Heather McGowan and Chris Shipley are prophets of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Their extraordinary insights and tools challenge and empower organizations, leaders, and people across society to thrive in a future marked by exceptional technological and societal change.”
—Major General James Johnson, U.S. Air Force (ret), former Director of Air Force Integrated Resilience
The Adaptation Advantage brings sense to the sometimes confusing and scary world of change. McGowan and Shipley give us permission to be entrepreneurial by exploring the nature of opportunity and a natural pathway to engagement. Ambiguity is our friend in a world that understands change as a chance to improve lives. The authors beautifully weave macroeconomic phenomenon with a prod for introspection. Their book is a “self-help meets personal empowerment” treatise. Reading this book is a therapy session with motivational power. You'll want to reread it again and again.
—Stephen Spinelli Jr., PhD., President, Babson College, co-founder of Jiffy Lube
The Adaptation Advantage is fueled by the power of an elegant idea: our ability to learn and adapt is inseparable from our sense of identity. And as automation driven by machine intelligence remakes our world, the need to continually transform our identities becomes the very foundation of human growth—and how we thrive. McGowan and Shipley have wrapped a vivid and immensely readable narrative around this idea. My advice: read it!”
—Randy Swearer, PhD., Vice President of Learning Futures, Autodesk
In The Adaptation Advantage, McGowan and Shipley deliver a powerful message for corporate leaders about success in the future of work. Learning and identity are not only intertwined but fundamental to any organization's ability to adapt and create value. How exciting to read a book built on the core premise that learning unleashes our human potential while also driving competitive advantage.
—Sean Gallagher, PhD., Executive Director, Centre for the New Workforce, Swinburne University
The Adaptive Advantage needs to be on every educator's bookshelf, preferably dog-eared with highlighted pages, guiding their efforts to reorient the education system into continuous and future-focused learning. McGowan and Shipley's advice is both simple and profound—our students— competitive advantage is their exponential and expansive capacity as humans to adapt, advance, and add value, rather than to compete with artificial intelligence that mimics their genius.
—Tonya Allen, CEO, Skillman Foundation
The Adaptive Advantage lays out a clear, compelling case to stop defining ourselves by our jobs, to extend formal education into lifelong learning, and to let curiosity lead us through the arc of our working lives. That way we remain resilient no matter how forceful the waves of change become. Most books about the future of work put automation at the center of the story. McGowan and Shipley put humans at the center—as well they should. Many essential capabilities can't be replaced…creativity, collaboration, judgment, sensemaking, empathy, and other forms of social and emotional intelligence are uniquely human. And while technology will continue to evolve the way we work, we have immense agency to determine and design what we do and why we do it.
—Sandy Speicher, CEO, IDEO
The Adaptation Advantage tackles head-on the most critical challenge facing all of us in the near future: Where do we find purpose and prosperity in a world that increasingly feels beyond anyone's control? The extent to which we adapt to a radically shifted concept of “work” will inevitably be determined by our ability to rethink learning – away from a fixed-term preparation for employment, to a continuous way of living. Accordingly, this vital book offers a road map to the oldest question of all: How, then, should we live? Among a growing cadre of dystopians, it's refreshing to hear a much-needed optimistic analysis from McGowen and Shipley.
—David Price, OBE, Best-selling author of Open: How We Will Work, Learn, and Live in the Future
An insightful comprehension of the velocity and force of the multi-tiered and numerous elements of change offer leaders the insight and capability to creatively lead transformations. Resilient and adaptive learners will be the change-makers of the future. How thrilling to read the book that potentially allows us to embrace change as a propellant versus a weight.
—Lynne Greene, Former Group President, Estee Lauder Companies
McGowan and Shipley's The Adaptation Advantage nails it. Adaptive identity requires letting go – letting go of a job or skill set identity in order to thrive in a world of rapidly changing societal norms and technologies. This is required reading for all students of service science, such as myself.
—Jim Spohrer, PhD., IBM Director, Cognitive Open Technologies
In a world of exponential change, we all need strategies to help us continually adapt. With The Adaptation Advantage, Shipley and McGowan have given us the user manual.
—Gary A. Bolles, Chair for the Future of Work, Singularity University
Heather McGowan and Chris Shipley have crystalized what the future of work looks like and it is good news for us humans, providing we embrace change, get comfortable with the unknown, and keep adapting and learning. That last bit bodes well for the business events industry, which is the ideal vehicle for professionals to develop and maintain an agile learning mindset, to retool and retrain, and to hone the uniquely human skills—like creativity, empathy, and communication—that will ensure our future success, individually in our careers and collectively as a species.
—Sherrif Karamat, President and CEO, Professional Convention Management Association (PCMA)
Twenty years of research have shown me the importance of bringing humans to the forefront of the future of work. By recognizing the centrality of human potential, The Adaptation Advantage illuminates the value of resilience, adaptability, and the qualities that make us uniquely human in the future of culture, work, and self.
—Vivienne Ming, PhD., Theoretical neuroscientist, founder, Socos Labs
The Adaptation Advantageis the clearest, most compelling, and most original examination of the present and future workplace. Packed with powerful data-driven insights and provocative examples, this book is a masterclass in how individuals and organizations can and must develop the capacity to change fast and learn faster. McGowan and Shipley offer sage advice and wise counsel on every page, and it's imperative that you take their lessons to heart. But the big surprise in this book is that it's not about learning to live with more robots, but rather learning to become more human. Whether you were born digital or born analog, The Adaptation Advantageis your indispensable resource for thriving in a world that is transforming as you read this.
—Jim Kouzes, Coauthor of The Leadership Challenge and Executive Fellow at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University
This book is an essential guide for anyone who seeks to understand what it means to be human in the age of intelligent machines. The sources of advantage in the future of work have shifted to our uniquely human capabilities. Heather and Chris urge us to go on an inward journey to uncover who we are and consider how we manifest our passion, character and collaborative spirit as our most enduring and sustainable means of making positive progress as people, leaders, and institutions.
—Dov Seidman, Author of HOW and founder and chairman of LRN and The HOW Institute for Society
This book will change the way you see yourself within the future of work, give you very practical ideas for leading in that new but unknown world, and leave you genuinely inspired about what the future holds.
—Peter Sheahan, CEO, Karrikans Group
The paradigm of pursuing higher education is shifting. For example, American workers are now getting a job to go to college versus going to college to get a job. In this must-read, Heather and Chris effectively describe these and other trends that are playing out across corporate America today. In a world where rapid learning and adaptation are essential to prepare for the future of work, we need leaders across industries, disciplines, and functions to work together to become champions of human potential.
—Rachel Carlson, CEO and co-founder of Guild Education
In a world where we are drowning in information, and misinformation, clarity is power. Many jump on the fear bandwagon around the future of work, but Chris and Heather have done their homework, the thinking, and crafted a vision for how humans can adapt and thrive, with supreme clarity. They tackle this subject with original thinking and substance.
—Annalie Killian, Vice President Strategic Partnerships, sparks & honey
Speed is the only constant in today's world. That much is clear to all of us. We read tomes upon tomes deploring it or analyzing it, but most of it is opinion and editorial whereas Heather and Chris break it down into clear, actionable concepts and better yet, anchor them with science and examples so plentiful that this book will become your absolute go-to when you mean to school others in the potential perils and opportunities of VUCA.
—Duena Blomstrom Author, co-founder, and CEO, PeopleNotTech Ltd.
The digital revolution is overturning careers as well as companies. This book will be an essential guide to the future of work for both individuals and organizations.
—Mark Bonchek, Chief Epiphany Officer, Shift Thinking
The Adaptation Advantagepaints a vivid and compelling picture of a future of work in which the most successful and fulfilled participants will be those who continually learn and relearn in order to adapt to accelerating social, economic, and technological change. As a result of these changes, our current system of higher education is being presented with exciting challenges and opportunities to evolve to support that increasingly dynamic societal and work force future.
—Russell L. Moore, PhD., Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, University of Colorado, Boulder
Microchips cannot and will not replace relationships. Your next job starts where the robots stop. Learn to embrace that handoff. The best way to do that, Heather and Chris argue, for both individuals and organizations, is through rapid learning, unlearning, and adaptation. Heather and Chris's book is an indispensable guide to how to navigate this new era in the workplace.
—Thomas L. Friedman, Foreign Affairs Columnist, New York Times
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Names: McGowan, Heather (Consultant), author. | Shipley, Chris, author.
Title: The adaptation advantage : let go, learn fast, and thrive in the future of work / Heather McGowan and Chris Shipley.
Description: Hoboken, New Jersey : John Wiley & Sons, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020001497 (print) | LCCN 2020001498 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119653097 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119653059 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119653172 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Labor supply—Effect of technological innovations on. | Work—Forecasting. | Manpower planning. | Organizational change.
Classification: LCC HD6331 .M34 2020 (print) | LCC HD6331 (ebook) | DDC 650.1—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020001497
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020001498
For my wife, Pat, from whom I learn every day; for my family, who supports my learning adventures; and especially for my brother Jonathan, who models persistent adaptation every day. —Heather
Nancy Latta has always understood that identity and joy come from work well done and so very much more. Shirley Shipley embarked on life-changing learning when most mothers of five would have opted for a well-deserved nap. My work on this book is for them. —Chris
There are a lot of snappy, shorthand ways I could summarize Heather and Chris's book, but my favorite is this phrase that they use to encapsulate the essence of what they are saying: the abiding cliché and dominant news headline in the workplace these days is that the robots are going to take your job. What you learn from this book, though, is that, yes, indeed, robots can take your job. But if we're smart, they can also guide you to and define your next job. Because whether it's robots or automation or digitization, two things are true and always will be: there will always be another technological advance that will devour existing jobs—and, yes, those advances will be coming faster and faster. But we will always need humans to translate and augment the latest technology and we will always need humans to make meaning, joy, and connections that entertain us, inspire us, and connect us the moment we put our technology down. Microchips cannot and will not replace relationships. Your next job starts where the robots stop. Learn to embrace that handoff.
The best way to do that, Heather and Chris argue, for both individuals and organizations, is through rapid learning, unlearning, and adaptation. These skills are the new normal. Rapid learning, by the way, is not just about how to augment machines as they spin off new jobs, but how to augment humans as they stay the same, always craving meaning, joy, and new forms of entertainment and connections in every new epoch.
Rapid unlearning and adaptation are both about how we embrace and absorb new skills and how we let go of old ones. To be able to do both effectively and constantly, they argue, requires a mind shift and an identity shift—a letting go of “who we think we are” and a regular reinventing of yourself. I find this the most original aspect of their book—the important role that identity plays in how and how much we can learn and adapt at the steady pace demanded by this age of acceleration.
Heather and Chris argue that those who do it best will be those who allow themselves to be vulnerable, forcing themselves to be more open to the new and to the other. And that is not always easy under any conditions, but it is especially challenging when social norms are rapidly changing, or new immigrants are arriving with greater speed and numbers, and your identity—your sense of home, work, and norms—feels like it is under assault. That people today all over the world are reaching for walls to slow down the pace of change and protect their identities is not an accident.
I will let them tell you the rest …
If there is anything I can contribute from my own research and writing, it's the conviction that the technological forces that are requiring such rapid learning, unlearning, and adaptation—this new normal—are not going away. Indeed, they just keep getting faster and touching deeper into more areas of daily life, commerce, governance, and science. Why?
The short answer is that technology moves up in steps, and each step tends to be biased toward a certain set of capabilities. Around the year 2000, for instance, a group of technologies came together that were biased toward “connectivity.” Because of the dramatic fall in the price of fiber-optic cable, thanks to the dot-com boom, bubble, and bust, we were suddenly able to wire much of the world and, as a result, connectivity became fast, virtually free, easy for you, and ubiquitous. Suddenly I could touch people I could never touch before and I could be touched by people who could never touch me before. I gave that moment a name. I said it felt like “the world is flat.”
Around 2007, another set of technologies came together that had the effect of making the world “fast.” This was also driven by a price collapse—a collapse in the price of computers, storage, software broadband, and smartphones. This enabled us to do a huge number of complex tasks on the cloud with just one touch on a mobile device. We took friction and complexity out of so many things. Suddenly, with just one touch, on an Uber or Didi app, I could page a taxi, direct a taxi, pay a taxi, rate a taxi, and be rated by a taxi. With just one touch! Complexity became fast, virtually free, easy for you, and invisible.
Indeed, the year 2007 was a remarkable year. In 2007, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. Facebook opened its platform to anyone with a registered email address and went global in 2007. Twitter split off onto its own platform and went global in 2007. Airbnb was born in 2007. In 2007, VMware—the technology that enabled any operating system to work on any computer, which enabled cloud computing—went public, which is why the cloud really only took off in 2007. Hadoop software—which enabled a million computers to work together as if they were one, giving us “Big Data”—was launched in 2007. Amazon launched the Kindle e-book reader in 2007. IBM launched Watson, the world's first cognitive computer, in 2007. The essay launching Bitcoin was written in 2006. Netflix streamed its first video in 2007. IBM introduced nonsilicon materials into its microchips to extend Moore's Law in 2007. The Internet crossed one billion users in late 2006, which seems to have been a tipping point. The price of sequencing a human genome collapsed in 2007. Solar energy took off in 2007, as did a process for extracting natural gas from tight shale, called fracking. Github, the world's largest repository of open source software, was launched in 2007. Lyft, the first ride-sharing site, delivered its first passenger in 2007. Michael Dell, the founder of Dell, retired in 2005. In 2007, he decided he'd better come back to work—because in 2007, the world started to get really fast. It was a real turning point.
Today, we have taken another step up to another platform: now the world is getting “smart.” And it is being driven by still another price collapse—the collapse in the price and size of sensors. Now we can put sensors—“intelligence”—into anything and everything. We can put intelligence into your refrigerator, your car, your lightbulb, your toaster, your front door, your golf club, or your shirt. And with that intelligence, we can make your car drive itself, your refrigerator stock itself, and your shirt talk to your doctor and then tell your grocer which healthy foods to deliver to your home. And we can do all of that now with “no touch.” It all just happens by sensors talking to machines and vice versa. The other day I got a text message on my cellphone that said I had an appointment in my office in 30 minutes, but I was still 35 minutes away by car. It made me smart—or at least aware—with not even a touch, because it was sensing from my smartphone and GPS where I was, how far I was from my next meeting, and who that meeting was with when.
So what's the next platform? I believe that when the world gets this flat, fast, and smart, what happens next is that it starts to get deep. How so? Well, when your shirt has sensors in it that can measure your body functions and then tell your e-commerce grocery store what foods are right for your particular body type and DNA and then order them for you at Walmart and have them delivered by an autonomous vehicle or drone to your refrigerator and restock them when the refrigerator announces that you are running low—that's “deep.” And that's where we're going. Deep is the ability to hit that precise target you are looking for—no matter how small or hidden—in the precise context you are looking for it and then impact that target—heal it, fix it, track it, extract it, illuminate it, fake it, or destroy it—with an accuracy that a decade ago would have been dismissed as science fiction.
And that is why, in my opinion, deep is the word of the year. Have you noticed how many things we are now describing with the word deep?—deep mind, deep medicine, deep war, deep fake, deep surveillance, deep insights, deep climate, deep adaptation.
We discovered that we needed a new word, a new adjective, to describe the fact that “deep technologies” have two qualities that we could tell were a difference in degree that was a difference in kind. One is physical. Deep technologies literally get imbedded deep inside your neighborhood, your home, or your bedroom. Having Siri or Amazon Alexa in your bedroom is deep. Having 5G wired into the streets of your neighborhood is deep. Having a shirt that monitors all your key bodily functions is deep.
The other quality is existential. Deep technologies can reach into places so deep and produce outcomes, insights, and impacts so profound and accurate that we also needed a new adjective to describe them. Deep technologies are almost God-like in their powers to hit precise targets in medicine or war; to find the right needles in the right haystacks of data; to manipulate the right atoms and cells in science; to create machines that can defeat any human in chess, Jeopardy, or Go; or to fake any face, voice, or image—always with an accuracy or at a depth that was considered science fiction just 15 years ago. And that is why deep technologies also need to be governed in new ways, because they can be used for so much more good or evil in so many new ways.
As the world has gone from flat to fast to smart to deep, it is overturning and melting traditions, foundations, and bonds in every realm of our lives—how we work, how we communicate, how we learn, how we educate, how we conduct business, how we conduct trade, how families communicate with each other, and how governments control their people—to name but a few. In my opinion, this inflection point may in time be understood as the single biggest and broadest inflection point since Guttenberg invented the printing press. And you just happened to be here. And it's not over—in fact, it's just getting started.
Heather and Chris's book is an indispensable guide to how navigate this new era in the workplace.
—Thomas L. Friedman
Foreign affairs columnist, the New York Times