By Joshua Barthel and Dan Fukushima
While no one would mistake America’s most famous virologist for a poet, Dr. Jonas Salk found uncommon eloquence inferring life lessons from the scientific method.
“Life is an error-making and an error-correcting process,” he is commonly attributed with saying, “and nature in marking man’s papers will grade him for wisdom as measured both by survival and by the quality of life of those who survive.”
We will return to the trial-and-error claim. But what needs no further exposition is Salk’s all-too-resonant education metaphor, evoking the universal human gripe that long after one’s formal education concludes, everyday life nonetheless feels like a test.
Nowhere is that feeling more pervasive than in the modern workplace. According to a nationally representative Gallup survey of 18,665 employees, “Seven in 10 U.S. workers reported disruptive change within their organization in the last year.”
The perception is particularly acute among leaders, the category of workers most likely to report “extensive disruption” both within organizations and their individual jobs. Showing up to work today can feel like showing up to class having studied for a quiz, only to discover the textbooks have been swapped out overnight.
Disruptive change can be a good thing, but anyone who has bandied the concept in a future of work context knows it is usually discussed in relation to risk mitigation. Today and historically, when disruptive change occurs in the workplace, the default reaction is resistance. But what if it weren’t? What would adopting a healthy attitude toward change look like in an organization aiming to attract and retain talent in a competitive marketplace?
It is worth pausing on Salk and calling to mind why vaccines function in the way they do. By exposing the body to a small disruption — a weakened or dead disease-causing microorganism — a vaccine cues the body to simulate its response to a potentially larger disruption in the future. In no uncertain terms, the body learns. In Salk’s case, the disruption in question was the smallpox virus, horrifically disruptive to both individuals and society at large. It killed, by some estimates, as many as 500 million people in the century before it was eradicated. But eradicated it was — an astounding collective achievement for our species.
Here, we are discussing disruption of a different kind, less deadly but just as pervasive. Some key parallels arise in psychology: If people are given small doses of change on a regular basis, then so-called dramatic events may not seem so dramatic. Just as individuals can be inoculated against disease, they can be inoculated from disruption if they have developed the requisite resiliency.
From a workplace human capital perspective, there is no better preparation for disruptive change than to instill a culture of lifelong learning. To the extent disruptive change can plague both individuals and organizations, lifelong learning will act as a vaccine and build resiliency.
DEFINING A WORKPLACE CULTURE OF LIFELONG LEARNING
In everyday conversation, the lifelong learning concept has a regrettably low bar. What we are talking about is fundamentally different from today’s landscape of one-off training sessions, continuing education credits, or easy-to-acquire certificates and digital badges. Instead, what we are describing is a form of fundamental reskilling that occurs habitually, both within and across organizations: turning a finance person into a marketer; a healthcare expert into a hospitality industry expert; a human resources professional into a communications strategist. Lifelong learning includes increasing skills in your current function and industry, but also acquiring the skills to completely shift domains.
That is an uncomfortable proposition for many people to hear, but the speed and degree of change make it an imperative. The following examples shed light on what this paradigm shift may look like while addressing some of its key sticking points, psychological or otherwise.
NEW TALENT MODELS REQUIRED TO ADDRESS ATROPHYING SKILLS AND AI’s RISE
The ever-increasing pace of change in society means the half-life of knowledge will continue to shorten. In the coming years, organizations will have to rethink how they go about upskilling and reskilling employees, as well as how they buy or rent talent via internships, fellowships, or contracts of various forms.
We expect a demand for redesigned jobs such that a position in an organization bundles tasks into rapid-atrophy and slow-atrophy categories, or otherwise determines how to sprinkle rapid-atrophy tasks across the organization to prevent employee obsolescence.
This may sound like an impossibly high degree of labor analysis, but as AI supports better assessing and monitoring of performance, changes to productivity and identification of aptitude will be measured in previously unforeseen ways. Any influx of data affects the labor market, and an influx of this scale could completely reshape workplace skill and knowledge gaps.
There is an opposite side to the coin. Today, when we think of workers using AI, we typically imagine an AI system the company has invested in that a worker then uses.
But over time, the cost of AI technology will decline dramatically, to the point where an employee may have their own AI support platform, following them through their career, incorporating years of learning about how they think and behave — both on and off the job — and then applying it to the job. Such a technological adaptation could raise the floor for many people seeking to enter new careers and learn new skills, especially in the knowledge economy. As a Toffler Associates Expert-in-Residence recently put it, “AI can make everyone a ‘B’ or ‘C’ player. ‘A’ players may not be helped as much, but a novice might become a ‘C’ player more quickly with AI.” This possibility can only become a reality if both individuals and organizations are open to the kind of learning that AI can enable — hence the need for a paradigm shift on the issue.
Of course, this raises still more unresolved questions. If a personalized AI is involved in the hiring process, what should that look like? Is an organization hiring the employee or the employee and their AI as a package deal? How will the company AI and your personal AI interact? How can learnings from previous jobs be transferred to this new job, and from this job to your next? Legally, what will that mean for intellectual property?
LIFELONG LEARNERS ARE BEST EQUIPPED TO NAVIGATE NON-LINEAR CAREERS
Today’s perceived trend of shorter and shorter tenures with an employer, coupled with a lasting post-pandemic spike in gig work — will take a twist to include shorter career arcs. An additional consequence to the rapid-atrophy of skills caused by technology is that, for some industries, career duration may carry less value, both for the employer and the employee. We would expect this situation to force people to reinvent themselves and how they navigate their careers. Whereas hearing of someone making a “career change” can still be major news (perhaps even minor scandal) in some industries, in coming years the phenomenon will become less surprising.
Today, one’s standing in an organization is very closely tied to tenure and experience. If we transition fully to a world in which a career can be made up of new vocations every few years, tenure and age will become less important and the correlation between hierarchy in an organization and tenure (or age, for that matter) could be nonexistent. Having bosses much younger and employees much older than you will become the norm.
This is where the individual person will find the real benefit of a lifelong learning practice. In a world where being in school or retired are no longer the binary bookends of a career, people will adopt more fluid approaches, transitioning into and out of various markets based on their skills, life demands, and individual preferences.
It is instructive as ever to return to Alvin Toffler’s seminal words in his 1970 book Future Shock: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” Those words hit the page 18 years after Salk’s intravenous polio vaccine but nine years after a safer, cheaper, and more easily administered alternative — the Sabin oral polio vaccine. Salk arrived at an answer first, thereby carving a niche as one of the most famous virologists in history.
But it was lesser-known Albert Sabin who never stopped learning even as Salk’s product hit markets. Manufacturing challenges emerged with the Salk vaccine, leading to the tragic Cutter Incident that inadvertently caused 40,000 cases of polio. In the end, Sabin’s vaccine won the day, eventually being adopted by the World Health Organization (WHO) as it successfully eradicated polio from the Americas by 1994.
It is a difficult truth that whatever we learn, we must be prepared to unlearn and relearn. Disease may still hit the vaccinated, and the future may still shock the lifelong learner. But both will have an unmistakable advantage in their statistical readiness to meet the disruptions of the future, both expected and unexpected. In each case the blow is softened, and both individuals and society are better equipped to continue down their intended paths.
Joshua Barthel is a strategy consultant at Toffler Associates. His background spans a variety of professional service industries including law, architectural design, and communications—all informing his current focus on strategic foresight for federal agencies. With personal and professional passions intersecting at the written word, Josh thinks like a writer and specializes in analyzing big picture changes in the future of work, science communication, and technology’s societal implications. He received his BA in Government from Harvard College.
Dan Fukushima is a futurist and leads the Futures and Foresight practice at Toffler Associates. He has been helping organizations identify, plan for, and capitalize on disruptions for over 30 years as a corporate strategy consultant. His specialty is analyzing the future for growth opportunities, innovative solutions, and impacts of the evolving workforce. He received his BS in Industrial Management from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
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