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skills for the digital era · Humanity Working

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: They'll probably have a combo.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: I think their honey will be the bomb.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: Whoa.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: All right, I gotta go.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Tip your bartenders and waitresses.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: I gotta go.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Hey guys, today uh I want to get a bit more specific about one aspect of being personally effective, having the right skills to be effective today and in the future.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Let's start with what's needed today and where it seems like things are going.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, I think a few things have been pretty obvious, right?
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_02: So there's been much more reliance on tech.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_02: And I think for almost all of us now, there is the need to be at least basically prof uh technically proficient.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um, doesn't matter whether you're operating a point of sale system in a store or working in a restaurant or a factory or sitting behind a desk.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but some other things have changed as well in terms of the way in which we do our work.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um, as we've discussed several times on this podcast, work's become unstructured and ambiguous, and also, I think very importantly, work that was synchronous and in the same room in many cases as our colleagues is being replaced by other work.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_02: And that other work is often asynchronous and with people elsewhere in the world.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, that's been exacerbated dramatically by the pandemic, um, so much so that in many cases um people were doing work, the work that was left, that was happening, if you like, synchronously and in the same room, much of that has transitioned into something that is asynchronous and with people elsewhere.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_02: So it's very likely, even as we move back into the office and we start working together, that the things that work well in that way are gonna carry on working that way.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and things that work well in a more traditional way will go back to the more traditional way.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: But either way, what's very clear is that folks that are either coming into the workforce now or adjusting the way they work in the workforce are really gonna have to be flexible enough uh to be able to work in these different, if you like, work modalities.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Paul, another nuance to that is um you'd mentioned about working with anyone on a global scale.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: Uh in even traditionally, tech has enabled that, uh, you know, video chat and things of that nature.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but that was within the confines of a company, typically.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um and what we're starting to see, and we will see more and more, is that the people that you interface with any work capacity on a regular basis, those people that you mentioned are all over the globe, they might not even work for the same organization.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, they could work for an entirely different organization that might even not be in your industry.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: It could be individual freelancers, what have you.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but you know, certainly tech has enabled this new breed of exponential organization where staff on demand is so critical.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so it doesn't really matter that they share the same uh badge as you.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: I mean they need to simply share the same uh objective or the same desired outcome as you uh to foster a good working relationship.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: And in many cases, that relationship doesn't even need to be strong.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: It can be a very ephemeral relationship that lasts only a moment, um, but is still very effective.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: You know, a couple of things came up there.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh as you were saying this, uh, Paul, on the on the skilling up, if you will, of people through, you know, forced on them by this pandemic.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: They were forced to skill up.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: I wonder how many of those folks realized then, by virtue of being forced to skill up, that they had this sort of enlightenment about work.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like, oh, I don't need to stay here.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I mean, you see articles like that, but it's like that that's a really interesting positive benefit for the workforce of the pandemic, is like all that doubt and fear of like I'll never be able to adjust to this.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: A certain percentage of people probably were like, oh, I now I can do all kinds of stuff, you know, and and so that's gonna have an impact too, you know.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's odd, actually.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I'll say, speaking personally, when I look back upon my career, um I had the early part of my career, like a lot of people, um, when I first started out, came out of college and started doing a very specific job.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_02: In this case, I was doing IT training.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_02: And when I first started doing it, I felt woefully unprepared for it, right?
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't feel like I had the right technical skills.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't feel like I was a particularly good trainer.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I didn't feel like, in a sense, I almost felt like a like a fraud doing the work.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_02: And then over time, over a period of uh initially weeks where I had a little bit of a breakthrough and then months and then uh and then years, um, I became very technically proficient in the thing that I was training people on and significantly better at training people on a day-to-day basis.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_02: So I kind of came out of that understanding and knowing what I was good at, right?
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_02: I I I knew the technology, I knew the technology very well.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_02: I could even write courses as well as deliver them.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I could troubleshoot any technical problems associated with the software that I was working with, and I was good at training people.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_02: And then as my career shifted and I went into different roles, I had the the normal thing that you that you do, where you go from, if you like, this uh the the cycle that people talk about a lot as going from, or the path, I suppose you could say, that people go from, which is referred to as unconscious uh incompetence through to conscious incompetence through to conscious competence through to unconscious competence, you go through that cycle with any with any work that you're doing.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_02: And as you learn more and you become more expert in it.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_02: But what was intriguing was that as I shifted into these different roles, and the roles became, if you like, more generalist in nature versus specialist in nature, it became super hard to even really know what I was good at.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_02: Am I good at anything?
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_02: Right, you get to a certain period in your career and you're doing something in a generalist way.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_02: Am I really good at anything?
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and I think one of the things that you just brought up there with regard to the pandemic is that some of the things that people have become really good at are very intangible in nature, very difficult to nail down.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_02: And as we start to think about the personal effectiveness of people before the pandemic and during the pandemic, what have you become skilled up in?
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of that is not very tangible in nature.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_02: And so it really comes back to that process of self-curiosity that we've spoken about so many times on this podcast, right?
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_02: Really investigating what it is that you're good at as well as what it is that you like.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_02: I do agree.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_02: I think a lot of people have gone through this process and effectively developed a new set of skills.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_02: They now really need to kind of look deep inside themselves and figure out what those skills are.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:48
  unknown: Yeah.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: And Ryan, you touched on, you know, this idea of ephemeral and quick and different, you know, shifting relationships, relationships across this spectrum of different people in ways you never did before.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, looking forward, you have to anticipate that that continues and exponentially grows, maybe even, right?
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: Definitely.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: And even just within the next five to 10 years, we think.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and this is going back to the the concept of the the gig economy, um, is just that you know, technology's enabled us to create these relationships.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: And um, what we're gonna get better at, we're not there yet, um, but what we're gonna get better at is how to define what each one of these relationships means to us and and and what level of depth you need.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, similar to the way you'd have close colleagues at work, and then you'd have people that are outside of your team and things like that.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: Think about that on a global scale.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you'll have um people that are in your core unit, maybe that's even your family.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it could be your team at work, but then you have uh relationships that are just on the fringes of that, that still share your strategic objectives um with you and are very passionate about being involved with you.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but then think about these, you know, the layers outside of that you continue to build.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, you so think about that outer circle, if you like.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, those could be people that um you simply ask advice from, right?
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um maybe you know you just needed advice from somebody, and there's somebody that can give you that advice, and they could sit in an entirely different place in the world.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: Your relationship doesn't need to be deep with them, it's kind of transactional.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you just needed that one thing, that one information exchange.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think people uh don't even realize how much of a part they play in the gig economy now.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, if you just if you hop in an Uber or you stay at an Airbnb, I mean you're you're an actor in that play, right?
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: You you're you're in the gig economy.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: In that particular situation, you're in the gig economy as a as a consumer of a service, for example.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: But that's what makes this thing work.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: It only works when when you have this kind of that consumption at scale.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um and we're gonna start seeing more and more of that.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: You know, in fact, we're running our business.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um, almost um, you know, 80 to 90 percent of our business is managed in a staff on demand way.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, we model ourselves as an exponential organization, and we literally have 10 to 15 active gigs uh going on at any one time with any uh number of parties that exist anywhere in the world with any number of different skill sets from marketing to software development to uh research to uh data analysis and trend analysis to SEO optimization and then just to running experiments, uh asking people what they think about something and doing that, asking that question at scale, um, extremely valuable to an organization that's in a startup state.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I think there's something else interesting about that, which is even if you're a full-time employee in a company today, um, you are in a sense participating in this highly flexible gig economy that Ryan was talking about.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_02: Because as you mentioned, many of the people that you're gonna be working with, um, even if you're not today, are gonna are going to fit that set of characteristics.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so you as you as a participant in this this bigger picture, there's always an alternative, right?
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_02: There's always an alternative to the work that you're doing.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_02: Um, somebody else uh out there could be uh could do the work potentially cheaper than you can or faster than you can, or a group of people might be able to do it cheaper than you can or faster than you can.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_02: So there's that element to it.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um, if you like that uh uh the adage about there being, no matter how big you are as a company, no matter how accomplished you are as a company, that there are always uh people out there that are smarter than you.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_02: No one organization has a monopoly on those people.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_02: So in that sense, you're there, uh you're participating in it, right?
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_02: You your job could potentially be uh replaced in part or in hull by these other participants.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_02: But then the second aspect of it as well is that people that are coming into this uh into this world or are participating in this world need to think about how they are going to be flexible enough to do well in this economy.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_02: So availing yourself of those types of uh resources to help you do your work better, but then also be flexible enough to be able to adjust and adapt what you do as the organizations adjust and adapt around you, which is why this flexibility thing keeps uh keeps coming back into play.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's interesting because if you think about it, whether you're inside an organization or outside and in a freelance type model, it's really important that the, for lack of a better term, the metadata about an individual continues to become more and more robust so that the connections can be formed, whether that they're formed uh on purpose by the individual or people seeking skills, but also from a technology standpoint on the back end, like an AI that's mining for connections, that makes sense.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're doing that inside an organization, you can further maximize the effectiveness of all your employees because you know they're connected.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: You know, so for example, if you're in a medical field uh, but it's a big company, maybe one of the one of the people in the organization has specialty in cancer, but they don't don't, they no longer do that work at your company anymore, but they have a background or they've published the simple stuff of the the things that people are interested in benefit the whole organization.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: So whether it's inside, outside, or both, it still comes down to the individual's uh skills, metadata, whatever you want to call it, the the demographics of that person, their profile, becomes really powerful in this instance.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, flexibility is a soft skill.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: Capturing all that stuff is another one.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: You know, what else do you need?
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: And and how can we, you know, move this forward, right?
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, Matt, you've brought up something I actually think is really, really interesting, right?
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_02: If we're trying to predict forward here, and of course that's always a very dangerous game.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_02: Somebody will play this back in five years' time and make us all look like fools.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_02: But what you really sort of describe there, there's an analogy, a pattern, if you like, that looks like it could repeat itself here.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_02: So we have the internet and then we have intranets, right?
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and what that really was about was about organizations um understanding that some of the um, some of the power, if you like, of the internet, the ability to be able to be able to flip from one piece of information to another and and navigate very rapidly through the body of knowledge that exists in the world out there, that that could also be very useful for navigating the body of knowledge inside inside your organization.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_02: So hence the birth of um intranets and um the usage more of you know search versus traditional filing and file structures and things like that.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_02: So super cool and very, very powerful inside organizations.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_02: Now, where we're at in this early stages of the um of the gig economy is we found a much better way uh to connect ourselves to people that can help us in whatever we do.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_02: And as you point out, um, there's actually no reason why, with the right data and organizational structure in the company, and with a workforce that is primed for flexibility in the way that we've just discussed, there's no reason why, particularly if you're a larger organization, you can't find the person who is in a completely different role inside your organization, but has this area of specialized expertise or this strong interest, and ideally both, and find that person, get that person, and use that person's um knowledge and skills for the work that you're doing.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_02: So I do think it, I think it'll probably follow that same pattern.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_02: We go outside, we see all of this, uh all of this uh great set of capabilities.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_02: Having done that, um, we continue to do it, right?
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_02: Because it's hugely valuable and because, you know, there's all these smart people out there that aren't working for a company, but we also in the larger organizations start to say, you know, I can I can now find somebody who can really help me with this.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_02: And they happen to work for my for my company already.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: Really interesting.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: Really interesting.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: We also think that there's gonna be, you know, somewhat of a a baseline of skills that uh most people are gonna have um that right now are um rare enough that they're at a premium, if you like.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um so understanding of you know data science and AI and a and a deep understanding of how social networks work and things like that um are gonna be important for every human, not not just for you know the computer scientists or the data scientists or the or the computer programmer and things like that.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: So it's it's there it's gonna be um more of a a common attribute or a common skill across the board.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: And that doesn't necessarily mean that you know everybody needs to be like the preeminent data scientist, you know, that spent 20 years in the field and get to that level, that 400 level of expertise.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's more of you have a sufficient understanding so that you know what you need and how to get it.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_01: You think about like a computer programmer, for example.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, uh computer programmers are extremely in high demand because of you know the boom of the boom of software.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but we're getting into the you know low-code, no-code uh type of technologies now, where it becomes increasingly more important to be able to craft your narrative that uh can be memorialized in in the no-code software, right?
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: To have the vision.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and so in that case, it's more valuable uh to be a good storyteller.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's more valuable to be an experienced designer, like a UX designer, for example, than it is to be an actual writer of code.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because once you get to the point where you've developed that that user experience, that's the innovation.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um the writing of the code isn't necessarily the art form at that point.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's the it's designing the experience.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: And then again, in a no-code environment, then essentially um once you have nailed that, then the application is developed.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: Billion Minds has taken over a dozen years of research into the habits of the most effective among us in this new world where work and life are merging.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: They've distilled it down into a 90-day program targeted at employees that do unstructured, ambiguous work.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: Employees from five different countries around the world are using Billion Minds to help them start each day with a purpose and end it with accomplishment.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: If you or your team wants to discover how billion minds can help employees optimize their work in the context of their broader life, go to billionminds.com slash learnmore today.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's billionminds.com slash L E A R N M O R E.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: Billion Minds.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: Providing practical tools for our way too busy lives.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: So is this the death of expertise?
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's that that's not the case, right?
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's it's a different thing entirely almost.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's kind of like what we were talking about before, right?
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_02: In the sense that you do have expertise, it just might be harder in some cases to pin down.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_02: What I was actually going back and and clearing out my bookshelf the other day, and I was looking at some uh some books that um predicted certain things.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um and kind of picked them up and and uh it's a little bit like uh what we just talked about.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, in five years' time, well, what we're saying look really foolish.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_02: One of the things that was a common thread between some of these older books um was that they kind of indicated that highly specialized deep knowledge was gonna be so much of a premium, and that everything that wasn't highly specialized deep knowledge um was gonna effectively fall by the wayside and technology was gonna make that irrelevant.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I think that's not exactly true.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_02: And I think what is starting to happen and what will continue to happen is that um there's it's basically kind of go two ways.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_02: So there are going to be, and there will continue to be, very highly skilled people with very, very specific skills, and those skills are gonna be in very high demand across multiple organizations.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_02: So therefore, you may be this deep specialist who is potentially very highly compensated, but the skills that you bring, you then provide to half a dozen different organizations or a dozen different organizations or 20, right?
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_02: It's if you like the democratization of highly specialized consulting.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_02: And almost anybody that fits into that category becomes a consultant and they have multiple.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: Organizations recompense them for their expertise.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_02: But to supplement them is a set of highly flexible generalists.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_02: And the highly flexible generalists are the ones whose skills are predominantly soft skills and who are the people that can rapidly skill up in a certain area and do effective work across a whole bunch of different domains.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_02: And on a Monday, they're this type of person.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_02: On a Wednesday, they're this type of person, or they jump into a project for two weeks and then they move into another project.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_02: And some of those people will also work as consultants, but some of those people may wind up being, if you like, um, the connective tissue inside organizations and stay within those organizations as the flexible entity that brings together technology and this type of human expertise that we talk about.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_02: Because one thing that is abundantly clear, and I don't think was abundantly clear like 10 or 15 years ago, is that one of the real um benefits that humans bring to the to the work equation is that human beings can have that capacity to adjust and adapt and be flexible.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_02: So that as systems build up, as computer systems uh are built up, and what's referred to in technology often as technical debt builds up, which is, if you like, the complexity and ossification of um of fixed systems.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_02: As that builds up, the human being is the is the thing that can adapt.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_02: The human being is the thing that can adjust.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so um that's going to remain very valuable um for people.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_02: And so generalized education, if you're going down that path, just needs to be more sophisticated generalized education.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_02: And then skilled education needs to be very, very, very skilled.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_02: So I think we'll what we'll have is highly, highly skilled specialists and highly skilled generalists.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_02: But the highly skilled generalists, those skills are not really I'm super good at three or four or five different things.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_02: No, it's I'm super good at being a generalist.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's interesting.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: I've heard you talk before, maybe this is a subject for another podcast, about the uh the cycle of the adoption of these softwares and how we get them out there, they're amazing.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: And then when that that debt starts to pile up, we just throw people at it, right?
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: And then sort of come through this other cycle of of, you know, and it'd be interesting to examine where we at where we're at on that on that cycle too, just maybe as another uh another another conversation for another day.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_01: But um, speaking of other podcasts, we we did a podcast on the the outcomes network, um, which is certainly apropos of this conversation as well, which is uh we talked about the importance of um breaking down the problem that you're solving into discrete components, if you like, and then effectively uh building a network around those things, right?
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so tapping into the abundance of human ingenuity globally um requires you to have some level of sophistication in terms of uh how you break that down and distribute it, right?
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think that lends to what Paul was saying in terms of the um the expert generalist, if you like.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that skill set is being able to break those things down, is being able to communicate those discrete outcomes that you're trying to achieve to those other people.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and doing that at scale is a is an important skill set.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_01: That doesn't mean that um, you know, the generalist has zero knowledge.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, you have to have just enough knowledge on a particular topic to do, to act on it, if you like.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and there's so many places now, uh, like Maven, for example, is uh is a service where you can just get on the phone with somebody for an hour or half an hour and and just pick their brain.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: The the whole transaction is just you picking this person's brain about a particular topic that that they're an expert in.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_01: Now you can leave there, not as an expert.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: You don't leave that conversation as an expert.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: You leave there as an informed person that can then determine what you need, right?
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: And but until you had that knowledge, until you had that level of knowledge, you wouldn't have had the ability to act on that thing.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, uh just a case in point, one of our interns uh here at Billion Minds is working on our SEO strategy.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, having never done SEO strategy, um, and we're doing some experiments on keywords.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: He doesn't need to become an SEO expert.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_01: There are a lot of them, right?
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but he needs to have a sufficient understanding of what's going on and how the algorithms work so that he knows what questions to ask, so that he knows where to get help.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_02: And this is really, really useful in the context of trying to make um strategic decisions.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_02: So it actually allows you potentially to speed up dramatically um the rate at which you make strategic decisions.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_02: If you think about sort of the old school way of this, of doing this, the old school way of doing this would be um, okay, I'm thinking of moving the company in this particular direction.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I've got to now try to find the expertise, if I don't have it myself, to allow me to whether to know whether I should move the company in the strategic in the strategic direction.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_02: Now, given the fact that you're making a shift, you're making a shift from the old world to the new world, it's not going to be very likely that you've got, you know, 20 experts sitting on the bench that are just waiting for you to move in this direction.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_02: So in the old world, what you could have done is you could have like hired a team uh to experiment with that.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_02: And then if the if the team came up with some good uh some good insights, or if they skilled themselves up in this and produced a business case, then potentially you could now make this pivot into this new strategic direction.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_02: But in the new world, as Ryan mentions, that expertise, and we're talking about world-class expertise, yeah, is available to you and can literally be uh you know brought to you potentially within days or even hours.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_02: Ryan and I had this exact experience.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um, before we formed Billion Minds, we were working in an internal startup inside Microsoft that was focused on clinical research.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_02: And we were toying with a strategic decision as to whether to um expand our area of um focus, if you like, into drug discovery, which is a connected domain to clinical research, but it's quite different in terms of who actually uh conducts it, the people, the nature of the people we're working with, uh the scientific discipline associated with it, et cetera.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_02: And we knew quite a bit about clinical research, but collectively um we didn't really know um that much about drug discovery beyond what we needed to know in our previous roles.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_02: So we wanted to find out, and we wanted to find out quick.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_02: So, what did we do?
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_02: We worked with Maven, actually, that the organization that um Ryan was just referring to.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_02: So we worked with Maven, and within a day, we had three world-class experts.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_02: And our our question to them was really simple.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um, can you make us as smart as we need to be to help make this strategic decision?
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_02: So we spoke to one who kind of like gave us the lay of the land, what the layer of the land looks like right now.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_02: We spoke to another one who like helped us understand where this domain was going.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_02: We spoke to a third about the role the technology plays in this, and then we kind of collected together that understanding and that learning, formed a set of questions, and then spoke to another two or three about what potentially this strategic pivot would look like for our organization.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_02: And within uh, what would you say, Ryan?
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_02: One or two days, we had enough information to make that strategy decision.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_02: We did it at low cost, we did it at high speed, and we did it without having any of that knowledge inside our organization.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_00: And it strikes me that the incentives for all the players in that scenario line up much more effectively in that in that scenario than they would have in any other way you would approach it, both for the experts and for the people seeking that information.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, on the margin, people like to bestow their wisdom on you.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_01: You know, um, it's it's it it feels good to to to be knowledgeable on a particular topic and to help someone else to get knowledgeable on the topic.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_01: And then, you know, plus they're compensated for it too.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that comes back to what we said before, which is like people realize they had skills they didn't realize were valuable, or they learn new things that now are valuable or across different things and they can see a different path for themselves um coming out of the pandemic, but also with the technology addition.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like this has got to change the way organizations are built going forward, right?
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the the the days of just erecting a whole bunch of organizational structure in anticipation um for a to be state are are are certainly on the way out.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, we talked in in previous podcasts about the exponential organization of the EXO.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we feel like that's gonna be much more the norm.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_01: Very lean in terms of volume of full-time employees, um, but very, very good at building you know, massive networks of people that can help um just traditionally referred to as community and crowd, right?
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_01: So tapping into all the uh the wisdom of the of the crowd um at scale.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_01: And that traditionally means tapping into social networks.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think every organization is um gonna really see social networks as being a very important asset to them, their presence there, the the data, the insights that are derived from that.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then uh continue to identify areas where automated, um, or you have algorithms that can take on repeatable tasks and things like that that uh that can be removed from the humans and and that helps from a scaling perspective.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_01: And then, you know, we talked about uh you know Uber and Airbnb as examples earlier of um of organizations that are part of the you know, quote unquote gig economy.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, one thing that they do um that they have in common is leveraging assets that don't belong to them.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_01: And and that's gonna be really, really critical.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_01: You know, traditionally you build up a giant inventory of stuff and you own that stuff, and then you've got to sell that stuff.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and now we're starting to see you know, Airbnb, they don't own those houses, they don't own those rooms.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Uber doesn't own any of those assets, the cars, the vehicles, right?
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, so we're gonna start seeing a lot more of that.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_01: And the technology that emerges is all that which it takes to handle all those things I just mentioned at scale.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's a very good point, Ryan.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, this whole idea of like becoming big and powerful in an organization by virtue of the assets that you own.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_02: We even saw the next um revolution in that, whereby um organizations were looking to hoard and own data and maximize the value of that data.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_02: Even that, we might be entering a phase where that becomes significantly less valuable as we open up the paths to accessing data through a whole bunch of making it easier and easier to access data from multiple sources versus go to get it from uh from one individual one.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_02: And so the logical um progression from uh being a company that is successful by virtue of the fact that you own stuff um is that you become successful as a company because of the data that you own.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_02: Then I think probably the next generation is um it's the insights that you can generate, the insights that you have from the data that you have access to, and the insights that you have from the people that you have access to.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_02: And so this makes it challenging for organizations, right?
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_02: In a world where you have less data than your competitor in-house, and you have less people than your competitor in-house, but you have access to as much data as your competitor, and you have access to just as many smart people as your competitor because all of the barriers to access have gone away, yeah, then that makes it much, much easier for smaller organizations to take on larger organizations because of the fact that they're behaving in the way that Ryan is discussing.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then performance and excellence rises to the top.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: Playing field is leveled in in some ways.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's that's cool.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: Are you looking to hone the skills you need to thrive as work and the rest of our lives merge?
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_00: If so, we can help.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: For the first time, Billion Minds has taken the program it offers to businesses and customize it for individuals in a program they call the Elements.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_00: Whether you work for yourself, a small business, or a big company, you can sign up today.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: Just visit effectiveness.me and join up now.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_00: Use the code WAYTOBISY to get a savings of$74.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: Billion Minds, providing practical tools for our way too busy lives.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_00: And it's really important that education adapt to the world that is and the world that's becoming to prepare more effectively for the things we talked about that will switch in the workplace.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a that's a really interesting parallel.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, if you want to prep for this right now, and this is you know the first you're trying to really wrap your head around this, what do you what do you need to do?
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_02: Well, inside billion minds, we coach people at all areas of their uh of where they are in their journey, whether they're coming out of college or whether they're towards the latter part of their career, um, and trying to deal with what's happening in their work life versus their non-work life.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_02: So we thought about this quite a lot.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_02: And I think uh it's going to be very specific to the individual.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_02: But as you kind of prepare yourself for this new world while executing in the current world, we already understand that in a in a in addition to what we've outlined so far, getting really smart on understanding what you are expert on outside of the confines of your own organization is really, really important.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_02: It's very likely that for many of us, um, we're gonna be doing a lot of things for a lot of people, um, whether that's a lot of things for a lot of people inside our company or a lot of things for a lot of people outside of our company or a combo of the two.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and we do expect that that work will get more ambiguous.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_02: So you got to really understand how to be good at doing ambiguous work, right?
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_02: As we've discussed on previous podcasts, we really, really think that organizations need to be good at helping people get to that point.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_02: And they need to think really seriously about that.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_02: They shouldn't just accept and assume that everybody's gonna be good at that type of work.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_02: They're not, right?
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_02: So there's a role for organizations here, but as an individual, if you want to thrive in this world, understanding that you are going to be working for more people, you are your work is gonna be more ambiguous, and re-evaluating what your expertise is is really important.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_02: I'll just give you like a very simple example.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_02: There are people out there who maybe they really enjoy, I don't know, maybe they really enjoy micro brews and they drink and and they drink a bunch of different different beers.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_02: They know all the nuances of it.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_02: And maybe they've spent like four or five years really, really building up a body of knowledge associated with that.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_02: That knowledge is marketable, right?
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_02: They may never think about it that right uh in that way because they are literally somebody who is, you know, sitting in a desk job doing something entirely different.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_02: But they have some knowledge that is useful to other people.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_02: Sports fans out there that actually do know a ton about sports settings.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_02: So really understanding what you know about and then understanding how that knowledge could be marketable for others.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_02: We are no longer in a world where the letters after your name, the degree you got, where you got that degree from is the only definition of who you are as an individual or what expertise you bring.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_02: It will become much, much, much easier for you to take these things that you're good at, double down on them, and then and then sell those services to other people that can benefit from them.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so it again, it comes back to that self-curiosity to help people understand that and then start to build, if you like, their own uh business model to be able to monetize the services that they provide.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_02: That's great.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's interesting because the the university degree, the letters behind your name, served almost for a long time, I think, as a shorthand for oh, this person knows what they're talking about.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_00: And then it got watered down to be, you know, well, okay, so you went to school, but what do you know?
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_00: What have you done?
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_00: And that's I think shaken out in the data where you know, Google and so forth are just like, yeah, we don't care what your degree is, you have to know what you're doing.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, show me what you did, and that you can continue to do it on a high level and that you know how to learn.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's what we're looking for.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like maybe the the the degree will be there too, but you also have to pass this other test, which is you actually know what you're doing, you actually have a body of work and expertise plus maybe you get the degree also uh in for for any number of reasons, but it it does shake that standard equation in your mind, or or that thought of like, well, I'm definitely going to get my degree here, I'm definitely going to then try to get into an organization and I'm you know gonna continue that that path.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's really opened it up, it's really interesting.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_02: I love your concept of it being a shorthand because there's so many other ways to do that now.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, right.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_02: I mean you can do a podcast, you can write a blog, right?
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_02: There's so many that you can participate in a community online and uh avail yourself of those services.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_02: And Ryan, I was just thinking about how when we have consumed these services from experts um that are helping us build billion minds in the area of, for example, social media or in the area of uh, for example, you know, building out a technical infrastructure that's that underlies our products and services.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_02: How many times have you, as somebody who's like consuming these services, how many times have you looked to see where they went to college?
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_01: Not once ever.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_01: No, I'm looking, uh it's interesting.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_01: I I'm I'm looking at uh their previous work.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I'm looking at how um how they communicate.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and then frankly, the the how other people have perceived their work too, right?
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_01: So uh it's a it's very important to um to always set a very high bar for yourself if you're a freelancer, because you know it's very it's very difficult to get a job when you're at four and a half stars when all your everybody else is at five, right?
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because you're evaluating them based on your own assessment of their work, um, but then also everybody else's.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_02: And if you think about it, what I suppose that means is that an alternative to going to college, and by the way, I'm like I said, I would evaluate it if I were doing again.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not telling any kids that are listening, don't go to college.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not saying that.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_02: I think going to college is awesome, and it has a whole bunch of of really, really useful things, and and many of us, it was the best years of our lives.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_02: So stay in school kids.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, stay in school kids is this.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_02: But so not saying that in any way, but it is true to say that an alternative to that shorthand that you were talking about, um is If you like living your life or doing your work in the open, that's what these freelancers are effectively doing, right?
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_02: They're doing their work and they're doing it in a public forum in a sense.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_02: And so therefore, people see that public forum, they see that work conducted in that public forum and they go, I'll have that.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_02: And then they go to pull uh pull that work.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_02: Now, people there's a whole bunch of other questions, right?
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_02: As to whether, you know, for example, will I have stability?
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_02: Will I have financial stability doing that?
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_02: Will it feel comfortable doing that?
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_02: Will I get benefits doing that?
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_02: Or am I gonna have to source those benefits from elsewhere?
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_02: Then use that as a means to landing your dream job, right?
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_02: That's entirely possible as well.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_02: So a resume, a resume looks very different.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_02: The future resume looks very different to the past resume.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_02: And you can land the job of your dreams effectively through this alternate path versus through the more formal, you know, getting getting the shorthand that you're talking about.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's almost like you're obligated to work out loud in this new environment.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_00: And the depth you're capable of reaching in other modalities add to your legitimacy as an expert or whatever, probably more so than a CV would have, uh, you know, a resume would have, or a university degree from an established university.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's that plus.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I've done all the, it's not just publications, it's almost like that was reserved to people who would publish in journals or whatever, or could get published, et cetera.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, now you can self-publish for better or worse.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_00: If your work is good, it will get seen.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_00: If your work is good, it will get shared.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_00: It will create this body of work that you don't need a uh the the gatekeeper to to put out there.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_00: You can actually effectively do that on your own now.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_00: And that really never existed before.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then you're building up your own body of work.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's it's pretty impressive.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um yeah, or certainly hasn't for or certainly hasn't for like a long, long, and I mean like centuries hasn't existed like that, right?
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, yeah, I suppose it's certainly, I mean, there are there have been citizen scientists and things like that throughout, you know, throughout the centuries, but for the last century or two, it's been the way you do this is you go to this seat of high learning.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_02: There is a, you know, that's how you get access to this extraordinary body of knowledge that you can then build upon.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_02: Now, just you know, previously we were in a world, I guess, where um those centers didn't have as much rich information and the body of knowledge wasn't so rich.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_02: And so you could have like citizen scientists and so on that could come up with their own amazing, unique discoveries, yeah, um, and had less of a formalized um education.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_02: But today we're almost back to that, and we're back to it because there is now an ability to be able to come extremely skilled um and extremely educated on stuff outside of sitting, you know, outside of getting into Harvard or getting into Oxford, right?
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_02: You can still do that, and that is wonderful that you can.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_02: And it's wonderful that individuals can effectively build out this set of highly gener, highly applicable generalized skills and highly specialized skills, and they can potentially do so at at relatively low cost.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_00: The Way Too Busy podcast was presented and produced by me, Matt Neal, and was brought to you by Billion Minds.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to get in touch with us, tweet us at Rising Billion or email us at WayTooBusy at BillionMinds.com.
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_00: Billion Minds, creating practical tools for our way too busy lives.