing differently, we gather better solutions to moving forward in a much more positive manner. In fact, we not only increase our own learning and capacity, but create the opportunity to scale and spread those ideas and thinking across our organizations. As Richard Pascale and Jerry Sternin share in the Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World’s Toughest Problems, “Invisible in plain sight is the community’s latent potential to self-organize, tap its own wisdom, and address problems long regarded with fatalistic acceptance.”

For which Pascale and Sternin add, “Positive deviance is founded on the premise that at least one person in a community, working with the same resources as everyone else, has already licked the problem that confounds others. This individual is an outlier in the statistical sense – an exception, someone whose outcome deviates in a positive way from the norm. In most cases this person does not know he or she is doing anything unusual. Yet once the unique solution is discovered and understood, it can be adopted by the wider community and transform many lives.”

Positive deviance is both an intentional and internal approach to solving our organizational problems, issues, and challenges, which inevitably pushes back against the idea that “no one is a prophet in their own land” and “familiarity breeds contempt.” It works on the belief that there are bright spots within our organizations, positive deviants that are having real success towards those problems we’ve deemed intractable, even though they have the exact same access, training, and resources. The same everything as everyone else in our organization, and yet, they are finding success and achieving positive outcomes. Instead of moving towards an external source of expertise to solve these challenges, positive deviance intentionally turns towards engaging an internal problem-solving approach.

What Pascale and Sternin share in regards to positive deviance is that, “The basic premise is this: (1) Solutions to seemingly intractable problems already exist, (2) they have been discovered by members of the community itself, and (3) these innovators (individual positive deviants) have succeeded even though they share the same constraints and barriers as others.”

Which makes the spread and scale of these ideas and thinking easier and quicker to assimilate within the organization, as long as we move past the no prophet and familiarity mindset and stance. Seeing that these solutions are being provided by those within the organizational group and community working with the same resources as everyone else, provides the ability to moving past excuses, to the understanding that we can solve our own problems and challenges, and in fact, we already are.

This intervention of positive deviance pushes progress forward in two very meaningful ways, (1) by moving from a knowledge to a behavior focus. It engages these bright spot ideas and solutions not by telling and providing the knowledge, but through doing and learning new behaviors and practices. Positive deviance focuses on learning by doing to scale and spread those bright spot solutions, and (2) there is a shift from putting the focus on what’s wrong in the system that we need to fix, to one of what’s right and how to engage, scale, and spread those positive solutions across the entirety of the organization.

However, before an organization or system can fully tap into what these positive deviants or bright spots are doing different, we must first define and identify what are the common practices that already exist within the organization and system. Without identifying the common practices and behaviors that already exist, it will be very difficult to truly determine what these positive deviants are doing differently and why it is leading to successful progress and outcomes. The ability to determine what a positive deviant is doing differently that leads to better outcomes, then allows a leader, an organization, or a system to begin to engage and amplify those practices and behaviors across the ecosystem. As Pascale and Sternin share in Positive Deviance, “Until we determine what everybody is doing today, we can’t spot the exceptional and successful strategies.”

In Fast Company’s 2000 article Positive Deviant by David Dorsey, Jerry Sternin shares that there are eight “steps toward adopting positive deviance as your change program”

1. Don’t Presume That You Have The Answer – too often, believing we have the answer to the problem closes us off to a diversity of thinking and ideas, keeping us from truly seeing the how and why positive deviants are having success in solving the problem.
2. Don’t Think Of It As A Dinner Party – As Sternin shares in the the article, “Everyone in the group that you want to help change must identify with the others in the group. Everyone must face the same challenges and rely on the same set of resources to come up with answers. If group members don’t see themselves as working on identical challenges with identical sets of resources, then positive deviance won’t work.”
3. Let Them Do It Themselves – This is not a top down process, but rather one of discovery and testing out of these solutions within the group to see how those processes and behaviors work for them in their group.
4. Identify Conventional Wisdom – As Sternin adds in the article, “Before you can recognize how the positive deviants stray from conventional wisdom, you first have to understand clearly what the accepted behavior is. Establish what it is that most group members do.” It is difficult to truly determine what is different, if you don’t have a baseline for what is the same.
5. Identify And Analyze The Deviants – It is in defining the conventional wisdom of the group, that the positive deviants will emerge. It is in defining the common that the uncommon begins to become more apparent. It is in this process that the invisible become visible.
6. Let The Deviants Adopt Deviations On Their Own – Sternin defines this step as critical, “Once you find deviant behaviors, don’t tell people about them. It’s not a transfer of knowledge. It’s not about importing best practices from somewhere else. It’s about changing behavior. You design an intervention that requires and enables people to access and to act on these new premises. You enable people to practice a new behavior not to sit in class learning about it.”
7. Track Results And Publicize Them – Provide a space for results to be shown, let people see how results are achieved, which will allow the group to become interested and curious about them and how doing things differently led to these results. Then celebrate success.
8. Repeat Steps One Through Seven – For which Sternin adds, “Make the whole process cyclical. Once people discover effective ways to deviate from the norm, and once the methods have become common practice, it’s time to do another study to find out how the best performers in the group are operating now. Chances are that they’ve discovered new deviations from the new norm.”

In simpler terms, Pascale and Sternin in their book, Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World’s Toughest Problems, share how the following 4 steps are important in moving towards the Positive Deviance process:

1. Define the problem and desired outcome.
2. Determine common practices.
3. Discover uncommon but successful behaviors and strategies through inquiry and observation.
4. Design an action learning initiative based on findings.

For which they also provide 4 characteristics of the Positive Deviance process:

1. It is generative.
2. It is based on strengths and assets.
3. It is not expert driven. Community members provide culturally appropriate expertise.
4. It is embedded in the social context of the community.

Ultimately, finding the positive deviants and bright spots in the system is both an unconventional and intentional act. It requires moving past conventional wisdom of the day, past the external experts, and truly determining what is happening successfully (already) within the organization or system, why is it happening, how it is happening, and in what ways can we scale and spread it across our teams, our groups, the community, and eventually, the entire organizational ecosystem.

Or as Pascale and Sternin share, “Positive deviance? An awkward, oxymoronic term.  The concept is simple: look for the outliers who succeed against all odds.”

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Future of Things (FoT): In An Era of Encroachment

It’s interesting how seldom we consider what we believe to be innovative today, will eventually become the status quo of tomorrow.

Not that long ago we marveled at the idea of humans being able to fly. Now we have more than eight million people who fly through our skies each day, supported by an intricate infrastructure and expansive system of supports worldwide to ensure the safety and comfort of those eight million arrivals and departures. No longer do we contemplate the wonder of flight, as much as we complain of small seats and the lack of wifi.

As Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google, USA puts forth, “[In the future], the Internet will disappear, you won’t even sense it, it will be part of your presence all the time.” Which makes me think of how far we have come from our first curiosity and wonder of the possibility for flight, to what we have created today. We no longer marvel or fancy the idea of flight, or how far the current level of technology has really taken us, or even the incredibly vast infrastructure and system we have created in support of flight.

Rather, it has just become a natural part of our everyday life.

In many ways, we stand at that same place of consideration, curiosity and wonder we had towards flight, when it comes to this idea of automation and artificial intelligence in today’s world.

Determined to figure out what we can do, well before we know out what we should do.

Which takes me back to the idea of flight and Eric Schmidt’s quote on the presence of the Internet, especially in light of the rapid and accelerated pace of change in today’s world…

It makes me wonder if automation and artificial intelligence will just become the new normal and natural part of our everyday lives in the future? If so, how long? 5 years? 10 years? 20 years? How long before its presence is no longer noticed or felt, it just is? And how will that change our personal and professional lives? How will it change the way we live and work? How will it change our world and our place in it?  

While we don’t have that same intricate and expansive infrastructure and system that we have since built up from that first flight, we do know that idea of automation and artificial intelligence in our world is no longer that grounded and curious wonderer envisioning a time in which flight is possible. From agriculture to manufacturing, from driverless cars and trucks to neural networks, the march is on.

The question then is no longer if it is coming, but where is it actually taking us.

And while we are not in a time where automation and artificial intelligence can take away all of work, it is definitely a time of encroachment into that world. As Thomas Davenport and Julie Kirby share in Only Humans Need Apply, “As computer programs focus on the tasks they can do, it’s those pieces of jobs that are taken away. The encroachment happens one task at a time, meaning that a job that is only 10 percent automatable doesn’t go away. It’s just that, now, nine holders of that job can do what used to be the work of ten.”  

As they add, “Instead, they’re just nudged, nudged, nudged toward the door.”

In many ways, automation and artificial intelligence are like the early days of flight, as we figured out what we could do, it also opened up a plethora of new possibilities and new pathways as it expanded its wings into the future. No one could have foretold from those first flights, the level of sophistication that we would have today, as well as the millions of jobs and opportunities it has provided for people, from airports to travel agencies.

But what we do know, it required new skills, new learnings, and the ability to adapt to those changes.

So, then the question becomes, will automation and artificial intelligence have the same effect on our future world as flight has had on our past? Or will it be different this time, as many have predicted. Will its ramifications on the future dare us into new arenas or push us into dire straits? Will automation and artificial intelligence decimate jobs and work as we have known it, as many have anticipated, or will it rewrite the rules of work?

While time will only tell, for now, we must be aware that we exist in a time of encroachment by automation and artificial intelligence.  

Which means we are living in the nudge. A few jobs here, a few jobs there. Often barely noticeable. Almost like a frog that has found its way into a vat of heating water, we don’t understand that the water is boiling until it is too late. Or as Hemingway adds, “gradually, then suddenly.”

It doesn’t mean that we no longer need cashiers, it just means that we don’t need as many. It doesn’t mean that we no longer need radiologists, we just don’t need as many. And so on and so on. I think you get the picture.

As this encroachment increases, so will the need for people to adapt and learn. It requires that we are constantly upskilling our knowledge and our skillsets. Especially as Davenport and Kirby share, “The parts of our jobs we’ll keep are just the parts that can’t be codified.” For which they add, “If work can be codified, it can be automated. And there’s also the corollary: If it can automated in an economical fashion, it will be. Already we’re seeing a rapid decomposition of jobs and automation of the most modifiable parts – which are sometimes the parts that have required the greatest education and experience.”

Which means, in the future, like the Internet that Eric Schmidt speaks of, upskilling will need to become a natural part of our existence. To the point that it won’t even be felt. Continuous learning will just become a part of who we are and how we live and work. There will be this need for us all to become curious, creative, critical thinkers.

Especially as automation and artificial intelligence enhance the “threat of deskilling.”  Davenport and Kirby add in Only Humans Need Apply, “The jobs are deskilled when technologies are introduced that no longer require workers to have formerly necessary skills – meaning that semiskilled our unskilled workers can now hold those jobs. In turn, the labor force is deskilled when, enough machines having taken over a particular task, the skill becomes a ‘lost art’ to people.”

In many ways, we are seeing the deskilling of the “hard skills” and the necessity for upskilling what are known as the “soft skills,” or those skills that remain difficult for automation and artificial intelligence to replicate and codify.

Either way, awareness is paramount as automation and artificial intelligence begins to get its wings.  

Which means that the question is no longer as much about whether automation and artificial intelligence will come after my job, but whether or not I am continuously learning the skills, skillsets, and knowledge that will still make me viable and valuable whether automation or artificial intelligence comes after my job or not.

I will leave you with these thoughts from Davenport and Kirby, “It’s important to understand all this because, in our work alongside cognitive technologies, we will need to keep adjusting to their evolving capabilities. To be able to anticipate how our own roles will change, we must be able to predict the pathways from today’s state of the art to future possibilities.” For which they add…

“Complacency is not an option.”

Discovering Emergent Innovation In The Educational Ecosystem

“Innovative organizations regularly change the ‘rules of engagement’ with ideas, isolate and define problems in new and unusual ways and look harder for plausible solutions.” -Emergent Innovation: A New Strategic Paradigm via The Journal of Strategic Leadership

What we often fail to realize is that innovation is already occurring across our organizational landscapes on an ongoing basis. Whether or not we are open to recognizing it is a very different story. Pockets of positive deviance exist, both individually and organizationally, providing new ideas and novel solutions to the problems that endlessly plague our organizational ecosystems.

Unfortunately, especially in times of change, we fail to allow space for the emergence of that innovation. Most often, we lack the will or ability to engage those novel and new ideas and solutions in constructive ways that spread and scale at any level.

In most cases, we find organizations sporadically searching out external consultants and ideas, hoping to ride the promises of the quick wins and quick fixes that abound within the ecology of education. Rather than taking the time to recognize the possibilities and bright spots that are already emerging within and across the organization.

And while we can see the success that these positive deviants are creating within the system, we avoid those novel and new solutions for the fear of the disruption, disequilibrium, and instability that those ideas have power to create across the organizational landscape. Or we look to find excuses to the “why” and “how” these bright spots are determining ways towards creating success within the system, with the same resources and support. As they often say, it is difficult to be a prophet in your own land.

Especially, in the midst of the chaos and turbulence that erupts in times of great change, we spend little time in recognizing the innovative opportunities that are emerging. Rather, we spend more time recoiling back from the volatility that ensues from these disruptive forces, insulating the organization in a facade of safety and stability, predicated on the comfort of static, status quo processes and structures. We find ourselves resorting to reactive actions, rather than engaging in proactive feedback loops.

Rather, we spend minimal time and provide little to no space for the emergence of the novel and new. Let alone the recognition of the positive deviance spread across the organizational landscape and how to effectively engage the learnings of those bright spots within the organizational ecosystem in an effort to scale up the innovation that is emerging and emanating from those bright spots.

To engage this emergence, Goldstein, Hazy and Lichtenstein share in their work, The Complexity and the Nexus of Leadership, four phases that “operate together to bring about adaptive emergence.”

Those four phases they include are Disequilibrium Conditions, Amplifying Actions, Recombinations, and Stabilizing Feedback.

Let’s take a quick look into each of these phases and how they support emergent innovation:

Disequilibrium Conditions: for emergent innovation to take hold, there must be a level of disequilibrium that is occurring within and across the organization. It requires moving past “the use of models of stability” and “enforcing top-down structures” that protect and insulate organizations from the discomfort that change is creating, and recognizing the novel and new ideas and innovations that are emerging through this disequilibrium. Too often, this disequilibrium is too uncomfortable to tolerate, pushing both individuals and the organization away from what is emerging and the implications of that emergence. Organizations that are able to push through the discomfort, open themselves to what Goldstein, Hazy, and Lichtenstein refer to as “opportunity tension” which allows for leadership to “engage, plan, pursue and capitalize on the potential.”

Amplifying Actions: as Goldstein, Hazy, and Lichtenstein share, “As disequilibrium increases, most organizations will see an increase in stress and tension, as well as an increase in in experiments in novelty.” Unfortunately, in the midst of this disequilibrium, leaders will look for ways to de-stress and stabilize the system, instead of increasing their innovative efforts to push forward into this change with more effective ideas and solutions. Leadership will often look fervently to past practices to keep the organization locked in linear and predictable processes and structures that provide some sense of stability. As Goldstein, Hazy, and Lichtenstein add, leadership needs to learn to “live with-and-even-embrace-the discomfort of disequilibrium, encouraging experiments and amplifying successes in whatever form they may come.” Which is a reason that many organizations never reach a state of change, as they tend to recoil back in the face of the stress of this instability. As the authors add, “As stress and intensity grows, the system approaches the possibility of a state of change.”

Recombinations: Goldstein, Hazy, and Lichtenstein share that, “Once a critical threshold is crossed, the system’s inertia has been overcome. The organization now enters a period when it can be influenced by forces for emergent order.” What is vital to this, is the understanding that individuals and the organization must push through the disequilibrium brought on by these change forces, rather than giving in to the discomfort and recoiling back to the safety and stability of what it has always known, what it has always done. It is in this phase that individuals and the organization can be driven by the learning that accompanies ongoing experiments in novelty and determining how that learning can move the organization forward more effectively and relevantly.

Stabilizing Feedback: as Goldstein, Hazy, and Lichtenstein put forth, “Finally, new emergent order, if it is indeed creating value, will stabilize itself in order to retain this increased capacity.” For which they add, “As this stabilizing process takes hold, the system finds the appropriate ways to position itself for overall sustainability in the ecology.” It is at this point that change truly takes hold in the organization and moves from the novel to a new way of operating and working. It is where the innovation diffuses across the organizational ecosystem.

Understanding these phases of emergent innovation better prepares our individuals and organizations to withstand the disequilibrium and instability that can often accompany the change of the new. It provides a framework for pushing through the discomfort that is often at the core of embracing emergent innovation and the organizational change accompanies it.

“Emergent events are driven by an entrepreneurial opportunity that pushes the organization outside its normal ruts and into taking new directions.”

Very often…

“A state of disequilibrium or instability…led to an unexpected outcome, namely, the emergence of the unexpected.” -Goldstein, Hazy, Lichtenstein via The Complexity and the Nexus of Leadership: Leveraging Nonlinear Science to Create Ecologies of Innovation

Awareness In A Time Exponential Shifts: Skills Remediation In The Face Of Automation And Artificial Intelligence

“We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come – namely, technological unemployment.” -John Maynard Keynes (1930)

In a time in which we face an abundance of fake news, it is becoming increasingly more and more difficult to know who or what to believe anymore…

And yet, clarity, coherence and clear understanding is vital to making sure we move into the future in a more effective and relevant manner.

Especially in the face of the many changes coming at us as individuals, organizations, and even society as a whole. In a world of growing dilemmas and adaptive challenges, we have to make sure we are not only asking, but getting the questions right, if we ever want our solutions to be effective and our answers relevant.

So let’s begin by asking ourselves one of the biggest questions that is being considered in regards to the future of work…

Are the robots coming? Or not? Are we on the verge of a dystopian future brought on by a robot and automation apocalypse? Or is this just another industrial revolution that will just require a time of difficult adjustments as we reskill and upskill to the creation of new types of jobs and work? Is it just like the industrial revolution of the past? Or is it different? Very different?

Or is it a bit of both…

Especially when no one seems to agree. The economists are more inclined to the business as usual attitude and approach, while the technologists tend to land on a much more disruptive scenario that seems to catch people by surprise in the level and speed of change that is soon to be thrust upon us.

The one thing we do know, it is a concerning and hotly debated issue across all of society, as we begin to think about the future we are creating for ourselves and for our children. And no matter what side you fall on in concerning the changes we will face in the future, the one thing we can say for sure, the future is going to be different, very different.

Either way, it is something we need to be much more cognizant of and considering when we think about the future of our students and the future of education…

As the World Economic Forum shares in Accelerating Workforce Reskilling for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, “To make the most impactful investments, education ecosystem stakeholders need to better understand what skills are readily available within the adult population and where the greatest skill gaps exist. This needs to be completed with information about which skills are in greatest demand in the labor market and how to provide the appropriate reskilling pathways toward new employment opportunities.”  

For which they add, “Growing awareness of technological changes associated with the Fourth Industrial Revolution creates a new window of opportunity for concerted action for investing in the skills and potential of the workforce of the future for all ages. A new new deal for lifelong learning is needed globally to provide dynamic and inclusive lifelong learning systems, to resolve both the immediate challenge and to create sustainable models for the future.”

It is in our understanding and curating of our awareness of these societal shifts and technological disruptions that we can better see not only the signals that are driving us forward into this automated and artificially infused future, but determine which of those signals which will provide the greatest opportunity for meeting the future needs of our students, as well as creating ongoing and relevant change that helps education meet those needs head on, in a more efficient and effective manner.

Yet, unfortunately, the World Economic Forum adds, “Despite the growing need for adult reskilling, opportunities for broad-based and inclusive reskilling are currently not available at the appropriate levels of access, quality and scale of supply in most countries.”

To add insult to injury, “Progress has been made in the access to greater amounts of low-cost digital training across many countries; but a cohesive system which addresses the divers needs of learners, dedicates sufficient resources, and brings together the right stakeholders in providing applied learning opportunities is still lacking.”  

Or as the Guardian adds in What Jobs Will Be Around In 20 Years, “Jobs won’t entirely disappear; many will simply be redefined.  But people will likely lack the new skillsets required for new roles and be out of work anyway.”

What the world is telling us is that our structures and systems are not adequately prepared to provide the capacity our people need to sufficiently meet these coming changes and disruptive factors we are and will be facing, at an individual, organizational, and societal level.

Yet, even in the face of these adaptive challenges, many educators will profusely disagree that it is in the role of education and educators to prepare students for the world of work, and that the aim should be squarely focused on creating students who have a lifelong love for learning. For which I would wholeheartedly agree, except in the fact that is no longer enough for success in today’s volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world.

We live in a world where continuous learning and upskilling must go hand in hand…

We live in a world where content is no longer the king and there are no extra points for being the “best rememberer” anymore. There can no longer be this divide between content and skills.  It is not an either/or proposition, rather, now it is very much an AND World.

Just as the coming of automation and artificial intelligence is creating a greater need for augmentation between humans and machines, education must begin to close the chasm that lies between content and skills. Just as the world of work is now requiring more human and machine augmentation, education needs that same connection between the need for knowledge and the future ready skills and skillsets that allow for greater opportunity for success in the future.

Closing this divide will be vital, as getting students ready for automated future is going to be a very different proposition…

Inability to have a greater awareness of these shifts and what they mean for society and the future of work is effectively preparing students for a world of remediation beyond school.

As the World Economic Forum shares, “In the United States, 63% of workers have indicated having participated in job-related training in the past 12 months, yet employers are reporting the highest talent shortages since 2007.”  

Even with ongoing reskilling and upskilling, workers are finding that they remain in need of skills remediation to even begin to keep pace with the shifts that are changing our world at an exponential pace.

Today’s students are walking out into a world of work that is much different than the world that many of us grew up in.

A world that is shifting and changing at an accelerated and volatile rate. A world that is seeing a constant diminishing of jobs due to the expansion of outsourcing, globalization, automation and artificial intelligence. A world of work which now sees more and more people needing to find comfortability in taskification, freelancing and the gig economy, which has become the preferred-choice for both a primary and supplementary income for over 113 million people (via McKinsey Global Institute).

Much of our past notions of the process how work looks in society is being wiped off of the societal map…

A world in which people will now have to be much more adaptive as they will most likely work 11+ jobs in their lifetime. A world of work in which the average life span of Fortune 500 companies has dropped from 75 years to 15 years or less. Leading us to seeing the need for our students to be more agile and adaptable as they will be required to move more and more, from job to job, in the face of these changes.

A world of work in which we are now able to more precisely predict the chance, as well as the percentage of a job being possibly being automated in the future, allowing us to better provide considerations and rationale towards future choices of employment and pathways to pursue.  For instance, according to The Future of Employment, the chance of automation stands at the following percentage for the following jobs; 99% for telemarketer to 89% for a taxi driver, just to name a few.

It is also a time when ideas like Universal Basic Income are being actively explored by countries and companies as a possible and foreseeable safety net for a world digitally disrupted by automation, artificial intelligence, taskification, and the gig economy.

As Stanford University academic Jerry Kaplan writes in Humans Need Not Apply, “Today, automation is blind to the color of your collar.  It doesn’t matter whether you’re a factory worker, a financial advisor, or a professional flute-player: automation is coming for you.”

And yet, our unwillingness or inability to become much more aware of these shifts, what these shifts may require of our students in the future, and the creation of the necessary pathways to provide them the skills to be more career and future ready, not only diminishes their window of opportunities for success in this new and changing world, but assures them that they will walk out into this world already in need of skills remediation..

More, now than ever before, we need to seek out those skills that make us both marketable and uniquely human, such as the 4Cs (creativity, collaboration, communication, critical-thinking), as well as empathy, compassion, and emotional intelligence.

Once again, it is an AND World. A world in which education needs to be considerate of the closing of the chasm between the need for both “hard” and “soft” skills.

Seeking out those future skills and skillsets, such as those provide by the Institute for the Future, the Singularity Hub, or even MITs Top Five Desirable Future Work Skills, for example:

• Judgment and Decision Making
• Fluency of Ideas
• Active Learning
• Learning Strategies
• Originality

As well as including entrepreneurial skills, design and systems thinking, and leadership skillsets, will in the end, not only support our students more effectively through their educational career, it will also help them to be more career ready for an unforeseeable and very non-obvious future that they are soon too face.

The more we search out those skills that serve and support our students to move into the future more effectively, the greater emphasis we place on expanding our awareness of what our students will need for a very non-obvious future, the better prepared we will be to see how those skills can and should be infused into today’s classroom to better prepare students for tomorrows world.

“The changing nature of work will bring to the fore a societal debate about the role of people in the workplace and what it means to be career-ready. Reflecting this debate, the K-12 sector will no longer push students toward post-secondary options that might not adequately prepare them for the new world of work. Instead, education at all levels will prepare learners continually to reskill and upskill and to know how to partner constructively with machines.” -via KnowledgeWorks Redesigning Readiness