How to Prepare Your Millennial Team for Disruptive Technologies

We live in an age of technological disruptions. Every single industry is being affected by the introduction of Artificial Intelligence on some level. In the past, technical knowledge and skills were prioritised in most industries. 

With machine learning increasingly disrupting many of the technical tasks, we now need to bring back four crucial human skills into our workplace culture to overcome the challenges of automation and Artificial Intelligence. As industry leaders, we have a responsibility to prepare our teams for the challenges ahead. There are things that company leaders can do to help their teams prepare for a smooth transition in the ongoing race of technological advancement. There are also things that team members, especially the millennial workforce, can do to help themselves. In this article, I list a number of factors that the C-Suite has to keep front and centre in the coming decade. I have also listed four essential skills that young talent can learn to survive and thrive in the coming decade. 

For Management: Leadership In The Age Of Artificial Intelligence

Know the implications of AI for your future workforce: If you are in any managerial or directorship position understanding the impact of AI and automation in general and machine learning in particular, has to be a priority. It may not feel imminent, but let me tell you this, it will hit you from nowhere. One morning you wake up, and someone will have created a new machine learning application that will put half of your team and maybe even yourself out of work. As a filmmaker, I've seen it happen in my industry. Half of my own tasks and most of the people I used to hire are now automated. So I had to pivot and I've been helping my team do the same. 

Predict tasks that will be disrupted by automation: It's imperative that you start thinking about what tasks are a good candidate for automation in your company. A few telltales signs are if a task can be defined in terms of "IF...THEN…", and doesn't require a huge amount of complex human interaction, it can be automated.  

Create new roles based on human skills: Be aware of new roles that you should be creating within your company for effective human and machine collaboration and integration. Another area that new roles are needed is in redefining how we measure human productivity and time. Currently, we compensate people based on the number of hours that they spend at work. This approach was initiated following the Industrial Revolution, and it was not perfect but good enough for then. With the digital revolution, however, we've experienced a whole new level productivity and agile working. Now, the AI revolution is threatening to change the dynamics of how we work once again, and yet most companies are still approaching time management like it's the 1950s!  

Reskill your team members: when the need for fast integration of new technologies become a priority in companies, the obvious solution may be to lay off many people in your teams to bring in fresh talent. Sometimes that is indeed the fastest way to respond to the rapid changes. However, this often damages the DNA of a company and hurts the employees mental and emotional wellbeing. Part of the reason for this challenging dynamic is the lack of an ongoing culture of reskilling employees. People get used to doing the same thing every day and become set in their ways. It's no surprise then that they resist change and struggle when it becomes inevitable. 

Now that we looked at an overview of what the management of companies can do to help their teams, below are four skills that the millennial workforce can learn to help them navigate the 21st-century career landscape. 

For Team Members: Four Crucial Skills To Help You Survive and Thrive In The Age Technological Disruptions

When it comes to the future of work, what we need to think about is the contrast between skills that machines can replicate and those that are innately human. Below are four distinctly human skills that separate us, humans, from the machines. If you want to succeed in the age of Artificial Intelligence, these four skills are your best friends.  

Emotional Intelligence: So, what is it exactly? There have been various descriptions by different experts on Emotional Intelligence. Daniel Goleman, who is one of the pioneers in this area describes it as "the ability to motivate oneself and persist in the face of frustrations, to control impulse, and delay gratification; to regulate one's moods and keep distress from swamping the ability to think, to empathise, and to hope. In short emotional Intelligence is the ability to understand and regulate emotions both in yourself and in others. Arguably, machine learning can allow future and some existing tools and devices to detect human emotions and respond accordingly. However, at least for the foreseeable future machines are unlikely to be able to have subjective experience, and that's where the intricacies of human relationship give us an edge. The challenge is that learning these intricacies and responding to them skillfully requires a huge amount of mental effort and practice, which many of us haven't had.   

Critical Thinking: The term critical thinking may sound very algorithmic and sterile. However, it is, in fact, very much intertwined with our emotional processing. The best way to understand critical thinking is to remember that our brain has two different operating modes, the fast mode and the slow mode. The fast mode is also known as the lizard brain, or the reptilian brain. It's where quick fight or flight reactions happen. The slow mode is the human brain where we have more rational thoughts based on our best assessment of a situation. For millions of years of evolution, the fast brain has reigned supreme and is the part that's present in all animals to some degree. However, what sets us, Homo Sapiens apart from our ancestors is the slow thinking part of our brain where we can understand concepts such as statistics and probability. When it comes to critical thinking, you need two main skills; one is having the ability to overcome the impulse to give in to the reptilian brain and slow down to think. The second thing is understanding the basics of statistics and probability and being able to use them in an integrated way to respond to a given situation. 

Contextual Creativity: You've probably never heard this term before - (I've dedicated an entire chapter of my upcoming book to it). It's also very close to my heart as it's the core essence of our company's business model. Contextual Creativity is different from artistic Creativity or other forms of creative pursuit. It is a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the context of other people's problems and helping them solve their problem or enhance their experience. People with this unique skill have the ability to connect the dots between several domains and create new ways of problem-solving and creating value. The term "text" means to weave. "Con" comes from a Latin root which means "together". So you can think of context as "weaving together", it is the space in which the text lives. Contextual Creativity requires an awareness of the space around subjects, in addition to the subjects themselves. It's much more holistic and cannot be defined with "IF..., THEN…" rules. That's what makes it a uniquely human skill, and we need to create more businesses and more roles within companies around this skill.  

Mindfulness: Finally, mindfulness is the foundation and bedrock of all the above skills. Without mindfulness, you can't develop EI, Critical Thinking, or Contextual Creativity in an optimum way. Take Critical Thinking, for example. When we see someone who always seems to act rationally, we may think that they are highly intelligent, but one of the Nobel Prize-winning behavioural economist, Daniel Kahneman, explains that thinking rationally is more about being fully engaged, than anything else. Now, being fully engaged simply means being mindful. One of the biggest topics that I get asked to gives talks and workshops on is often "millennial engagement" or "employee engagement", in general. We need to ask ourselves "how did we lose our presence in the first place?" Now, that's a long story, but the short answer is that technology has had a big part to play in this. However, instead of blaming the circumstances and modern technologies, the reality is that we are here now. There is no point in resisting the change. What has already happened is going to continue to happen. The real question is do we have the willingness to develop the necessary skills to live and work mindfully and stay fully engaged in our work environment? Well, we may not have a choice, because without these human skills we have a little edge over our machine counterparts.