Modern life is nothing if not fast paced and awash with change. Darwin famously said it’s the most adaptable that tend to survive, but whereas evolutionary change tends to happen over incredibly long timeframes, modern shifts are played out in ever shortening periods. It’s created a world in which the speed of learning is a competitive advantage, both for individuals and organizations.
Of course, learning organizations are not necessarily a new thing, but their nature has changed. The first-generation of the learning organization reached its nadir with the continuous improvement movement launched by W. Edwards Deming and encapsulated by Japanese car giant Toyota, whose quality circles, kaizen and takt time quickly spread throughout the manufacturing sector.
A second-generation then emerged to try and enable organizations to leap successfully from their current sphere to new spheres. This is a world that tries to overcome the innovator’s dilemma by learning new things even when their current strength remains powerful. Netflix, for instance, shifted from DVD rental to streaming.
Now however, we’re in a third-generation of the learning organization, with new technologies speeding up the rate at which we can both absorb new information and test our assumptions. This is coupled with a need to deploy those learnings over longer timescales as problems take on a global and complex nature.
Learning fast and slow
The transition to this third-generation of learning has been driven by a range of new technologies that allow data to be collected in real-time at never before seen scale, and for that data to be analyzed to drive data-driven decisions.
Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends report shows how far many organizations still have to go. It found that fear and uncertainty were the predominant emotions when discussing AI and data-driven technologies, with just 6% of organizations saying they were ready to embrace the new opportunities.
“Organizations are [slowly] now beginning to understand the scale and the massive implications for job design, reskilling, and work re-invention involved in integrating people and automation more extensively across the workforce,” the report says.
The key to this third-generation of learning organization is the creation of “superjobs”, which allows technology to do the things it is best designed for, and humans to do the things we are best designed for. These interpretive and service-orientated roles are heavy on problem-solving and data interpretation, communication and collaboration. They’re tasks that will require us to have much less rigid roles and job descriptions than was previously the case, allowing us to flex and adapt as circumstances dictate, applying our skills and abilities in ever new ways.
The rise of the superjob
“New research shows that the jobs in highest demand today, and those with the fastest acceleration in wages, are so-called “hybrid jobs” that bring together technical skills, including technology operations and data analysis and interpretation, with “soft” skills in areas such as communication, service, and collaboration,” Deloitte explain. “The concept of superjobs takes this shift one step further. In a superjob, technology has not only changed the nature of the skills the job requires but has changed the nature of the work and the job itself.”
Such jobs require a combination of technological and soft skills, with support from the latest technologies and data. They often combine a range of roles and responsibilities from traditional work, with technology significantly expanding the scope of work possible by a single person.
Deloitte suggest that these new roles will require a fundamental re-design of the jobs we know today so that we better tap into the unique strengths of man and machine. HR play a crucial role both in helping to design these new roles, but also in supporting staff in acquiring the skills required to thrive in them.
Learning as a competitive advantage
This will require effective human-machine interfaces to be created to allow humans and AI to integrate seamlessly together. Healthcare offers a perfect example, with patients still demanding human engagement with their medical teams, but those doctors and nurses being supported by the latest data and AI tools to help them deliver insights quickly and effectively.
The nature of technology development might also provide some pointers as to how learning at work should change. Deloitte argue that just as software development has shifted from the waterfall model to a more agile approach, learning needs to move from a standalone activity to one that incorporates learning on the job and integrates it into our workflow.
This is likely to require decentralizing the structure of our organizations, with smaller teams given greater autonomy to act, experiment and learn. The insights from these teams should then be allowed to flow up and around the organization to spread learning throughout. The insights from these teams should then inform resource allocation to allow the teams to adapt to the circumstances they find themselves in quickly and effectively.
This helps to produce an adaptive enterprise that is in a constant state of experimentation, learning and adapting to the needs of the environment it finds itself in.
“In a world where technology is changing jobs and people are living longer lives with more diverse careers, organizations have not only an opportunity, but a responsibility, to reinvent learning so that it integrates into the flow of work—and life,” Deloitte conclude. “In the age of the social enterprise, organizations will realize that creating and maintaining a culture of lifelong learning is not just part of their mission and purpose but is what gives their workers meaning both in and out of the workplace.”
It’s tempting to package change as being a largely negative thing, the creative destruction threatening to destroy all that we hold dear. It need not be thus however, and for those organizations and individuals that embrace learning, it presents an enormous opportunity to increase the full range of human ingenuity.
