Embracing the Future of Work – AI and Soft Skills for Competitive Advantage
From knowledge to skill, the power of AI-driven learning experiences
Soft skill simulations are the key to developing leadership and teamwork skills to combat the tsunami of change in our lived experience.
Why?
Because you can’t learn skills from slide decks. Period.
Plus, you will need to understand and have an in-depth experience of using AI tools to support you in your team.
Learning to ask the right questions and solving problems, adapting to new situations, means leveraging AI to enhance a drive high-performance delivery across all roles… and across all sectors.
Let’s add some fuel to the fire:
Soft skills are missing in action.
What I mean is that the soft skills gap is deep and profound in almost all organizations. Primarily because the domination of hard skills and technocracy maintains its power even in the face of the evidence that changing behavior can dramatically improve your chances of survival as a team and organization.
So, how can you position soft skills in such a way that people will hurry to adopt and implement continuous upskilling?
By linking it to AI.
Sorry?
By setting the context of simulations — the video game content — in such a way that AI becomes an integral part of the experience.
How do you do that?
Well, we have added AI to CinQ, our five-person simulation, in such a way that it becomes your sixth teammate.
This means that ODILE — the name of our in-game AI — is there in each player’s UI, ready to answer questions and help you navigate the numerous challenges the game has to offer.
You can ask ODILE about the simulation, about how you can solve problems, what you should do, how you should do it… From team strategy to basic tactics, the AI will support all the team members in their pursuit of beating the simulation.
Your skills quotient is enhanced by using ODILE to speed up planning and offer alternative ways of thinking and information analysis that will replicate how you will need to do this in the work environment.
Skills transfer from the in-game experience is immediate: there is no forgetting the slide deck list of dos and don’ts after two days, because you have learned it by testing yourself and forged the new set of skills through repeatedly trying and failing. There is no video-and-questionnaire-type learning here: as a team, you have to solve the communication and collaboration problems together, or you fail and pick yourselves up to get at it again.
This is the difference between knowing something, and a skill; you can apply a skill immediately, it immediately benefits you and your team, and as such, your organization.
Our thinking in terms of using AI to grow our simulation means that we are piggybacking soft skills onto one of the hottest subjects and key areas that keep CEOs and their executive teams up at night.
If it’s not on your mind, it should be.
It’s not about how many jobs will AI replace, but how you can use AI to enhance and grow your team’s skill sets in such a way that AI sits at the table with you and your team. Not only that, but it’s your sixth teammate, one who grows with you — and, equally, you grow with it. You need soft skills to drive AI. Period.
Part of getting your driver’s license for using and implementing AI across teams should be your soft-skills test, because without it… well, let’s say you and your team will be handicapped now and in the future.
A key difference between soft skills and knowledge is how information expertise is acquired very differently from leadership and teamwork skills. Soft skills are a capacity that requires time, blood, sweat, and tears, to build and develop. It doesn’t come easy, and requires constant training to grow and achieve high levels of performance.
So either invest in soft skills and AI-simulations for your teams, or you will be left behind at the starting line by others that are already moving forward.
The stark truth here is that this is actually not a choice at all: it’s about survival.
As my American cousins are fond of saying, it’s about embracing the “suck”: you have to embrace the current discomfort for future success.
Rock and roll.
DISCLAIMER: This article was written by a human.
