Change resilience: the meta skillset of the automation age?
Sally McNamara, development partner at FORWARD — The RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation — writing with director Peter Thomas and development partners Pete Cohen, Inder Singh, Kate Spencer and Courtney Guilliart on the link between change resilience capacity and effective learning.
Given the last two years or so, it’s easy to feel that we don’t know what’s coming next.
But one thing we do know: the skills we need to participate in the world of work are changing. And this means that there is a skillset we all need to master: the ability to adapt to change.
As technology accelerates and takes over more routine and predictable tasks, the work required of humans is becoming more demanding requiring us to expend more cognitive effort. Perhaps it’s time that we put more of that effort into learning how to deal with change — and so be able to better deal with the stresses that all change inevitably creates.
Regardless of your job or industry, navigating complexity and uncertainty in your work requires a higher level of change resilience — the ability to effectively self-regulate stress and anxiety in order to provide a point of greater stability for learning and growth.
There seems to be a huge emphasis right now on learning about what is new and exciting — whether that’s AI, Web3.0, or NFTs or general digital capability — and less on how to establish the solid underlying foundation from which to learn and grow. Creating long lists of new skills to master may be counterproductive if a significant percentage of the population is too fatigued, stressed or anxious to actually learn them.
Change, after all — even positive change, such as an investment in up-skilling which leads to a higher paid job — requires energy.
Let’s be real, change can be messy
One well-known model for understanding the spectrum of emotional and social responses to change is the Kübler-Ross Change Curve®, developed from Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ work on grief in On Death and Dying in 1969.
The stages in the model were not intended to be necessarily linear, but rather to capture the full range of emotional states people can move through in adapting to change.
Using the model we can begin to understand the increased cognitive load that we experience when adapting to change, and how with every gain through change, there is also a necessary loss to accept. Of course, every person will have an individual response and have a different timeframe in adapting to change. This means that self-awareness is an essential part of building change capacity.
Our brains are highly adaptable…and also limited
There have been many findings from neuroscience that support the idea that we are able to adapt. The concept of neuroplasticity, for example, provides a corrective to previous assumptions that our brains are hard-wired and our capacities fixed by adulthood. It’s founded on the evidence of the ability of our nervous systems to change the structure, functions, or connections of the neurons in our brains in response to stimuli. An understanding of neuroplasticity tells us why, for example, when you practice something consistently, like learning how to play a musical instrument, you get better: you rewire your brain based on experience. If you perform a task or recall some information, it causes connected neurons to activate and strengthens the connections between those neurons. Practice makes permanent.
But now, our brains have to deal with a huge volume of information — especially given the amount of information that flows from digital channels — and it’s not what our brains were designed for. As neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin put it in The Organized Mind: “Our brains evolved to focus on one thing at a time”. Technology makes it almost impossible to focus like this, meaning our attention is fragmented — leading to a sense of overwhelm and not being able to keep up. To learn effectively in the age of fragmented attention we need to learn new skills to counter distraction.
Why do we need change resilience skills now more than ever?
Our ability to adapt is nothing new: after all, we’ve adapted from the agricultural age to the industrial age and now the digital age. What is new is the accelerating pace of change.
The pandemic has only exacerbated uncertainty and complexity, leading to collective burnout for many people. Our need now is to be able to process, both emotionally and cognitively, the upheavals so we can move forward with confidence.
A lot of attention has been given (and rightly so) to navigating adversity, setback and challenge. But far less attention has been given to helping people build their capacity to respond and adjust to the change, novelty, variability and uncertainty we face each and every day. Additionally, mental health and wellbeing tend to be viewed through the lens of dysfunction — rather than the reality, which is that ups and downs are inevitable. Making the normal abnormal is itself a cause of stress and isolation for many people.
We are also experiencing a breakdown of traditional organisational boundaries, which for many people provide a source of comfort and familiarity. Greater autonomy, more flexibility and being held more accountable for outcomes all require us to have a greater degree of self-regulation than ever before.
And given we are all having to learn, all the time, we need the emotional and cognitive capacity to do so. Research suggests that rapidly changing circumstances, worry and anxiety impair our ability to learn and a stronger baseline of change resilience can lead to more effective learning of new skills.
What are the skills of change resilience?
There are many potential sub-skills that collectively make up ‘change resilience’, some of which we are exploring at FORWARD alongside our work in the effective learning of job-based skills:
- self-awareness
- self-compassion
- emotional regulation
- stress recognition and recovery
- cognitive agility
- perspective
- focus
- vulnerability
- empathy
- network-building
Our theory is that a strong foundation of change resilience skills is an enabler of the more effective acquisition of other skills — and that there may be deeper relationships between change resilience and other skills than first appears. This foundation of change resilience is likely to have a multiplier effect — to support not just skills acquisition but also broader health and wellbeing outcomes.
We’re working to map the detailed structure of change resilience, how it can be effectively developed, and what the relationship is with skills — especially the skills we will need in the future.
Follow our story as we explore change resilience skills and their relationship to the upskilling and reskilling challenges that we all face.
We are welcoming perspectives from organisations to inform a series of outputs on the focus area of: “People, Change and Durable Skills”, — contact sally.mcnamara@rmit.edu.au if you’d like to share your perspective.
FORWARD is the RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation.
Our role is to build an innovative learning ecosystem at scale, create new collaborative applied research and invent next-generation skills solutions that will catalyse workforce development in the future-oriented industries crucial to Victoria’s economic renewal.
We lead collaborative applied research on future skills and workforce transformation from within RMIT’s College of Vocational Education, building and scaling the evidence and practice base to support Victorian workforce planning and delivery and acting as a test lab for future skills to develop and pilot new approaches to skills training and education through digital transformation and pedagogical innovation.
We leverage RMIT’s multi-sector advantage to translate research insights into identifying workforce requirements and the co-design of practice-based approaches with industry.
Contact us at forward@rmit.edu.au
