When popular wisdom is wrong
Employable forever
We’re in a fascinating job market right now, with almost full employment, yet many forecast a perilous future where many professions will be displaced by AI.
Richard Miller is a revolutionary educator who asked the question, “What are the capabilities a person should learn if they’re never to be displaced, and are always to be in demand?”
He’s an engineer, but he completely rethought the typical narrow specialisations most inhabit. Based on decades of training entrepreneurial engineers he is convinced it boils down to these five things:
Learning things that matter;
Learning in context;
Learning in teams;
Envisioning what has never been;
Doing whatever it takes to make it happen.
Miller says, “Do that 20 times and you will be employable forever".
Question: Do you think he’s right? Anything you’d add?
How to double your effectiveness in just 70 days
You’ve probably heard of the theory that outstanding performers in almost any discipline get there with 10,000 hours of practice. Malcolm Gladwell popularised the idea, and persuasively showed how The Beatles and Bill Gates accumulated this much exposure to their chosen craft.
Trouble is, it’s wrong.
It’s not the quantity of practice, but the quality. Even the theory’s originator, Anders Ericsson, says that it’s deliberate, dedicated time spent focusing on improvement that counts.
While we were locked down during the COVID pandemic, I visited my elderly mother weekly and cooked dinner. And, for several months, she asked for the same dish repeatedly: a prawn pasta. So, for 10 weeks, I quite deliberately made the same dish. Well, almost the same, but never quite the same twice. I experimented with how much oil I used, how hot it was, frying the prawns in garlic first and removing them before adding them back, reducing the tomatoes to different degrees, adding smoked paprika.
Until, finally, it was superb. When I cooked it for my wife and son, they also agreed.
In a world where we seem obsessed by disruptions and breakthroughs, I maintain that our best chance of improvement often comes from doing what we do well, but keep making it better - deliberately. A 1% improvement daily, after all, will double performance in 70 days. Warren Buffett ascribes his success to the same principle, namely, getting average to good results repeatedly, over a long time, letting compounding do its work.
What’s most important, though, is not the repetition but the deliberation.
It’s the insight that accompanies the repeated efforts. I can cook a dish a thousand times, but if I’m not paying attention, learning each time, I won’t improve. If every time I do it, I ask, “Why did that work? What can I change?” I’ll end up somewhere pretty good.
Question: What can you and your team improve through repetition coupled with insight?
Clever labels
I’ve worked with several organisations now on a concept called social prescribing.
Over 20% of all doctors’ visits are not for medical complaints, they’re for social issues: loneliness, anxiety, malaise. So social prescribing is a referral to non-medical services: think social groups, sports clubs, volunteer agencies.
This movement has gained traction in Australia, after years of success in the UK and Canada. Profound social and economic results include lowered rates of hospitalisation and less use of medicines. While the key role isn’t the doctor (it’s the ‘link worker’ who knows, intimately, what a patient needs, and what’s available in their local community), the system won’t work unless doctors (and their representative organisations, like their colleges and professional associations) are convinced of its efficacy, its ability to sit alongside their existing practice, and its ease of implementation.
So, one element of true genius in this approach is in its naming: social prescribing.
Prescribing is what doctors do. So, social prescribing is just a variation on that. It can be taught, practised and compensated in ways similar to prescribing of medicines. Now, there’s more in this than just naming something cleverly, but it’s an essential start.
Question: What labels or names can you give a new initiative to ensure uptake from those invested in ‘old ways’?
It will make both you and me happy if you click the ‘heart’, so please do so, and I’ll see you next Friday!
Andrew
Great ‘episode’ Andrew - liked all 3…
Re AI, last month I attended an “evening with the late John Cleese” at Hamer Hall.
Part of his performance focused on the US screen writers and actors campaign.
He made the point that when Chat GPT was employed to assess who in the creative arts space was more susceptible to being replaced by AI, the result was the business executives, whose roles involved more predictable data driven decisions typically involving financial considerations etc, and that those in the creative (writers, actors etc) roles were much harder to replace due to the more unique nature of what their produced. 😏
Thought provoking as always Andrew-thank you.
I wonder whether adaptive, intuitive skills can be replaced by AI?
The book Atomic Habits by James Clear is about small steps for change that have a compounding effect.