Day 9 | Foresight

From 10:00 am to 1:00 pm Dubai local time today was the most energized and engaged I've felt in a while. Two things I enjoy professionally are strategic thinking and trying to solve really hard problems. As the day-to-day operator of a small health coaching business, I have significant responsibility for the impact that I'm having on the lives of both my team and our members. But intellectually, my role lacks the type of stimulation that I thrive upon. Engaging in a three-hour workshop with Raffaele Braschi, leader of the Organization practice at McKinsey & Company, had no such shortage of intellectual stimulation.

The "future of work" is a buzzword that seems to be gaining more steam by the hour. Over the past few years, it's been a somewhat amorphous concept as everyone tries to get their heads around what the future will look like. Over the past 12-18 months, it feels like there's been a lot more tangible studies, perspectives, and recommendations for those organizations that are willing to listen. McKinsey's study of 46 countries and 800 jobs yielded fascinating results. They anticipate that 30% of jobs will be impacted by automation--though only 1% fully automatable, the rest partial--which will lead to a reduction in somewhere between 400 and 800 million jobs. McKinsey is bullish on these jobs being recaptured through (1) social trends (i.e. needing more home care workers for an aging population and dual income families); (2) productivity gains that will increase free time that people will need to fill with leisure activities, creating more jobs; and (3) new jobs that we don't yet know exist. It'll be imperative, however, that companies actively in engage in upskilling, reskilling, and outskilling workers to ensure that the skills exist for these jobs to be recaptured and to avoid a spike in unemployment that could turn into a vicious cycle.

The conversation shifted to how Strategic HR Leaders should navigate these realities. HR Leaders will need to understand the company strategy, map skills, determine where to find (or build) those skills, and align the organization to have its HIPOs in Critical Roles (the 2% of roles that are responsible for 50-60% of strategic value. I had a side conversation with Dr. Heba Makram, HR Transformation Leader at Emirates Airlines--a progressive organization in the region--about how much of this work Emirates is doing currently. She responded—somewhat despondently--that most of her time is tied up with incrementalism (despite being the lead for HR Transformation) and while she's pushing to get to this type of work, it's been a struggle. Organizations that have the foresight to prioritize planning for the future of work and the role that automation will play (and take the time to reskill their employees appropriately) will likely have an inordinate share of future success. It's going to be both fun & scary to watch it unfold.