future skills and mindsets, a consideration

I was invited to a panel on “Partnerships for Sustainable and Inclusive Futures – Essential Skills and Mind-sets” at the Singapore Management University in March 2018. I wrote the following in a stream of consciousness/tweetstorm style as prep for the panel. I hope this is of some small value to others who did not get to attend the panel.

Kickoff question: What does partnership mean to you personally?  

1/ People far more eloquent than me wax about how progress in the 21C is made through global partnerships, across all levels of society; and that human progress relies on open economies, open societies and open government and so on.

2/I’m not that eloquent, but I do think about the future for a living, of which a considerable time has been spent on economic strategy so my approach tends to be centred around “How to create options for the future”. Leadership is about expanding options in a changing environment, ahead of time, so that you can access those options when the environment changes.

3/How does partnership come into the picture? I ask myself “Who does my success depend on?” and often it leads to “Who do I rely on outside the organisation?” and this quickly leads to asking “How do I lead an ecosystem, build a system of partners, and then stimulate others to make their investments in this ecosystem?”

4/The aim of this is to move this ecosystem from one of constant rate of returns, to an increasing rate of returns.

5/To do this, I need to have a clear view on “What is the value proposition in this ecosystem that I cannot provide, and how do I multiply my capital by stimulating ongoing investments by partners?” At times this means asking, “Where in the supply and demand portion of the equation do I intervene in?  What is my match, where do I light my fire?”

6/A partnership means mutual benefits. And mutual benefits can be for a reason, a season and a lifetime. The approach is different for each timeframe, but for a season and a lifetime, much more upstream work is needed till the ground, to assess who/what gets into the garden, facilitating different players and their role in maintaining the garden.

7/And this is the language of ecosystems. Ecosystems are hard work. Several things might help.

8/Having a roadmap helps coordination with partners.

9/Stimulate joint learning between partners. To do this, you’ll need to balance between proprietary learning, and shared learning. I mentally run by these questions below.

10/“What is the tollgate? How do I separate the value create by partners versus the value capture that I keep in house?”

11/“How do you prioritise partners?” A heuristic is whoever has capabilities I need will form my core partners. If I don’t prioritise, the coordination costs will kill me.

12/“What is a scalable system to keep transaction costs low?” Codifying complex knowledge is key to reducing costs.

13/“How do I lower barriers to participation, while maintaining quality?”

14/“Who is a good lead customer?”

15/Advantage will be copied, so you need to innovate to stay ahead of the game. Look ahead, but not to your competition. A heuristic I use is “Don’t beat Toyota, instead focus on the future”. The idea being the guy winning the game today may not be winning tomorrow’s game, because the game has changed. Focus on the game/future first, then the players.

16/Looking at innovation, a common mistake is to place too little emphasis on the supply side i.e. new skills and mind-sets that helps to open up new options. An idea or strategy is not enough, you need to create the option so you can access it. A good option is not achieved by simply trying harder Tiger-Mom style, but by changing what you do, how you do it.

17/Else you burnout, and that’s lame. Leadership is not about burnout.

Interim question: What is the difference between Skills and Mind-sets?

18/ A skill is something that you can be trained with. In a world where skills are getting more bountiful and can be increasingly outsourced, we need to learn more skills in order to thrive, survive. Hence the valid dominant discussion on upskilling. Skills requirements change, and we have to change with it.

19/ But a few observations at different levels. (a) Bosses hire for skills, but fire for values. (b) Even as we focus on reskilling (in Singapore’s context we have our Industry Transformation Masterplans by sectors) you hear common reservations on older PMETs’ ability to pivot skillsets. (c) Early childhood education investment not just in skillsets, but also resilience training

20/ What might this illustrate? Values in a way are bound into mind-sets. Mind-sets are harder to pin down, it is more hidden. But if you take people with a similar set of skillsets, the mind-sets account for a large margin of difference in output. When it comes down to mind-sets and skills, we tend to want the former but screen for the latter.

21/ Throw this into an iceberg diagram, "mind-sets" are at least a layer down from "skills". Whether you are able to add on new skills and grow over a lifetime stems from whether you have what Stanford Prof of Psychology Carol Dweck calls the ‘growth mind-set’ - a propensity to adapt to change.

22/ When you hear of some older PMETs’ inability to pivot to new skillsets, is it a function of aptitude (they just don't have the capacity to do the new thing) or attitude (they don't WANT to learn the new thing)? The attitude may in turn be a result of the mind-set ("I am fine the way I am, I resist change") or perhaps identity ("I am an accountant, not a data scientist").

23/The ability to learn isn’t just a mind-set we want to inculcate in the young as they enter likely decades of disruptions, but for slightly older people already in the various professions, we are talking about a decade or more for them. How do you inculcate a growth mind-set so these years are productive and meaningful as they ride the waves of disruption?

Interim question: How to develop a futures oriented mind-set? Please focus on intellectual frameworks, communities of practices that can deepen desired mind-sets.

24/ Remember we want mind-sets but tend to screen for skills? How do you screen for mind-sets? There are sometimes tell-tale indicators you can use when hiring.

25/ One combination I look for is a mixture of horizontal-vertical-geography. In a world of vertical specialists, the person with the horizontal skillset, the broad thinking, is immensely useful. Geography means he/she has lived-studied-worked in a significantly different environment and knows there are different operating systems. Instinctively they look out for different contexts, and connect the dots.

26/ But this is not an IF/THEN criteria. It just indicates something INTERESTING might live here.

27/ And many organisations and people stop here.

28/ What is more important is how you act on surprising information, information with high entropy.

29/ First, where do you get high entropy information? I have my usual trope on being plugged into intersections, or interstices between disparate domains. I look for people who inhabit these grey areas for unusual insights and weird/plausible ideas. Normally, it is hard to hire such people because they don’t do well in formal organisations.

30/ But you can be plugged into them. This is not another ecosystem to cultivate, it is just setting up a monitoring network and what you can do is to deliberately expose your staff, yourself to such different domain intersections, or interstices. For example, Chinese sci-fi conventions.

31/ Now, how do you act on high entropy information? What many people do is to apply filters to information processing e.g. before intake like watching news only from a particular channel, or after intake by using mental models to interpret what’s being consumed.

32/ But there is a danger because mental models are the enemy of complexity. They are useful as sources of decision making heuristics, and because human brains find it taxing to contemplate every single occurrence and choice in depth. This is where I’ll mention in passing Daniel Kahnemann’s thinking fast, and thinking slow.

33/Once again, not if/then. There are other, more oblique ways. 

34/ The next seven points draw heavily from ribbonfarm Venkatesh Rao’s post on “Fingerspitzengefuhl” or “finger-tips feeling”. This is an instinctive skill to navigate ambiguous, uncertain, rapidly evolving tactical situations through acontinuous, deep engagement. Go and subscribe to Ven, he is awesome.

35/ The important thing is what it is not. This skill will not produce a pleasurable, flow-state. It produces states that are messy, distressing, awkward, and will get in the way of escaping to a flow state.

36/ Because such high flow domains where you can escape the rest of the Universe and enter a state of flow, are increasingly useless in a world being eaten by software. A driverless car can be in driving flow better than your distractible mind. AI artists draw Rembrandt paintings. High end coffee machines beat artisans.

37/ People with identities deeply invested in excelling in a speciality of some sort have fragile minds. They leave distressing situations and seek out their home turf. This is not playing to your strengths, but to your emotional limits. So when situations shift, causing distress, the fingertips of the mind disengage first. The mind retreats to your speciality, or you mentally check out because you feel powerless.

38/ But on the frontier, there are no experts. Everybody is a beginner. And the only response we can have is to cobble together a clumsy, but meaningful, response to a situation with the skills we have. The world does not map to your skill boundaries, especially at the frontier.

39/ To make this work, you need to give up feeling like an expert, feeling like you are in the flow. There will be times when you are in expert mind, and there are times when you are in beginner mind. And you can get better at this. And when you do, the no-go zones begin to shrink. It gets easier to go into situations where you know your mind can handle any resulting emotions or feelings of powerlessness.

40/ And this is what being mindful means. It means not shrinking what the world brings up to you, it means seeing the world for what it is and not what you wish it to be.

41/ So here we go beyond habits and skills, because new skills, more skills, means experts. It is a mindset to win your own mind before winning the territory. The world is full of people terrified of wandering beyond situations they are confident of handling. If you can make a habit of overcoming that terror, you will have an advantage.

42/ Circling back to the question. Skillsets can be taught, within boundaries. Mindsets deal with the core being of a person. There are established ways of training mindfulness for large groups, the armed forces, certain religious traditions, large group awareness training and so on. It is possible to invest in training for mindset shifts on a large, population-wide scale. You can train mindfulness, an openness to the world, and the finger-feeling skills for deeply engaging in an ambiguous, vague and uncertain world is possible.

43/In Yuval Harari’s Homo Sapiens/Deus series when he asks what do we do with the “useless people” when automation/artificial intelligence have eaten the world, he points at the ability to write/rewrite our core being through mindfulness training such as vipassana. It is not new age crockery, there is a way forward but I fear it is a thin lifeline.