Summary: The Adaptation Advantage by Chris Shipley and Heather E. McGowan

Let Go, Learn Fast, and Thrive in the Future of Work. In ‘The Adaptation Advantage,’ authors Chris Shipley and Heather E. McGowan champion the transformative power of adaptability in the modern workplace. This pivotal read offers a fresh perspective on leveraging human ingenuity to outpace technological disruption.

Dive deeper into the strategies that will future-proof your career—continue reading for an insightful summary and thought-provoking review of ‘The Adaptation Advantage.’

Genres

Technology, Business, Money, Job Hunting, Careers Guides, Organizational Learning, Human Resources, Management, Leadership, Technology and the Future, Corporate Culture, Career and Success

‘The Adaptation Advantage’ delves into the evolving landscape of work, emphasizing the need for adaptability and continuous learning. The book argues that clinging to traditional job titles hinders growth, advocating for a shift towards a purpose-driven professional identity. It outlines how embracing change can unlock human potential, urging organizations to foster cultures of learning and innovation.

Review

‘The Adaptation Advantage’ is a compelling narrative that seamlessly blends interviews, research, and expert insights. Shipley and McGowan’s work is a clarion call to redefine our approach to work and leadership in the face of relentless change. Their emphasis on purpose over position resonates deeply, offering a roadmap for individuals and businesses aiming to flourish in an uncertain future. The book’s actionable advice and visionary outlook make it an essential read for anyone invested in the future of work.

What’s inside?

Humans have extraordinary skills that no machine can master – and that’s a good thing.

Recommendation

Future of work experts Heather E. McGowan and Chris Shipley argue that while technology may be the engine for massive change, humans remain in the driver’s seat. Only people have the “organic cognition” required for creativity, collaboration and adaptation. Acknowledging a new era of unprecedented uncertainty, McGowan and Shipley posit a future in which humans share knowledge and build meaningful workplace cultures.

Take-Aways

• Technology is transforming the world of work faster than ever.
• Technological augmentation, atomization and automation mean you must upskill and reskill for the future.
• Don’t tether your identity to your job; rather, think in terms of skills.
• Businesses must change their focus from extracting value to creating new value through learning.
• “Silicon cognition” cannot replace the “organic cognition” humans have evolved over 3.8 million years.
• The boss shouldn’t get the last cookie. Hiring only the best might result in top performers turning on one another.
• Culture and capacity define the workplace.
• Adaptive teams must hire for value alignment instead of past skills and experience.

Introduction: Learn how to embrace adaptability in the workplace.

The Adaptation Advantage (2020) explores how to navigate the future of work – without worrying about the robots taking over. It provides actionable insights on how to tap into uniquely human attributes like adaptation to excel.

Technology is transforming the world of work faster than ever. At the current crossroads, you face a choice: to dig in or adopt a new mindset. In this week’s reading recommendation, Heather McGowan and Chris Shipley explain how you can come out on top of the technical, business and cultural shifts affecting the workplace by detaching your identity from your job title and connecting it to your sense of purpose.

Listen.

That was the sound of one second. And what happened while you were listening?

Well, among other things, Visa processed 1,700 transactions; Amazon robots packed 17 packages; Twitter users posted 9,000 tweets; and people searched 76,000 things on Google. Oh, and 2.8 million emails were sent as well.

It’s hard to imagine the sheer scale of it all.

Stuff is changing fast these days. And if all this happens in a single second, imagine what happens in a day, a week, a year.

One of the many consequences of “things happening” is that the world of work is evolving at a pace that will make your head spin. You know this already – the media’s constantly declaring that robots are taking over our workspaces and coming after our jobs.

And it looks like we have a pretty good reason to be afraid – before too long, we’ll be out of work, sitting at home with nothing to do . . .

But, according to Heather McGowan and Chris Shipley, authors of The Adaptation Advantage, perhaps the opposite is true. Instead of believing we’re in competition with tech, we can use technology to our advantage, benefitting from the additional time that tech saves us in order to continue evolving. And this is our big advantage: our capacity to adapt.

Things are changing fast at the moment – and you’re already adapting.

Not to freak you out or anything, but if you think things are changing fast now . . . just you wait!

The rate of change is increasing exponentially. Which means that right now is actually the slowest rate of change you’ll ever experience.

Here’s just one example of the huge-scale changes that are underway.

When you think of the biggest populations on Earth, you probably think of China and India. But what about social media populations?

There are 2.2 billion Facebook users, compared to China’s 1.34 billion people. And 1.9 billion YouTubers, compared to 1.23 billion Indians.

WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger also beat India when it comes to population size. And these are communities that have sprung up over just a few decades.

And there are other changes too. Demographically, huge shifts are taking place in the Western world in terms of race, religion, gender identity, aging populations. While attitudes towards issues like racism and sexual harassment have changed almost overnight. So it’s hard to imagine where exactly we’ll be in a decade’s time.

And when it comes to changes in the workplace, there’s, of course, the impact of technology, but that’s been going on for a while now. Computers have been changing the workplace for decades. So have smart digital assistants – like PalmPilot which launched wayback in 1996.

And there’s a good reason for this change: machines are genuinely better than humans at routine and well-defined tasks. That is just a fact.

But this doesn’t mean we’re about to lose our jobs to robots, in fact, we might say the opposite is true. Think about all the ways that technology already helps you in your work. Most of us use phones or laptops daily, we stay connected with people all over the world. You might use platforms like Upwork or Fiverr to outsource work, platforms that help you break down big tasks into smaller, more manageable units – also known as the atomization of work.

Meanwhile, tech is also behind the automation of many work processes, from batch-sending emails to automatically updating calendars. We use tech in some cases to enhance human capabilities, a concept called augmentation. Just think of surgical robots helping doctors in ER – or of GPS systems allowing drivers to navigate their city quickly.

So, yes – tech is rapidly changing the workplace. But we are accommodating it. And it’s helping us. Thanks to these three A’s – atomization, automation and augmentation – tech is far from stealing our jobs, it’s actually giving us back precious moments which we can re-invest in ourselves; from learning new skills to re-prioritizing romantic relationships.

We need to stop defining ourselves by “what” we do.

So, how do you capitalize on this additional time? How do you figure out what to do with it? What to achieve in your personal life and career?

A good trick is to begin by shifting that question from “what exactly do you want to do?”, to “why exactly do you want to do it?”

How often have you been asked, “What do you do for a living?” And, be honest, how often have you asked the question yourself?

The exchange is ubiquitous. Chances are, when you meet someone, this is one of the first things you talk about. In fact, we define ourselves by our work – and we expect people to have clearly defined careers like “lawyer” or “doctor.”

We even encourage this attitude in young people. We ask children what they want to be when they grow up – and subtly nudge them in sensible directions when they tell us they’d like to grow up to be “a unicorn.” We also ask students what they want to major in; even in those incredibly formative years, we’re expecting them to specialize.

The narratives we tell ourselves about our careers are limiting. They drive people down particular paths that may not suit them and reinforce stereotypes – just think, for example, how few women have traditionally gone into scientific fields.

And these narratives do something else as well. They shield us from the most important truth about the world of work today: we cannot just do one thing any more! The world of work is changing incredibly fast and we have no option other than to adapt.

So, instead of thinking about a career in terms of a “What” question, think of it in terms of an evolving “Why” question.

Along the course of your career, you’ll experience setbacks – everyone does. Even the mighty Steve Jobs was famously fired from his own company, Apple. But as he reflected afterward, getting fired turned out to be a huge positive. Jobs found himself starting again. He tapped into a rich, new stream of creativity, founding Pixar and achieving huge success in a new industry – before triumphantly returning to Apple and steering the company to enormous global success.

We all need to develop an agile mindset and tap into what makes us unique as humans.

So how do you put your adaptation advantage into practice?

In short, it comes down to being agile – and to do this, you need to be constantly learning.

You’ll need to learn on an individual level, but also on the level of your business. There are four stages in the learning process that form a kind of S-curve on a graph: explore, experiment, execute, and expand.

In the first stage, you’re exploring what you or your company needs to improve. Maybe sales are sluggish; maybe your product is out of date. Then you start to experiment with new ideas – that’s when the curve of the S starts to shoot up in the middle. The execute stage puts the best of your new ideas into practice, and the expand phase optimizes them as you continue to learn about performance.

This isn’t just a one-off process; it’s something you need to repeat over and over, as and when your business requires it. Explore, experiment, execute, expand. And this is where agility comes into the equation. As other variable change you need to be able to keep moving – to keep embracing new projects, or new approaches to old projects.

Now, you may find yourself panicking at this stage. Maybe you’re wondering whether all of this continual, agile learning is also going to involve devoting time to picking up a bunch of brand-new skills, like engineering or coding. But thankfully, these aren’t the kind of skills that are going to be most useful to you on your journey.

According to the Institute for the Future, the skills that we need most of all, in fact relate to social intelligence and thinking in novel and adaptive ways. The World Economic Forum similarly values creativity and emotional intelligence above so many other skills. In a nutshell, social skills are key. They’re critical – maybe even more important than the tech skills we tend to want to prioritize, like STEM subjects in education: science, technology, engineering, and math. All across the world, it’s assumed that these hard, scientific skills are the ones we need in our new digital age. But according to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ 2019 survey, 77 percent of CEOs said they couldn’t find workers with the uniquely human skills they needed: skills like creativity, problem solving, leadership, and – it’s in the title – adaptability.

If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Tech is getting ever more effective at carrying out well-defined, mathematical tasks. But it’s still largely useless when it comes to things like creativity. These are our skills, they are our opportunity, with our non-machine brains, to excel.

The new world of work will require different things from its leaders.

So, who is going to be taking the lead in this bold new world of work?

Not the robots, that’s for sure! As we’ve learnt, leadership requires a uniquely human skill set.

But not everyone is a born leader. And in fact, many people have alarming tendencies when given positions of power. An amazing experiment from 2015 proved the point well. Dr. Dacher Kelter from the University of California, put groups of three people together to collaborate on a routine task. He randomly put one of the three people in charge and left them together in a room with nothing else but a tray of four chocolate chip cookies – four cookies between three people.

Dr. Kelter observed something interesting: in each study group, every single time, the person to take the extra cookie was – surprise, surprise – the leader. And according to Dr. Kelter, they enjoyed themselves – gleefully covering themselves in crumbs as their subordinates looked on.

If we look to history, as well as science, it becomes clear, there’s something inherently corrupting about power. So, how do we take steps to prevent bad leadership? We have to devote time to learning good leadership skills.

According to the author there are two key components to good leadership: first, you must model the way, next, you enable others to act.

Modeling the way is leadership in the truest sense: it’s being unafraid to go first, allowing yourself to be vulnerable and making sure your employees trust you. Given how much change is required in the workplace these days, leaders need to act with confidence when taking leaps of faith; this will help their employees to trust them.

Enabling other people to act, meanwhile, is about leaders trusting other people. Things aren’t just complicated these days; they’re complex – there’s an element of unpredictability. So a single leader is probably not going to be able to understand every part of their company’s work in detail. Leaders need to be OK with their employees knowing more than they do on certain topics. Leaders also need to create a work environment that allows other people to thrive, with an emphasis on wellness, respect, and psychological safety. Leading, quite simply, is not all about the bottom line any more – it’s about creating a great place for other people to work.

One last aspect of good leadership in a fast changing world: you need to know when to pivot. It sounds crazy, but it’s often the most profitable companies that find themselves at the greatest risk these days. Because when we get too comfortable, we forget the advantages of adaptation and we get stuck in old habits.

An adaptive organization is one that puts culture and capacity first.

We’re going to end by asking the question, what makes a successful organization? One traditional view is that organizations exist purely to serve their shareholders – that’s the view famously put forward by Milton Friedman in 1970. Friedman’s belief was incredibly influential for many years. But these days? Not so much.

Instead of focusing so relentlessly on the financials, it’s possible to look at organizations across two key areas: culture and capacity.

We’ve already touched on culture. It’s the atmosphere that leaders help to create within a company. A healthy company culture is likely to lead to prosperous and innovative work. Think of culture as your company’s heart.

Capacity, on the other side, is your organization’s brain. It’s how able you are to respond to challenges and opportunities – how well you cope as things change. There are practical concerns, like how much product you can make and which markets you can reach – but it’s also about your company’s mental capacity to handle change.

This is a more radical suggestion than it sounds at first. The goal of your organization isn’t value creation. It’s increased capacity – the ability to do more of what you do, even as things around you change.

The products that you’re creating, become an expression of your culture and proof of your capacity. They’re not the point of your company in and of themselves – not in a world where you might have to pivot at any moment and start making something else.

Recruiting for this adaptive organization is therefore extremely important. Let’s start with how not to recruit: by using job descriptions and resumes. That is far too old-fashioned. Because what an employee has to do today might not be what they’ll have to do tomorrow.

Imagine your company suddenly pivots to produce a new type of product out of necessity. Meanwhile, your employees continue doing exactly what their job description specifies. It doesn’t work.

Instead of a job description, offer potential employees a description of the company plus a description of your ideal candidate. Recruiting purely for specific talents isn’t quite right either – instead you should be aiming for people who are a good cultural fit, with a similar – but not too similar – sense of purpose.

In other words, diversity is also a key component – in every sense. Neurodiversity is hugely important, as well as employing people across different age ranges and from different backgrounds. Everyone can, and should, be learning from everyone else.

After all, that’s the advantage of being unique – take that, robots!

Summary

Technology is transforming the world of work faster than ever.

The world is undergoing three “climate changes” – in the environment, in the market and in technology – which are forcing people to become more adept at adapting. Jobs change so quickly that your current job may not exist in 18 to 24 months. IBM CEO Ginni Rometty believes that artificial intelligence (AI) will likely transform 100 percent of jobs in 10 years. The world is on the cusp of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, in which cyber and biological systems will combine to create a completely digital economy. Change is now happening faster than ever in human history. As New York Times writer Thomas Friedman puts it: “Later is over.” To avert catastrophe for the next generation, humans must adapt, now.

“Work is deeply engrained in our psyche. It drives our sense of value, purpose, and identity. If work shifts, we shift.”

Market climate change is on the horizon. Currency, collaboration and contracts, among other transactions, will all become digital and move at the speed of light.

The three climate changes will reshape ethics, community, geopolitics, politics, work and education. A “left” and “right” political choice will give way to governments that are responsive, adaptable and swift. People may feel changes within the realm of work most keenly, because work is very personal: It provides people with a sense of identity and purpose. The straight line from education to career to retirement will disappear.

Technological augmentation, atomization and automation mean you must upskill and reskill for the future.

Three forces drive work in the modern age:

• Automation – This work is repetitive, inexpensive, low complexity and of lesser value.
• Atomization – Predictable and discrete, this work is medium cost and of moderate complexity and value.
• Human and Augmentation – This work is ambiguous, complex, higher cost and of greater value.

Computers and computerized equipment have transformed humanity’s relationship with physical labor. Increasingly, these technologies are making inroads in the knowledge economy: fields like law, finance and medicine. Algorithms will “unbundle” complex jobs into component parts. They can then automate or atomize these parts and distribute them to the cloud where humans will compete for them.

“Every time you hand off something to an algorithm, you need to reach for something new.”

“Upskilling” means gaining deeper knowledge of your professional domain. “Reskilling” means training for a different profession entirely. Companies that were once “containers” for jobs will become “platforms” that combine human and technological know-how. They will require five types of talent:

• “Foundational” – People who operate a company.
• “Rotational” – People who do work required only periodically.
• “Contingent” – People who do work specific to a specialized need.
• “Transformational” – People who help a company navigate change or develop strategy.
• “Executive” – People who organize other talent for a company or an event.

Don’t tether your identity to your job; rather, think in terms of skills.

Young graduates can expect to work in 17 different jobs during their lifetimes. Don’t ask a child what they want to be when they grow up, ask what they want to do. Children need to learn how to adapt, how to build resilience and to cultivate agency. By the time students finish university, the career they want may not exist or may have changed dramatically.

“Whatever you do now, unless you are closing in on your target retirement years, is unlikely to be your last job.”

Kids need foundational knowledge that helps them put data in context. They also require fundamental literacies in traditional reading and quantitative skills, digital intelligence, creativity and collaboration. The popular online learning site Khan Academy, for example, organizes students by independence instead of age. By untethering learning from preconceived identities, youth will become more adaptable. Young people must understand identity as a constant negotiation between internal beliefs and observations and social and cultural forces.

Businesses must change their focus from extracting value to creating new value through learning.

Open and connected systems help learners recognize the signals of change and respond appropriately. These systems encapsulate three organizational learning generations. The first focuses on acquiring knowledge and storing expertise. The second observes product life cycles and optimizes for efficiency, while simultaneously anticipating new iterations. The third encompasses the autonomous learning loop in which the learning rate accelerates and builds new efficiencies and iterations in real time. Wise companies become “self-tuning” in their processes as their people use unique skills to drive innovation and improvement. The famous “S-Curve” macro-process demonstrates this in four stages: “Explore, Experiment, Execute and Expand.”

During third generation acceleration, the first two phases, Explore and Experiment, occur more frequently than during the Execute and Expand phases. Design thinking helps because it grants companies deeper understanding and problem-solving capacities and builds user empathy and solution matching practices. It places the user at the center.

“In the past jobs were about muscles, now they’re about brains, but in future they’ll be about the heart.”

The new work environment requires soft skills – such as working well with others. Employees must also possess less obvious capacities such as a willingness to learn and a capacity for understanding their purpose within the larger organizational framework. These abilities form the base of the “iceberg” that determines success. In a world where “the pivot is the new business model,” mental agility, feeling safe admitting ignorance and monitoring self-awareness are no longer optional, but vital. Workers must have social and emotional intelligence, creative thinking, communication and judgement skills, along with “sensemaking” ability and empathy. Hyperspecialization hinders your capacity to adapt, and remains more prevalent among older people.

“Silicon cognition” cannot replace the “organic cognition” humans have evolved for 3.8 million years.

People differ from animals by their “pedagogical learning stance:” an ability to take what they have learned and apply it to different situations and problems. Continuous learning and disruption is uniquely human and enables people to adapt to changing circumstances. Humans are creative, generate ideas, make connections between unrelated phenomena and see things from different points of view.

“Human cognition has benefited from 3.8 billion years of evolutionary R&D.”

What differentiates humans from animals also differentiates humans from – at least today’s – machines. Silicon cognition (AI) cannot replicate sentience or wisdom that comes from the organic cognition that humans evolved for millennia. Machines lack common sense.

Prioritizing STEM capacities for the next generation may be a waste of time: Machines will do those tasks better. Graduates in STEM programs make more money in their first ten years, but if they don’t work on the aforementioned skills, their value will decline. Ironically, corporations and universities neglect the cultivation of human skills even as the demand for them increases globally. In healthcare, education and government, machines can, at best, only augment but not replace human capacities such as empathy.

The boss shouldn’t get the last cookie. Hiring only the best might result in top performers turning on one another.

The days when the shareholder is king and workers are merely a cost that companies seek to minimize are almost over. Maniacal reliance on quarterly earnings is a poor long-term strategy for any enterprise.

“At its heart, leadership is a relationship between those who aspire to lead and those who choose to follow. It is the quality of the relationship that makes the difference.”

The meaning of leadership – its “content” – hasn’t changed much since the Third Industrial Revolution, but the context of leadership has evolved. Leaders need to be more mindful about where they lead their people and how. The Milton Friedman assertion that a leader’s job is to extract value from processes and people is phasing into Fourth Industrial Revolution reliance on adaptability and learning faster than your competition. Two experiments highlight the challenges leaders face today:

• “The Cookie Monster” – From a group of three people, one is randomly selected to lead. They receive four cookies to share. Each takes a cookie. Almost every time, the leader took the remaining cookie. When a person feels powerful, they stop caring what people think and lose their sense of empathy, fairness and collaboration. It is not surprising, therefore, that CEOs consistently score lower on Emotional Intelligence (EQ) tests.
• “The Super Chicken Paradox” – An evolutionary biologist tested a strategy for producing the most eggs from the best laying hens among nine flocks by putting the best together in one cage. Of the nine top producers, only three survived, having pecked the others to death. The better option: spreading out all the hens from the highest-producing cages. Within a few generations, egg-laying improved 160% and no hens murdered another. The lesson? Searching for the “best” candidates from the “best” schools and making them compete for the highest ranking positions guarantees counterproductive conflicts.

Let go of the cookie. Forget about creating super chickens. Be more vulnerable and available and share your values with your people. Unlearn strategies that hold you back from adapting to new scenarios. Fail and get better.

Culture and capacity define the workplace.

Instead of focusing on what your company produces, focus on the conditions in which you create and produce. These conditions are culture and capacity. Culture is a sense of purpose and value and which companies create either intentionally or accidentally. Workplaces with intentional cultures offer benefits that mirror company values. For instance, a business which doesn’t stock its vending machines with junk food reflects a desire for a healthy work environment. Accidental culture occurs when culture evolves without intention and almost always proves toxic. Every great culture has a sense of purpose that the company and its leaders must model daily. Identify and eliminate anything anti-culture.

“If culture is the heart of a company, capacity is its brain.”

Capacity is a company’s ability to respond to opportunity. Shifts in context help businesses acknowledge their biases. By nurturing a working environment which bolsters capacity, companies can learn from, and seize the opportunities presented by these bias-busting moments. Technology used to be something you learned to use to do your job. Increasingly, technology and people learn from one another.

Adaptive teams must hire for values alignment instead of past skills and experience.

The job description and organizational chart no longer matter. Fit springs from aspirations, not qualifications. Hire people for their capacity to learn, rather than for what they already know. Companies might resemble film and television projects, bringing people in for a limited period of time to perform certain tasks. They can apply what they learn from that experience to their next “tour.”

“By looking beyond conventional signals and tapping into unusual sources of talent, you’re more likely to attract a phenomenal and diverse team.”

A good job posting should start with a description of your organization. Describe the ideal candidate, not the job. Explain how you want the applicant to embrace the job. Building adaptive teams means embracing adaptive hiring strategies. The best leaders hire for mission and mind-set, but can be uncomfortable with people who think differently than they do. Cherish alternative points of view; they bring cognitive diversity to your organization.

Build adaptive teams that are purpose-built to deal with a particular challenge or goal. For example, a team could have specialists – engineers, designers, project handlers – who rotate frequently, and a research group that scans the horizon for new opportunities. Your teams need “clear eyes focused on an unclear horizon” while leaders raise the bar to meet new expectations. How can leaders encourage fearlessness when the future is so uncertain? Pay attention. Let go. Move fast. Make the future what you want it to be.

Final Summary

The key message in this summary is that:

Yes, the robots are coming – but they’re not here to take away all our jobs. In fact, the three a’s: atomization (the ability to split large tasks into smaller ones), automation (the ability to do things automatically, like send bulk-emails and update team calendars) and augmentation (using tech to enhance human capabilities) all these things are actually freeing up time and giving us more opportunity to tap into the skills that make us uniquely human – to work in ways that are truly suited to us. Leaders, for instance, can work on their emotional intelligence and social skills, while employees can devote time to creativity and innovation. As the world of work changes ever more rapidly, adaptation, the ability to pivot and change tack, is key. If you can harness this agility-mindset you’ll be able to create products that are a reflection of your company culture and proof of your capacity, rather than necessarily being the main-event. Ultimately, capacity and culture are the two main areas organizations need to focus on – It’s no longer just about the bottom line.

And to give you just one last piece of actionable advice. If you’re feeling nervous about the fast-pace of change, take some time to reflect on one of the hardest lessons you’ve learned.

Steve Jobs isn’t the only person whose worst career moment turned out to be his best. In fact, things that initially feel like bad news often have a way of benefitting us in the longer term. This is because we’re forced to adapt and go beyond what we initially thought was the limit of our capacity. So, think about the hardest experiences you’ve faced so far in your career, take a moment to write down the answers to these questions: What did you learn from the experience? How did you adapt? You’ll probably discover that you’re already much more agile than you thought, so, hold onto that, and before you begin to worry about not being skilled enough in tech or science, take a deep breath and remind yourself of your uniquely human skill set. This is what is really going to give you the edge in life.

About the author

Heather E. McGowan and Chris Shipley are leading voices in the Future of Work movement and have been collaborating on the nature of work, culture and innovation since 2015.

Table of Contents

Introduction xix
Breaking with Identity to Seize the Adaptation Advantage xix
So What’s Changing? xx
How Did We Get Here? xxi
How Big is the Challenge? xxii
The Adaptability Gap xxv
Amid Rapid Change, Keep Calm and Adapt On xxvi
So What’s in This Book? xviii
Who is This Book For? xxix
Notes xxx

Part I: Adapting at the Speed of Change 1
1 The World is Fast: Technology is Changing Everything and Planting Opportunity Everywhere 3
Wait a Second 3
Technological Climate Change 5
Environmental Climate Change 8
Climate Change of the Market 10
The Force of Three Amplifying and Interlocking Climate Changes 12
Notes 15

2 The Only Things Moving Faster Than Technology are Cultural and Social Norms 17
Shifting Ground Beneath Our Feet 17
From Linear and Local to Exponential and Global 19
Race 20
Religion 22
Age 23
Family 25
Gender Identity 25
Truth and Trust 26
Consent and Power Shifts 28
Death of Distance Reshapes Human Relationships 30
So, Who are You? Occupational Identity and Expertise 30
Notes 32

3 You’re Already Adapting and Not Even Noticing 35
We’ve Already Begun to Outsource Our Memory 35
People Aren’t Horses 37
Atomization, Automation, and Augmentation 38
Atomization in Action 39
Automation in Action 39
Augmentation in Action 41
Putting Atomization, Automation, and Augmentation Together 41
Notes 46

4 Getting Comfortable with Adaptation: The Slowest Rate of Change is Happening Now 47
The Power of Pause 47
From Scalable Efficiency to Scalable Learning 48
From Stocks to Flows of Knowledge 53
From Learning to Work to Working to Learn Continuously 54
Identifying Patterns to Build Bridges 56
Notes 60

Part II: Letting Go and Learning Fast to Thrive 63
5 What Do You Do for a Living? The Question That Traps Us in the Past 65
The Questions That Limit Our Identity 65
The Identity Trap 71
How Identity is Formed 71
Narratives Can Trap Us in the Past and Limit Our Future 73
Gender, Narratives, and Identity 73
The Confidence Gap 74
Identity is Never Done 77
An Occupational Identity Crisis Isn’t Limited to Job Loss 78
Notes 80

6 Finding the Courage to Let Go of Occupational Identity 83
What Does the Parable of the Three Stonecutters Have to Do with You? 83
The Day 1 Mindset: You are a Prototype; Start with Why 85
How Job Loss Can Be a Gain 89
Modeling Vulnerability: We Share Our Hard Lessons 91
What Do You Do Now? 95
Notes 95

7 Learning Fast: Why an Agile Learning Mindset is Essential 97
Learn Fast—What Does That Even Mean? 97
What Do We Mean by Learning? First-, Second-, and Third-Generation Learning Organizations 98
The S-Curve of Learning: Explore, Experiment, Execute, Expand 99
The Curse of Expertise: The Challenge of Unlearning 102
The Iceberg: The Substance Beneath the Surface 102
Identity: The Core of the Adaptive Mind 103
The Agile Learning Mindset 104
The Enablers: Uniquely Human Skills 108
Why We Need the Agile Mindset: The Broken Education-to-Work Pipeline 111
ABL: Always Be Learning 114
Notes 114

8 Rise of the Humans: Developing Your Creativity, Empathy, and Other Uniquely Human Capabilities 117
Play is the Way Forward 117
The Uniqueness of the Human Drive to Learn and Create 119
The Predictive Markets Declare Future Skills Favor Humans 122
Understanding Uniquely Human Skills 127
Chasing STEM at Our Peril 128
The Skills Battleground: Humans Need Apply 132
The Return on Being Human 133
Return on Humans for All Jobs: The Special Power of Empathy 134
Evolving Beyond Shareholder Value: The Purpose of a Company 135
To Maximize Human Potential, Place the Human in the Center 137
Notes 139

Part III: Leading People and Organizations in the Evolution of Work 143
9 Leading in Continuous Change: Modeling Vulnerability, Learning from Failure, and Providing the Psychological Safety that Builds Trusting Teams 145
You are at the Wheel 146
Leadership, Power, Cookies, and Chickens 146
What Makes a Modern Leader? 153
Transformational Leadership 167
Transformational Leadership and Change Management Models 168
Leading with Fear: The Burning Platform 170
Putting It All Together 173
Notes 173

10 The Adaptive Organization: Creating the Capacity to Change at the Speed of Technology, Market, and Social Evolution 175
What Should We Measure? 175
The Power of the Culture and Capacity Focus 177
Culture at the Core 177
Capacity: Culture’s Partner 184
Capability and Context: The Scissors Metaphor 186
In Accelerated Change, Focus on the Inputs Rather Than the Outputs 187
Becoming a Learning Company 190
Notes 193

11 Capability is King: Looking Beyond the Resume to Design Your Adaptive Team 195
No More Little Boxes 195
The Job Description is History 197
Job Descriptions Become Traps 198
Fire Your Job Description 200
Hire for Cultural Alignment 205
Hire Adults and Let Them Do Their Jobs 208
Turn the Right People into Great Teams 209
Embrace Cognitive Diversity 212
Get Comfortable with Failure 214
Live in a State of Continuous Learning 215
Manage a Multigenerational Workforce 216
How Do We Get from Here to There? 217
The New Leadership Imperative 218
Notes 219

12 Getting Ready to Seize Your Adaptation Advantage 221
Notes 223

Additional Resources 225
Books 225
Videos 226
Acknowledgments 227
About the Authors 229
Index 231