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Paul Slater: AI-Ready or Sleepwalking Into Irrelevance?
34 Plays26 days ago
In this episode, Eric talks with Paul Slater, author of The AI Ready Human, about what it actually takes to stay valuable as AI quietly reshapes how work gets done.
Paul has spent three decades at the intersection of humans and technology, from teaching people how to use their very first computers to writing more than twenty technical books at Microsoft. Today, his focus is on a harder question: what happens when technology changes faster than the human behaviors required to work well alongside it?
The conversation explores why many professionals assume they’re “fine” because they’re busy, experienced, or technically competent, and why that assumption is increasingly dangerous. Paul argues that the biggest risk isn’t sudden disruption, but gradual irrelevance: continuing to work the same way while the nature of value creation shifts underneath us.
At the center of the discussion is Paul’s framework for becoming an AI-ready human, built around seven foundational capabilities that compound over time, from basic readiness and control to resilience and adaptability. Rather than treating AI as a productivity hack, Paul reframes it as a forcing function that exposes weak habits, outdated mental models, and underdeveloped human skills.
They also examine how past eras of work masked these gaps through structure and standardization, why those buffers no longer exist, and what it means to treat adaptability as a trainable discipline rather than a personality trait.
This is a grounded, pragmatic conversation for people who sense that “keeping up” is no longer enough and want a clearer path to staying relevant in work that is changing whether they like it or not.
Topics Covered
- Why AI exposes weak human systems rather than replacing strong ones
- The danger of gradual irrelevance versus sudden disruption
- What “AI-ready” really means beyond tools and prompts
- Why adaptability is the most important capability going forward
- How past work structures hid gaps in organization, control, and resilience
- The seven human capabilities that compound in an AI-driven world
- Why most professionals underinvest in the skills that matter most
- Treating behavior change as practice, not inspiration
Episode Links
- Paul’s website: https://paulslater.ai/
- Paul’s newsletter and podcast, Humanity Working: https://www.humanityworking.net/
- Connect with Paul on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-slater/
- Buy Paul’s book The AI-Ready Human: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GGF74215?ref=cm_sw_r_ffobk_cp_ud_dp_AFHZ0PBDSACKZ2G27Z7H
For more episodes: https://unfoldingthought.com
Questions or guest ideas: eric@inboundandagile.com
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Transcript
00:00:02
Speaker
Paul,
Introduction and Early Career
00:00:03
Speaker
thank you for joining me. Where does today's recording find you? Hey, Eric. ah Physically, ah it finds me in Tulsa, Oklahoma. ah Emotionally, I guess in ah in a good and happy spot.
00:00:17
Speaker
Would you mind telling me about yourself, Paul? I've had a long career, mostly in tech. And I would like to say sort of tech and tech adjacent um across three kind of main locations. So I started my life and my work life in the UK, grew up in Oxford,
00:00:39
Speaker
um Went to ah King's College London. Wasn't smart enough to go to Oxford, so I ended up in in king's ah King's College London. um And then lived, for those people that know the UK, Oxford and London, kind of halfway between those two is Reading University.
Relocation and Career Evolution
00:00:55
Speaker
lived in Redding for a good period of time. And the reason that I lived in Redding was because um I had a company. My company was a training and consulting company.
00:01:07
Speaker
um And I fully anticipated that my number one customer was going to be one of the largest companies based in Reading, which is Microsoft UK.
00:01:20
Speaker
And I was, i like to say I was right about the company, but I was wrong about the country. So it turned out that my largest customer was Microsoft US, s not Microsoft UK.
00:01:35
Speaker
So um for a couple of years, Every week or two weeks, I was on a plane going from London Heathrow to Seattle, Washington. There and back, there and back, there and back.
00:01:50
Speaker
um And I don't know if there is officially a thing called chronic jet lag, but I appeared i had something like that. i appeared to have chronic jet lag. And at one point after doing this again and again and again and again, i was like, you know, I could just live in Seattle. I love Seattle. Why don't I just why don't i just live there? And so obviously it's not that straightforward to go to to pack up and move half across the world. So it took a little while. um But around 2002, I moved to to Seattle, kept that business with Microsoft,
00:02:27
Speaker
US as my primary customer.
Joining Microsoft and Career Reflections
00:02:29
Speaker
um And then around 2010, Microsoft ah decided to make me ah make me an offer I couldn't refuse, as it were, to go work for them directly, which I did for best part of a decade.
00:02:45
Speaker
Then I got kind of the entrepreneurial itch in in around 2020. There was something going on around 2020. don't know if you remember, and and it caused a lot of people to reevaluate things. I was one of those people.
00:02:57
Speaker
And so i ended up deciding to to go back into ah the field of of training and consulting and you know and all that kind of stuff again, which which I've really enjoyed.
00:03:10
Speaker
And one of the main reasons I've really enjoyed it is because when I look back across that full career, what I realized is the sort of common thread. My very, very first job was teaching people how to use computers.
00:03:23
Speaker
I mean, to literally computers, we're talking 1994, computers were arriving on desktops for the first time. And many people did not know what a computer was or what a computer did, right? This is...
00:03:37
Speaker
pre very very early days of microsoft windows and and and things like that um and i've got some crazy stories about how people ah for example i taught somebody who thought that a the mouse mouse used to have a cable on it they thought that if you pulled the mouse you were pulling the cable and you were pulling the cursor up on the screen i had all kinds of like screen stories i would tell people to close a window in microsoft windows ah Because it actually used to have like real ah sort of virtual windows in there. And I said, do this, do that, close a window. And they literally got up out of their chair and closed the window in the room.
00:04:13
Speaker
People did not know how to use computers. and And so all the way from there, all the way since, I've realized where my passion really lies, which is the intersection of humans and technology.
00:04:26
Speaker
And so um now I get the chance to focus exclusively on that intersection. And and it's led me to enjoy my web today more than I think I ever had.
00:04:40
Speaker
Paul, tell me that the person who was pulling the
Technological Transformations in the 90s
00:04:45
Speaker
cursor up and down and also this person who got up and closed the window, those people didn't work at Microsoft, did they?
00:04:52
Speaker
No, no, no, no, no. And this is like, when well, but they good there could well have been a few people worked at Microsoft who thought that way then, but I have but i don't know. No, no we were We were talking about people, ah many people for whom literally a computer was um was something that they had never actually seen. And when they walked in the room, that was the first that was the first time they'd seen a computer.
00:05:13
Speaker
And it was a fascinating time. i mean, we're talking um that period of sort of like 93, 94. most ah Most offices, if they had computers, the computers were not networked. so So literally, you'd be sitting at your computer and somebody in the room next door. There was no way of those computers talking to each other.
00:05:35
Speaker
um lot of my early work was sort of setting up some of those those networks with people. um For many people... um The first time that they saw computer was when they'd arrived on on the desks on um on a Monday morning, or actually more accurately, the monitor, which most people confused for the actual computer, by the way. They thought the monitor was the computer.
00:06:01
Speaker
um And the monitor arrived on the desk. The big old tower unit was underneath their desks. And... and They didn't know what to do with it, but it was combined with really, really challenging discussions. So typically what might happen is you'd walk in, you'd see that, and then you'd be invited into your boss's office. And the boss might say to you, ah got some good news and some bad news.
00:06:32
Speaker
The good news is you got this amazing new piece of technology. The bad news is that we've just fired your, and they wouldn't say executive assistant in those days, they said something like, we've just fired your secretary.
00:06:45
Speaker
And now you're doing all of that stuff. And this led to kind of widespread freakouts, right? You had people who were um who were basically scared because they didn't know how to operate this stuff and they thought potentially their careers were over.
00:07:05
Speaker
Those first few months that I spent in the workforce teaching people how to use computers, um almost every week in a classroom setting, I would have at least one person who was a, we used to call them criers, right? Oh, I just had my first crier.
00:07:20
Speaker
It was almost like in the emergency room, people talk about a bleeder, right? It was like, yeah, we just had our you just had our first crier. And it was not just frustration at not being able to use it. It was frustration wrapped into utter unadulterated fear that they would never get it.
00:07:37
Speaker
And as a result of them never getting it, their careers were over. And so that's one of the reasons why the this sort of interconnection between the human impact and the technology itself has always been the thing that has fascinated me the most.
00:07:53
Speaker
So you talked about your you were teaching people to use computers, but then you had confidence that your primary client, I guess, was going to be Microsoft
Training and Consulting Experience
00:08:06
Speaker
UK. What kind of training were you doing or or expecting to do maybe when you went into that?
00:08:12
Speaker
Yeah, so that was interesting. So um just to sort of go back prior to when I had my own business, in is I started off in in predominantly in training.
00:08:24
Speaker
Then a collection of training and consulting. So I went from um an organization called Oxford Computer Group, um where I worked for for a year or so.
00:08:38
Speaker
Went from there to an organization, which is still around today, called Global. ah called Global Knowledge, they were called Global Knowledge Network in those days, and they were an offshoot of of the tech company Digital, for folks that remember ah for folks that remember Digital. Digital were a huge company, and there were about 68,000 people, I think, at their at their highest point.
00:08:57
Speaker
um And they had a training division, and I went to work in that training division. And then I set up their of nascent um consulting division as well um so we're kind of like late 90s at this point some major technology releases were uh were coming out and um i had i was training very very regularly and i was fortunate enough to be named microsoft's uh uk trainer of the year they had a they wanted to start awarding ah the trainers that they thought were
00:09:36
Speaker
were really good trainers of Microsoft products. And so with that, that kind of like unlocked a series of opportunities that I really wasn't expecting, right? um So I started to get invitations to help write Microsoft curriculum.
00:09:54
Speaker
um And so i would be sent over to Redmond. i would meet with the ah with the teams that were building ah sort of new generations of software for folks that are technical, things like Windows 2000 and Exchange 2000 and things like that, which were a new generation of of software. So I would go there.
00:10:16
Speaker
They hadn't written their training materials. um And so I would learn about the product, help write the training materials, And then, of course, people don't really think about this, but if you've got like some, a massive software release, then the IT department's don't know the software before the software comes out. So they've got to be trained. But in order for them to be trained, there needs to be an army of trainers to train them. And so I was commissioned to to do the train the trainer stuff. This army of trainers that was going to go out and teach all the IT departments, they were trained by me. And then also the press...
00:10:57
Speaker
ah you know, who ah the IT press were going to be writing about this stuff. um They would collect all those journalists together and then they'd spend five days with me and I would do like a deep immersion in the in the new software that's coming on so that they could write about it in the press.
00:11:12
Speaker
And so that led to um a new something that i that I knew I could do, but I hadn't done for ah for a long period of time, which is I'm teaching still, but I'm writing
Writing Career and AI Challenges
00:11:28
Speaker
quite a lot. I'm writing courses and and things like that.
00:11:31
Speaker
And that led to this interesting opportunity at Microsoft, whereby they really wanted to get quite seriously learning writing much more detailed technical books.
00:11:48
Speaker
And they needed people who could understand the technology and be able to communicate about that technology effectively. So in other words, they needed You might call it a technical writer, but it's more than a technical writer. They needed a combination of a technical writer and an architect because there wasn't going to be anybody who could explain it to the technical writer in the way that the technical writer would understand the person. You you had to be both. You had to be the architect and the technical and technical writer.
00:12:17
Speaker
And so I realized that's actually something I can do. and And that it was quite a rare skill set. So when I kind of transitioned into working for Microsoft directly, yes, I was doing training on their behalf and I was speaking at conferences on their behalf and stuff like that, but predominantly,
00:12:36
Speaker
I was doing this thing where I'm wearing these two hats. I'm wearing in the architect hat and I'm wearing the technical writer hat. And so for really if several years, I was basically a professional writer, a professional, if you like, ghost writer, because my name is, if it's in the book anyway, it's like really, really buried inside. And it's sort of shown as being written by this monolith that is Microsoft.
00:13:00
Speaker
But over that time, I wrote probably 20 books. um And it was kind of cool because i i was i was I wasn't paid based on the number of copies sold of this book. I was paid basically to deliver a book in three months.
00:13:16
Speaker
And it was a it was it was interesting. It was rewarding because I got to meet a whole bunch of people that were be the right at the cutting edge of technology and learn from them.
00:13:28
Speaker
Like super, super, super smart people that I would have never had the opportunity to meet otherwise. um But at the same time, it was kind of lonely too, right? A lot of time spent writing. And I think there's a reason why...
00:13:42
Speaker
um most writers only really, write only truly write for like a couple of hours a day. if you're writing for eight to 10 or 12 hours a day, day after day after day after day, it can be pretty exhausting. I had this fantasy that because I was going to develop this amazing like writing aptitude that I would, I would use all those skills that I had built.
00:14:07
Speaker
And after I was done with my day job, then I'd write my book. And I never did because by the time by the time I got to the end of the day, the last thing I wanted to do was sit in front of a computer and write. And so it has literally taken, because of that type of work that I was doing, I stopped doing that kind of work in about 2007, 2008. And it's taken all the way through 2025.
00:14:30
Speaker
and it's taken all the way through to twenty twenty five to get to a point where I actually put in the work and have ended up with a book of my own with my name on it, which is the AI Ready Human.
00:14:45
Speaker
Tell me about the work that you're doing today or what your focus is. And then, you know, the book just came out. So please do tell me about that as well. So really for the last five years um or so, that intersection that I was talking about, that that um technology and human and how they and how they combine um for good, the challenges that it causes and so on, that's been my primary focus.
00:15:19
Speaker
As I've tried to understand very deeply what are the what are the human skills, the sort of intangibles of great work that are needed in a world where technology itself exists.
00:15:38
Speaker
is changing very rapidly, but perhaps more importantly, the technology is changing the way that work happens. um And so I've been doing that through building programs, through organizational design work with organizations to help them understand how you know how do we structure our infrastructure, our policy, our culture, and things like that in order to be able to get the most out of humans in this in this new world of work.
00:16:08
Speaker
Um, and cause if you really think about it, and most people don't, um, if you really think about it, every aspect of work has transformed really over the course of the last, uh, over the last last five to 10 years.
00:16:22
Speaker
And it's not all in a visible way in the same way. that I described when people had the computers arrive on their desk. That was a very, like when back in the 90s where you walked in and all of a sudden there's this big monitor on your desk and this tower underneath your desk, that was a visible instantiation of how the world of work was changing.
00:16:44
Speaker
But today, a lot of those shifts are just subtle changes to what's happening inside the devices that you're already using. So there's not this like physical instantiation of it.
00:16:58
Speaker
But they come together, right? They compound. And as they do, if you sort of take a backward lens and look back 10 years, you'll you'll realize that the what, the when, the where, the how, the who with, all of these aspects of work have utterly, utterly transformed.
00:17:19
Speaker
And And therefore, we need we need new approaches to deal with ah with what is different.
00:17:31
Speaker
um I like to say to people that, you know, that quote that is misattributed to Einstein, the insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.
00:17:43
Speaker
I actually flipped that completely on head. Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting the same result because everything has everything has changed. Everything under ah underneath us has changed. So if you're managing how you were 10 years ago and expecting the same results, you're not going to get them.
00:17:59
Speaker
If you're approaching work in the same way that you were 10 years before, you're not going to get those same results. If you're collaborating with other people in the same way that you were 10 years ago, you're not going to get the same results. And so on and so on and so on and so on. So that's been my focus. And um and
00:18:19
Speaker
It is, you know, we've dealt with different trends through that period, through the last five years. Obviously, there's been things like the remote, you know, the remote trend, the hybrid trend, um and where we've settled with regard to that, that changes how people work.
AI's Impact on Work and Human Roles
00:18:35
Speaker
But then, of course, a really, really big one and a really fascinating one has been the rise and emergence of AI and specifically generative um AI, which for most of us is the way is is the visible version of this AI that is now surrounding us. um And so when when I saw that shift happen about a year and a half ago, i was delivering a maybe a year ago, something like that.
00:19:05
Speaker
i was ah um I was doing a ah presentation. on the workforce transformation that was needed in the light of of AI.
00:19:16
Speaker
We had a whole bunch of people who came up to me beforehand and came up to me afterwards, and they were kind of explaining how they were approaching all of this. And I realized that they were thinking about it in a very traditional way and not really reflecting just how much AI is changing work.
00:19:35
Speaker
And then like that night, I wrote down the words, the AI ready human. And I'm really started to think about what I needed to write in order to be able to to deal with it specifically. Because I think that there's a whole bunch of different changes that are happening.
00:19:50
Speaker
i think in this case, We are, we've got a relatively good sense as to what it is from a technology perspective. We have a very poor sense. Most of us do have a very poor sense as to the nature of the nature of the work transformation.
00:20:05
Speaker
And that's the piece that really interests me. So the title, the AI ready human, given what you're saying, it sounds to me like The title might sound like it's about me as the human, but given what you're saying, it sounds like you're also concerned with the nature of the workforce or the culture or kind of the expectations that we set up about how we're all working together.
00:20:35
Speaker
I think to a certain extent, it's all interconnected. The real focus of the book is centered around what I want people to do is I want people to go beyond an abstract.
00:20:46
Speaker
Oh, this is interesting. Or, oh, this seems profound. Or ah or even, all this can make me much more productive. And into truly looking deeply within themselves as to I know that we are the start of something that is already radically transformed work.
00:21:09
Speaker
Generative AI is the fastest adopted technology in the history of technology, right? Within nine months of the launch of more than half of office workers in the U.S. have tried it.
00:21:26
Speaker
there's no there's There's no other technology in the history of technology that even ah approaches that. Like four or five years was the massively fast adoption of technology. the the The things that we think of that were adopted super fast, things like, i don't know, Instagram or or the iPhone or something like that. It was always like sort of four or five years. This was nine months before we, until we got to like half of all of all people using it.
00:21:51
Speaker
And so we, it clearly is sticky. It clearly is interesting. And that's a lot of how people think about it. But what they need to really start doing is thinking about, okay, as a human, and this is why I went with the AI ready human versus the AI ready employee or what whatever, right? Is as a human, right?
00:22:13
Speaker
What does the new me look like that will thrive in a world that this AI transforms? And so we focus it in on the human because we're really focusing in on the human capabilities.
00:22:29
Speaker
Now, that said, within that and within the book, we talk about stuff that you do as ah as an individual, but we also talk about what collaboration is like in this new world, how AI joins your team, how, for example, for the vast majority of us, pretty much all of us actually now,
00:22:47
Speaker
or going from a world, if we were individual contributors inside our organizations, we're all kind of managers now because we're managing these AI entities to help us do the work that
AI-Ready Organizations and Individual Capabilities
00:22:58
Speaker
we're doing. And so we have to have a set of management capabilities that we would that we would never have had before.
00:23:03
Speaker
And then and they're by contrast, or not even by contrast, but but as a sort of consequence of that, What that means is that um as we develop a collection of AI-ready humans inside an organization, that translates to having AI-ready organization.
00:23:22
Speaker
So in the book, I'm really dealing with, I would say, predominantly one side of the equation, which is what is the set of the capabilities that set of capabilities that the human needs. in my broader work in my consulting and sometimes in my speaking as well i talk about the other side of that equation which is what's the infrastructure what's the policy what's the culture in order to allow that to truly in order to allow the the the capabilities of those individuals translate into an ai-ready organization is there a target audience for your book
00:23:56
Speaker
I wrote about this the other day. i think I said, um if you use technology and you have a pulse and you're human, oh no, I said, if you, if you work,
00:24:11
Speaker
and you're human then you're then you're then you're probably our audience um i had to i realized i had to put in the and you're human because don't dogs work right so so ah so ah so a dog a working dog is not going to get it's not going to get a lot out of this book but if if you if you work and you're human you're more or less more or less our audience that said And we're really, really early days. I mean, the book only launched a couple of weeks ago. But um I have already had some situations where leaders inside organizations have purchased it, read it, and then bought it for everybody in their organization.
00:24:56
Speaker
And so they're kind of using it as a as a means of getting the change and the transformation they want in their workforce. But I would say it is predominantly written for the for the individual.
00:25:10
Speaker
But that individual could be entry level employee or a CEO, because the patterns are actually the same, regardless of where you sit inside an organization.
00:25:21
Speaker
What do you want a reader to take away or get from the book? I have a goal. um And to be honest, probably um it's probably shooting for the moon.
00:25:35
Speaker
um I structured the book in a very, very specific way. So I mentioned it's called The AI Ready Human, but the subtitle is Your 90-Day Program to Stay Relevant as Technology Transforms Work.
00:25:51
Speaker
um i have my own podcast humanity working and we we have a lot we feature a lot of authors um on that podcast and they're my favorite episodes by by a mile um and i learn so much from them but at the same time there are very few of those books where I know that coming out of it, I've done something different when I'm actually practically doing something different.
00:26:22
Speaker
I'm interested in behavior change. So I'm interested in the idea that you will you will start reading this book and you'll be behaving in a particular way and you'll come out of reading this book and you'll be behaving in a different way.
00:26:37
Speaker
And so a lot of my background is in micro learning and experiential learning and all of that kind of stuff, which is really the most pro is, you know, it's kind of like how people, how simply piano works or Duolingo works or things like that, right? Where where you actually want to, ah you want a tangible result.
00:26:55
Speaker
And so I've taken a lot of those principles and put it into how I do this and into how I structure the book. So this book doesn't have like the 12 traditional chapters that you would normally have in a, in like a business book. It's got 90 individual days and each day has got a, a concept that and And actually in the physical book, know that your physical copy has just arrived, in the in the physical book, you've got the concept on the left-hand side of the page and you've got a practice associated with the concept on the right-hand side of the page.
00:27:36
Speaker
Quick aside, never try to write a book like that. is the It's the hardest thing in the world because you're dealing with, like the way you normally write is you you have an idea, you have a concept and you're and you're trying to, to or you're taking it to its obvious conclusion.
00:27:52
Speaker
i have the restriction of ah of a physical page on a 6x9 book 90 individual times. It was like trying to write 90 poems or something. It was, it was painful.
00:28:03
Speaker
um But hopefully the, hopefully the result for the reader is, is helpful. I'm sure that these are positive constraints. You know, the, like working with a fixed focus or or fixed focal length lens on a camera, you have to get really creative, even though when you first start using it, you feel like I can't do anything with this.
00:28:24
Speaker
I'm sure that you got very creative. Oh, yeah, it just it
Writing Challenges in the AI Era
00:28:28
Speaker
was fine. It just like it was it. the The problem was it took probably twice as long to get it to where it needed to be. then it took me to actually write the thing in the in the first place. um So but hopefully as people will read it, they'll sense the idea that like, man, every word there is chosen.
00:28:49
Speaker
So it was, ah yeah, it was really difficult. And by the way, people ask me all the time, did AI help you write it? i was like, you tried you try you try writing something like that using a AI to actually write it, and it's basically impossible.
00:29:03
Speaker
Today. Won't be in, probably won't be in a year any year's time, but today it is. Anything that is complicated in terms of, you know, keeping track, not just of individual words and sentences, but then paragraphs and now multiple paragraphs. And now I need to think about, well, what did I do in a prior chapter? Sort of thinking my experience with generative AI is that there's something special about the human brain that we do some of those things fairly well.
00:29:34
Speaker
And generative right now does not. Well, and it's particularly hard, particularly hard for the type of thing that I was trying to do, because really I have two overarching um constraints. You talked about constraints. I have two overarching constraints that I have to ah to live within. So first off,
00:29:58
Speaker
over these 90 days, like day 73 might be building on day 15 and day 21, right? And we're using elements of spaced repetition and various other things to to help ensure that as you're going through this thing, each everything is building on what is what has gone before.
00:30:18
Speaker
But then secondly, i have this concept of I wanted to isolate, as I mentioned, the human capabilities that you needed in order to be able to thrive in this in this new
Essential Human Capabilities in AI Era
00:30:29
Speaker
world. So you're sort of like you're going from somebody who is surviving with AI and using it to be more productive to what I sometimes call as being the conductor of the AI orchestrators. Like you've got all these various different AI things. You are very much in control.
00:30:43
Speaker
You're conducting it to, yes, work efficiently, but also to do better work, to work ah to make sure that the product you're producing, the value that you're creating is greater than it would be otherwise. And so we we built out a set of seven human capabilities, we call the Magnificent Seven,
00:31:03
Speaker
And I and so I had to ensure when I was writing the book that each of these capabilities also builds on the prior ones. And so, as you can imagine, you're not just talking about a challenge which is big enough in its own right, which is the amount of information that has to be that has to be pulled pulled in.
00:31:25
Speaker
um But also the the retaining those those two sort of mental models at the same time. And.
00:31:37
Speaker
The the book, which is, you know, a shade over 200 pages. mice Once I'd started my first draft or I'd completed my first draft and collected together everything I'd written on these topics previously, it was over 10 times that length. it was about hot It was over half a million words that I had to distill down into into this and then go those go across those and across these seven So it's...
00:32:07
Speaker
As I say, I'm sure we will get there in the future. But right now, that concept of like doing something that a human can do, which is is basically maintain these sort of larger structures and think about the human journey that the reader is going through.
00:32:28
Speaker
and make sure that it all makes logical sense, um is something that is well beyond generative AI capabilities today. And it's encouraging. It's encouraging that it is.
00:32:40
Speaker
When I... When I started, i really i really wanted to see what it could do. And so I did use AI very extensively early on for about two weeks. I tried building different models. I've got a good technical background, so i was building...
00:33:00
Speaker
custom GPTs, I was building automations and integrations, I was looking at authoring software um where you could add, you could basically make API calls to various different AI models.
00:33:16
Speaker
I was playing with all of the different AI models. I played with every piece of it. And the main reason I was, I didn't think it was going to work, but the main reason that I wanted to do it was because for me, that would allow me to understand truly what the limitations are so that I could write about them convincingly. It was like my big experiment to determine what to do. But after two weeks of doing that,
00:33:39
Speaker
um' i I ran headfirst into all of the challenges that that we're talking about. So um so yeah, it was just ah it was it was a fascinating early experience as I was trying to put all this together.
00:33:53
Speaker
What are the magnificent seven? First off, just briefly, kind of like here's how they came about. um So as I mentioned...
00:34:06
Speaker
I'm most interested in the the set of human capabilities that we need to thrive in a world that is being transformed by technology. And in plain language,
00:34:21
Speaker
People would often refer to those capabilities as using terms like soft skills. Some people use the term durable skills. Some people use essential skills. um But there's there's a series of different terms that are used for it.
00:34:35
Speaker
And through my work over the last five to ten years... i've I've looked at a lot of what are referred to as you know soft skills ontologies. So people have done quite a bit of work in a whole bunch of different fields to say, okay, what are all of the soft skills that are needed in the workplace? What is more important? What is you know what is most important? What is less important going forward and things like that?
00:35:04
Speaker
And the challenge with them is that all of these soft skills ontologies are different to each other, despite the fact that they're describing the same space. And then also, in many cases, they're just almost like a like a pick and mix, like a just a tuly like choose your own, you know ah let's say, communication skills. And then you break down communication skills into three or four or five other things and conflict resolution. And then you break that down into three or four or five different things.
00:35:34
Speaker
And so what you end up is just basically a mess that is collected together that people just refer to as soft skills. And then a bunch of hand-waving inside organizations when people start talking about how they're really important and we should develop them, but but we don't really know how to measure them.
00:35:50
Speaker
We don't even know how to say reliably what they are. um And as a result, everybody just says, well, it wouldn't it be great if our employees had better soft skills, but then they don't do anything about it? And so I wanted to kind of like figure out a way to to fix that.
00:36:06
Speaker
And most of the time when I was interviewing people around this that were in this field, they would say, well, yeah, but it's just really complicated. And I would be like, yeah, but I don't know. So is flying a plane. So is being a doctor, right? I mean, these things are complicated, but professions, real professions um like find a way to create consistent, to represent these things consistently so that people know what to learn, know when they're being successful, you know, and all of those kinds of things. So the, the genesis of the Magnificent Seven came from trying to put together something that collected together all of this, all of those durable skills that you need at work, but do so in a way that is deeply understandable, not just for the human person,
00:36:47
Speaker
ah that needs to build them, but also for, ah let's say, learning development departments inside organizations or CEOs and inside smaller companies and go, okay, if my if my people can do these seven things, then my company will do well.
00:37:01
Speaker
If I can do these seven things really well, then I'll thrive in the workplace. And so um that's where that's where it came from. And then the second aspect of it was really centered around the idea that Because they're durable skills, they should be evergreen. In other words, we should have always needed them.
00:37:25
Speaker
And they should also be ever-changing in the sense that but when the world around us changes, it changes how we need to ah to execute these capabilities. we need to We need to use this muscle, but use this muscle in a different way because the world because the world has changed.
00:37:42
Speaker
So that was sort of like all of the work that but went into it. I interviewed about 200 different employees, specific employees, to try to pull together common threads as to how really effective people do work. And then I interviewed learning development leaders and you know and various other people that worked and worked in this field.
00:38:00
Speaker
So long, long, that's all the genesis of all. You asked me what they were, I'll now get to that. right So, yeah. so ah There are seven layers, as I mentioned. So we go from the lowest level all the way up to the to the highest level.
00:38:17
Speaker
And um I will go from bottom to top, but know that top is the is the ultimate goal. So the lowest level is ah readiness. And we think of that as just simply your ability to be able to show up every day with some form of focused energy.
00:38:38
Speaker
So that could include things like getting enough sleep. It could include things like exercising, moving, um good nutrition, all of those kind of things. But the stuff that sort of fills your battery so that you can can work effectively.
00:38:52
Speaker
How people do that will be individual to them. The next layer above that is organization. So we think of organization as really, in today's world, making sense of the world around you, right? So what is actually going on? And if you think about it, right, organization is extremely different now than it was when I first started in the In the 90s, we still had filing. we had We had people whose job it was to physically file things in in filing in you know in filing rooms and record departments and things and things like that. All of that's gone away, but do we still need organization? Sure we do. We need organization to to understand everything that's going on around us, to be able to structure our day in a way that allows us to get work done, right? So a lot of the things that...
00:39:38
Speaker
A lot of the formal structure that gave us organization before is gone. So now we have to do our own organization in order to be able to make sense of the world ah around us. Next layer up from that is control. And you can think of control as when am i ah when do I, how do I take command of everything happening? So it's entirely possible to have a like a very organized calendar But 90% of it wasn't scheduled by you.
00:40:00
Speaker
And then you're not really in control. It's entirely possible to have your desk beautifully organized, but being interrupted every five minutes by a notification on your phone or on your watch that is distracting you and pulling you away from it. In those cases, you're losing control.
00:40:17
Speaker
So that's control. And above that, um we have balance. And so balance is not the old school like work-life balance.
00:40:29
Speaker
It is really the the energy that I was talking about before, how you're distributing your energy across the different parts of your world, right, with your You know, which part, what part of your energy is going to your, to let's say your family and your friends, what part of it is going to the work, what part of it is going ah to personal growth and, you know, and socializing and things like that. And that is harder than it's ever been because all of the boundaries between those different things have gone away.
00:41:00
Speaker
On top of that, I have motivation. And so motivation, I think, is the ability to be able to continue going through the natural ebbs and flows of work. So you're going to have times a day where you appear to be more motivated and when you're less motivated.
00:41:16
Speaker
You're going have times of the week, times month, and so on, where your motivation is going to naturally ebb and flow. How do you set yourself up to make sure that you can you have, over the in aggregate, over the course of the days and the weeks and the months and so on, that you're able to continue going despite those natural ebbs and flows?
00:41:34
Speaker
On top of that, I have um resilience, which... If motivation is that sort of short-term thing, you can think of resilience as being the super long-term thing. um every All of our lives have significant setbacks and challenges, and change can be extraordinarily challenging. And through AI, we're creating enormous amounts of change, just as before. We were creating enormous amounts of change when we all...
00:41:59
Speaker
left the office for a period of time, but it's how you go about managing that. I call it coping emotionally and intellectually with change. And then on top of that, the sort of North Star, the seventh one is adaptability.
00:42:14
Speaker
And the reason that I have adaptability right at the very top is because is because it is the number one capability that people will need to thrive when work is entirely different tomorrow than it is today.
00:42:29
Speaker
and need to ah I need to continuously and constantly adapt. I need to be built for change. I need to be built for change as a human being. And so those are the seven. Hopefully you can see that they kind of do logically build upon each other.
00:42:43
Speaker
if you If you are missing in a lower level, you're going to miss on the high level because you haven't built that foundation at the lower levels. And so through the AI Ready Human,
00:42:54
Speaker
um look to help people build that set of capabilities all the way from the bottom to top in a way that's very easy for them to to understand and very practical.
00:43:05
Speaker
But in a situation where, or doing so in such a way where it's explicitly targeted to this new world of work defined by AI.
00:43:16
Speaker
And so that's the ever-changing part that goes alongside the fact that we've always needed these capabilities, is the evergreen part. Tell me what you think about this. It seems to me that while I think I understood you or I think I recall you saying that these are evergreen, that in 1990 or 1950 or at some point in the past, while these things would have been valuable, that
00:43:52
Speaker
in a a higher percentage of circumstances in the past could I have gotten along without exhibiting all of these behaviors or maybe exhibiting none of them.
00:44:07
Speaker
Whereas today, think that, again, while you said that you wanted these things or you believe that these things are evergreen, that with things like generative AI,
00:44:21
Speaker
that the work that is really valuable today actually kind of requires this. And I i can't yeah get by. It's harder to get by without exhibiting these behaviors than it was 20 50 years ago.
00:44:36
Speaker
let's talk about the human and then let's talk about the work that the humans do.
Evolution of Work Structures and Adaptability
00:44:40
Speaker
So in the, let's, let's go back to the 1950s, right? If I was a completely disorganized, well, pick organization, because it's a nice easy one for people to get their heads around, right? So if I was a completely disorganized human in the nineteen fifty s That might translate to the fact that I'm not writing down in my physical diary that i've I'm supposed to be having, I'm British, I'll say tea, having tea with my uncle
00:45:14
Speaker
next Thursday. And so I missed the train and I don't get there. And, and my uncle's waiting for me at the station because there's no phone that, that he has on him. And so he misses me and then he's, he's mad at me.
00:45:30
Speaker
Right. So that's a sort of like, That's what we mean when we when we when we say evergreen in the sense that there are consequences for not exhibiting these behaviors. And those consequences ah change, but there have always been consequences for not exhibiting these behaviors.
00:45:49
Speaker
But, and this's and this is a very important part of it, number one, the level of sophistication you needed in terms of exhibiting these behaviors was much lower, right? Because you didn't have the 75 different ways in which somebody could contact you. I'm sure you, just as I have, like, been been in situations where you've missed something, missed an appointment, and it's because it went into the wrong email and the email went into the wrong calendar and it went into the, you know... it fell in the wrong, the wrong virtual hole, right? um And so your organizing system didn't have enough sophistication to deal with the fact that you've got all these different ways of inbound information, information coming.
00:46:30
Speaker
And then, of course, the second piece of it was that, and it all depends on how how far you want to go back. In my next book, I've got a thing where we kind of talk about all of these things through ah all the way back to like the 1700s and 1600s and 1700s and show how it's changed as we've gone through these different things.
00:46:47
Speaker
these different eras of work. But let's go back to that, to that same period, that sort of 1950s, 1960s. um Work was very structured then, right? So when you, when you went to work,
00:47:02
Speaker
was predefined, where you went to work was predefined. Even during the course of the day, you know, you'd have your break at 1030 in the morning and 230 in the afternoon and the lunch break at one o'clock and so on.
00:47:17
Speaker
And so the structure made all of these decisions for you. And so there was no cognitive tax associated with trying to make all of this stuff work.
00:47:33
Speaker
And so to your point, right, you could have a very rudimentary application of these things until relatively recently. Now you need a highly sophisticated application of these things. And most people don't have it because they haven't been taught it. And they kind of make it up as they go along and hopefully build up some of these some of these capabilities. And so that's really part of what I wanted to achieve. I wanted people to start thinking about things that that they'd never really thought about before because they just sort of organically built them and got away with what they did.
00:48:14
Speaker
It's kind of interesting. It's kind of like like if you were to look at ah like an an an Olympic runner... And what running looks very simple. Running is is, you know, if it's a distance runner, they might look a little different to a sprinter. But, you know, you look at a pattern and you recognize, you can recognize that is running.
00:48:35
Speaker
Well, I got tell you, when I go out for a jog later today, I'm not gonna look like an Olympic athlete. I'm doing a thing that is sort of like theoretically running, demonstrably running, but if you took a video of me doing it, it wouldn't really look like those people. Those people do that well. Why do they do it well? Because they practiced it. They figured out that this thing called running that seems really simple can be done in a particular way, and if it's done really well, you get faster.
00:49:04
Speaker
we This is sort of, my goal is that this is sort of the a equivalent of that. All those things that you sort of do, you don't really think about, now you start thinking about them and you start doing them better.
00:49:15
Speaker
Interesting to me to think about how some of these things might have shown up over time on average, of course, because any individual circumstance or any individual is going to change this a lot. But I'm guessing that from, you know, about the 1910s or 1920s with the advent of scientific management and the assembly line and whatever else, that things like adaptability became for a growing percentage of the Western world, less and less important. Yes. Because, you know, you did just the rate of change sort of stuff. Like,
00:50:00
Speaker
when you got that first computer on your desk, well, the next computer on your desk was more than likely not a as substantial of a change as just getting the computer in the first place. I feel like you've you sort of said that earlier.
00:50:15
Speaker
But then before the advent of scientific management maybe even we can go back further and talk about industrialization you know i i suspect that things like adaptability were quite prized and not that they weren't prized in 1950 or whatever but I think, you know, if you, if you think about a, the thing that's coming to me at the moment is Huckleberry Finn or the adventures of Tom Sawyer or whatever, you know, where he has to, what is the story? He has to paint the fence white and he tricks all of his friends into doing it. Like they think that that's a treat. Yeah. Well, that was real creativity and you had to get a job done and you had to figure out how to, at some point in the past, you know, this mythical past that I am putting together here.
00:51:09
Speaker
You had to be creative in order to, you have had to be adaptable in order to Come up with something that you could sell to someone else, because at least in the United States, you know, before about the 30s or so, you didn't have a social security system. You didn't really have much of a social safety net, not at the federal level.
00:51:35
Speaker
And so you had to be resilient to setbacks, for example. And so, you know, I wanted to, I guess, more so state this, but put it out there for a point of of conversation, discussion as well. but But state it, because as you were talking, i was realizing, oh, wait a minute, I kind of set my starting point.
00:51:59
Speaker
at about a hundred years ago. But before that, they time existed and things were different and they've changed throughout time. Oh yeah. And actually, if you do go back to that, ah to those early periods, though, the there were a few things that were really, really interesting about them. So number one was, yes, you needed creativity. There was a there was a time where,
00:52:24
Speaker
where solv ah like individual and group problem solving was a really, really, really, really big deal. And obviously in agriculture, for example, would be a great example of that, right? You've got some, let's say you keep sheep and then there's a there' is a ah there's a disease outbreak with your sheep, right? You've got to survive. So you've got to figure out ways to be to be able to deal with this. And you're going to rely on your knowledge, the knowledge that's sort passed down through the generations, the knowledge of the people that are that are around you, and you're going to be able to to to figure out, hopefully, in some cases, obviously, people did not, but you're going to you can hopefully figure out how to adapt and how to adjust.
00:53:01
Speaker
And so it applies to the skilled trades, it applies to to even to more unskilled labor and so on. And yes, you're exactly right. So you have the you have the birth of the Industrial Revolution.
00:53:14
Speaker
You have um machines enter the picture and the machines are um are starting to take things that were done in a knock not defined way and defining them. And we had to figure out how how the humans would work around them. And most of the time, particularly in those early days,
00:53:35
Speaker
The humans were the sort of, they thrived in the gaps, right? They were the they were the parties that were that were doing all of the stuff that you couldn't automate, that you couldn't do.
00:53:47
Speaker
You needed somebody who was creative and innovative to be able to to act in between these highly standardized mech mechanized things. Then you get to a point in the the evolution of work whereby with the birth of scientific management processes and things like that, that it becomes almost gospel inside organizations that the more standardization you have, the more you turn, the more you get people to behave like cogs in a wheel.
00:54:18
Speaker
the more efficient you are going to be. People forget the origin of the word computer. Computer used to be a role that a human being held. If you look at pictures from Library of Congress from the 1920s, you will see a room of computers and it's a room of people, women mostly, um and actually in some cases almost all women, will be sitting in in rooms and they are the computers because they're they're behaving in a very structured kind of algorithmic way that is that that is designed to achieve to achieve a specific result and so you're absolutely right we have gone through waves where the top parts of the pyramid are more prized in a work construct and um and are and times when they are less
00:55:06
Speaker
I suspect that we've now entered the sort of like final wave of that. I always hesitate to say final waves, but I suspect we've entered a final wave of that now whereby for the foreseeable future, the idea of being adaptable and resilient is going to become, again, the most prized asset. why Because we now live in a world that can't be modeled in the same way that it was back in the day, right?
00:55:35
Speaker
it What was possible through the traditional sort of scientific management processes was only possible because the world, your competitors were not changing overnight. your The nature of the work you did was not ah was not changing overnight. I mean, heck, we just, like the day were recording this, we just, you know, heard that Tesla is going to start at least, it's not that making cars is probably not going to be Tesla's core business anymore.
00:56:01
Speaker
Right. I mean, this is the this is sort of the the world in which in which we live now, whereby you can go, yeah, I know we made cars, but now we make robots. You know, it's it's that that's what we're entering, what we're entering into. And so people need to be able to adjust and adapt much, much faster in order to be able to deal with that.
00:56:19
Speaker
I agree with you 100 percent. And it sounded to me like when you were talking about training people and you had a crier or whether that was the same or not as, you know, hey, here's this computer, but we just got rid of your secretary. I think that if you get laid off or if somebody feels like they just don't even need to employ you in the first place, because it's more expensive in certain cases to employ $100,000 a hundred thousand dollars a year employee is employ person who,
00:56:52
Speaker
does an okay job than it is two employ person who you know, manager or whatever they are, who is going to then spend, i don't know, let's say $15,000 a year on an AI. And the AI actually at this point doesn't do a very good job at all.
00:57:12
Speaker
But the thing is that the ah ah ROI on a year employee that does okay work is worse than an AI that costs you five or 10 or $15,000 and really doesn't do a good job at all.
00:57:28
Speaker
And so if you're one of those people that is negatively affected, thinking that you can just go and find another job without changing your behavior or changing your expectations seems like a fool's errand. And I felt like you were speaking a little bit to that in a number of things you said earlier.
00:57:52
Speaker
Yeah, definitely.
Future Job Market and Adaptability
00:57:54
Speaker
um i I don't have a crystal ball in terms of what's going to happen to the job market. And we have been over the last At least 50 years, but probably 100 years, we've been through wave after wave whereby very smart people have predicted mass unemployment and the type of mass unemployment that has been described.
00:58:16
Speaker
Obviously, that we've had periods of very high unemployment, but that that the type of mass unemployment that's being described, which is we've got we've got you know factories now, so we don't need factory workers, so everybody's going to be out of a job.
00:58:30
Speaker
That those those technology driven waves of mass unemployment have not really happened in the past in the way that we would expect to. So the question is, is this different? Right. Is this different in ah in some way, shape or form? And I can't I can't be certain about whether it is I suspect it is right. But I can't be I can't be certain that it is.
00:58:53
Speaker
But there is a risk, there's a non-zero risk, and it's probably, certainly, in at least in the teens' risk, that we are entering ah period like that for the very reasons that you're talking about. And for the fact that this is not a question anymore of just simply, well, the robots do this, so I can, like we have this phrase in technology, you move up the stack, right? So you just go, you just go, okay, okay, well, computers do this now, or robots do this now, so I'll do the thing that manages the thing, right? Yeah.
00:59:21
Speaker
And that works when when there's strong limitations in the technology. But here, what we're dealing with is, in many cases, the AI doing things that highly skilled humans were doing ah were're doing previously. And one of the most interesting, and I would say worrying pieces of it, is that For a lot of the jobs where the jobs themselves are very, very tightly defined. So think of something like, ah I don't know, like accountancy, right? There's a tax code, right? where there is a where Where your job depends upon a body of knowledge and that body of knowledge can be used as ingress into a technology system.
01:00:11
Speaker
you're kind of screwed, right? Because you're effectively, all the way in which you survived is just being a bit smarter than those than those pieces of technology. Now, once that technology is as smart as you are, you're kind of screwed. you've got to think of other ways ah of of other things to do and other ways to approach it.
01:00:27
Speaker
And so i do worry about that. And I worry about the idea that I think um'm many of us, certainly not all of us, but many of us are either paralyzed by fear and uncertainty and doubt and not knowing what to do about it, or going a bit head in the sand. I worry about this idea of us sleepwalking into irrelevance, right? ah Our jobs disappear while we're busy scrolling on our phones, right?
01:00:58
Speaker
i don't want that to I don't want that to happen, which is one of the one of the main reasons that that i wrote the book so i i i think that there is a non-zero risk that that that that can happen one of the things i'm encouraged about we're only like a couple of a couple of weeks in um and so it's very early days but but right now we're the number one new book and the job hunters category in uh amazon And the reason that I'm encouraged by that is because a friend of mine said to me recently, and I think he's dead right, we're all job hunters. even if you've been in a
01:01:36
Speaker
Even if you've been in a job for 20 years, the same company for 20 years, you should have the mindset of a job hunter, which is, in other words, what's the what's the next thing?
01:01:47
Speaker
whether it's in my company, outside of my company, what's the what's the next thing where I can be valuable in that that that next thing, valuable in a way that computers are not replacing, but where the computers are helping me do a better job where I'm at where i'm in control.
01:02:05
Speaker
And so the fact that job hunters are looking at this um to me is encouraging. i just encourage all of us to think of ourselves as job hunters.
01:02:16
Speaker
Well, Paul, you have definitely taken me to a point where you're going to leave me wanting more because rather than asking you to, you know, tell me where I can learn more you any final thoughts and all that a couple of minutes ago, i wanted to keep going because I was finding this so interesting. So thank you for that. You know, I think that's a good, a good place to to be at the end of a conversation and, and it makes it really interesting to get to read the book.
01:02:49
Speaker
So again, thank you. So I'll ask you the final two questions knowing that I left us very little time, unfortunately. Where do I go to learn more, connect? And do you have any final thoughts or words of wisdom, things you would want me to be thinking about after today?
01:03:03
Speaker
The book itself, as I mentioned, is called The AI Ready Human. ah You can find it on Amazon or if anybody wants a signed copy, they can just go to my website paulslater.ai and you'll find a book ah link there and you can get a signed copy if that's kind of your jam. That is for some people.
01:03:24
Speaker
ah and um And so a lot of information about it there. um we also have a newsletter and a podcast called Humanity Working. So if you go to humanityworking.net, that's a substack, and I post about this um this stuff regularly.
01:03:41
Speaker
um And then in terms of final thoughts, I think I want to come back to ah to that idea of sleepwalking into irrelevance.
01:03:53
Speaker
i don't think I don't think that as humans, we have that much time. to continue to behave in the way that we have been behaving at work. And I'm not saying, i'm not making a comment about being lazy or busy or any of that or any of that kind of stuff.
01:04:15
Speaker
The point that I'm making is that what got us, all of us, whether we're a CEO of a company to an entry-level person, what got us to where we are today by definition, will not get us to where we need to be because where we need to be is so different.
01:04:34
Speaker
Most people spend less than 2% of their time working on the types of skills that we've been that we've been outlining. than 2%.
01:04:48
Speaker
less than two percent
01:04:51
Speaker
If as an individual, you are focused like a laser on building your adaptability by building these underlying capabilities and start getting really serious and focused about doing that versus just sort of let it happen by osmosis through the through the world of work, you will be incredibly well positioned to deal with whatever is coming next And it's really the only way to do it because if anybody tells you that they know what's coming next, they're lying because nobody knows really what's coming next.
01:05:24
Speaker
So that adaptability trait is the trait. It is the thing you have to get. So I just urge people to get really, really, really serious about that human capability trait.
01:05:34
Speaker
of adaptability. Don't assume that you have it just because somebody told you a couple of years ago you did, right? Work on it. Train on it. Like the Olympic athletes train every day on figuring out how to run.
01:05:47
Speaker
Work on your adaptability in that same way. And if you do, you're going to be okay. If you don't, there might be challenges there And it sounds like we might find a 90-day program in your book.
01:06:00
Speaker
So hopefully that's a place that people can go to work on it. Well, Paul, I appreciate you being here. I've really enjoyed the conversation and I hope that the launch of the book has gone well and continues to go well. So thank you again.
01:06:15
Speaker
So far, so good. And thank you so much for having me on.