Strengthening Collaboration and Leveraging New Technologies with Dr. John Boudreau

foreign welcome to the future of teamwork podcast my name is Dane grudenwald CEO of huddles free group and today joining me from Santa Fe New Mexico we've got Dr John Boudreau John's got uh some cool work that he's doing around the future of work disaggregation of work and he's got a title of senior research scientist at the Center for Effective organizations which is part of University of Southern California so uh welcome to the show John thank you Dane well done on that introduction so thanks yeah it was a mouthful as you said um I bet uh it was exciting just connecting a little bit before we pressed record here today to talk about how you know you should really be retired by now but you're in this you're in this realm of exploration a possibility that that really has roots you know going back earlier into your life experiences with your father's uh profession so maybe you could share a little bit with with the listeners about how you came to be doing this really important and impactful work oh I'm happy to Dean thanks for the opportunity and let me think up at the top of the hour uh Alicia who has been so helpful with background support and Kevin Oaks my good friend colleague who apparently had the uh idea to recommend me so thanks very much to all all of you um and so yes I stand here in Santa Fe in my Santa Fe New Mexico office having retired my professorship at the University of Southern California that was a 15-year professorship and uh uh and sort of director of research for the Center for Effective organizations with many good colleagues like Ed Lawler Sue Mormon Alec Levinson Chris Worley Etc and before that I was at Cornell University for 22 years um uh kind of uh one of the top places in the world to train future human resource leaders an entire School devoted to Industrial and Labor Relations as they call it uh primarily the work relationship so I've had a very Charmed Life Dane with with Mentor after mentor and amazing student after amazing student and I get a chance to interact with folks like you who are brilliant and hopefully make a humble contribution to some of that debate so it's a pleasure to be here and you know your question about how did that get here is is an interesting one to me if you had asked me that question before about 2003 and remember I started at Cornell in 1981 and got interested in this field probably in about 1975. and I would have told you you know I don't know I went to business school and I read all these books and articles about the Japanese management system in the 70s and giving Frontline workers more agency and more voice and it just intrigued me um and got great advice to go get an MBA at Purdue University and then on and that was on the way to the PHD at Purdue uh so it would have been a fairly typical you know Cornell gave me a job offer to be honest it was such a great institution that I was pretty sure I'd wash out well before tenure and as it happened I forgot I had enough talent to actually get tenure there and eventually full Professor with a with a center um so about 2003 I was actually working with the Navy I was teaching as part of an Executive MBA program for captains and commanders people who command carriers and uh squadrons and that kind of thing great fun and I had a Handler Admiral Phil Quast uh who had been all over the Navy in his career and knew a thing or two about asking good questions so I did my first seminar and I called my father because my father had been in the Navy and said hey I'm teaching the captains and commanders of ships like you were on came back into the bar on over a Bearfield said tell me again when I got into this and I said you know Phil I'm reminded of a story about my dad my dad was a worker in the 60s for IBM and in the 60s many of you will recall those black and white photos of a computer that filled a room with tape drives on their wall and blinking lights everywhere in a console in the middle well my father and his team were the people who fixed those computers and Dane as you as you observed there were legends that a computer could go down because of an actual insect in the wiring now called a bug and that may be the origin of the word bug well my dad was a bug fixer with his team so Friday night comes along he's putting his tie on at eight or nine PM because he's off to fix the computer and we uh he says do you want to come with me and I say sure so we get in the car and we start driving way out in the desert think Hotel California and after a drive about a half hour in the dark we finally see a light in the distance we go through a checkpoint and we're in a cinder block building filled with a computer a computer that happens to track missiles at the White Sands Missile Range my dad and his team pull up the floor boards pull down the wall boards pull down the ceiling boards and it is nothing but wires and they go to work with their wire testers and they work online they finally fix it so we're driving home Sun's Rising very thoughtful moment I said dad you like your job and he said John let me make clear IBM is an amazing wonderful company I'll have a full pension medical benefits your mom is taken care of as you know John they have Christmas parties for the kids every year he said it's an amazing company with amazing leadership and he said there's just one thing and I said what's that he said I just wish that in IBM's policies they knew how much it would mean if our supervisor without was authorized to take our team out to dinner with our wives when we complete a big repair job like the one we just did in the same way that the sales team is authorized to take their people out for dinner with their wives when they beat the quota and it just stuck with me that there are so many instances where these Frontline workers who we now know as Heroes I hope that stays are if they just have a little more voice if someone just knew a little bit more about what would make for a great work experience that things might change for them and so in my mind Dane I like to think that maybe an idea I write or a comment that I make or a course I teach or an executive I work with in a small humble way those people who do brilliant work may make the work experience a little better for someone like my dad yeah that's a great it's a great uh Genesis story and I think you're absolutely right which is we're living in this time uh where things are changing through technology socially the the pandemic and just one small sound bite one small story could encourage a team leader a functional manager uh executive of a small business to to kind of venture out try something different and have huge impact because we're living through this uh Talent shortage um there's a lot of change in the market and I think that that teams and the companies that that go that step further particularly for some of these undeced workers that tend to get overlooked could could really reap huge rewards for their people for their customers shareholders for everyone yeah I absolutely agree that's neat so um talking about Frontline workers I know you were sharing beforehand that that you are seeing some evidence out there I heard a story that uh CVS at some point time started offering some of their workers up in the Northeast the opportunity to schedule and go and work in a store down in Florida in the winter months so that's one way that you can take someone who's often on the shop floor and give them some flexibility some agency some voice you know are there other sort of key examples that that you've seen through your research that that kind of light up a bit of a spark of inspiration yes in fact there are a great many of them and I'll let me give one more shout out to my good colleague and friend Robin Jason thawson who's now a principal at Mercer Robin and I have written the last five books together along with David creelman and across those books I think we see a number of themes the you know one book was kind of about the principles of transformative HR uh that and then there was a book about workers beyond the employment contract get Workers contractors Etc then a book on Automation and now the latest book work without jobs uh which is about deconstructing work into its elements and and workers into their elements and matching those rather than matching it to job and job holder level so across all of those one of the themes that comes up is just how creative and uh work design can be when it's approached as an experiment when it's approached as something we apply agile design principles in the same way that we might uh we might apply agile design to a product or software the idea of learning from the users the idea of Perpetual upgrading uh just that you know like your every technology you own is perpetually Obsolete and perpetually new because it's being upgraded almost constantly and I like to think about work that way and Frontline where it's true for desk workers for sure but Frontline workers we see immense uh developments in scheduling that's often where it starts and with the help of machine learning Ai and algorithmic optimization you can actually have a platform that could offer those workers work in Florida in the winter unheard of in the past but with cloud-rate systems that are all integrated um you know we see evolution in the world of automation one of my favorite examples from our book is when you automate an oil rig means you take the people off and you let robots do the maintenance the people don't go away the people end up in a control room in a safer more climate controlled base and the interesting thing and this runs across so many examples if you have someone who's good at diagnosing what's wrong with the oil rig kind of like my dad and his team with computers that person is no longer stuck on one oil rig you can move them virtually now from rig to rig to rig and you can work on any rig that has a tough problem and so you see that all you see that with bank tellers um a number of my chro colleagues during the pandemic transformed their Frontline store associates as physical store traffic went down with the pandemic online traffic went up yeah well figured out a way to send their folks home with a virtual call center in their home and have them join the call center teams yeah that previously were located in one place so the mind boggles and it will just get more mind-boggling as we continue what with the the Advent of generative Ai and and other feature uh feature developments yeah I I agree I think uh remote control rooms virtual call centers they they have huge leverage for for a lot of people that have often been uh overlooked because they had to work in a physical location because of the the tools that they were using so uh that's a great that's a great example great story and it it Sparks in my mind this concept of not only can Bob or Jenny or whoever it might be do more of the work they're great at which is which is a big benefit of this disaggregation of of tasks and ability to to serve multiple sites at once but it's got to have a massive uh knowledge transfer training impact too I would imagine just just intrigued like when you are seeing the use of technology to allow someone to kind of jump in and out of multiple operating environments virtual or physical um how are some of those customers perhaps embracing the training opportunity the knowledge transfer that that creates it's an interesting one I suppose one of the most uh um one of the most Vivid examples of knowledge transfer I think is when you have an expert who's available virtually through augmented reality and it's it's only one but it's kind of a good extreme one where the export can literally look through the goggles whether it's a physician whether it's a repair person um you know and they can see what the person in the field sees what the physical person sees what that does is it allows you to probably move the worst of your repair people and I don't mean that in a pejorative way I just mean there is a distribution maybe based on experience or whatever and you're going to have people that are it's their first time and you know they get better I guess if they got a hundred tries at that repair and now with the goggles on yeah who's done it a thousand times who can not only say do this like an instruction manual but can explain to them why in real time in the flow of work yeah and and I think if we start their day and we can work backwards to more traditional kinds of knowledge transfer um I I know a number of startups that are working on kind of on the concept that generative AI maybe the gateway to capturing much of the knowledge in a team or in an organization and making it accessible in a conversational way so it's uh you know again the development the knowledge transfer idea what do we mean by knowledge uh how you know could we actually tap the quote-unquote knowledge of all the workers that we have access to or that that either work for us or are in contract I I think about my dad and I haven't thought of this before but in today's world he might very well have almost a direct voice to someone who could change the policy yeah part of the systems we have today I agree and and you used an interesting word that I've not heard referenced um so you said to make this knowledge transfer accessible in a conversational way so could you expand a little bit more on what a conversational way is I think it's uh you know some some of my colleagues a number of them really have have coined the terms of in the flow of work that's been around for a while the idea that um we not on everything but on many things we will learn best when we're in the moment and we're trying to figure something out or we have it right in front of us and that's the moment where our bodies our minds are really ready to learn and um and frequently moment hasn't contained much learning opportunity in it you were so busy trying to get things done that you really didn't have time to learn learning happened in a training course or something like that and so that notion of I guess conversation is is the right word that you can be having a conversation with a knowledge holder at that moment where you can really use the knowledge I I suppose if we extend it Dane we see this in a lot of the um early stage and even now very mature organ companies that offer what we might call nudges to leaders et cetera where you you know you get a ping you know obviously Microsoft systems work day systems all the big ones you get a ping that says hey you haven't checked in with this team member for one and by the way I've realized this team member has been working long hours lately you might want to talk about that I mean it's just amazing um what how how the the this kind of knowledge can be provided exactly in the moment when someone needs it yeah no that that makes a lot more sense and actually we've got a Founder series that we've just recently shot with a few different Founders and um all three of them with their you know emerging new technologies are using that nudge concept so when you tie that to conversational access I I totally get it now so thank you for sharing that um and it is it is exciting to think again you said that these people have often been stuck in the flow of work and not been able to learn in that flow because they were taken to a classroom so if this is um a digital access even in a in an operating environment when you're on a machine or something like that if it can be coming in through glasses through a headset on a screen um that's that's opening up so many doors of of opportunity yes it really is that of course the the algorithms that direct the learning to you are getting better and better yeah you know but build algorithmic engines like the ones that show us products you know we're all mystified by how our web feed shows us things we talked about to our spouse last night but haven't typed in yet and I think in the most possible about knowledge being that way that all of the as the system watches us work it will actually begin to be able to make a judge about what it is we might need without a lot of human intervention and if it's anything like my household if my wife's looking at lamps or lampshades then when I go onto my social media feed because our IP address is obviously somehow connected I'm getting lamps too so it's not always I might be getting nudged by something not that I'm looking for on eating but something that one of my team members is looking at so best practice dissemination has got to be interesting in that environment too probably a few glitches here and there but I think those I think that parallel to the marketplace um is where the pick pick whatever search engine you like Amazon is a good example Netflix Google anything that can read can kind of read what you're about and then offer suggestions I know some of the people in AI even a decade ago were saying we're beginning to get to a point where it'll be cheaper for an Amazon a Netflix Etc pick your search engine to send you the product or service and let you refuse it because it's so likely to be what you want so it'll arrive on your doorstep you're lamb that's amazing your wife will say I can't believe this this is just what I was hoping for and there the idea would be that it's a better bet that you'll keep it than that you'll return it because they can be that accurate and imagine if we could be that accurate with things like training and career advice and offering a task or a project or a next job a pathway to a career level that kind of thing went to call a customer when to go and walk over to a a team member's machine and and look at what they're doing or help them with the problem I mean it it really unlocks a lot of the the gaps that are naturally being created through like imperfect information flow yeah it's kind of management by walking around taken to a next level where the cloud becomes the place you walk in a way yeah yeah and you know um one of my questions that we were talking about before we came to the show was not only how do you see the AI changing the workplace but how do companies prepare for those changes so with with that construct that concept it are there particular tools that that you're seeing um companies uh jumping into are there particular roles that they're creating within their organizations to be starting to assess the tools and the business practices that might you know create a bit more awareness to jump on these opportunities as they emerge well I I absolutely do think so Dana let me have a bit of a disclaimer because I know a lot of your listeners are brilliant folks they're operating startups in this area and and all that like I said I have a I don't know if I've said it here yet I have an amazing job which is that I get to talk to brilliant people like you like the people on this podcast they tell me their stories um perhaps I offer a humble idea that may help direct them and then I write all that down in the book and they say boy that child is really smart and I've managed to keep that career going for 40 years so I want to give all all due respect to the folks that are listening and I'll offer my own humble observations um I guess I would say that um and uh let me give one more call out to my colleague David creelman who's also also a co-author we're working on an AI presentation to some HR folks at the doctors of that borders organization where I um I work on a Innovation committee and one of the things that David said as we were working was it may be a bit early to actually jump to the applications and the products themselves there's certainly a real role for vendors and others to play in demonstrating the development however I think the the fundamental mindsets of things like work being perpetually Obsolete and perpetually upgraded the mindset that we approach work as an a constant agile design exercise uh so we're we fail fat we do scrubs we test features and we do it the same rigor that we would with a product you know you don't just throw out the entire product of service you experiment with features and you do it in a way where the risk Rewards likely to be high I'd love to see organizations begin to adapt that perspective to work and then I think you have the environment in which you have to trust and the collaboration of the people that really matter which is the Frontline workers and hopefully their trust in helping you redesign work as things like AI evolve but a quick example and I'll let you get a word in here and Ellen shook the head of HR at Accenture wrote an open letter to her her people her employees I guess for the most part and said we'd like to invite you to help us understand how to automate your job and that and we will one won't guarantee you lifetime employment by hitting means I don't remember precisely the arrangement but the idea was we're going to also then work hard to make you prepared for that automation future um my colleague Ben Schneider and I have developed an instrument to measure the climate for work automation that measures whether workers are afraid whether they believe their supervisors are capable whether rewards are tied to automation Ben Snyder is an icon in the world of things like climate for safety climate for service and has been doing that research for decades so I think there's number one I think before we jump to the applications it's it's great to step back and ask ourselves what is our almost our attitude our culture for a lot of a better word to use Kevin's term about the nature of work does it tend to be a rigid one where people are in jobs and those jobs are expected to be stable and we ask ourselves and we react to Automation and say oh my goodness I guess it's come to take your job versus The Other Extreme where we say automation is one of many ways that we're going to co-create work constantly that if you think of it that way then as something like generative a AI emerges there's a space to begin to have trusting hopefully very positive conversations about how it should and how it shouldn't be automating work and combining with the human workers that excites me because there is a lot of unknowns there's there's a lot of fear around is my job going to become obsolete is my skill set going to become Obsolete and the example you share there from Alan circuit Accenture which is inviting the team to be part of the the definition of problems to solve and and the assessment of tools that may be out there making it a cultural initiative a team initiative a core objective for business performance that's that's powerful because it's to your point as well on when who starts and when they start everyone can access that in their own small way or a big way depending on the organization that they're fortunate enough to be leading indeed India I think so I think there are once you once you score back and say what if work was the subject of agile design the way our products are I'm I have a few companies interested in this experiment Dane it's one it's a my it's so far it's a thought experiment uh but what I've what I'd love to do and what I've written about is you imagine there were let's say we're face to face and we have a white board and what I'd love to do is have a leader identify those people in their Organization for already good at agile design or um whatever you might call it service oriented design lean Etc and they're probably working on products or software or services and I would say let's bring them in a room okay bring all your tools and I want you to go through and word substitute the word work for the word product and the words worker and manager for the word users or customers and let's just see what your tools look like and and then engage them to say okay what's your best advice on how we treat work like the products who already designed in an agile way and I've got a couple of companies that are just about ready to let me uh work with them as they do that experiment but that to me is the it it most makes total sense it makes total sense John because we had um Kurt Landon from Inspira who's a former Chief people officer now founder of of this emerging HR consultancy search practice and he was talking about how 30 years ago when he started it was still called Personnel right people were in personnel and there was no real consideration of employees as customers or users it was like Hey how do we protect ourselves legally and you know manage these personnel and one of the the key things that Kurt shared which is in his profession You Know Chief people officers Chief Human Resource officers we're now seeing a very interesting shift to bringing in Outsiders to head to function someone from operation someone from Finance someone from product yeah and and your your story about product management product development in in that agile capacity that's the skill set that that I think uh people already have a way of doing things so why not let them loose on on some human elements exactly I did a I wrote a book some time ago called retool and HR which was kind of my contribution to the analytics debate about gosh it's probably about uh 12 or 10 or 12 years ago and the reason it was called retooling in HR was what I tried to do was provide examples like we've just done where you can take a framework that leaders already know well let's say portfolio theory in finance apply chain optimization in operations uh Inventory management risk management in in the world of like Pharmaceuticals or something and this one would be agile design and you'd apply that those Frameworks to work or to HR so for example yeah I find that leaders outside of HR think much more in a much more sophisticated way about things like recruitment selection retention and development when I frame it as a pipeline of talent moving through the organization and then we can talk about bottlenecks we can talk about inventory we can talk about pivot Points you know and they've already got a smart brain that does that you know they're already so good at it yeah and I find if I don't do that to be honest they come at the people's stuff with very simplistic ideas you know we have to recruit and personal yeah exactly personal experience whatever fat I've heard a good one is we've got to be recruiting new people at the very best universities in the world because we want the very best and I'll say possibly what if I told you you're only going to order from the vendors that are the most expensive but that produce the very very very best quality possible and they would say wait a minute that would not be John that would not be a good general rule sometimes we can wow recruit you know and you just it's just interesting how quickly that their brain I would love to put up almost a brain scanner on and watch this yeah from the first incidence of just recruit the best people everywhere too oh wait a minute if I thought of this at the raw materials uh procurement then I'd say no no I've got a great nuanced model for when we might take let's say lower quality but more likely to join us and and quality and someone we could develop yeah that's that's extremely powerful I've I've heard and we've had guests talk about humanizing processes to to make it more accessible but this is almost the opposite it's like it's like dehumanizing that the HR and using the process mindset to just unlock some of that thinking I think that's right with that in mind I'll make one distinction it's not and it's men in no um negative way what we often see is agile HR is agile tools applied to HR processes so you know making our Learning System more user friendly making our our Career Development system our recruiting and you can apply agile tools to make those things faster more user uh chented Etc and that's a good thing uh there's been a lot of progress that way what I think I'm talking about is applying those agile tools to the work itself to the work that is in a way that's targeted for all those HR processes got it and there's another Factor there that comes up I was talking to uh bhps foundation in Houston before they divested that that asset and um the foundation still exists naturally but they were talking about some of their oil and gas assets where there were people out there right now who were working in a facility that was going to become you know demand it was gonna they were going to use those control rooms like you referenced and it was going to impact communities and yeah their concern was how do we invest into these communities in our people so we continue to have a a license to operate and and allow them to transition into other Industries so that that construct that you just talked about sort of applying it to work and the disaggregation of work uh could could help a lot of companies with assets that are either decommissioning or heavily transitioning into digital or virtual to to be bringing their team in to you know other roles in the communities other ways of creating businesses other ways of creating services that may be offered elsewhere in the organization that you know they've got other assets those people could be valuable if they were reskilled retooled I absolutely agree and we saw some examples of this during coven um you know we saw um worker swapping across very different organizations you know to create a supply chain that went from automate automobiles to personal protective equipment often require that two companies that had never worked together didn't even know each other began to share workers we saw an initiative by a number of by HR colleagues Ellen shook among them to open up a platform where Industries with Excellence workers could see the openings in industries that needed more of them so I absolutely agree I think I'm struck you mentioned BHP and in another project on the future of work with my colleague Jonathan daughter and Kat Brunei with executive networks we are talking with uh HR folks about the future of work and one of them was from a mining extraction company and he said you know I came back in with a future of work deck and my CEO basically said I want something more uh comprehensive I guess I'd call it and he went back and he thought about it and he said we need to even get Beyond a license to operate we need to commit to making the society that we're in more capable of sustainable work for as many people as possible and just as you said that would mean supporting businesses that may have nothing to do with your license to operate supporting education initiatives with the idea that will be regenerative when we you know when we decommission will have left the place better even beyond our licensed operate I think that's a very potent item yeah you know very futuristic a very interesting way to frame the start of a discussion of the future of work it is and uh my brother is actually a development Economist consultant back in um Australia and does a lot of sustainability work and one of the stories he would use as part of his kind of Executive Education when he was working with a new customer is um if you think you can just you know demand your operations and continue selling products who's going to be buying you products because if they don't have incomes if they're not part of a meaningful community near your supply chain then then how much damage are you doing to to you know the End Market that you serve yes exactly exactly yeah raises some both wonderful opportunities and challenges about where the boundaries are now yeah you know what are we really called the organization you know what is the what do we really mean by the workforce yep yeah no it's exciting so we've talked about some opportunities and challenges there but we haven't necessed and we talked about some examples of uh distributed teams as the world becomes more digital um but what about the the skills what are the essential skills do you think that individuals should be focusing their time on so that they can play in some of these experiments and some of these emerging best practices of of what is work how is work divine yeah I I think what we're we're seeing Dane basically is the acceleration of padrumbi that we've seen for decades and decades which is that you know as I said I think work has been constantly upgraded for a long long time whether it's by automation or the availability of workers who work in a different way than an employment contract or any number of other trends so um you know I think we've seen kind of an evolution you know how how recently was it that we were talking about getting everybody coding skills and now it looks like coding is going to be something you prompt and get back you know I'm a generative yeah AI is a coding tool and it's an image creating tool it's a writing tool and so I think that's going to continue not that I anticipated BT or generative AI but I think the the best the best skills are going to be those that support agile experimentation in the work relationship so you know openness to learning curiosity adaptability all those things where we we put in our minds the idea of what if the work you're doing is going to change constantly but but very very tangibly maybe every year or two years and what would it take for you to be informed about that be ready for that and be in an organization that can sustain a relationship with you even if you leave and come back through that so all of those things I think um the idea of anticipation you know the I think many organizations not all but just take an extreme case to make a point I think in many organizations it's still a matter of waiting until the automation or the new development arrives even I've talked about this with Executives for probably 30 years about layoffs you know you did you why did you wait until the very last second when doing the layoff was extraordinarily powerful and not that again not that I presume to be able to do their job better but just a question I asked you know when did you really know that this plant was headed for closure and they'll often say you know two CEOs before me knew we were going to have to go land and they all just kind of avoided it until it was right in front of us and so I think that idea of honest anticipation where you say something like today you know I can see Chachi DT writing draft articles for reporters let's call in all the people here who do writing and let's honestly put that on the table and say what do we think it'll affect your work and if it did what would that effect be and how would you want us to partner with you something like that yeah yeah that's yeah that takes a lot of honesty it also takes a lot of Courage particularly for smaller businesses that that don't have the pipeline of talent they're like well if I start having that conversation they might leave go and work for a bigger company that's more likely to have other roles for them um so it's a tricky one but but it is a conversation that needs to be had it is Dean and I'll just put again I'll put something in that's a little a little bit radical perhaps but you know when I'm in those conversations one of the things I think of and often talk about is the idea of this organization boundary and you know it goes down almost to a kind of existential question of what does it really mean if someone leaves well in the past we said that means they don't have an employment contract they don't work for us maybe at the extreme we thought they were disloyal you know and I almost want to say well let's think about your boundary as permeable let's think about that entire world of workers as the workers you could engage with and let's ask ourselves what kind of an ambassador might your people be two other workers that might come in or maybe borrowing from the organization they join because they know you so well now that's most systems aren't set up for that but they're I think there is a position to be taken that leaving doesn't have to be the same zero one variable we've traditionally thought yeah that's a good call to action John I don't think it's radical either I think we're seeing some good evidence of that in a number of organizations uh Heather McGowan I don't know if you've done any work with her but she's a brilliant speaker she just put out a book on the empathy Advantage yes and she talks about it's it's great she talks about um organizations in the past having hoarded Talent hey we trained you you've got institutional knowledge we're going to hold on to you and how damaging that can be to some businesses because that individual could actually be 10x what they are now if they went out and had experience and came back they could be a great Ambassador and uh and then sometimes you need someone to come into the team who there isn't going to be a 40 hour a week job for or or a long-term position but they need to come in and do something very important and and help the team and the company along so I think I like that permeable wall uh analogy I think that's really smart when you do start to think about those skills curiosity adaptability learning coaching problem solving some of those kind of more human connectedness skills which will allow people to you know be on multiple teams adjust as Technologies change um and you come from the world of Academia how do you how do you think we bridge that from Early Education to continuing professional development they're not they're not necessarily skills that that the corporate training environment spend a huge amount of time or money on I think that's right and and you do see um initiatives I suppose let me let me start generally and work inward um I'll just do a quick walk through Dana of this some of the central Concepts in the book that rather than I wrote most recently in 2022 called work without jobs and our title doesn't mean that all work is going to be disassociated with jobs in fact most work probably is going to be perfectly handleable by the traditional job system however at the what I would call the edges where automation is happening so fast that you can't really write the general prescriptions quickly enough whereas you said there are terrific workers out there who would be willing to work on what some are calling a fractional way I'm hearing a lot about fractural Consulting uh fractional CEOs fractional CFOs where they come in without 40 hours a week to help out so all of these things push the boundaries of a job-based system because one of the things Robin and I discovered writing the books about Automation and non-employee work was that they often happen at the task level or project level and indeed if you look at all the research automation you'll see that the first thing the refrigerants have to do to answer the question let's put it this way will automation take my job the first thing they have to do is break jobs into tasks and and some of the tasks are automatable and some of them are less automatable and then they they were for a while using arbitrary rules to aggregate back up like if 80 of your tasks are 50 likely to be automated I'm going to say your job is in danger you know I've been delighted to see lately with General AI that they're starting to put reported like this um in 80 percent of jobs at least 20 percent of the tasks will be affected by a generative Ai and I think that's a better way to think of it so I think we um in a world like that then we we need basically to be disaggregated we need to be willing at least as an exercise to essentially snip apart a paper job description into its elements to snip apart the individual and look at the whole individual in terms of what I like to call their capabilities what they can do that's related to skills and skills an example of disaggregation so we can say okay let's let's try disaggregating the work and let it coalesce in whatever way best even if that's not always a job let's disaggregate and also complete the worker let's look at all the capabilities they have Beyond just the job or the job sequence and ask ourselves how those capabilities match with the disaggregated work in a kind of melted soup that can reconfigure back into something I think of it as melting ice cubes and then to your education point I think education disaggregates from degrees into into or learning we might call it disaggregates from a zero one degree like a Nursing degree to a set of elements a set of classes a set of qualifications that could also now be matched with these and I think that's a pretty tectonic I think it's necessary at a lot of these edges we see a lot of exploration of this kind of thing by really good people in education and I think that's a bit where we're going is to look almost as you say at the start of education and start to say yeah you know what how does this contribute to maybe a disaggregated element of work like creating something um like making a judgment call or maybe like something technical yeah not and I like that you're pointing out that it's at the edges because it if you're in the core of a business and not so processes and systems there are going to be so many obstacles and barriers to starting to make that change yeah but if you learn from the edges you can probably do things that aren't gonna you know upset your best customer upset the balance of the team but be learning and bringing bringing the good stuff in oh yeah I absolutely agree with that I like to say um so Robin and I called this thing the new work operating system like a computer operating system going from batch jobs simultaneously uh I don't know if people know but in the modern PC the reason it can seem to do 20 things at once is not because it has more CPUs it's because someone figured out how to divide the CPU work into nanoseconds and allow the computer to prioritize based on your activity and so we we think about that new work operating system and what I say is until the book becomes a really big bestseller yours your leaders and your workers aren't going to say I want that Jason thoughts and Boudreau work operating system but they are going to say I can't seem to get the work to move fast enough to stay agile I can't seem to have enough fluidity with my people to have them move to where they're needed rather than say well that's not my job you know as we automate the automation changes so quickly that rewriting job descriptions and rehiring is just awfully slow maybe it may be the symptom is we have a job opening that's been open for months and months and months and what I say is I think in those spots they're already motivated they already know something's wrong here you know and to come in and make perhaps if we loosened up this operating system from jobs drop holders and degrees would that give us some insights about how to deal with this Edge that you're wrestling with yeah and I like that that brings us full circle to your dad's story John because if you could do that then you're spending a lot of time on the culture of your people because you know I I value John or I value Jenny or Crystal because they're part of my culture it doesn't matter what role they're doing now how am I appreciating them giving them opportunities to have a voice to have Agency on scheduling learning that that creates something special for everyone so I like that that brings us full circle to serving the uh the front line workers or all the workers that maybe have been overlooked in the initial sort of virtual shift through covert indeed very well done Dan now I see why you do this so well yeah it's fun it's fun I mean this conversation's flown by um there were so many great takeaways I don't think I could summarize them but you use the word radical and I don't actually think there's too much radical about this I think it's futuristic but but you've laid it out in such a way that it is Within Reach it's prac there's pragmatic ways to start inviting people in and and to experiment so um thank you for the work that you're doing thank you for the way that you've shared this passion of yours uh with our listeners today and uh yeah I've I really appreciate it John thank you Dean that's very very kind of you again hopefully a Hubble contribution to the brilliant work that you and others are doing and much appreciated thanks for the opportunity you bet and if people want to come and find some of your research your writing your books um there's a lot out there how do they best track down you and your material well there is a web page it's pretty comprehensive Dr johnbuduro.com um like drjohnboudreau.com and that's probably a really good place to support uh there's also some of you know if you go to the Center for Effective organizations website that's obviously where I was housed for 15 years and so they've also got a collection of things um yeah and I'm you know on LinkedIn uh posting semi-regularly as well so a lot of places to find me out there thanks for asking well thanks again for your time John and uh I'll definitely take you up on the offer to come visit New Mexico and try some of those trout streams soon oh yeah we'll have to get you here I'd love to love to host you when you get here Dane thanks wonderful thank you

2023-07-18 02:13

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