The Next Rules of Work w/ Gary Bolles

AI isn't just changing jobs. It's changing the rules of work.

Every week brings another headline about layoffs, automation, and the future of work—but what's actually happening beneath the hype?

This week, we sit down with Gary Bolles, global fellow at Singularity University, author of The Next Rules of Work, and one of the world's leading thinkers on the future of work, to separate signal from noise.

Together, we explore:

• Why AI isn't the biggest disruption—it's the pace of change.
• Why young professionals may face the greatest challenges (and opportunities).
• What parents, educators, and leaders need to rethink.
• Why the "career ladder" is dead—and what replaces it.
• How organizations can become more human-centered instead of more automated.
• The skills, mindset, and agency we'll all need to navigate what's next.

This isn't a conversation about fearing AI. It's a conversation about building careers, organizations, and communities that are resilient no matter how technology evolves.

If you've been wondering what work looks like over the next decade—and what you should do about it—this episode is for you.

Learn more about Gary here: https://www.gbolles.com/

Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered professional advice. We are not responsible for any losses, damages, or liabilities that may arise from the use of this podcast. The views expressed in this podcast may not be those of the host or the management.

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Transcript

No Human Left Behind

0:00

one of the reasons that I end my book "The Next Rules of Work," the final line in it is, "No human left behind. And the reason I want people to understand that we all make decisions, and we're making decisions that we often don't think have ripple effects in society, but they do.

AI Anxiety And The Guest

0:29

Welcome to "Your Work Friends," where we break down the now and next of work. I'm Mel Platt. And I'm Francesca Raneri. We're excited about this episode. Every week, Francesca and I read another headline around how AI is replacing jobs, changing careers, or just completely reshaping the workplace, and honestly, it can be really hard sometimes for us to separate what's real from what's just hype. I don't know if others are feeling that way too. We certainly are, and that's why we wanted to talk to Gary Bolles. Gary is one of the world's leading voices on the future of work. He's the author of "The Next Rules of Work," and he has taught more than 1.7 million, learners on LinkedIn Learning, and he's also a global fellow at Singularity University, where he helps leaders think about the future of work and transformation. Yeah. In this conversation, we really wanted to know from him what are the next rules of work. We unpack what AI is actually changing, why young people may be the most affected, what org... What organizations need to rethink, and most importantly, what all of us can do to build a career that's resilient, no matter what happens next. Because the God honest answer is none of us know. So if you are like us and are trying to make sense of where work is headed, this episode, and I'll tell you, this conversation left me feeling a little less anxious and a little bit more prepared. And hopeful Gary's just awesome, so with that, here's Gary.

Real AI Change Versus Hype

2:04

All right, Gary. Everybody's talking about AI. I don't think we can escape it. It's in every headline, every text message, every conversation at work, layoffs, skills, the end of jobs. What's actually real versus what is super overhyped right now, in your opinion? Yeah, absolutely. So a couple quick bullet points just to give people the red threads. If you work in a company that is already highly automated oh, I don't know, tech companies, yes, you're gonna find there's a lot of work that's impacted. If you work in an organization that is very long-term utility or government agency or something that's been around for a long time and it's not very digital, doesn't have a lot of technology in place, you're-- it's really slow 'cause most of the change is about people. So those are the endpoints. And then what are the frictions? That is, what slows things down in how people shift to use these kinds of new technologies and what speeds it up? So again, speeds it up if there's-- if you're already digital, it speeds it up. If the laws of your country allow you to either fire people or change the workforce really rapidly, and it slows things down a lot if people have been doing the same kinds of work for a long time, if, you're in a country like Germany where the laws don't let you lay people off very easily. And so you just gotta add all those things up and then decide, okay, so given the kind of work that I'm doing or where I wanna work, kind of company I wanna be in, either if it's a tech company, which also unfortunately is proving a lot more regularly that they don't care that much about their employees, so they're willing to lay them off pretty quickly. Meta did 8,000 workers in a week on one email. Or you're in an organization really cares about humans and really wants to keep people employed then, and wants to train them to be able to do the new work and all those sorts of things. Then you can do the math yourself. And then the thing that really drives people crazy, which is perfectly understandable, is that it changes so fast. I would say always it's sure the technology have a big impact depending upon who you are and where, what kind of organization you're in, but it's the pace and scale. It's that it goes so fast. It's you thought you were using the most recent version of one tool and now there's another one or-- and then it's affecting so many people. So it, it's being used in so many different organizations. So I tell people, just take a deep breath- Yes, it's gonna impact different kinds of work roles, and the more you can be leveraging the tools yourself, understanding how they might be applicable in your work, awesome. The one population we can talk more about this that is the most affected though, that doesn't have a lot of control is young people. That's the five alarm fire we have to be dealing with. It's not just AI, it's just the ways that work systems work. But they're the ones that are really having the most challenges right now. Yeah. I-- We're hearing that if an- anecdotally throughout conversations in the day-to-day. I have friends who have kids graduating from high school right now who are choosing not to go to college because they're, they don't see the path, so they're leaning into trades, which is great. We're also, we have a huge gap there that's needed to be filled, right? So I'm curious about that. What's what might be one shift people are underestimating the most right now?

Young People Need Career Agency

5:23

Oh, good question. So- the linchpin, like the part of just how work works where the rubber meets the road the most has nothing to do with technology, and it's the hiring manager. I often use words like manager and supervisor and that sort of thing. But what most people don't really see in the data, which is absolutely the biggest influence, is no matter what tools your company uses, no matter what kinds of people you traditionally hire, no matter whatever those processes are, you have a job opening or you have the opportunity to promote somebody inside the organization. But you're the one who runs the team. What are your incentives and disincentives, especially for hiring young people? But for any population that is gonna get disadvantaged potentially by really rapid change, by a need in, for developing new skills. So just give an example. Two years ago, McKinsey said they were gonna hire less young people. We don't need 'em. We can just do a lot of that stuff with tools. And then two things happened. First is their clients figured out that they were using software instead of people, but still charging the same rates. Oh, no, you don't get to do that Yeah. Yeah. We can use the tools too. And the other thing they realized is, oh, you can make these younger people so much more effective in their work, and they can do a lot of stuff that it used to take us years to train. Oh okay, now we need more. So that's what McKinsey just said. No, we're gonna actually dramatically increase our hiring of young people. So lots of variance by industries, but the guarantee that especially more advanced degrees or degrees from certain types of colleges and so on gave you a big leg up, which was true in the past, is no longer as true. And so when you've got friends that are any listeners have-- are parents and have kids that are going through this decision-making process, I always tell them you, you-- first off, I have tremendous concern for three populations: young people, their parents, and their teachers, because they're the ones that are being so dramatically affected. I tell the parents, "Look, the rules you knew about encouraging your kid to go to a college and get that degree and amortize it, there's still plenty of places where you're gonna have traditional jobs and that sort of thing, but it's not a guarantee." Yeah. So the more you can help your kid to be independent, to have agency, to make new decisions, to... and it's a logical hedge against uncertainty if what your kid does is to do what I call a portfolio of work. Yeah, they might get a day job, but then they're driving for Uber at night and they're working on a startup with their friends and so that, that's a hedge strategy, and it's perfectly rational. Even though parents ask me all the time, "Why won't my kid get a real job?" I actually I think this is a healthy shift in a lot of ways. Something I've always thought even when I was 18 choosing to go to college because I was told that was the path to do. Yeah. That's what success meant. It also felt man, I'm too young to be making these big life decisions about what I wanna do at 18. Yeah. I couldn't even choose a meal. It was McDonald's number four, so it's interesting now. It's like live life a little- Yeah experience a lot of things, get really clear about what you want before you start choosing a path is actually a little healthy. Yeah. It's absolutely, and I'll tell you what the rhetoric, the, what was the mindset of parents in the past was that there is this tiny little window- Yeah where if the kid doesn't go to college, they've missed it. Yeah. That's it. You're dead. They're, you're- It's over. They're Yeah. So a friend of mine-- And it varies a lot by culture, but there's a good friend of mine from India, and he he went to his mother when he's graduating high school. He said, "Mommy, Mommy-" I don't wanna go to college. And the way he tells the story is his mother just looked at him and gave it a beat. She said "My son, you have three options: engineer, doctor, loser." Oh man, that's harsh. Yeah, no pressure. No pressure. So that's the old rules of war. He's "No, okay, I, I get..." He chose engineer, but those are the old ru- It's what our parents know. Yeah. What, what is harder is to, to... when they don't feel like they actually can give great advice about how to navigate a world of work that, that is changing so rapidly. And so I just- Yeah I do suggest that, look the thing to really be thinking about is how you develop agency in your kid, and that doesn't mean making decisions for them. It means helping them to make the best decisions. But to focus on what's next, and I don't mean tomorrow. What's the next step they need to take that will help them to be able to launch into adulthood? And that's a different question. Yeah. It's very different. Yeah, as a first-gen college student myself, that was the ans- They were like, "No, this is it, or you lose at life." And I'm like, "Okay." Yeah. No pressure there. But I'm, it's- yeah so it's a healthy shift here happening even though there's some uncertainty, it sounds. As long as we give them the tool set. Yeah. So you wanna give them the mindset, agency, take actions. They've gotta develop a skill set, and they've gotta have the tool set. You have to know how to be able to develop the skills that are needed, find out, get the signals from the market, what it's looking for. Yes, have some North Star that pulls you forward, but also know what the job market might be looking for or where there might be opportunities. And we have to help them early on to crack that code because if we don't, then they could be making very tactical decisions without necessarily realizing they're gonna have to do this again and again. There's gonna be a lot of career changes. Yeah. I said in the past we used to... the metaphor we used was a jo- was a ladder, right? Career ladder. Go to one company and work your way up. And then Tammy, who was the former CMO of Yahoo! years 10 years ago, she said "No, I think it's a jungle gym." You go up, and you go down. I said, the, what I, the image I show now is a trail network. I said, "No, it's a trail network." It's a bunch of trails that you could follow, and some of them are well blazed and really deeply furrowed, and okay, that's the-- what many people have done before. But you're gonna keep hit these constant intersections in your own trail, and sometimes you might just blaze a new one. And, if you ask people who've been working for any length of time, 30, 20 years, the most common thing you're gonna get if you say, "How did you get into this line of work?" The response will be, "Oh mine was a very non-traditional path." So trail network. Yeah. And so that's what you wanna encourage your kids, is like you're either f- following trails or finding new trail or blazing new trails. But that's what's gonna happen, is that's the picture to have in your mind, is that you're gonna have these range of options, and what you wanna do is continually make the best choice you can for any particular point in time. Oh, I love that. You're worried about three people, like the kiddos, the parents, and the teachers. And I think about in order to really like, traverse a trail, you kinda need to know how. And I'm curious about the connection between your concern with teachers and navigating the trails. Yeah.

Teachers Shift Toward Learning Skills

12:21

So first off, education's not monolithic. We-- there's very different phases of it, from very early on like pre-K. But there are still things that, that pre-K-- e-even in a pre-K world you can do to help prepare kids for the future. Sure. I'm happy to talk about some of those. But then you got this K-12 thing, which is again, it's a sort of arbitrary box we put around it. But those teachers are supposed to be helping you to learn new things and helping you to develop skills and get along with each other and that sort of thing. And their job increasingly has to be focused or that, that has this underpinning, this foundation layer of social and emotional learning. And if what the teachers keep on doing is inde-heavily indexing on the bodies of knowledge that they're trying to s-stuff into their kids' heads then unfortunately we're missing the narrative. That's not the key deliverable. Key deliverable is to help them to learn how to learn how to manage their own emotions, learn how to get along with others, learn how to follow some kind of passion in their lives. That's really the key deliverable. Unfortunately, a lot of our school systems are not designed for that. And then in what I call the young adult launchpad, the college system, the more that the people that are helping you to navigate that the trail, they kinda have to know how it works. And unfortunately, there's a lot of people that have been in the ivory tower for a long time that haven't worked in the real world for a long time. They don't... they actually are able to help with that kind of advice. We're pushing with my c-small consulting company, Chamonix Red this sort of mindset of what we call switching from being just a college or... Not just a college, but being college or higher education, to being more of a life center. Like how do you help them to actually think of this as a launchpad? And what are the things you would need to do walking in the door? Yeah, you would touch the career center as you're walking out the door. "Oh, by the way, I need a job." Yeah. Our mindset we wanna encourage for educators, especially in higher education, is now walking in the door. You wanna make sure that you are equipping these young people, this mindset and toolset for life change. And then the skill set, like the skills that you're teaching them are going to be durable. They're gonna be usable again and again for the rest of their lives. Yeah. So funny. My think about tenure and all these systems we have- have been in place for a very long time, and they need to rapidly shift not only academia and K through 12, and it's oh my god, these things need to shift in the next two to three years. Yeah. That's probably not gonna happen in order to meet the moment.

From Hierarchies To New Operating Models

14:45

Yeah. I'm also thinking about orgs and how they need to shift too, you talk a lot about moving from like things like from jobs to skills to tasks. What are most organizations gonna be structured like in the next few years? We've heard anything from it's the biggest organization's gonna be 50 people to nothing's gonna change. I don't know if I buy either of those. Your thoughts? So it's all the above. So think of it this way. So you've got these endpoints in terms of or how organizations are structured, and you're right. In the same way that our educational institutions were shaped, especially in the West, by the industrial era, so one teacher, 30 students listening to mind-numbing lectures for the entire time that's a production model. That's a factory production model. And it's the same thing with our organizations is we've got these things called hierarchy, which go all the way back to the time of Alexander the Great. We've got these things called org charts, which were originally pioneered by this little company called IBM. And what we've done is over and over again, we've got these industrial era processes that sort of shove people into these slots. And now if you were to take any organization in any industry or nonprofits, N- NGOs, government agencies, and you were to wipe the slate clean and say from start to deliver the same value we do for our customers or our constituents How many people would we need? How much technology would we use? And so that's a high-class question that startups can ask because they're just starting out. So that's how you get a 50-person company that can do a tremendous amount. They can automate from scratch. They can do-- They, they could basically decide, make a lot of those decisions. But Walmart is the largest employer in the United States. They don't make decisions like that. They don't make a clean slate decision how, how could we run our stores with zero people? And so that's what you get, is you get these end cases. And so the, the-- When I show-- I, I talk a lot about to help people understand is the industry you choose, the business you choose, or if you're a nonprofit or NGO, or... There's a business model. The reason it exists, it provides value to somebody, and that then drives ultimately an operating model. How many people do you need? Where do they go? And there's always a history if they've been around, company's been around for a long time. What you find is that when you get these big resets, like the AI tsunami, is there's some organizations treat it as an opportunity to go through this complete rethink, complete transformation. And so yes, you will get some smaller organizations out of that. But as with a McKinsey, no, we need more people- 'cause you're gonna find you can create even more value if you give these same tools to others. And then if you want-- some people find it inspirational, and some people find it creepy, but there was a company profiled in New York Times a couple weeks ago called Medv. And it's two people, and they use AI agents to sell GLP-1s fat reduction and weight reduction. And it's just two guys brothers, and $1.8 billion run rate. Now, the agents make up customers. They lie about the fact that they're saying it sell, it makes its own products, which it doesn't. It's all about just selling and it makes up all these social media stories and... But it's all agents. It's all software doing it, and it's two people with an in- incredible run rate. So that is the dream of a venture capitalist, is to have that quote unquote "capital efficient" company. But that's not the future I want. I want-- I don't want a future with millions of one-person companies because I don't think that's actually how you create a lot of value. I think you, you create a lot more value by humans working with humans. Yeah. I think I'm struck with What is the purpose of organizations anymore? Because i'm looking at one of the fastest growing jobs right now is training AI how to do your job at this point. And I'm not trying to be super negative about it, but- No, yeah. Oh, go ahead. We don't-- Yeah. Let me just go

Layoffs Regulation And The Economy

18:32

into my... We don't have a lot of regulation in this country around layoffs. It feels like we are in a almost brutal capitalist type of philosophy around- Yeah get as much profit, get as much rev as you can out of this thing, get as much productive-- productivity and efficiency out of this thing as you can. And I'm wondering if that changes in the future or if it gets more- Yeah pronounced. It's a good question. So you have to go back to the fundamentals is what's different at the macroeconomic- picture. So what is happening with the global economy. And so in a downturn in the United States during-- I don't know if any of your listeners remember the-- there, there was a global pandemic, but during the, this global pandemic, What? What was that? the US went from three point seven percent to eleven point two percent unemployment in three weeks- Oops in April of twenty twenty. And so that's an example of a macroeconomic condition that had nothing to do with AI. ChatGPT had not been released in early twenty twenty. ChatGPT three point five had not been released. And and it-- but it had to do with macroeconomic conditions which created mass unemployment. But in, in Germany, they went from five point two to five point six percent unemployment because there's a series of laws that say it's-- you can't l- just lay people off, and you've got to train them if you tell them they gotta go find another job. And so there's these macro conditions, and that has a lot of either-- it's either an accelerant or it's a decelerant. And so in the United States, we don't have an employment system. We have an unemployment system. You don't get benefits unless you get fired, unless you're out of work. And whereas what we should have is a lot more resources to keep us trained, so we're always having work. So then you d- drill down into the organization level and if you're working for a tech company, which- is already highly digitized and may not care that much about its employees, then yeah, you're probably gonna find that you're you're one of the fir- you're, you-- If you're last in, you're probably first out. That is, you'll, you're very likely to find there's less guarantee that you're gonna be kept employed. And so this is why we need to go back to this whole thing about agency, is we really do need to encourage people to to have a lot of agency and to be continually thinking about the next step. If you look at the studies with, about young people today if you look at the waves, I don't use phrases like Gen Z and Gen Y 'cause I always say I don't think this is a new generation. I think this is a new species. I think this is the next-- Young people are the next form of humans. But but if you look at the waves, the most recent wave of young people in work, two-thirds when asked the question, "Are you already looking for another job?" Answer, "Yes." And it gets a lot less as you move up in age. And so this is what we call the era of optionality, is it's more and more young people especially, and not just, not all young people, and not just young people, but more and more young people are looking at their digital distraction devices continually watching for market signals. Are my friends working on a new startup? Does some- does a friend down the street in another job have a better boss than I do? Or so and their-- and that means that their loyalty and the belief that they would stay working up the career ladder is much, much lower. Why do you think the younger generation is a different species? I gotta know that. So evolution, I, it's a little bit tongue in cheek, but it's not too much. It's because- yeah. I got a seven-year-old, I understand this. Okay. Okay, you got... Okay, great. Then you got it. I'm like, please- All right. So- please confirm my beliefs. Sorry. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Look, at any point in time, ev- so one of the wonderful things about evolution whether you're a massive fan of Charles Darwin or you just think of it as a metaphor, is that it's continual incremental innovation. It's constantly trying out new things. And that's true of our genome, that's true of us in societies, is we're doing this little steps to test out new inno- and then they become waves of innovation when lots more people do them. And so when you get a really big shift in behaviors, in motivation, in societal context, in a lot of the things that we used to think were kinda guaranteed, like why you work and, and- when all those things go through really big resets, I think you get just a completely new set of motivations, characteristics societal constructs, just completely new ways of doing things. I'd love to talk about this whole AI and human kind of capacity value- Yeah piece, because the headlines are so mixed. Francesca and I are reading the headlines every week. It's like people are getting 20% to 30% more efficiency, and then the next week it's, no, people are doing double the work because the agents are toddlers, and they're not y- there yet. Yeah. And and then, also companies are seeing real value, and then actually CFOs haven't seen any ROI from this with their P&L. So there's, like, all of these conflicting stories out there. Yeah. I imagine there's obviously some real wins happening and some real losses happening. Where do you see this value? W- what's the- Yeah story here? 'Cause all this mixed messaging around the value happening here.

The Truth About AI Value

24:14

All right, so I'm just gonna give you some quick bullet points because it's a broad landscape, but I just want to, again, help people to see some of the threads that I've seen. So the first is there is no such thing as AI. Yeah. There's no such thing as artificial intelligence. It's a marketing label and it's I'm a child of Silicon Valley. I spent more than 50 years of my life in Silicon Valley, so I can gently criticize my brethren and sistren. But it's a marketing label. So the more we say an AI coworker, I used an AI today nobody says, "Oh, I used the internet today." It just, it becomes part of the woodwork. And so we're at this inflection point where it benefits tech companies a lot for us to keep on using these labels and to make it sound like these are some of the most incredible tools that have ever been on the planet. In many ways, they are some of the most incredible tools that have ever been on the planet, but they are flawed. They've got deep flaws. They can do incredible things, but they also can do incredibly stupid things and in- ineffective things. So here are some of the things that happen inevitably, is first off, CEOs love this stuff because it gives them back a couple hours in a day to automate a whole bunch of stuff that they thought they had to do themselves. And so they then think, "Oh great. Everybody can get the same benefits." And it doesn't work like that. It turns out that there's a lot of different kinds of work that it's r- You can use a lot of these tools to automate a lot of repetitive tasks, and that is awesome, and you can change workflows. But people don't change very rapidly. They don't have a lot of incentives to change rapidly, especially if the company isn't telling them why they're training this software. Is it to replace? Are you really, or is it to make me more productive? So what you find is that there's some use cases where it's very-- it's automatically really useful. Call support. So when you call nowadays for any kind of support, the tools are gonna likely be answering more and more, and it just allows humans to be able to do the more complicated stuff. But it also means you often need fewer humans on call desks. So that's-- There's a couple different applications, but then there's a variety of uses, such as with programmers, where good news, you can knock out a ton more code than you did before. Bad news, you didn't do it. You have no idea what's in that code, and you have to go bug hunt it, search through a lot more, and you might be spending more time- doing the bug hunts than you did before because you didn't write the code. So it's this sort of technology giveth and technology taketh away, and we've seen this in wave after wave of technology. And what ends up happening then is several things. There's some people get tremendous advantages very quickly and they get-- And especially startups, you're gonna find just are gonna have fewer people. That's just gonna happen because they can automate a lot of stuff. Whether it's really good or not, they're still gonna automate a lot of stuff with the tools. Bigger companies, they're gonna find some parts of the companies that can really leverage the tools really well. But again, people change fairly slowly. The tools have some flaws. There's... You can make a lot of mistakes with them, such as opening up the, your company's private information to the world. So you've gotta actually have a bunch of controls. You have to have governance around these things, and that slows stuff down. So what I urge people to do is don't read the headlines. Any article that begins with either, "I asked ChatGPT..." or, "Sam Altman says..." Don't read those articles. Yeah. Just don't read those articles because it's gonna be something that's gonna trigger you if you're worried that the technology is gonna have, is gonna suddenly be able to do everything a human can or we won't need humans at all. Don't read those. Instead, look for the articles that talk about where people have been able to use the technologies to do really amazing things in something that you care about, that you're fascinated by. Those are the ones that you should be looking at because that's where you're gonna be able to create value. And that's-- And for young people especially, I'm not telling you have to go become an expert in the tools. As a matter of fact, I'm not telling you have to use the tools. What you're gonna find is that there are going to be certain kinds of work roles where people are using the tools a lot and then you're gonna be encouraged to be able to use those tools yourself because you'll be able to do as much work as others can. A-a-again, only in specific jobs. Yeah. I'd love to actually-- So we are not anti-technology at all here. I think we're more- Yeah cautious adopters of what are the things to think through. And just to your good point where do you see this actually elevating human work right now? There's just so many great arenas. And a lot of it just depends upon sort of the sniff test or the bar you're setting. Yeah. So if we could wave a magic wand and every human on the planet had access to tools or to, to the kinds of advice and capabilities that allowed them to be able to find or create meaningful, well-paid work, that allowed them to have great medical advice, that allowed them to be able to get input on how to parent better, that allowed them to become better teachers, better-- if everybody in the world had access to all of the kinds of tools we would like to make sure and access to the work itself that we would like to make sure everybody's able to use then great. We don't need as many of the tools because if you have people helping you to do that would be awesome. That's not the way it works. There's tons of populations that do not have good access to medical advice, that do not have good access to, to learning. And so there's tons of great examples where people have been able to use the tools to do something that they just literally could not have done before or that helped them to be able to do something, achieve something they wanted, start new businesses, learn new skills, connect with people that they would never have connected with otherwise be able to do things that used to take them hours to do and now they can do in minutes that allow them to do other really cool things. There's tons of great use cases. Unfortunately, in the yin and yang of any technology, there's a lot of cases where the technologies can be used for ill, where they can be used to hack your brain, where they can be used to to violate cybersecurity. There's all sorts of negative things that the tools can do already. And because a lot of the tech companies don't take responsibility for trying to mitigate against those ills oh, I don't know, social media- it's just a little-- it's a lot more easy for people to do bad things with the software. So here's what we need. We need people to be good consumers of the software, use tools because they've researched the companies and they know who's trying to do this all with benefits to society. And you-- we really do need to be able to especially help parents to navigate the decisions about when kids have access to these tools and when they don't because there's a lot of other societal negatives such as cognitive offload, having the technology make a lot of decisions for you that will have some really negative consequences downstream if we're not helping especially younger kids to be able to understand when technologies are most useful and when they're not Yeah. I recently saw the latest report on the top uses for AI in everyday life, and one of the things that really struck me were the outsourcing your thinking piece, which I've seen in real time with some younger folks I work with, where I'll ask a question- Huh and they'll ask ChatGPT while we're in the conversation, and I'm like, "Okay, what do you think before you get that answer back, I wanna hear what you think first." Yeah. Which is interesting. And the other was around therapy, which I'm torn on, just because in terms of mental health systems in this country, there's an access problem. And so this is an area where it's really challenging because you have those populations without access, like you were saying. That's a great way to elevate access to people who don't have it. But it's also now we're potentially outsourcing community for people through- Yeah 'cause they're going to their tech first versus an actual human. So we thought COVID was bad when people came out of COVID with social skills. Yeah. So what does the social fabric look like in five years if that continues?

Social Cohesion In A Screen Age

32:25

That's top of mind for me. What I try to urge people to be thinking about in their own lives personally, just for each of us as individuals- is what is the level of social cohesion in our lives? Yeah. How many friends do you-- are you active with? How many people do you talk to on a regular basis? How much do you get out interacting directly with humans? I would be classified as an introvert, and I know I need to work a little harder to go out and do those things. And I'm lucky because I get invited to do, lots of talks and consulting around the world. So that kind of pulls me to do those things. But in the age of AI, we have to do more. We have to first focus in our own lives how much social cohesion we have, and we have to understand that a lot of the ways we used to have social interactions in the past, the technology can insulate us from. We've got-- in the US, we have, deep trends towards having fewer kids towards less membership in institutions like churches, towards less in-person interactions lot of online learning. And each time we do that, it's really important to think of this as a balance in our lives. Because with more social cohesion, with more interaction with humans, especially in the communities like where we live, then the greater society, the greater strength societies have. And the more we are individuals and we are less involved in interacting with others, and the more we use the tools, especially to interpolate our interactions with others or to make decisions related to others, then that, that reduces social cohesion. And so that's just the picture I want people to have is, look, we want-- we all want countries, societies where we've got these strong connections to each other. And then in our own lives, just look, we have to look at how much time are we spending on that screen? And maybe just a little less and, but not just less screen time. That's what I tell parents all the time. It's not about telling the kid less screen time. It's I want you to do more going out and being hopefully a free-range kid or at least, interacting with others and playing games with others and that sort of thing. So and you, so you get hooked- Yeah on how fun that is. And it's the same thing for adults. Yeah. Yeah. Just getting outside and touching grass as we like to say. Yeah. Or, or- What about- Or humans, yeah. Yeah. Just be a human. Inappropriate, only inappropriate ways. Yeah think about this a lot because my son plays soccer, and he has a coach that's from Brazil. And when you look at soccer and you look at the, how different countries play and their ethos towards soccer, right? Now Brazilians are so good because they just... It's not organized play, it's just organic play. They go out and they play all the time. They're playing in the backyard, they're playing in parking lots, and it becomes like a musical composition where the United States it's all organized play and it's about strength and what I'm finding is there's this very interesting movement, especially in high school on down of it's organized, but it's encouraging people to get into organized free play. Yeah. I'm seeing huge upticks in things like run clubs, dance clubs cell phone-less schools. A lot of... I, my son has structured soccer practice, but he also has two unstructured soccer practices, which is just, there's no coaching, it's just go. And so I think people are starting to understand the value of that unstructuredness and learning just the joy of play or the joy of being together, the joy of being human. I feel like I'm seeing that rise a lot, and there's something that's really magical about it. I don't think you can substitute anything in the flesh in real life. I don't, and I don't know exactly what that magic is. I like to think it's a little woo. But I am also feeling like we're starting to see some rise in that as well. I certainly hope so. So I just finished a lecture tour in Brazil. Oh, hi. All right. There you go. This is my fifth time flying into São Paulo in just the past year. Okay. So I'm a very big fan of the culture. And so here are some of the things that are just wonderful to have. It's wonderful to have multi-generational families- living under the same roof. Not everybody can do that. It's wonderful to have some kind of play activities that you're encouraged to do from very young. Brazil has, is one a- one approach. The educa- the the learning system in Finland the s- schools all are play-based for the first three to four years that a kid goes to school. So the more we're helping kids to be kids early on, and learning the skills of interacting with each other, not... We don't always get along with each other. I know that's, for the parent of a seven-year-old that's probably a new memo. But we d- we have these frictions with humans get in interacting with each other, and we're to learn. Yeah. And that's what all that social emotional learning stuff is about. What I would hope then is, yes, more and more because we thrive on social signals. We thrive on recognition, we thrive on conne- authentic connection with other people, and we have to also thrive where there are frictions. We have to-- The more we can make those heterogeneous gatherings, not just homogenous ones where everybody looks like me, but they it's comes from different perspectives or different backgrounds and then that's what we want as societies because we really want that kind of interaction, and then we want to always over-index on what connects us. Yeah. That's very fair.

Skills Based Orgs And Talent Flow

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Yeah. I wanna flip to like what that means in an organization you've talked about moving from rigid hierarchies more towards access to talent, and I'm curious about what that actually looks like in practice. So there's a couple of things that if we could wave a magic wand and we could have organizations be very human-centric. That is to structure work and the interactions between people in work in ways that really work for the majority of humans, is there's a couple of things that you would want. And there's organizations all around the world that are doing different parts of this playbook. So first thing is that the organization's heavily indexed on what I call a degree of membership. So how much of a connection do people feel to the purpose of the organization, what they're doing, to each other? And so that degree of membership is you might feel 1% membership with your organization, which means you're just about ready to walk out the door. You might feel 100%, 110%, I'm all in. This is where I need to be. And what we need is the mindset within organizations that we want to try to increase this. Second is that depending upon whose statistics you look at, either the number one or number two reason that people leave jobs is because of their... I don't use the word manager or supervisor. I call that a team guide, but the person who leads your team. Yeah. And if there's frictions there and it's not great then that's a really high reason for you to be looking for new work. So the organizations that heavily index on the training for that person to help them to know how to lead and to helping people within a team to know how to lead as well, all the, that investment is really important, or else you don't get a flexible organization because then you s- people stay locked in a hierarchy. Third, you have to have this mindset that you're trying to help people develop as humans. And so how do they know their own skills? How do they know what they're good at, what they love doing, kinds of problems they like to solve? And then how can you continually try to make the kind of framework inside the organization so they can be doing that kind of work? So that, what ends up happening then is some organizations become what are called increasingly skills-based organizations, so they know they've got databases to understand people's skills. They often put in project marketplaces- Yeah so that when a person who leads a team needs somebody, they can find the skills in- inside the organization or outside the organization. ChatGPT just announced a a, OpenAI just announced a partnership with Upwork the gig work platform, where you can literally go into ChatGPT and describe a project And then the software will look on Upwork's database and give you the team of tomorrow, like the perfect skill set for something. So now think of that in every organization. And think of the same thing from the ind- individual side, where they would be able to see those opportunities, especially in larger organizations. That's what the future may hold, is that more organizations become more fluid like that, and they become... They-- What they need is a flow of human talent, people that can continually solve new problems. And what individuals need is to continually have optionality, is to understand more about their own skills and then be able to solve the kinds of problems that they most like to. And and so a lot of organizations already are starting to experiment with these types of things. And the opportunity is to create more flexible organizations where you just are able to continually bring in, especially young people. We need to make sure that this really works for young people through apprenticeships and mentorships. But where they're able to do more project-based work, and they're able to be focusing on generating output so they can point to the things that they've accomplished and developing new skills as rapidly as possible. Who do you think is doing this really well? Because I've been in this space for my entire career. We've been talking about things like job marketplaces since 2019. Yeah. The needing manager development and having great managers and coaches is something every organization is always working on, and I'm curious about who you think is doing this really well. Yeah.

Unbossing And Other Playbooks

41:34

So there's a couple facets to it, and I'll just point to some of the different kinds of structures. So as I think I was saying, so that you've got this business model that sort of defines what the organization does, and the operating model is: how do you organize humans? How do you leverage technology? Yeah. How do you leverage the assets of the organization? And there... So when it comes to focusing on being a learning culture and changing the role of the traditional manager, I'd have to point to Novartis the pharma company, and I think it's 80,000 employees now. And they have two practices that I always point to. The first is they strongly encourage everybody throughout the organization to talk about the latest course that they took. It's all about what are you learning. And then once a year, they have what's called Curiosity Month, and they teach courses to each other. Might be in cooking, might be in something related to chemistry. But it's-- the whole idea is to build this fabric of connection between people and to learn from each other. And then they also have a practice called unbossing. And even senior managers within the organization, when they walk into a meeting, they often will begin by saying: How can we unboss this meeting? And what that means is, how can I not be the person who comes up with all the decisions? You come up with the decisions. You solve the problems, and then I'm here to support you. I'm here to find you the resources. I'm here to remove roadblocks if you need other parts of the organization to help you. But you have to change the calculus by which humans are working together and embrace this much more flexible approach. And then the mindset that is behind more project-based work is is typically to think of the ev- every skill within the organization as being an enterprise resource. Companies like Google actually don't hire in certain work roles, a specific, for a specific job. So if you're hired as a programmer at Google, for instance, you go through the same training program that every other programmer goes through. And whether you went to a code camp or Carnegie Mellon, you're gonna go through the same training. And then when you come out of that, you date around. You go to different groups to find the c- where the connections are. And and it's a, that is a mutual decision. Do I think it's, it is, it's very much like dating. Do you, do I think you're a good match? Do you think I'm a good match? And so you think of these as practices that can be done at scale inside organizations, it's harder because you've got to train that team guide. You've got to train the former manager or supervisor to deal with ambiguity, to be able to understand that they've got to continually be developing skill sets, to be thinking more like a coach than somebody who is in command and control. And so that's a, that's an investment. Yeah but I'm encouraged to see more organizations that are s- starting to embrace more of this mindset. For sure. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. I only have two questions for you.

No Human Left Behind In Practice

44:26

Okay. What responsibility, Francesca and I are constantly talking about this with the changes that are coming about with AI layoffs, and we see them k- you know- Yeah when we think about the responsibility organizations have in society right now. What responsibility- Yeah do you think companies have right now in this moment? So first off, again, just the AI layoffs it's very difficult to tease this out of the market data because it's a lot of tech companies are the ones that are citing the use of the tools, but they're also marketing tools to-- that kind of sounds more like layoffs are marketing. Is that how it works? Buy my products 'cause it'll save money? So it's hard to tease out of the data. What you do find is more of this sort of initial baselining of companies decided they don't need as many young people, or they don't need as many people in entry-level work because they feel like they can replicate a lot of the work with the tools. So when you say responsibility I would say organizations that are very shareholder-driven, the understandable pressure that a CEO feels is to reduce headcount. And what I urge people who lead in, especially large organizations, but any shareholder-driven company, it takes courage to say, "Look, what has happened over and over again is companies have gotten these new technologies, they laid off a whole bunch of people, everybody, including their competitors, has access to all the same technologies, and within three or four years, everybody's got access to the internet, everybody's got web servers, everybody, all wave after wave of te- everybody's got cloud computing, and then now everybody's got the AI tool set." You are going to regret that you got rid of some people who really understood your customers or really understood the processes in your organization, and now the tools give this baseline, lifts all boats. And so that's what I encourage from a responsibility standpoint. Say, look, it takes courage to go back to your board, to go back to your shareholders and say, "Look, we are making this investment because we know we can be more competitive, or we know that we can provide more value to our customers, and we are going to dedicate ourselves to doing that in the most effective way we possibly can." What are you most hopeful for? I call myself a cautious optimist. So I've been accused of believing that people will continue to make human-centric decisions. But one of the reasons that I end my book "The Next Rules of Work," the final line in it is, "No human left behind." And the reason I end that way is I want people to understand that we all make decisions, and we're making decisions that we often don't think have ripple effects in society, but they do. They do. We're very responsible. And and so the more that I see examples of people all around the world who are saying wait a minute. No, we actually can make better, more human-centric dec- decisions. We actually can give people the tool set so they can solve new problems and create new value." I'm just encouraged by more and more of those stories and signs. And then I'm also encouraged because I'm starting to see educational institutions that are starting to get the memo, that this is a time and opportunity to be able to jettison those industrial era processes, and instead to empower lifelong learning and lifelong work with this unique tool set, but continually by reinforcing interactions with humans. And I see there's plenty of great examples around the world where educational institutions are transforming themselves as well. Awesome. Thank you. I appreciate you, Gary. All right. Always great to talk to you two.

Closing And Newsletter Invite

Speaker 6 48:13

Thanks for joining us today. Music was by Pink Zebra. This episode was produced, recorded, and edited by yours truly, Francesca and I of "Your Work Friends." And we're an indie pod, folks. We drop new episodes each week on Tuesday, so please

Speaker 7 48:30

come back to check them out. Subscribe on the platform of your choice, and if you want one big meaty insight about work every single month, subscribe to our newsletter on yourworkfriends.com. Bye, friends.

Speaker 6 48:41

Bye,

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friends.