Latest / Hope + Possibilities: Trust, Leadership + Strategic Foresight / The Future of Advice and Mentorship: A Leadership Living Lab

Transcript

The Future of Advice and Mentorship: A Leadership Living Lab · Hope + Possibilities: Trust, Leadership + Strategic Foresight

• 0:29
  Hi, I'm Nola Simon, and I'm the host of the Hope and Possibilities podcast.
• 0:33
  I'm embarking on a new series where we talk about careers
• 0:38
  and the future of work and
• 0:45
  It's honestly the easiest version of futurism that
• 0:48
  people have available to them.
• 0:51
  People are used to thinking about how jobs will lead them to be able to
• 0:58
  satisfy goals, how it will lead them to be able to afford the lifestyle
• 1:03
  that they want to engage with.
• 1:05
  But they're also used to actually giving advice to other people
• 1:10
  about how work will build a future.
• 1:15
  And so commonly, it is a question that futurists get, which
• 1:18
  is: how do I advise my kid?
• 1:21
  What do I advise my kid to study?
• 1:23
  What skills are going to be in demand once my kid graduates from school?
• 1:31
  That's a really approachable way to engage in futurism because it's so
• 1:38
  applicable, and it's so pervasive, and it's something that happens for everyone
• 1:47
  at every stage of life throughout history, right?
• 1:52
  But the general frame of it, a lot of people understand parenting
• 1:58
  to be a futurism project.
• 2:01
  How do you prepare one generation for the next?
• 2:09
  And that's really what it comes down to.
• 2:11
  And that can be directly for people who are parents, but can also be
• 2:16
  people who influence those kids.
• 2:18
  Your niece, your nephew, your neighbors godchildren, however
• 2:23
  you have family connections.
• 2:26
  But even just as a leader even if you aren't necessarily, deeply involved in
• 2:32
  close family ties, as a leader, you're constantly exposed to people who are
• 2:38
  making decisions for the future and people are going to ask your perspectives.
• 2:43
  So how do you mentor, and how do you give advice in a way that helps
• 2:50
  people prepare for the future?
• 2:53
  And that's really where the opportunity of this living lab is how can we-
• 3:00
  take our specific experience and advise others when we don't know the future.
• 3:10
  We have uncertainty about what is possible.
• 3:16
  The advent of
• 3:20
  AI is going to probably influence how things
• 3:26
  change and develop in the world of work and we really don't
• 3:30
  know what that looks like.
• 3:31
  And it's everywhere.
• 3:32
  It's pervasive.
• 3:34
  But what are the things that are going-- not going to change?
• 3:37
  And what will change?
• 3:38
  We don't know for sure, right?
• 3:41
  So how do we prepare
• 3:46
  for something that we don't exactly know the shape of.
• 3:53
  And I heard Margaret Heffernan, who's a professor, who is
• 3:57
  also an author of many books.
• 4:00
  She actually has been brought in to do leadership practices with, police
• 4:05
  or some kind of security force.
• 4:07
  What she was saying is when you're actually dealing with an event like a
• 4:12
  bomb or something that is supposed to explode and has immediate risk, if you
• 4:18
  don't make decisions in the moment without sufficient data, the bomb goes off.
• 4:26
  People die.
• 4:28
  So how do you make decisions in the moment that don't feel safe or secure?
• 4:37
  And, your may-- your work might not involve that level of risk, but
• 4:44
  that uncertainty, that ambiguity, we can all get better at making
• 4:49
  decisions in the face of that.
• 4:52
  So I'm gonna give you an example of how I advised my daughter
• 4:57
  when it came to university.
• 4:59
  So initially, she wanted to go to school for science.
• 5:02
  So over the years, we had prepped.
• 5:05
  She knew what courses to take wha- what she would need to have in her
• 5:11
  toolkit to be able to qualify for the programs that she was looking at.
• 5:15
  So that meant that she took a lot more math than she was ever happy with.
• 5:18
  But when we came to the reality of signing up and enrolling in a
• 5:22
  university what we found was when we toured the campuses and we talked to
• 5:27
  the people who were involved in the science program she was considering,
• 5:31
  all of it made her desperately unhappy.
• 5:34
  Those tours were not positive tours.
• 5:36
  She hated the whole experience.
• 5:40
  And for me, I'm looking at this going, "You may have it in your head that
• 5:45
  science is where you fit, but your body is really telling you a different story, and
• 5:51
  you're not happy with how this is going to look like to live on a daily basis.
• 5:58
  So you might be able to go to school and enroll in this
• 6:04
  But the reality of showing up at class every day and doing all of
• 6:08
  the work that's going to get you to the degree, not to mention even if
• 6:13
  you finish the degree, this is the type of work that you're gonna do.
• 6:16
  Is this going to really make you happy?
• 6:18
  And so
• 6:21
  her expectation that she had prepared for years
• 6:27
  was something that she actually decided to let go of in the face of
• 6:31
  the reality of imagining what the day-to-day would actually look like.
• 6:38
  And so she actually let that go and decided to take a gap year so she
• 6:44
  would have the space and time to be able to think about what she really
• 6:48
  wanted and what she really valued.
• 6:50
  And she ends up studying social work.
• 6:52
  And initially she wasn't sure if she actually wanted to take a minor
• 6:55
  in art, but again, the reality of actually combining social work and art
• 7:02
  It's a really challenging combination to find in Canadian universities.
• 7:06
  You wouldn't think it would be.
• 7:08
  But also the way that those degrees and the mentality of the two different
• 7:16
  departments works and the process involved and how you actually do the work and
• 7:23
  what's required just the time frames, the type of commitment levels involved.
• 7:29
  The two programs don't combine very well.
• 7:33
  And so she decided to leave art as a nice-to-have, a hobby, something
• 7:39
  that she could use to decompress from the other work that she had to do.
• 7:44
  And so you go from a theoretical and, overall
• 7:54
  prep for an imagined future, looking at the reality of what it would
• 7:59
  be like to live, and you end up in a completely different program.
• 8:03
  This also happens at work, right?
• 8:06
  I took math, and I minored in history, and I ended up in financial
• 8:13
  services in account management dealing with American customers
• 8:22
  Not exactly a straight line, right?
• 8:25
  So how many people really end up in jobs that their degrees prepare them for?
• 8:31
  Now, if you add in AI, what changes?
• 8:37
  So I'd argue that the reality of how you live the day-to-day is really
• 8:43
  where it's going to come down to.
• 8:45
  It's you can prepare as much as you want.
• 8:48
  You can test out, you can experiment with AI but it's really when you're doing the
• 8:54
  work, how does that make you feel, right?
• 9:00
  When you wake up in the morning, where do you go for work?
• 9:03
  What does your day-to-day look like?
• 9:05
  What do your meetings look like?
• 9:06
  How many people are you engaged with during the day?
• 9:10
  Are you solely involved in a screen?
• 9:12
  How does that make your body feel?
• 9:15
  How do you feel validated?
• 9:17
  What questions do you have?
• 9:18
  Who do you turn to for advice?
• 9:21
  How does that build in a network?
• 9:24
  And how does that feel fulfilling?
• 9:27
  Who do you trust?
• 9:29
  A lot of that really is what we're looking at, and that's how we give advice, right?
• 9:35
  And a lot of times what happens when we're mentoring and we're giving advice
• 9:39
  to people who are younger than us we're recycling what worked for us.
• 9:45
  The, the old adage of, you know, go in early, stay late.
• 9:50
  Does it really matter if nobody's actually in the office?
• 9:54
  Nobody sees you staying late and there's nobody to actually go to a bar
• 9:58
  with after work because everybody's working from home on Friday.
• 10:02
  It looks very different, and it's going to be different, and it's going
• 10:08
  to continue changing as the world evolves, as social norms change.
• 10:18
  And then so how do we advise people?
• 10:21
  A lot of it is based in identity.
• 10:25
  Who are you?
• 10:28
  You would never advise somebody to go in and take a typing test and
• 10:33
  figure out how fast they could type because nobody cares, because you can
• 10:37
  actually dictate how do you unlearn the skills that we spent a lot of time
• 10:45
  learning but are no longer relevant?
• 10:48
  And how do we let go of the identity pieces that
• 10:56
  built a career and built a livelihood, but won't help anybody else build a future
• 11:05
  that's based on the reality that we've got now and that is developing currently.
• 11:10
  That's really what the challenge is, and that's what I
• 11:13
  envision the Living Lab to be.
• 11:15
  How do we break down the skills involved sharing what works, and unlearning
• 11:23
  what's not helpful any longer?
• 11:25
  That's really what I'm looking at.
• 11:28
  So join me.
• 11:29
  This is the first episode, and we'll go from there.
• 11:35
  And I'd love to hear your feedback and your questions and your advice.
• 11:39
  This always works better when we've got interaction and we c- we can look at
• 11:43
  the specific things that you submit.
• 11:45
  So if you wanna do that, you can email me, nola@nolasimon.com.
• 11:52
  You can comment on social media, just make sure you're tagging me,
• 11:56
  it's Nola Simon sayings everywhere.
• 11:58
  And you could review the podcast and include your your questions you are
• 12:03
  looking for an example of a Living Lab, I have a version of this on my
• 12:08
  website, which is nolasimon.com/podcast.
• 12:13
  There's a section on the Living Lab that I've done for AI.
• 12:17
  I will link it in the show notes.
• 12:19
  Thanks for tuning in.