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Episode 5: Ripple Effects - Gary A. Bolles, Chair for the Future of Work for Singularity University
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In this episode, Phil Fersht engages in a thought-provoking discussion with Gary A. Bolles, a futurist, author, and thought leader specializing in the future of work and workforce transformation. Gary is the Chair for the Future of Work at Singularity University and co-founder of eParachute, a platform designed to help individuals navigate career transitions in our rapidly changing job landscape.
They explore the profound impact of exponential technologies, particularly artificial intelligence (AI), on the future of work and human experience. Gary emphasizes the importance of viewing AI as a powerful toolset rather than a co-pilot or co-worker, highlighting the necessity for a mindset shift, skill development, and effective utilization of new tools. He introduces the idea of "unlearning" outdated practices and encouraging opportunities for employees to embrace new ways of solving problems.
They discuss the importance of self-knowledge, setting personal learning goals, and making learning a team sport to enhance motivation and engagement. The discussion ultimately highlights that by cultivating the right mindset, skill set, and tool set, we can navigate the future of work with confidence and purpose.
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Transcript
00:00:12
Speaker
You're listening to From the Horse's Mouth, intrepid conversations with Phil First, ready to meet the disruptors who are guiding us to the new great utopia by reshaping our world and pushing past corporate spin for honest conversations about the future impact of current and emerging technologies. Tune in now.
00:00:39
Speaker
Great. It's great to be that here with everybody. You all know who I am at this point. and I'm Phil 1st. And today I'm joined by Gary Ballers. who's ah um He's a futurist, author, thought leader on the future of work, workforce transformation, and my favorite topic, which is the human side of exponential technologies. um Gary's the chair at the Future of Work.
00:01:05
Speaker
ah for Singularity University, and he's also co-founder of eParachute, which is a platform designed to help individuals navigate career transitions in this rapidly changing job landscape. So I really look forward to um harry you know how Gary views um you know AI as a powerful tool to help energize our businesses and us our careers and not just a co-pilot. I've said a joke, which is actually sadly true, but some CIOs roll out co-pilot these days and claim AI victory. And we all know that AI is really a business conversation before it is even a technology conversation. So Gary, what's what's your take on AI as a powerful tool?
00:01:56
Speaker
So first of off, I really appreciate the invitation. Looking forward to a great conversation. um I do ah focus extensively on the human side of exponential technologies. Singularity University, as I'm sure you know, ah was was founded on the premise that exponential technologies can have a great benefit for humans. It's not always clear that It happens that way every time, technology giveth, but technology also taketh away. And the the same is true ah for you this thing that we call AI. And I'm sure all your listeners know, but um AI is probably a little more of a marketing term than anything specific about any technology. It's a basket of technologies from machine learning to generative AI.
00:02:40
Speaker
And it's it's a catchphrase I think that a lot of us are using to just describe this sort of watershed moment where the technology has sort of leaped forward in terms of capacity. And so, as I said, technology giveth and technology take away. ah We've been talking at Singularity University through the work of people like Ray Kurzweil.
00:03:03
Speaker
literally for decades, about machine learning and artificial intelligence was eventually going to get to this point where it was going to have significant capability and capacity in terms of a toolset that would allow us to be able to accomplish far more than we'd been able to do before. However, ah a lot of the discussion, a lot of the rhetoric is that it's much more than that. It's a co-pilot. It's a co-bot. It's a co-worker. And I try to urge people to sort of step back a little bit and say, wait a minute. So so when whenever we go through these technology watersheds, ah there was this thing called the PC, then this thing called the internet, then this thing called cloud computing. And now we have this thing, this bin called AI.
00:03:48
Speaker
Over and over again, the same things happen. It's a new toolset, and we think that it represents a big leap forward in how it's going to um and empower humans, with and it always is. However, we don't always know the best ways to use it, and we don't always know who is going to benefit and who actually is going to have some negative consequences. So I talk a lot about what what I think of as the three legs of the stool, mindset, skillset, and toolset.
00:04:16
Speaker
So this bin of technologies is a tool set that we can leverage in a wide variety of ways. And I'm happy to talk about some of the best use cases for it. It also can be used to automate a lot of human work. So that's why every human being needs to have a continuous mindset of adaptation and growth and needs to develop a skillset to be able to leverage that tool set as effectively as possible. Yes. sir What's different um this time? Because it feels like we go through these waves of change with technology. We went through the RPA automation wave before pandemic, which met a sticky end, a lot of it, because the technology just didn't do what the technology firms claimed it could do. There was lots of great marketing around automaking the enterprise.
00:05:08
Speaker
and your job's going to be automated away, blah, blah, blah. And now it's Gen AI. It's the evolution of Gen AI. It's people's voices and images being faked. It feels a little more threatening with the convergence, supposedly, of general intelligence with computing. But how real is this, you know Gary, in terms of, is this a true threat to our careers? Are we going to be replaced by somebody who's better at AI than I am? or Well, what do you see really happening right now? So I'm a recovering journalist. I used to be the editorial director of a half a dozen technology magazines in the 90s. We started something called the interactive week, which was the Internet's first newspaper in 1994. And so I've seen of a lot of the waves and and actually been in the process of serving a lot of those waves and helping people understand you know some of the impacts and opportunities of those technologies.
00:06:06
Speaker
So um you asked what's different. The first thing that's different is that every new layer of technology, including all those that I just mentioned, builds on the previous layers. So if ah OpenAI had released chat GPT 3.5 and needed to mail around CD-ROMs like America Online used to, you wouldn't have gotten 2 million people adopting it in a month. um And so because each layer builds on the previous layers,
00:06:36
Speaker
The result is that the pace and the scale of access and adoption is increasingly greater. And so that means that we as humans, our mindset is typically not able to deal with those kind of hockey stick exponential curves ah very effectively. And so the first the first thing that's different is the patient scale builds on those previous technologies and the speed and the range of usage is so much greater, so much faster. ah that the The ripple effects, those waves are extremely impactful, um just like the waves of the global pandemic were. They ended up having ripple effects through a variety of different industries and societies.
00:07:21
Speaker
Second thing that's different is that ah they're called GPTs because they have general purpose cap capacity and those ah That capacity comes from the fact that these applications are typically trained on gazillions of web pages, ah databases, and content sources. and so ah they are it's It's a rare watershed.
00:07:52
Speaker
in that it's not just access to information which the internet protocols provided, um especially HTML ah and TCP IP, but it's it's access to the broad range of content that humans have created at a breathtaking scale. And as the capacity has synthesized so much of that information so rapidly, we've never had a watershed technology like that in the past. However, there are two tremendous risks. So the first is the risk that the data that that um technology is trained on is ah from humans. We created that data. um So bias comes free. All of the flaws of the way humans think, all the flaws that we have embedded in our content are deeply embedded in those technologies. So we can say that they hallucinate, but the truth is they're actually quite inaccurate on a regular basis.
00:08:46
Speaker
ah without guardrails. And so so that's the first threat, is that they are empowering others to be able to ah create a lot of technology very, very quickly. A lot of that content is biased. And so you have these ripple effects on society, just like with social media, that can have a lot of negative consequences if we don't have guardrails. The second threat, when you talk about to our careers, um so what happens with technology over and over again?
00:09:12
Speaker
If you think of human work, like the the actual steps that we follow, ah work is just three things. It's a problem to be solved. How do we solve problems? We perform tasks. How do we perform tasks? We use human skills. So that's work. Human skills applied to tasks to solve problems. What most automation does, especially you talked about robotic process ah automation, for example, focuses on tasks.
00:09:37
Speaker
So over and over again from the original aux driven plow to OpenAI's chat GBT and the other similar technologies, they automate tasks. So that's all that those technologies do.
00:09:56
Speaker
um They don't really solve problems. They automate the tasks that humans previously performed. And so they add up the whether or not they add up, to a job that goes away is actually a decision made by a human, at least today.
00:10:11
Speaker
So if you used generative AI in your company and you got twenty percent a 20% increase in the effectiveness of workers, that is 20% more time freed up, you have a set of decisions to make. Are you going to give them that 20% to come up with new ideas for the company? ah That's what I used to do with what they call 20% time.
00:10:33
Speaker
i Are you going to use that to help people to have better lives and just not have to work as hard? Are you going to give them a four-day work week? Or are you going to lay off 20% of your workers? So technology never takes away human work. Humans decide whether or not the automated tasks add up the jobs that go away.
00:10:54
Speaker
but That's a very distinct response. um And, you know, it's the old adage of, you know, how do you shave? I mean, when we used to do outsourcing back in the day, it was, hey, we're going to take 30% of your role and we're going to send it to India or wherever to do a lower cost. What are you going to do with the rest of your time? um Then we have a situation now where most people seem to work remotely.
00:11:20
Speaker
and um It seems if you finish your tasks by one o'clock in the afternoon and you're working from home, what are you going to do with the rest of your day? If you get people into an office, they'll have to find something to do between one and five in the afternoon before the bus sees them late. So is this simply a bit more about motivating people, giving them freedom to be creative, finding different ways to to judge people's performance at work, and forgetting a bit about effort. I mean, i mean how is this ultimately going to play out there?
00:11:55
Speaker
So again, I don't want to make it sound like um I either have all the answers or I've seen all of the you know the impacts and therefore I've got a crystal ball for the future. um Instead, what I'd like to say is ah I think we see a lot of the potential ripple effects. We see a lot of the benefits and where the technologies are very useful nowadays.
00:12:17
Speaker
ah and there The fog is very thick going down the highway, so there's a variety of potential outcomes, different scenarios that we we can envision, and then we can collectively decide which ones do we want.
00:12:32
Speaker
So you're right in saying outsourcing was a great example of breaking down the tasks that highly paid humans in developed economies used to do. And then we would throw those tasks over the wall to people in a developing economy that we could pay less. And then companies had a decision in the same way I was talking about what happens when it's automated.
00:12:56
Speaker
um So what we've done in in the post pandemic world is I called it the great reset. because we had to step back, we had to look at what work is, and especially what jobs are, and make some decisions about how flexible we're going to be. And so, I i said what ah what work is, um it's sort of those three things, skills, tasks, and and problems to be solved. Jobs actually have six characteristics, and it just so happens it's the six W's that Aristotle talked about, um what, where, who, when, how, and why.
00:13:31
Speaker
So the what, where, and when were all affected by the the great reset. The global pandemic changed a lot of what people did for work, where they did it for work, and when they did it for work. And so if you are ah leading in an organization that has very flexible work, you actually don't care if somebody finishes their work by 1 o'clock or by 9 PM, except that you want them to have a meaningful life. Because if you have the right kind of agreements between you as to what the work outcomes are, the problems that you've solved, as opposed to just the tasks that you performed. If somebody gets their work done in an hour versus eight hours, then also, you have a discussion. yeah Are you going to say, great, you can take the other seven hours off? Or are there other things that they could be working on? Or could they be helping others who are not able to do their work in an hour? Those are all discussions.
00:14:23
Speaker
but but if view bungee cord back to the old rules of work and you think that work is only happening if it happens in front of you, I call that management by surveillance, then you have a particular kind of relationship with a worker that I think you need to ask some questions about. And instead, if what we want is every human being to have access to meaningful, well-paid work and we want them to be solving fascinating problems,
00:14:53
Speaker
What you just pointed out is um if you think of war the tasks that people are performing as sort of a landscape, like a magic quadrant, and down the lower left, it's boring and repetitive stuff that nobody really wants to do. Yes, that's what's going to get automated. And if the upper right corner is really fascinating, interesting, one-off problems to be solved over and over again, that's where humans thrive. And so if we think of the tool set as just replacing a whole bunch of humans and moving more and more into the upper right quadrant because it's cheaper,
00:15:23
Speaker
then I think we've missed something. And if instead we think what the tap the tool set as helping people to move up into the upper right quadrant and solving more and more fascinating tasks, and we have the agreements in place where we don't care exactly how long it takes them, we want them to do it in the most effective manner, then I think that everybody benefits. The organization benefits because it gets extremely effective workers and the workers benefit because they get more and more interesting problems to solve.
00:15:52
Speaker
ah Interesting. It sort of brings into play what is the purpose of full-time employment beyond just doing tasks. And I talked to various colleagues who run consulting organizations, for example, and ah one of them said ah he gets more value from who contractor staff and his staff his full-time staff.
00:16:15
Speaker
Because the minute you have a full-time staff into your company, they suddenly had this Holden reception on what to do during the day, what motivates them. Whereas if you have a contractor, they have a task to do and they want to deliver it with excellence so they can get the next task and the next task. and And it does beg into question, you know, what is the future of employment versus people just becoming very talented individuals who are paid to do specific roles, right?
00:16:45
Speaker
So you brought up a couple of fascinating points to me. So the first is, um I mentioned Bungie according back to the old rules of work. What is full-time work? Well, why is it five days a week? Why is it eight hours a day? Well, it turns out that five days a week comes from one factory in the northeastern U.S., right near you. ah There was a garment factory a hundred years ago. And the people who ran the company had workers who were Christians and workers who were Jewish. And they decided, well, rather than giving them each their own day of rest, let's just give them both, give everybody both days of rest.
00:17:21
Speaker
one company, and it affected the world. And you're going to go do a startup now, wouldn't you just have people work Monday through Friday? Why? oh Why those days? um We bungee cord back to these old rules. And then eight hours a day or 10 hours or whatever you know the the rule is in your country actually came from a lot of attempts, both in Britain and in the US,
00:17:46
Speaker
to try to just, big especially for factory workers, to try to to limit the number of hours that they could be forced to work for the same wages. And so ah these are old rules of work. And so ah so that's the first i think fascinating aspect that we're talking about is we need to be intentional about these things. We need to question, well, why why would we do this? Many of the experiments with four-day work weeks, for instance,
00:18:10
Speaker
are very successful. People feel better, they enjoy their lives more they there's more, they're more effective in their jobs. ah and But the country of Greece, where I was just lecturing a couple weeks ago, ah they have just instituted a six-day work week for certain kinds of industries ah because they feel they need to get, as you were saying, more value. That is more, if there are more hours that are being worked than maybe the overall productivity in the in the country.
00:18:38
Speaker
will grow. um I'm not a big fan of productivity rankings, but the ratings, but that's one way to be thinking about it. The other aspect of what you brought up, though, I think is really important is when you say more value from whether if it's full-time or contract stuff.
00:18:52
Speaker
As far as I'm concerned, that value, if it's driven by shareholder thinking and by you know the ah total amount you can make people work and that sort of thing, um I think that's ah that's a fail for our system. That's one of the old rules of work. However, ah one of the next rules of work is, well, what agreements do you have about the value that's being created?
00:19:11
Speaker
So maybe theyre those full-time workers are doing other things like building social cohesion in the organization. Maybe they're staying in their jobs longer. Maybe they're more loyal to the organization than those contractors who could walk away tomorrow and something you wouldn't have access to their work anymore.
00:19:27
Speaker
So a lot of it is just not just the the but hours that people are putting in or what their output is, it's what are the agreements between you and those workers as to what effectiveness looks like. And if you co-create that, then I think everybody benefits. You get a much, much better ah work environment, you get much more focused, energetic people. I'd also argue that in many organizations, we don't yet even really understand how to construct work roles. We tend to have very traditional approaches of these boxes with job descriptions focused on tasks.
00:20:03
Speaker
And so if we make that a process of co-creation, there's tons of organizations now that are experiment experimenting with skill-centered hiring, skill-centered work, ah internal project marketplaces. And that flexibility probably gets a lot of the same value that the the person you were just talking about gets from contract staff because they've made the and work environment inside the organization far more flexible.
00:20:30
Speaker
Yeah, um fascinating, isn't it? i mean And yeah the one thing, I mean, I'm in the knowledge industry, but all I care about is having a team of people who are passionate. If you get up in the morning and you're just happy to be here and you want to the excellence of what you do, my job is to sell smart people to work and do smart things. So I just want to be a bit passionate and motivated.
00:20:57
Speaker
And part of that I feel is when they collaborate well with other staff in the business or outside of a business, when they're actually spending more time interacting with other people and less time doing maybe mundane routine work of just blah, blah, blah, you know, and um That's I feel where you know one, I get my team into the office three days a week and we make sure we do fun stuff in the office. It's fun. We stare at each other around the room and think, hey, we're back in the office now. Let's talk about some stuff. That's where the ideas come. That's where the magic happens. and And that's where I think the biggest challenge for leadership is the day is how do you
00:21:42
Speaker
And how do you drive these behaviors within your organization? How do you, one, get people to be more collaborative and more excited about what they're doing? And then, two, how do you get them to, you know, we call this lovely phrase, we use the phrase unlearn, but how do you get people to learn new things, learning ways of but using chat GPT, for example?
00:22:04
Speaker
or a cloud in the workplace where you can actually analyze data way smarter than you were before. You can literally put Excel flat files in and it pumps out your chats for you. It's like taking days at a time. It gives you more time and freedom and the ability to do other things. So as we look at the future and we look at these tools which can empower us, how do we derive different behaviors from our people. So they are more curious. They are more willing to say, Hey, let's stop doing it that way and do it this way. I mean, what's your advice from your experience over the years? to yeah Okay. So
00:22:41
Speaker
You youve brought up a couple fascinating aspects of of how it is that each of us as humans determine the kind of work that we want to do and the ways that we do that work. So ah to encourage the kind of behaviors that you were talking about, about being passionate and motivated. So ah what we find is, um you mentioned ah that I'm a co-founder of a company called eparachute.com. Well, that comes from the knowledge of a book called What color is your parachute which is sort of the world's career manual 10 million copies in print just so happens It was written by my father. um I was trained as a career counselor. I was 19 years old And what we learned from 50 years of my father's work is that it begins with self-knowledge The more you know about yourself
00:23:24
Speaker
The more you understand what motivates you, the more you know what your North Star or Southern Cross is, what pulls you forward in your work that you can be passionate and motivated about, the better you're going to be able to be contributing to the work of an organization or a team.
00:23:43
Speaker
The second is that each of us need learning goals. We need to be lifelong learners. I'm actually wearing a t-shirt that says lifelong learner. and And so the more we have goals of the things that we want to learn in a world of exponential change, the more we have that north star southern cross to pull us forward. The third insight is that learning needs to be a team sport. That is that the more you can mentor others, others can help to mentor you. People who are farther along on their learning journeys in whatever you want to learn.
00:24:12
Speaker
The more that is a team sport, then the more motivation you have that you are all learning together. And then finally, you mentioned unlearning. So unlearning is simply the process of looking at the way that you perform tasks and solve problems in the past and determining, oh, that's not working anymore. And so we find that what's really helpful is to put people into ah workshops or, you know, you can buy people people pizza for lunch and he say, all right.
00:24:40
Speaker
We're going to do what we call a code lab. We're going to take a process that we have today. We're going to take a problem that we solve, and we're going to come up with completely new ways of solving that problem in one hour. And you can use the tools. You can leverage Claude and Chachi BT to help you fuel that process of creativity.
00:24:57
Speaker
And the result is, okay, now we know what we're not going to do anymore. And we have new ways of solving problems that we hadn't even thought up before. And the more you can kind of create that environment, um, I still have to start something called next colabs, next colabs.io, which is a, a collaborative, uh, a group of people around the world that are all learning the AI tools and helping each other to learn them, how they can apply them in different use cases in their work.
00:25:25
Speaker
and we We found getting our analysts to showcase how they're using their tools um and how they're using their tools to do better research, faster research, better data analysis, and we we get them to present them to each other is the best form of co-learning.
00:25:43
Speaker
And it's like, Hey, look, I just did this. I'll just do that. Otherwise you can talk yourself blue, just trying to force people to use new tech and saying, Hey, go, go on a training course. Learn this, do that. Uh, I'm seeing better success from companies doing bootcamps and this stuff, um, driving that collaboration forward. Otherwise it's just more and more lip service to let's come up with, uh, that AI roll out and say, we, uh, say we did this.
00:26:11
Speaker
So I think there's one final thought, um yeah but ah sorry Gary, around um driving change within organizations. um What's your advice to mid-career enterprise leaders today who are just struggling with this stuff? like it's hard to change I mean, we talk about the debts that companies need to repay to move forward, whether it's data, process, skills, and people, but ultimately it feels like it's a culture debt which companies need to repay. hope would How can companies ultimately
00:26:48
Speaker
change how change their cultures so they can become more collaborative, more learning driven, more passion driven and get away from this old legacy mindset. Is there a there any is there anything that they can do quickly to maneuver these juggernauts or is it is it just a slow process of change that we have to look for?
00:27:13
Speaker
So this is, I think, the key question, certainly one that I get from um the C-suite of organizations around the world. ah the um The short answer is...
00:27:26
Speaker
Yes, it's hard because humans ah tend to resist change. um I've done a series of courses with Dr. Evian Gordon, who's one of the world's brain experts. And the whole way that our human brains work, if you ask Dr. Evian to distill it, is safety first. We tend to protect what we have and their and so change is hard.
00:27:50
Speaker
So how do you help people to change? um It just so happens that my title has shifted with Singularity University, no longer just chair for the future of work, but now I'm a global fellow for transformation. So I'm building a lot of the sort of IP around just how we transform as individuals, organizations, um communities, and countries. And what it turns out is that ah people need a combination of incentives and disincentives. And i'm I'm a big fan of incentives, so I'd rather focus on the positive.
00:28:20
Speaker
i I mentioned at the beginning that my framing is always mindset, skill set, and tool set. And you talked about changing the mindset of organization, which we often call culture. So why would anybody change?
00:28:34
Speaker
Why would they have a mindset of change? Well, it's pretty clear. There's very good research. The first is that they have a personal commitment to a growth mindset. um Dr. Carol Dweck's book is seminal in that it helps us to have the language around what a growth mindset is. So personally, I need a growth mindset.
00:28:52
Speaker
Secondly, we need alignment within the organization. That is, we need synchrony, some way to be able to coordinate. What are the strategic goals of the organization? What are the ways I'm helping to be able to support those strategic goals? Third, we've got to make sure we have the right skill set, ah you know, these this new AI tools. none None of us knew what prompt engineering was three years ago.
00:29:13
Speaker
And so we are continually developing new skill sets in a variety of different work roles. And so it's it's critical that we have the organizational operating system where we can continually learn new things. We can leverage this tool set to develop a new skill set.
00:29:29
Speaker
And it starts small. It starts on the individual basis. um i yeah ah just going to double down on you If you help people to have better self-knowledge, you help them to be able to figure out the kinds of problems that they love to solve, and you give them the opportunity to do that, and you make that a process of co-creation,
00:29:48
Speaker
you're gonna find the standard distribution that a substantial portion of your organization will want to continue to change. However, there will always be resistors and what you need is momentum. Over and over again, to this is what happens in successful or ah cultural transformation programs. The Institute for Corporate Performance did a study of these programs and found that 85% fail.
00:30:17
Speaker
That's bad news. However, good news, 15% succeed, and they've got sort of an 18-factor sort of roadmap for how to do that, which I reproduce in my book in The Next Rules of Work. And so it's really, really important that people are trying to catalyze change.
00:30:34
Speaker
understand that operating system, understand how it is that people do change and give small opportunities for people that do mindset shift, to do change mindset habits so that they can actually have the organization all rowing with their same ores in the same direction.
00:30:53
Speaker
yeah Well thanks Gary, this has been a um really insightful and challenging conversation about how we can change our way to doing things and and and how the um the future work is starting to take shape and I think someone said to me recently the future work is unsettled and I ah think he's correct in a weird way, it is still unsettled and And part of the problem is how can people justify the sheer expense to the employer? Like, hey, I earn a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year. Am I still worth that to you? And I do think um people need to really try hard to
00:31:34
Speaker
you know, bond with their employer so they understand what those outcomes are, they understand um how to foster a change mindset, that I'm a learning mindset to be effective. So I mean, it's fascinating to think about these issues and and I believe you'll be coming to our summit in New York in a few weeks and I really look forward to hearing more of your views then. So thank you for your time today. Absolutely. No, really looking forward to it.
00:32:05
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in to From the Horse's Mouth. Intrepid conversations with Phil first. Remember to follow Phil on LinkedIn and subscribe and like on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite platform for no-nonsense takes on the intricate dance between technology, business and ideological systems. Got something to add to the discussion? Let's have it! Drop us a line at fromthehorsesmouthathfsresearch.com or connect with Phil on LinkedIn.