In this article from 2019, IDEO emphasizes the importance of creative leadership. Rather than assuming a leader has all the right answers, the most expertise, or complete knowledge, the piece suggests that leaders must instead promote diversity, embrace ambiguity, and think creatively.
Creative leadership is not about avoiding change. It’s about turning vulnerability and complexity into assets, and even leveraging them as tools for speed. While it can be unsettling to dive headfirst into the unknown, modern leaders must build the creative confidence needed to navigate uncertainty with and for their teams. Their agility and positive outlook generates a feedback loop that keeps everyone moving forward with a sense of possibility about what’s to come and how they can shape it. With creative leaders, an ambiguous juncture becomes navigable, and what awaits on the other side could change the game, helping the organization take the lead.
The skills unpacked in the IDEO piece are not only beneficial to leaders, but they are also paramount for the general workforce. "Social, emotional, and technological skills are becoming more crucial as intelligent machines take over more physical, repetitive, and basic cognitive tasks," as an overview piece by McKinsey illustrates. These skills, traditionally called "soft skills" are not only demanded by employers but are becoming increasingly necessary for individuals to retool themselves and become more adaptable in the age of automation.
Read this five-minute overview, and then take a deeper look into the research McKinsey and others have been doing around the future of jobs skills.
The World Economic Forum's report on the future of education comes as a comprehensive call to action for educators and policymakers worldwide. By highlighting the roles of primary and secondary schools in preparing workforces and societies of the future, WEF has identified "promising models of quality education for the Fourth Industrial Revolution." In doing so, they provide "Eight critical characteristics in learning content and experiences have been identified to define high-quality learning in the Fourth Industrial Revolution—'Education 4.0'".
These characteristics are in line with other calls for interpersonal and "soft" skills and emphasize the importance of these human skills we have been discussing throughout this month's Top of Mind. The report's thorough nature gives educators, employers, and policymakers an in-depth perspective on what is necessary for the 21st Century and beyond.
In this peer-reviewed article from 2019, the impact and perception of traditional teaching vs active learning is examined with fascinating results.
Despite active learning being recognized as a superior method of instruction in the classroom, a major recent survey found that most college STEM instructors still choose traditional teaching methods. This article addresses the long-standing question of why students and faculty remain resistant to active learning. Comparing passive lectures with active learning using a randomized experimental approach and identical course materials, we find that students in the active classroom learn more, but they feel like they learn less. We show that this negative correlation is caused in part by the increased cognitive effort required during active learning. Faculty who adopt active learning are encouraged to intervene and address this misperception, and we describe a successful example of such an intervention.
In several recent articles from the BBC, we see trends of education adapting around the global need for more human and interpersonal skills in the workforce. As the first explores, there has been a rise in micro-credentialing, as a means to update your skills throughout your life rather than seeing education as a one-time event. This piece presents several models for this micro-credentialing, putting forward the idea that while higher education currently remains relevant, workers, like leaders, need to be agile enough to adapt to shifts in the labor market.
In another piece, we see further exploration into the power of soft skills as a way to "robot-proof" ourselves. While we must prepare the students of today with the critical thinking and interpersonal skills highlighted in previous piece we have provided, we must also emphasize our need to be "constantly updating [our] skills throughout your career."
While the prospect of the future of work can be daunting there is great hope in our ability as humans to adapt and thrive.
