CONTINUOUS LEARNING AND THE CORPORATION
Long flights are useful for clearing inboxes, a task made much more palatable if you think of it a bit like panning for gold. Amid the deluge of not-that-important or -interesting stuff, you occasionally find a gem that sparks a thought.
One of those came today in the form of this paragraph in Rudy de Waele’s eponymous newsletter. He writes:
As corporations are influencing politics on a large scale, business leaders of tomorrow will have to take more responsibility for society. They will have to reflect strong human values for customers and citizens to identify with, to avoid them to stop buying their products. Strong leaders will have to come up with a vision and a plan how to integrate lifelong learning, for example, as an enjoyable experience, for people affected by technological unemployment.
De Waele writes about the intersection of technology and society, something about which I care deeply and write and speak about frequently. Here, he was making the case that as automation, virtualization, and tech-enabled monitoring impact the number and nature of jobs, “We’re witnessing every day the collapse of secure pillars of our society.”
The answer, he seems to assert, is that companies need to step up to shore up those pillars.
After snorting a bit of my airline soda water as I read the first sentence, I thought, “Well, that’ll never happen.” Citizens United imbued corporations with the authority and rights of people, yet somehow, corporations aren’t expected to act like people, nor are they held to the moral standards that society might impose on, say, you or the neighbor next door. Corporations get many of the benefits of personhood without much expectation that they act like (decent) people.
Absolutely, society must demand that corporations — by which I mean their leaders — act in ways that “reflect strong human values” not only so that they can retain their customers, but so that they also retain the rights and privileges that come from being a “person” in society.
De Waele example is equally intriguing in that it seems to conjoin several ideas. To repeat:
Strong leaders will have to come up with a vision and a plan how to integrate lifelong learning, for example, as an enjoyable experience, for people affected by technological unemployment.
His initial assertion could not be more important, as we face a future of work and employment in which a worker’s most critical skill is the ability to rapidly learn and relearn. Yet De Waele also seems to be saying that “lifelong learning” be delivered to employees as an “enjoyable” perk or as a consolation prize to those who lose their jobs to automation.
In fact, continuous learning has a much more central role in the future of business, vital not just to retention but to business productivity itself. In work under way with collaborator Heather McGowan, we posit that educational and corporate institutions must fundamentally rebuild their mental maps of the learning-to-work paradigm deeply embedded in today’s culture. In that model, young people study to gain expertise leading to increasing specialization. Once employed, that education supports a career spanning decades until retirement. This is a “learn to work” model that assumes distinct and serial phases in which one learns, contributes, and retires. In this model, historically, a single dose of education was sufficient for an entire career.
That paradigm fails at the hands of today’s rapid technology development and adoption, profit-centric business priorities, and dramatic geo-political and demographic shifts. In its place comes a new model, one in which we “work to learn.”
In this new model, workers continually adapt to changing conditions, new technologies, shifts in job requirements. They will become adept at questioning what they have known in order to unlearn old ways and create new knowledge sets around emerging requirements. Think of banking. For some, even complex financial transactions no longer require a bank or even physical currency. As the mental models and contextual references for this work shifts and evolves, so to must the workforce that delivers that value.
In this adaptive environment, then, workforce development is no longer a discretionary expense; It is the central research and development effort necessary for organizations to remain relevant and continue to deliver value to the market. Continual learning, then, is a business imperative and a cost of doing business.
Deloitte’s John Hagel calls the corporation’s ability to deliver continuous learning “scalable learning.” Scalable learning is the ability to create new knowledge, not transfer knowledge that already exists. Hagel asserts that scalable learning is at odds with scalable efficiency, the mantra of many company builders, investors, and leaders.
We would argue that there is no enduring efficiency in a workforce that is unable to adapt to rapidly changing paradigms, and that rapid change is the single defining characteristic of the future of work.
“Lifelong learning,” then, isn’t simply a soft-landing for displaced workers; it is an essential characteristic, dare we say the lifeblood, of resilient, adaptable, and enduring companies.
Chris Shipley and Heather McGowan write, speak, and consult on the future of work and learning. Learn more at futureislearning.com.
