DEFiNiTioN:ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed
As smart machines take over rote, routine manufacturing
and services jobs, there will be an increasing demand for the kinds of skills machines are not good at. These are higher- level thinking skills that cannot be codified. We call these sense-making skills, skills that help us create unique insights critical to decision making.
When IBM’s supercomputer, Deep Blue, defeated chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov, many took this of a sign of its superior thinking skills. But Deep Blue had won with brute number-crunching force (its ability to evaluate millions of poss- ible moves per second), not by applying the kind of human intelligence that helps us to live our lives. A computer may be able to beat a human in a game of chess or Jeopardy by sheer force of its computational abilities, but if you ask it whether
it wants to play pool, it won’t be able to tell whether you are talking about swimming, financial portfolios, or billiards.
As computing pioneer Jaron Lanier points out, despite important advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) research it is still the case that, “if we ask what thinking is, so that we can then ask how to foster it, we encounter an astonishing and terrifying answer: we don’t know.”1As we renegotiate the human/machine division of labor in the next decade, criti- cal thinking or sense-making will emerge as a skill workers increasingly need to capitalize on.
iBM’s latest supercomputer, Watson, recently took on human contestants at game-show Jeopardy.
http://www-943.ibm.com/ innovation/us/watson/
2 S o C I A L I n t e L L I G e n C e
DEFiNiTioN:ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions
While we are seeing early prototypes of “social” and “emotional” robots in various research labs today, the range of social skills and emotions that they can display is very limited. Feeling is just as complicated as sense-making,
if not more so, and just as the machines we are building are not sense-making machines, the emotional and social robots we are building are not feeling machines.
Socially intelligent employees are able to quickly assess the emotions of those around them and adapt their words, tone and gestures accordingly. This has always been a key skill for workers who need to collaborate and build relationships of trust, but it is even more important as we are called on to coll- aborate with larger groups of people in different settings. Our emotionality and social IQ developed over millennia of living
in groups will continue be one of the vital assets that give hu- man workers a comparative advantage over machines.
MiT Media Lab’s Personal Robots Group is developing a robot that can generate some human-like expressions.
http://robotic.media.mit.edu
3n o v e L & A d A P t I v e t h I n K I n G DEFiNiTioN:proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote
or rule-based
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor David Autor has tracked the polarization of jobs in the United States over the last three decades. He finds that job op- portunities are declining in middle-skill white-collar and
blue-collar jobs, largely due to a combination of the automa- tion of routine work, and global offshoring.2Conversely, job opportunities are increasingly concentrated in both high- skill, high-wage professional, technical and management occupations and in low-skill, low-wage occupations such as food service and personal care. Jobs at the high-skill end in- volve abstract tasks, and at the low-skill end, manual tasks.
What both of these categories of tasks have in common is that they require what Autor terms “situational adapt- ability”—the ability to respond to unique unexpected
circumstances of the moment. Tasks as different as writing a convincing legal argument, or creating a new dish out of set ingredients both require novel thinking and adaptability.
These skills will be at a premium in the next decade, particu- larly as automation and offshoring continue.
Change in employment by occupation, 1979-2009
Percent
4 C R o S S - C U Lt U R A L C o M P e t e n C y
DEFiNiTioN:ability to operate in different cultural settings
In a truly globally connected world, a worker’s skill set could see them posted in any number of locations—they need to be able to operate in whatever environment they find them- selves. This demands specific content, such as linguistic skills, but also adaptability to changing circumstances and an ability to sense and respond to new contexts.
Cross-cultural competency will become an important skill
for all workers, not just those who have to operate in diverse geographical environments. Organizations increasingly see diversity as a driver of innovation. Research now tells us
that what makes a group truly intelligent and innovative is the combination of different ages, skills, disciplines, and working and thinking styles that members bring to the table. Scott E. Page, professor and director of the Center of the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan
has demonstrated that groups displaying a range of per- spectives and skill levels outperform like-minded experts. He concludes that “progress depends as much on our col- lective differences as it does on our individual IQ scores.”3
Diversity will therefore become a core competency for organizations over the next decade. Successful employees within these diverse teams need to be able to identify and communicate points of connection (shared goals, priorities, values) that transcend their differences and enable them to build relationships and to work together effectively.
-10
-20
-30
1979–1989
1989–1999
1999–2007
2007–2009
Professor Scott E. Page has shown how diverse groups yield superior outcomes when compared to homogeneous groups.
http://press.princeton.edu
Managers Professionals Technicians Sales Office and
S e n S e - M A K I n G
iBM’s latest supercomputer, Watson, recently took on human contestants at game-show Jeopardy.
DEFiNiTioN:ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions
MiT Media Lab’s Personal Robots Group is developing a robot that can generate some human-like expressions.
n o v e L & A d A P t I v e t h I n K I n G DEFiNiTioN:proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote
Percent
Professor Scott E. Page has shown how diverse groups yield superior outcomes when compared to homogeneous groups.
