The Most Critical Skill for the Future of Work
In Conversation with Stefano Oliveri: Futures Literacy
The future is not a linear progression of the past. That’s the message I hear loud and clear from Stefano Oliveri, a contributor to the Italian Institute for the Future (IIF) and an alumni of the Master in Strategic Foresight at Trento University who has worked in digital transformation for most of his career. I reached out to Stefano after coming across his work for the IIF, where he was part of a group of 8 alumni that published the report Will the World be Better After COVID-19? I was excited to learn more about the report and to discuss the four necessary skills in a post-COVID-19 world. I was also interested in what it was like to write this report while being on lockdown in Northern Italy, one of the regions hardest hit by COVID.
That was the intention.
My conversation with Stefano instead ignited a personal exploration into Futures Literacy, a skill that may be the key to unlock workplace resilience at scale. In this week's newsletter, I use Stefano's work as a launchpad to exploring:
His efforts to be a continuous learner;
Why humans are often the worst forecasters of our future;
COVID-19 only as a symptom of change;
The Discipline of Anticipation.
Expect a slightly different format today than the traditional interview. As always, feedback is welcomed and appreciated!
Stefano Oliveri is a lifelong learner. As someone involved with digital transformation for decades, Stefano understands the pace of workplace change has and will continue to increase. Meaning there is no job one of the future that we need to prepare for, but our attitude towards continuous learning needs to change. At an age when most people are thinking about retirement, Stefano went back to school to do a Masters Degree in Strategic Foresight. It was, as he says, an opportunity to refresh his mind. This was part of why I was so interested in diving into the subject of continuous learning with him. Not only is he trying to think about how to help people, systems, and large organizations change, adapt, and evolve, he is also a living embodiment of what it means to be a lifelong learner.
We had a wide-ranging conversation, but there was one item that stuck out from everything: Futures Literacy. Futures Literacy is one of the skills the IIF predicted to make the world better post-pandemic. But after digging a little deeper, I want to take that one step further. Futures Literacy is the most critical skill to learn and master for the future of work.
What is Futures Literacy? From UNESCO:
Futures Literacy seeks to uncover advanced approaches to using the future, to build people’s capacity to discern and make sense of complex emergence. Not only does this help overcome fear and antipathy towards the uncertainty that is inherent in a non-deterministic universe, it also provides individuals, organizations, and governments access to better understand the world, and to act in accordance with our values through the consideration of the richness of experimentation, innovation, and creativity that surrounds us.
Okay, that’s a mouthful! But learning about Futures Literacy marked the first time I’ve heard an articulate way to describe being prepared for the unknown.
Imagining Change
We all know that resilience is not something that can be learned from a textbook. It is also not necessarily something that can be mastered. As Adam Grant and Sheryl Sandberg put it in their book Option B, “you build resilience, you don’t have a fixed amount… [and] I don’t think there’s any skill more critical for success than resilience.” Resilience is the muscle we use in the workplace that allows us to be amenable to change. Resilience lets us push through to another day when we lose a bid to a competitor. It helps us make hard decisions about what product line to cut. It helps us manage to go from working in the office to working from home, permanently, in the blink of an eye.
Resilience is something I’ve been thinking a lot about as part of my own journey. It is a muscle that I’ve been working on strengthening. And although my path is probably more dramatic than most (i.e. quitting my job in the middle of a pandemic to start a new business), I continue to wonder if there’s a less drastic way for people to become more resilient, and one that can be done at scale. The truth is that no matter who you are, how much money you have, or where you live, bad stuff happens. All the preparation in the world can’t prevent the unexpected. But we can get better at imagining what the unexpected looks like. We can train our minds to view uncertainty as a resource.
We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know
It’s hard to plan for a future we don’t know how to imagine. Our imagination is often anchored to things we already feel are possible. Pre-existing biases and cultural norms have narrowed our assumptions about the future. “They have limited our ability to imagine outside predefined paradigms or to sense and make sense of phenomena that may not belong to pre-existing models” (Nicklas Larsen). Even though many knew the chances of a pandemic were high, and thought we’d imagined all potential repercussions, we weren’t able to anticipate working from home for 6+ months, homeschooling kids of all ages, and not being able to visit loved ones (none of those items are on the chart below!). Limiting what we thought was possible meant we were extremely ill-prepared for this moment.
Government, education systems, public institutions, large businesses, etc. are often guilty of using the past to plan the future. As a result, society often becomes prisoners of the past. As part of our conversation, Stefano calls out our current set of leaders for too often treating the future as an extension of the world today. “Yes, the pandemic has brought and will continue to bring about big change. But change has been happening.” Critical shifts brought on because of climate change, terrorism, infrastructure breakdowns, and shifts in the global economy mean that change has been happening all around us, not just the last six months. Plus, change happens more frequently than ever before. Traditional skills are becoming obsolete, and change cycles are shortening from fifty years (where they were just a century ago) to two to three-year increments. Stefano sees Covid as a symptom of change instead of the big change-driver we’re making it out to be. Becoming futures-literate allows us to remove the constructs around the change we think the future can hold, helping better prepare us for things like... Zoom fatigue!
If Zoom fatigue feels insignificant, think about our inability to imagine something as ubiquitous as air travel:
On January 5th, 1889, the Detroit Free Press pushed back against the long-held dream that man could one day fly like a bird. Airplanes, the paper wrote, “appear impossible”: The smallest possible weight of a flying machine, with the necessary fuel and engineer, could not be less than 300 or 400 pounds … but there is a low limit of weight, certainly not much beyond fifty pounds, beyond which it is impossible for an animal to fly. Nature has reached this limit, and with her utmost effort has failed to pass it.
(💬: Excerpt from The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel)
Or life after Brexit:
After Britain voted to leave the European Union in June 2016, British government officials felt tremendous uncertainty about where the country was headed. To help them develop a clearer vision of the road ahead, my colleagues, Andrew Carton and Brian Lucas, ran an experiment. They randomly assigned government officials to write visions of a post-Brexit Britain that were concrete, specific, achievable, or meaningful. None of those instructions worked. Government officials struggled to form and articulate what the future might look like. But when they were randomly assigned to imagine taking a time machine to the future, they wrote much more vividly.
(💬: NYTimes - To build resilience in isolation master the art of time travel)
Why Short Term Wins Feel So Good
Why are we wired this way? What stops us from being innately futures-literate? Well, whether we want to accept it or not, our brain generally rewards short-term over long-term gains. This is called “present bias,” referring to the idea that when we are in an either-or situation we often choose to settle for the immediate win rather than waiting for some larger, more unknown, future reward. Since forecasting for the future is so ambiguous, we need to imagine a feeling of the future, rather than an absolute, to push outside of our limitations. The better we can become at systematizing the methods to imagine our future, the easier it will be to imagine it.
Let’s use the example of Mark Kelly, the American astronaut, engineer, and retired U.S. Navy Captain. As Kelly prepared for his year-long mission to the International Space Station, he talked of an exercise he did by mentally traveling to the future. He skipped over what he wanted to achieve, the fear of what might go wrong, and uncertainty of what it would be like to live, eat, and work within the small confines of the ISS. Instead, he imagined how he wanted to feel, saying, “My goal was to get to the end of [the mission] with the same enthusiasm and ability and energy as I had in the beginning.” This approach, this way of thinking about the future, ties in neatly to an aspect of Futures Literacy called the Discipline of Anticipation.
(📸: Why the Discipline of Anticipation is a Necessary Condition for Human Resilience)
Uncertainty as a Resource
More specifically (and probably more easy to digest) is the idea of Discipline of Anticipation, which allows us to be aware of our assumptions and uncertainties about the future. The goal in becoming futures-literate is to begin to view uncertainty as a resource we leverage and use to our advantage, rather than an enemy of our plans, ultimately enabling us to become more resilient. Although acquiring and teaching the skill of future literacy is relatively new, there is already some research to suggest it improves one's confidence in controlling motivation, behavior, and performance. Initial research by UNESCO showed that “by embracing uncertainty and complexity, students [became] more creative in developing strategies and [increased] their self-efficacy.” By challenging thought patterns, Futures Literacy can “change the conditions of change,” an important requirement for leading transformations in society and businesses.
Why is Futures Literacy so important? Why am I so bullish about teaching this skill to everyone? Why do I think this is a path to more resilient businesses and individuals? It is because Futures Literacy ensures that we don’t colonize tomorrow with the ideas of today. Am I naive to think that we’ll be able to one day completely understand the future? No. Do I recognize that we still often struggle to even understand our past? Yes. But I see getting a better grasp on imagining what the future will hold as a way to help employees, employers, and organizations build resilience. To help someone who is unemployed searching for a new job make better decisions on what career path to take. To help the K-12 curriculum better prepare students for jobs that don’t even yet exist.
Futures Literacy may be a new skill. Resilience isn’t.
After School Activities
UNESCO’s Futures Literacy explained.
These 4 skills can make the world better after COVID-19 by Stefano Oliveri for the World Economic Forum.
Transforming the future: anticipation in the 21st century by Riel Miller: Head of Futures Literacy at UNESCO.