We are living at a time where change is happening faster than ever before. Instead of the tendency to slow down anytime soon, it is becoming even faster. In fact, we are in-between two eras, the industrial age, having lasted almost two centuries now, and the robotic age.
Fortunately for you, change favours the creative.
One thing that is now very important is to be aware of is the robot curve. The robot curve is a constant waterfall of obsolescence and opportunity.
When you want to succeed in the robotic age, you have to keep moving up the waterfall, while It is always flowing down.
This means that you have to keep learning new things. This is very different from what we had 100 years ago. Back then, when you learnt one skill, you were set for your whole career. Now, it’s about constant learning and innovation.
In order to be able to constantly improve, you need to learn certain skills. These "metaskills" are higher-order-skills that bring profound knowledge to specific tasks and disciplines. In other words they are master-skills for acquiring new skills.
Those five metaskills are:
…is about intuition and empathy.
Intuition …is the ability to arrive at conclusions without the use of logic. Each second, our sensory organs pick up about 11 million bits of information, while our brain can only process 16-40.
Empathy …is the skill to experience the thoughts, emotions and feelings of others. Mirror neurons in our brain (monkey see, monkey do) let us reflect people’s emotions and learn from them. Empathy is crucial in working together with others. These neurons can also be trained, so empathy is something you have, but you can also learn.
…is the ability to see the whole picture, not just the parts. It is the discipline of overcoming beliefs and biases to observe situations the way they really are. This is difficult because the human mind loves simple either-or-choices.
We often fall into the trap of limiting us to two choices when there are more alternatives. In any kind of system, there are traps caused by so called feedback-delay. Feedback delay is when necessary information is delayed when needed for a decision.
…is applied imagination. It’s about how to be original – the only thing that cannot be copied. Innovation is the value that sets you apart from others. The formula for this is: O = K * I – originality is knowledge multiplied by imagination.
Without knowledge or imagination you usually copy others and change a thing here and there. With more imagination you can create things they haven’t seen before, but without knowledge they don’t know whether or not this exists elsewhere already. With more knowledge and less imagination you can bring ideas from other industries into your industry, which is kind of original. If you have imagination and knowledge, you can create something that is new to the whole world – and that is what it takes to be on top of the robot curve.
What stops imagination? Part of the problem is not knowing the techniques:
It’s about design and design thinking. Design thinking is a generative approach to solving problems: You create answers; You don’t find them. This is nothing like traditional business thinking, which is a two-step process: You know something, then you do something – this is not innovative. Designers put a step in the middle called making. Making is about imagining new ideas, prototyping them and testing them to show if they work or not.
Process:
This is also often part of the process:
This process is messy and doesn’t follow a predefined process but adheres to high quality.
This is the opposable thumb of the metaskills – with this skill you can improve all the other metaskills.
Autodidacticism: Self teaching, learning how to learn. Everyone has a different way of how they learn – knowing that is very powerful.
A good approach is to find your way into the joyzone, the psychological concept of flow. This is to find the place where the work is neither too hard, nor too easy. When your work is too hard you become anxious and don’t learn. When your work is too easy you become bored and you don’t learn. You need to find work that is just a little bit challenging and you feel completely engaged – then you are in the joyzone and you are learning about ten times faster than you would otherwise. Unless you are passionate about your work and you have a great time doing it, you are probably not going to learn.
The key to happiness at work is understanding what the world needs – and then knowing who you are. When you know those two things, the greatest chance of success is finding the overlap between those two areas. Success in the robotic age is really a journey to yourself.
Marty Neumeier is the author of the book "Metaskills: Five Talents for the Robotic Age" and therein published all of his thoughts on our modern society. This site was a short visual summary of his book, barely scratching the surface of the topics discussed in the book.
The book is availible on amazon, like many other of his books, filled with wisdom and theories about the world.