Future Real Estate Skills - Human or Machine?

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What will be the highest value skills to have within the most successfull commercial real estate companies over the next 5-10 years?

1. Data Analysis & Interpretation: Transforming raw data into actionable insights, optimising investment strategies and understanding nuanced market dynamics.

2. Sustainability Expertise: Championing eco-friendly practices, resonating with a growing environmentally-conscious audience and ensuring compliance with evolving green standards.

3. Partnership Building:Cultivating strategic alliances, broadening a company's reach, resources, and adaptability in a collaborative business landscape.

4. Design Thinking: Employing a human-centric approach to innovation, creating spaces that are both functional and emotionally resonant, ensuring sustained tenant satisfaction.

5. Space Utilisation: Adapting and reimagining spaces to reflect contemporary needs, offering flexibility in design and maximising the utility of every square foot/metre.

6. Stakeholder Relationship Management: Nurturing trust and loyalty with tenants, investors, and partners, fortifying the company's reputation and ensuring long-term collaborations.

7. Marketing & Branding: Carving a distinctive brand identity, leveraging both traditional and digital platforms to capture and engage target audiences.

8. Change Management: Streamlining transitions in adopting new technologies, navigating market disruptions, and leaning into innovative business models, ensuring operational resilience and forward momentum.

9. Adaptability: Demonstrating agility in strategy and operations, preparing companies to pivot seamlessly in response to unpredictable market shifts.

10. Digital Proficiency: Integrating emerging technologies, enhancing operational efficiency, and offering a cutting-edge tenant experience, staying ahead of industry curves.

11. Strategic Forecasting: The ability to anticipate market shifts and future trends will be crucial. This skill will help companies in making informed investment decisions and staying ahead of competitors.

HOW DO WE SCORE - HUMAN OR MACHINE?

Now lets score each of these skills on their human quotient. Out of 10. The higher the score the more human input needed.

* Data Analysis & Interpretation: 6/10

While technology can gather and process vast amounts of data quickly, human intuition and expertise are still vital in interpreting the results and drawing actionable insights.

* Sustainability Expertise: 8/10

Though tech aids in monitoring and implementing sustainable systems, the strategy, innovation, and execution heavily rely on human expertise and values.

* Partnership Building: 9/10

Building relationships and forging partnerships is inherently human. While tech can facilitate communication, the essence of partnership remains a human endeavor.

* Design Thinking: 7/10

Technology provides tools and platforms, but the empathy, creativity, and problem-solving core to design thinking are deeply human.

* Space Utilisation: 7/10

Technology offers tools for modeling and visualisation, but understanding human needs and translating them into space design requires a human touch.

* Stakeholder Relationship Management: 9/10

Tools can manage data and automate communication, but genuine relationship-building, trust, and loyalty are human-centric.

* Marketing & Branding: 5/10

Digital marketing leans heavily on technology for analytics, reach, and automation, but crafting a brand story and strategy is a human endeavor.

* Change Management: 8/10

Tech can assist in the implementation phase, but understanding organisational culture, and guiding teams through transitions, is primarily a human skill.

* Adaptability: 8/10

While tech can provide data to guide shifts, the ability to be agile, resilient, and responsive to change is a human trait.

* Digital Proficiency: 4/10

The nature of this skill requires understanding and utilising technology, but humans are needed to strategise its application, integration, and innovation.

* Strategic Forecasting: 7/10

While technology and AI can analyse current data and provide predictive models, the human element is essential in interpreting these findings in context, making judgments about unquantifiable factors, and devising strategic responses. Understanding the broader socio-economic and political landscape and its potential influence on the real estate market requires nuanced human insights. Thus, while tech plays a role, the larger part of strategic forecasting remains human-driven.

SO FAR SO GOOD

The scores above were generated by a machine. And they surprised me. I thought our human skills would be considered less important than the algorithm actually did rate them. Which made me think, either it was just being polite or it is true that we underestimate just what is special, and non replicable, about being a human.

Let’s think about what humans are good at. Where do we excel?

How about:

Empathy and Emotional Intelligence: Humans have the innate ability to understand, relate to, and act upon emotions—both their own and others'. This is crucial in areas like stakeholder relationship management, design thinking, and partnership building, where understanding human needs, preferences, and emotions can lead to more effective decisions.

Contextual Understanding: While machines can process vast amounts of data, they often lack the broader socio-cultural and historical context. Humans can understand subtleties and nuances in ways that machines currently cannot.

Creativity and Innovation: The human mind's ability to think outside the box, draw from disparate fields, and come up with novel solutions is unmatched. Areas like design thinking and strategic forecasting benefit immensely from human creativity.

Ethical Judgment: When faced with decisions that have moral or ethical implications, humans use a complex interplay of cultural, social, personal, and situational factors to arrive at a decision. Machines can be programmed to follow ethical guidelines, but they don't "understand" ethics in the human sense.

Complex Problem Solving: While machines can solve well-defined problems efficiently, humans excel at navigating ambiguity, dealing with incomplete information, and addressing problems that don't have clear-cut solutions.

Intuition: Often, decisions in fields like real estate are made based on gut feelings or intuition, especially when data is lacking or inconclusive. This intuitive sense, drawn from years of experience and tacit knowledge, is challenging for machines to replicate.

Interdisciplinary Thinking: Humans can draw connections between seemingly unrelated fields or ideas, leading to innovative solutions. While machines can be trained on vast datasets, the serendipitous connections often made by humans are less predictable for machines.

Learning from Few Examples: While many machine learning models require vast amounts of data to train, humans can often learn from just a few examples, adapting quickly to new situations.

Value-based Decision Making: Humans make decisions not just based on logic or data, but also based on values, beliefs, and personal experiences.

Collaboration and Teamwork: The human ability to work in teams, leverage each other's strengths, and collaborate effectively is a complex social dynamic that is challenging to replicate in machines.

They are all good aren’t they? Powerful. But I cannot help but think most of us are not as good at these ‘human skills‘ as we should be. They may well be innate and generic to all humans but how many of us can say we have them in abundance? Not enough?

Here’s some suggestions as to how we can fix this:

Empathy and Emotional Intelligence:

1. Practice Active Listening: Truly pay attention to what others are saying without formulating a response in your mind.
2. Self-reflect: Regularly check in with your emotions and understand their origins.
3. Engage in Role-playing: This helps in understanding different perspectives.

Contextual Understanding:

1. Continuous Learning: Engage in lifelong education, reading books, articles, and attending seminars or workshops.
2. Travel: Experiencing different cultures can provide broader contexts and understandings.

Creativity and Innovation:

1. Engage in Diverse Experiences: The more varied your experiences, the more dots you have to connect.
2. Practice Brainstorming: Allow your mind to explore ideas without judgment.

Ethical Judgment:

1. Engage in Moral Philosophy: Read and debate about ethical issues.
2. Seek Diverse Perspectives: Engage in discussions with people from different backgrounds and belief systems.

Complex Problem Solving:

1. Challenge Yourself: Take on tasks or projects slightly out of your comfort zone.
2. Break Problems Down: Divide complex problems into smaller, more manageable tasks.

Intuition:

1. Trust Yourself: When faced with decisions, listen to your gut while also seeking evidence.
2. Reflect on Past Decisions: Understand when your intuition served you well or led you astray.

Interdisciplinary Thinking:

1. Study Outside Your Field: Engage in courses or readings from diverse disciplines.
2. Network with Professionals from Other Domains: This exposes you to different ways of thinking.

Learning from Few Examples:

1. Practice Rapid Learning Techniques: Such as the Feynman Technique.
2. Engage in Hands-on Learning: Practical experience often accelerates understanding.

Value-based Decision Making:

1. Define Your Core Values: Understand what matters most to you.
2. Regularly Re-evaluate Decisions: Ensure they align with your values.

Collaboration and Teamwork:

1. Participate in Team Activities: Such as sports or group projects.
2. Develop Communication Skills: Understanding and being understood is key to effective teamwork.

All of which feels like terribly hard work! Maybe though that is the price we are going to need to pay to stay relevant, and valued, in an AI mediated world?

And you thought your school days were over:)