Would you prefer your people to be safe or strong?

Jonny is eight. In 2050 he will be 32. What do you think he should be learning at school to prepare him for the 2050 job market?

In his latest book “21 Lessons for the 21st Century”, which I read over Christmas, Yuval Noah Harari paints a scary picture of the future and claims it’s impossible to predict what ‘jobs’ will look like in 2050, what with AI, algorithms and other changes brought about by infotech and biotech. In a short chapter on Education he concludes that children need to be taught the four C’s: Critical thinking, Communication, Collaboration and Creativity.

I’m thinking ‘yes, kids, 2050, I agree’. Though what about grown-ups now?’ When I was at school I can’t remember being educated in Harari’s Four C’s nor in any one of them and not during my degree nor through my professional qualifications. I got into ‘management’ without learning much about critical thinking, communication, collaboration or creativity. I bet I’m representative of the grown-ups currently running organisations and managing people. Maybe we grown-ups need to think about the Four C’s right now.

Creativity was beaten out of me by the constant pressure of tasks to hit imminent deadlines and that was before emails were invented. I’m glad to say I have recovered. Stress of imminent deadlines is now tenfold and then there’s the pressure for compliance in our risk averse and ‘disaster at any moment’ organisational life. Compliance kills creativity.

Managers, engineers, professionals need critical thinking to sift a deluge of information: mountains of collected data, KPI’s, “fake news”, social media, and then make sense of it as part of contractual and legal requirements to decide on their course of action.

Much of what I do as a leadership team coach involves facilitating the flow of communication within and around the team I am working with; it’s not that they can’t do it themselves (some can, some can’t), it’s more like they are so busy that communication is often the last thing, if at all, they plan for and as an outsider I see nodes and links that they don’t.

And that leaves collaboration. It seems everyone is now talking about collaboration as if it’s something they are doing. Few can tell me how. I ask: “how are you collaborating?”

“Well, we are working together”

“Yes but how?”

“Err, we get along, we listen to each other and adopt the right behaviours”

“What are the right behaviours?”

“Yeh, we are having a workshop next month to work them out”

I’m now thinking, it’s too big a job to train up all the grown-ups in Harari’s Four C’s, best keep going facilitating those that see the need.

Latest news. I’m reading “12 Rules for Life” by Jordan Peterson. Early on he asks a great question of parents – ‘would you prefer you kids to be safe or strong’. I think that’s also a great question for grown-ups, leaders and managers. Would you prefer your people to be safe or strong?