The group was the first to get a run-through of my new concept framework Vectors of Disruption, shown below, which I used to introduce and frame the rest of my presentation.

Click on the image for the full-size pdf

Some brief thoughts on the framework:

The first comment is that I – as many others – am not a fan of the word ‘disruption’, which has lost much of its meaning through misuse and overuse in recent years. However I cannot find a better word for what is meant here. I’m very open to other suggestions!

Overall the intent of the framework is to distinguish between the different layers that are driving disruption, from the underlying forces, through the high-impact developments and finally key structural shifts. These are often confused, making the mechanisms – or vectors – of disruption far harder to understand.

The framework is of course immensely simplified. There are many other elements that could have been included, such as demographics, however many of these will play out over a longer period.

Underlying Forces

The most common focus is on Information technologies, with past future exponential growth in Data, Processing, and Connectivity, which a long runway yet for these trends. Advancing Interface technologies are also critical in giving people far deeper engagement to information.

Technologies in other domains, including Materials, Health and Energy are also impacting not just these industries, but many others, including construction, infrastructure, manufacturing and transport.

Expectations are continuing to rise on every front. Societal expectations, notably of sustainability and accountability, seem to be shifting into higher gears. Customers are demanding powerful experiences and customization. Another important force is that of shifting Investor expectations, who not only expect consistent growth, but also scalability and constant renewal.

High-impact developments

Here we can catalog the array of technology buzzwords that soak through almost every business presentation you are likely to see this year, such as AI, Robotics, Big Data and VR. While these developments are hyped, they individually are likely to have a massive impact on business and society, and even more when they are combined. However there are also important non-technological developments, including Power to the individual and active Capital reallocation by investors.

Structural shifts

While it is bold to point to only two fundamental structural shifts in the economy, I believe they will be responsible for the majority of structural change in coming years.
Automation in manufacturing has already significantly played out, however we are really just at the beginning of the impact of automation – as the application of AI and robotics in a work context – on not just almost all job roles, but how organizations function.
Platforms are the fundamental mechanism underlying the network economy. Beyond the evident rise of marketplaces in transport, accommodation, work, and many other domains, platforms also encompass blockchain and crypto-currencies, open innovation structures, and new models of reintermediation.

Disruption

It is clear that these forces, developments and shifts mean that existing Business models are unlikely to be sustainable without changes, sometimes evolutionary, sometimes revolutionary. However we also need to focus on other domains of disruption, including Organizational structures, Urban structure, Education and the Role of Government. Perhaps most importantly there is potentially massive disruption to existing Social structures. Understanding and shaping this in positive directions – to the degree possible – is everyone’s responsibility.

Of course this framework only looks at the vectors and structure of disruption, not the responses or solutions. I will be creating other frameworks soon that focus on what we need to do to create successful outcomes in a disrupted world.

As always this framework is released as a Beta v1, not intended to be final, but a first attempt that will be refined over time if useful. So please let me know your comments, ideas, and constructive criticism so that can be incorporate into subsequent versions.

To conclude I provided summary advice to individuals, families, and organizations on how to prepare for the future of work. Below is this section of the report. Click here to read the full report (12.4MB).

What you can do today

All change brings challenges and opportunities. Given the exceptional pace of change in the world today, no-one can expect a job for life or even a consistent role for many years. Everyone will need to consistently enhance their skills and move on to new roles to keep pace with the world. We can heed basic guidelines that will serve us and our livelihoods as we move forward.

Individuals

Take the time to plan your future.
We all need to be our own futurists. In a busy world, we must carve out proper time to consider how our skills and our dreams will fit with an economy that is swiftly changing. We must work today to prepare ourselves for the jobs and opportunities of the future, transitioning from our past career to our future careers.

Carefully choose your expertise.
Our livelihood tomorrow will be shaped by what we study today. To stand out, we should aim to excel at one or two specific areas of work, at which we can become an ‘expert’. It is important to follow your passion, but also to consider whether the skills you are developing will still be valuable in 5, 10 or 20 years’ time.

Fuel your appetite for learning.
We all need to keep learning throughout our lives to keep ahead in this fast-changing world. Rather than this feeling like a chore, we need to make learning something we want to do. Discover what you most want to learn about, and design it to be as fun and social as you can.

Families

Learn how to learn.
There is no more vital capability for the future than the inclination and ability to learn. Many children start to associate learning with tedium. They need to discover the joy of learning by focusing on what they love best, whether it appears useful or not, and actively develop the habits and routines that will allow them to apply their learning skills to any topic they choose.

Nurture human capabilities.
While specific skills in STEM and other areas will be in demand from employers, the most valued attributes will be personal capabilities such as adaptability, resilience, optimism, creativity, emotional intelligence and judgment. Learning skills is critical for children, developing into well-rounded adults is even more important.

Prepare for future jobs, not today’s jobs.
Careers advisors are one avenue to seek guidance when preparing for your future, however as we live in a constant state of change it’s also important to do your own research to consider whether careers you might pursue may still exist in decades to come, and where the new work of the future may emerge.

Foster a growth mindset
In a rapidly changing world, children as well as adults of all ages must understand that they can develop and increase their capabilities through study and perseverance. What we learn from our experiences is not what we are able to do, but how we can get
better at creating our own personal success.

Organisations

Envisage your successful future organisation.
Today’s companies will fail if they simply try to eliminate some jobs and add others. Every single work role will change in the future, shifting to draw more on uniquely human capabilities. Becoming tomorrow’s successful organisation requires a clear vision of the skills and roles you will require, and planning how to transition your current team from where they are to where they need to be.

Design work to tap your staff’s potential.
As human capabilities come to the fore, organisations should aim to tap the broadest possible scope of their staff’s capabilities. In a flexible organisation, the best ideas and skills can come from anywhere, bringing out everything people can contribute. Well-designed collaboration will create outcomes that individuals could not achieve alone.

Hire for human capabilities, enable continuous learning.
Find people who are flexible, imaginative, empathic and hungry to learn. The best way to attract the most talented is to provide them the opportunity to learn continuously. Offer formal learning, but also design work so your staff develop their knowledge and skills every day.

Read more from the report.

Image: Kevin Dooley

Below is an excerpt from the report giving a snapshot of some of the shifts needed in education:

Education of the Future

Looking further into the future of education, we may see a radical restructuring of how we learn, not just in schools and universities, but through our entire life. Classrooms will continue to exist, enhanced through the use of a wide range of new tools, technologies and methodologies. Education will also become an ongoing part of everyone’s lives, and embedded into our employment, helping us improve our skills and capabilities while we work.

Characteristics

Pervasive accessibility
Learning will be always available to everyone at all times, at work, home and everywhere spend time

Personalised journeys
Everyone learns differently. Algorithms will uncover our preferences so all learning is designed for the individual.

Real world relevance
Education will prepare us for the real world by focusing on understanding how knowledge will be applied and the emotional and relationship skills required

Immersive experience
Virtual reality and other tools will allow us to experience lifelike situations and practice in simulations before we need to apply our skills in real life

Augmented teachers
Teachers will remain central to education, but they will be augmented by technology to draw on the best tools available

Peer learning
Education will shift to learning from experts to learning with people who are like you, learning together as the world changes

Credentials

Formal degrees and diplomas will continue to be important in the future, however will be less necessary. Algorithms are increasingly able to analyse data about your work and study to indicate your capabilities in a work environment, often better than a formal academic qualification can.

Some employers are identifying high-potential candidates with software that assesses how specialists in a field have contributed to their profession and how their peers view them.

Rather than multi-year degrees, we will often get recognition for shorter learning journeys. Massively Online Open Courses (MOOCs) are offering ‘nano-degrees’ that show competence in a specific domain.

We may move to a world in which employers look more to the information they can gather about individuals’ knowledge, work and attitudes than to their official certificates.

As such I was delighted to be commissioned by Commonwealth Bank to create a report in collaboration with their team: The Commonwealth Bank jobs and skills of the future report (12.4MB), to share useful insights for individuals, families and organisations what we can do today to shape a positive future of work for all Australians.

The report has been launched this morning and can be downloaded here (12.4MB).

In coming days I will be sharing a number of elements of the report on my blog, as well as some of the media interviews stemming from the report. For now here is the introduction to the report, which summarises the core ideas. The report content is of course equally relevant to any countries, not just Australia.

INTRODUCTION

Ross Dawson
Futurist and Author

My session pulled out to a very big picture view, starting with the key drivers of Acceleration, Society and Structure, delving into the disruption of Work and the resulting human Capabilities we need, and finally on to the fundamental shifts in Learning, Education and the resulting Leadership that is required.

The slides to my keynote are below. As always, my slides were designed to support my presentation and not to stand alone, but may be somewhat useful to those who weren’t present for my keynote. Many of the slides were in fact videos, in this deck only shown as images.

Following my keynote was a fantastic panel discussion moderated by Jan Owen, where I was joined by Fiona Mackenzie, Anthony Mackay and Matt Wright. I hope to share a few of the many ideas we touched on in the discussion in a later post.

Image: Duane Cox

Click on the image to see a video of the segment:

In the segment I pointed to some of the broader trends shaping the future of work, as well as particular jobs that would be disappearing or growing.

REFEREES are an excellent example of the kind of work that is on the verge of being automated. Judgment and decision-making is required, however those decisions needs to be based on as full data as possible. Human referees can only have one view of events. While many sports are starting to allow computer data to be used, such as whether the ball has crossed the line in soccer, these are only in limited instances.

Of course judging whether there has been a foul is far less cut-and-dried. However multiple cameras on all action, combined with machine learning algorithms fed by thousands of examples of what does and does not constitute a foul, could probably already perform better than most human referees on the field. Sportspeople’s and fans’ willingness to embrace the new technology is another issue, however there are few who would dearly hang on to the flaws of human referees.

DESIGN is in a way the defining domain of the future, in shaping technology, products, and indeed everything in our world so it best suits humans. Design requires creativity, and even more it requires a deep understanding of what it is to be human, and how we want to experience the world. In the segment I used the example of emotional robot designers, those who design machines to interact with us on an emotional level.

While it sounds like a specialist role, in the broadest sense it will be a massive job sector. We need to design effective emotional engagement into the technologies we create. Design will be at the heart of the 21st century, and design work will grow massively, because it requires uniquely human capabilities to forge a human-centric world.

As a society we need to be thinking deeply about how automation will impact today’s and tomorrow’s jobs. Many jobs will disappear, yet there will massive demand for many domains of human talent.

Considering this we can shape our companies, educational institutions, and personal journeys to where prosperity lies.

An interesting article titled The uncertain future of work reviewed some of the ideas presented by speakers at the event. On my session it reports:

Ross Dawson is a leading futurist, entrepreneur and strategy advisor. He sees relationships and creativity as essential attributes in the future working world, arguing that “human relationships, relating, understanding, empathy, engaging” are what sets us apart from machines. He says “the most important part of education is playing because it’s engaging with others, socialising”. Similarly, creativity is a particularly human attribute and Dawson is excited about the potential for education to foster thinking that can promote new ideas that “bring together things that have never been connected before and express that in a new way visually through words, through imagination, through arts”.

The ultimate capability is to combine capabilities. Imagine a world where computers support doctors’ decisions by scanning tens of thousands of articles to synthesise data, evidence, drug interactions and so on and then make a recommendation; the doctor’s specialisation and the computer’s complementary information, providing better, faster and more imaginative ways of solving problems.

The days when rote learning were useful – if they ever existed – are long gone. The role of education today is to foster our intrinsically human characteristics and capabilities. There is nothing more valuable than being able to play – with objects, with ideas, and with people.

Today’s schools – not to mention universities – do not teach us how to play, in fact they very actively stifle those capabilities. At very least they should allow our natural instincts of play to remain, far better they should teach us to play even better.

That is how humans will keep ahead of machines.

I approach this idea as both a speaker and an event organizer. I have been a professional speaker for over 15 years, and have also organized many conferences and events, including our Future of Media Summits, the first cross-continental conferences ever held.

A recent article in Sydney Morning Herald on how the new app Zeetings helps “keep audiences awake” looks at Zeetings, “a presentation app that is both interactive and social, and promises to stop audiences slumbering in their chairs.”

The article describes the background of the app and goes on to quote me:

Ross Dawson, one of Australia’s most prolific presenters, said the advent of more social presentation tools was timely as people generally wanted more engagement.

“I tend to work in situations where the audience is knowledgable and insightful. This is not about a guru on stage but being able to tap the experience of the audience. You would be getting participation from the one person on the stage but with everyone engaging and contributing to the content,” he said.

These are hardly new opinions from me. An article in News.com.au in 2009 quoted me extensively on the future of events (the original story has been taken down but the quotes are still available online here):

“In a world of instant access to information and videos of the world’s best speakers, it makes no sense to sit in a darkened room and watch a series of talking heads all day,” says Mr Dawson.

“Usually the best ‘networking’ opportunities at traditional conferences are during coffee breaks, where you have to hope you’re standing next to someone interesting in the queue.”

…

“There are many forms of unconference, however the basic idea is that participants create the agenda on the day,” says Mr Dawson.

“This leads to highly interactive discussions, and the topics reflecting the interests of the people there.”

…

“Over the last year or two Australia has been catching up with some of the world’s most innovative event formats,” says Mr Dawson.

“Offering many opportunities for people to keep up to date on new trends and ideas, plus benefit from being able to connect with their peers. I believe and hope that traditional conference formats will struggle in coming years.”

“Traditional event formats are dry and stultifying. People like interacting and conversations. Unconferences create unparalleled opportunities to meet and engage with like-minded people.”

…

“In a world awash with information, it is critical to be exposed to many diverse perspectives and insights,” says Mr Dawson.

“A very few speakers and presentations merit 45 minutes. Most other ideas can be highly condensed with little loss, creating a far more dynamic and stimulating experience for the audience.”

…

“Online social networks now allow us to find and connect with people who share interests with us,” says Mr Dawson.

“Very importantly, they also make it easy to keep in touch and develop relationships that people we’ve met.

“Since networking is not about exchanging business cards but building relationships, online social networks are invaluable.”

Let’s hope that more event organizers use the fantastic new technologies that are available to create more engagement and more value for audiences. The future of events will be different and better, but it’s not happening fast enough, yet…

Below are a handful of the particularly interesting insights from the report.

Ranking ICT Development
The annual report calculates an “ICT Development Index” for every country on the planet. Hereare the latest rankings, compared to last year:

Source: Measuring the Information Society 2014

Exponential bandwidth
These charts show the exponential rise of Internet bandwidth globally, with strong catch-up from the developing world and Europe accounting for half of global bandwidth.

Telecom revenues
These charts show that despite massively increasing bandwidth, the shift from high-cost traditional telecom offerings to more competitive IP-based communications has resulted in essentially flat revenue for telcos in the developed world. However as far more people become connected in the developing world, domestic telcos are benefiting with solid growth. Of course telecom firms are rapidly diversifying into other revenue streams.

Rise of e-government
The E-government Development Index shows Europe significantly ahead, with the most rapid development in Oceania.

Many more juicy details in the report.

An article in CIO magazine titled Humans versus machines: Who will be employed in future? reviewed some of the highlights of Dawson’s speech. After the article’s opening it quotes:

“Robots and artificial intelligence are getting better and better over time. So we have robot vacuum cleaners, we have robot dish washers… [robots] being able to fold the laundry. Now this happens to be quite expensive machines… but we can have household robots do these kinds of tasks,” said Dawson.

“Drivers are being challenged. Drivers may not exist. Mercedes just announced they have a semi-trailer, a big truck, which is going to drive around without a driver driving it.”

More knowledge tasks are also being handed over to machines, he said. He used the example of IBM’s Watson supercomputer assisting doctors by looking through hundreds of thousands of documents and data to come up with a suggested diagnosis to complex diseases such as cancer.

We absolutely need to recognize how machines can take over some existing jobs, but a more powerful frame is seeing how humans and machines can best work together.

However, it doesn’t have to be a situation where it’s humans versus machines and there are fewer jobs for people, Dawson said. Jobs for humans are not necessarily reducing, just changing, and it’s more about working together with machines to increase humans’ capabilities, he said.

A computer first managed to beat a chess grandmaster in 1997, he said. “That’s a long time ago and computers have come a long way since then; yet, the best computers at chess can still be beaten by humans and computers working together. The best chess in the world is played by humans and computers working together,” the futurist said.

“Again, doctors together with technology can be better [themselves] — with the robots, the artificial intelligence.”

The key issue is ongoing skill development, driven by individuals and supported by institutions.

“Back in the ’70s and ’80s, when you did a degree you were able to live off the fruits of your labours for quite some time. Today, when you get a degree, it is already out of date. So what does have value is deep, world-class expertise. You can’t just be the best in your domain locally; you must be at the right level globally,” Dawson said.

“Humans are good at relationships; machines… are not nearly as good. We [humans] can collaborate and work together. So this is where deep expertise is — that we must work with other people, collaborate with other people.

“[The] third piece, which is distinctively human and keeps us miles ahead of the machines, is creativity. The ability to do magic, pull together things that we read or things we dreamed or conversations we’ve had into something that is new.”

We need to choose our domains of expertise, and use peer and community learning to stay on top of our domains. In a fast-changing world the most effective learning is collaborative.

“Clearly you can’t be a world class expert in 20 domains, but you can say there are two complementary domains. Deakin University recently released a master’s in business and data analytics. These two complementary skill sets is where we can create value.”

With technology constantly evolving at a more rapid pace, informal learning will continue to be key in future, Dawson said. He used the example of TopCoder, where coders compete not only for prizes but to learn from others how and why a project succeeded or failed, and improve their own skills and processes.

“If you want to be a world class expert, the only and the real way to do it is find those who are the experts, follow them on their social media, engage and have conversations in that community.”

We need to accentuate and make the most of our humanity. The power that technology gives us means that we must choose wisely how we use that extraordinary power.

Even though machines can be stronger, faster and smarter than humans, they don’t automatically come with humanity, Dawson pointed out. The high-level ethical decisions that humans make means that we can’t simply hand over all power to the machines to run our jobs.

“We have the power to create ourselves; we can change our genetics. We can literally change who we are as humans, let alone the impact on the nature of work and the shape of the planet. This is something where you all must be ethicists, who are making ethical choices.”

Read the full article for more insights.