7 AI Era Skills Through 7 Stories

I’ve been blessed to have led or partnered on nearly one thousand change and transformation initiatives. Through it all, one truism keeps popping up: The power of stories.

As humans, we are hardwired to learn, grow, and change through stories. Here are seven stories from those initiatives and my books and experiences that drive home why the following seven skills are so crucial in the AI Era.

Your Life Has So Much to Teach You

“Everybody wants to talk about all the successes I’ve had in the last 20 years of my life,” said Andrew Zimmern , the James Beard Award-winning celebrity chef. “But that’s only because I lived through my past... I was a real mess. Drugs. Alcohol. Mental health issues. I stole purses on Madison Avenue and sold them to get money for drugs.... My past taught me that if I stop focusing on what I can take from things, and instead, go through life focused on what I can bring to things, people are going to want to work with me and I’ll be successful.” Zimmern has been sober and clean for decades now. But before his successes, he was one of society’s failures: Homeless and squatting in buildings in New York City.

SKILLS LESSON: In an era driven by algorithms and analytics, what makes you, you, makes you special and powerful. The crucible moments of your life impact your motivations, your drive, your passions, and — on the flipside — can create your biases, defenses, and fears. For better and worse: We all bring what makes us, us, to our work. It’s crucial that you understand your strengths and your ‘flipside’.

I’ll Never Get Those Minutes Back

This July 14, it will be 30 years. The night my mom died, they lost her in the hospital. After the ER doctors said there was nothing more that could be done — that she would pass within hours — our family was sent to the Intensive Care Unit to wait for her to be transferred there. But there was a miscommunication between the ER and ICU, and nobody knew to go get her. For 40 minutes, she was all alone, dying in a corner of the ER, until someone realized the problem. She did pass in our arms in the ICU later that night. A year later, after all the grieving, I realized: “Dammit, that hospital stole 40 of the last minutes I’d ever have with Mom.”

SKILLS LESSON: At that moment, I was also neck-deep in research for what would become my first book. I realized that How We Communicate is far deeper than how companies think about it. It forms the bonds between us, connecting all of us to something bigger than ourselves. And I realized: Everything we do — especially in how we communicate — uses a portion of someone else’s life. So How We Communicate is both what makes us human in the AI Era, and it should be treated as a sacred act, one that uses portions of other people’s lives.

You Were Born to Be Creative

“My teachers were really concerned about me,” he says, laughing. “They were concerned about my mental health. They called my mother in. They said, ‘He’s disrupting the other kids. Could you ask him to come to school dressed like a normal kid?!’ I was obsessed with Batman, because there was no magic... he was just an inventor. So Mom made me a Batman costume, which I wore to school every day for sixth months.” That’s Aaron Dignan , who is an angel investor and helps build partnerships between the startups and the large companies he advises. “Most parents would have given in to the authority figure and agreed to get me to stop wearing the costume. Not my mother. She’s a theater teacher and a little militant in her creativity. So she said, ‘No, I’m not going to put any boxes around this kid. He’s a different kid, he needs to do his own thing.’”

SKILLS LESSON: Like Aaron, every one of us was born to be creative. Kids create, imagine, and play full-time. And then society and authority figures pummel that out of most of us. In the AI Era, we need more companies and managers and teammates (including you) to be like Aaron’s mom: Safeguarding creativity. Creating safe spaces for us and our naturally-born creativity to flourish.

Everything is Figureoutable

Talking with Elisabet de los Pinos is immediately uplifting. You begin to feel that anything is possible! Named by Time magazine as one of the ten entrepreneurs who will change your life, she founded Aura Biosciences to create nanodrugs — viruses that can attack cancer cells and only those cells. “Future generations are going to judge me by our ability to cure cancer,” she proudly proclaims. “I’m not here to improve life survival for one month. I’m here to cure it. We should be able to make drugs that go directly to the tumor. We know how to kill cancer, but it’s so toxic. We know so much about molecular biology — we just have to figure out how to deliver it.”

SKILLS LESSON: While you, me, and most of our teammates are unlikely to achieve anything like Dr. de los Pinos, our critical thinking — our belief that everything is figureoutable — is crucial to our success in the AI Era.

Failing is Your Key to Success

“I was brought up in an environment where it was OK to take chances, it was OK to fail. Failure can be an option, but fear that limits you cannot be. My parents, my family, my sisters — everybody encouraged that. It’s interesting to note that my siblings and I all went into creative fields... television, fashion, playwright, dance.” He ends with a smile, “I find myself dealing with autistic things — I mean artistic things. It’s a fine line!” That’s Jon Landau , James Cameron’s partner and producer of two of the most successful films in history, Titanic and Avatar.

SKILLS LESSON: There is no personal agility — the ability to quickly unlearn, experiment, relearn, and adapt — without failure. Success and failure are inseparable. You can’t have the upside without embracing the downside. At the end of his career, one of the greatest basketball players ever, Michael Jordan, made a commercial about failure: “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career ... 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot ... and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Paint the Bathrooms

The goal of the new manufacturing plant manager: To take his plant from Worst to First — from a plant that the company was ready to close, to their best and most efficient plant. He and his team were great leaders and managers and they had a great plan: Plans for changes in technology, tools, support, compensation, rewards and recognition, training and development were all in place. I was there to help with change management — engaging the hearts and minds of everyone on the shop floor. I began by learning what mattered to those people, not just to the company. After interviewing the people doing the work, I learned nothing would work unless we did one thing first: Paint the bathrooms. And ensure they were well maintained. Why? Doing so would be an immediately verifiable ground-level demonstration of respect — that they mattered and would be treated differently.

SKILLS LESSON: In the AI Era, your humanity — how you listen, how you care, how you show that you care, how you show that the people you work with and those you serve truly matter — will be the most important thing that cannot be replaced by analytics and algorithms. Carry your empathy for others proudly. Demonstrate it always.

Don’t Fight Stupid, Move On

“Don’t fight stupid. You are better than that. Make more awesome. If you are trying to make a difference, to make something happen, and you keep bumping into ‘No’ ... no one who will say ‘Yes’ ... no process that will help you, no appeals ... you are going to have a long, slow, painful death,” advises Jesse Robbins , technology entrepreneur, investor, firefighter, and founder of Orion Labs.?“Get out of there! Every time I tried to win over stupid, I regretted it. And every time I moved-on, I was glad I did. Don’t fight stupid!” He learned the lesson about Never Fighting Stupid whenever he did try to win that fight: “I’ve never looked back and said, ‘I’m so glad I won. I was right and they were wrong.’ On the other hand, every time I’ve gotten a chance to build something new with great people, I remember every single one of those. If the organization or your boss is incapable of changing, it’s time for you to move on. There are a host of opportunities waiting for you elsewhere.”

SKILLS LESSON: If you’re working for a company or a manager who doesn’t ’get it,’ Don’t Fight Stupid and Get Out of There. That is among the most important kind of courage in the AI Era. You’ve got to work with great people. You’ve got to be valued. You’ve got to be able to make more awesome than AI can generate. For many, the biggest courage of all: Getting outta there, and finding new great people to create with.

To Continue the Journey

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Bill Jensen is a seasoned strategy and transformation executive, advisor to C-suite execs, globally-known keynote speaker, and author of nine best-selling leadership and change books, including Simplicity, Disrupt, Future Strong, and The Day Tomorrow Said No. Reach him at [email protected] .