The Adaptation Advantage: Let Go, Learn Fast, and Thrive in the Future of Work

Autodesk's Mickey McManus puts it better than we could: “Humans are what we call passionate, but passionate is such a weak word. Humans can't help themselves. Humans riff on stuff. Humans putter and create. They can't be stopped.”

The best leaders are incorporating learning post-mortems into the feedback loops of every step of every project. At Unreasonable Group, for example, Epstein takes regular occasions to ask his team to provide feedback. He invites project participants to answer three seemingly simple questions: What worked? What could be better? What should we celebr

Now consider the 70–20–10 model of learning, we introduced in Chapter 9. In this model, 10% of learning is coursework or direct instruction, what we typically think of as “formal education.” The next 20% of learning occurs in shared experiences with others and 70% is learning that happens in the flow of work.

What matters is whether the candidate can be “one of us,” where “one of us” means someone who can think, adapt, challenge, change, and grow. These abilities are paramount in the workforce that needs to find and frame problems not yet known. For that we need diverse and divergent thinking, creativity, curiosity, and talent that asks probing question

Without sufficient “outside mind”—outside of what we've always done, outside what we were trained to think and do, outside the norms of the past—organizations will slip into a default mindset trying to frame and solve new problems by force-fitting old solutions on them.

“We need to consider learning agility, growth mindset, adaptability. These are aspects that we need to consider because I don't want to hire someone to do one job for the next two years; I want to hire them for the ability to do the next five jobs over the next 10 years,

We have to describe jobs not as a set of tasks, but as a series of tours in which people apply their experience and expertise, build upon that foundation, and then move on to new applications and learning in continuous cycles.

It's a radical but remarkably straightforward concept: companies are nothing more than culture and capacity.

“The half-life of skills is getting shorter. Hiring someone because they know something that's in demand today is going to be of limited value.