COVID-19 is changing our world irrevocably. First and foremost it is a health crisis, people are getting sick, families are losing loved ones and the virus is going to be with us for the foreseeable future.

In the words of this week's guest, Coronavirus might also be the great catalyst for business transformation. What previously was expected to develop over the course of several years is instead unfolding before our very eyes in the course of a few months. If the Future of Work requires restructured workplaces, redefined roles, rapid learning and reserves of trust, and it does, organisations are being challenged to do all that and more as they address the Coronavirus pandemic. Those are the words of this week's guest, Future of Work strategist, Heather McGowan, whose new book, The Adaptation Advantage, co-authored with Chris Shipley, has just been released. You can listen below or by visiting the podcast website here.

In our conversation Heather and I discuss:

• Why COVID-19 is acting as the catalyst for business transformation and the Future of Work

• The pivotal role of culture and how leadership styles will adapt in the Future of Work.

• How we need to embrace and absorb new skills and let go of old ones

• Why our old measure of potential success, IQ has given way to EQ and is now shifting yet again to AQ or adaptability quotient

• Why the role of HR needs to evolve and what HR leaders need to do differently

Support for this podcast is brought to you by Insight222. To learn more, visit https://www.insight222.com.

Interview Transcript 

David Green: So today I am delighted to welcome Heather McGowan, future of work strategists, lecturer, author and speaker to The Digital HR Leaders podcast. Heather, it is great to see you all the way from Boston. Welcome to the show. Can you provide listeners with a quick introduction to you and your background and current activities?

Heather McGowan: Yes, it is great to see you again. It is so rare that in the world of constant Zoom’s, I am actually zooming with someone I actually met three or four months ago in Paris, so it is good to see you again. My name is Heather McGowan, my co-author Chris Shipley and I wrote the book The Adaptation Advantage, let go, learn fast, that is driving the future of work. Which came out in April from Wiley, and it is really geared towards how do we get people in a mode of constant adaptation and learning as opposed to downloading a singular skill set for a singular job.

David Green: Well, I know we are going to talk a lot about the book. You kindly sent me a version that I have been poring over and scholaring up on it as it were. Let's start by going beyond the headline that robots will take away our jobs, which we do see a lot of, maybe not so much during the current crisis, but certainly the last few years. In your book you highlight technology invisibility and visibility as the key agents of change. What do you mean by this and what is it that is actually changing and precipitating the fourth industrial revolution and the future of work?

Heather McGowan: So Tom Friedman had made a whole list of things that were going to change with data, technology, AI, etc and I added to his list visibility and invisibility. Because I think that what data does and automated technology more broadly, is it can make some things we used to do invisible. So if your lights come on at a certain time in your house automatically and if your temperature changes when you walk in the room or your car knows that you have got to get to a meeting so your watch reminds you that the traffic is going to take 35 minutes, back when we used to go out, that stuff is suddenly just invisibly happening for you. Stuff that becomes visible is starting to understand, like we are doing right now with contact tracing, that we are seeing quarantine fatigue because we know by cellular data, more people are moving and more people are getting close to people they were not getting close to before.

So that is how it makes invisible stuff now visible.

David Green: And actually you talked about Tom Friedman, he wrote the foreword to the book, and he had this lovely line in there “Your next job starts where the robots stop”

Which kind of talks to the lazy headlines that we see and it really is about humans augmenting technology rather than being replaced by them. That is some of the ethos in the book.

Heather McGowan: Yes, for sure. So one of the things that Chris and I also point out in the book is that not only is technology going to consume some routine and predictable tasks, which it will and already has, if I took your phone, wiped out your contact list and hand it back to you, how many people could you call?

Your childhood home phone number, maybe your parents? A handful right? But 10 years ago, which is not that long ago, I remembered about 25 - 30 phone numbers off the top of my head. Now I can not remember four digits because we have outsourced that piece of technology and that is fine. Same with navigation, we do not pull out maps anymore unless we are going on a really exciting road trip. Otherwise, we pretty much let technology drive us where are we going and reroute us around traffic. But what technology can also do is show us opportunity. So in the book we interview Frida Polli from pymetrics, we also speak to Joanna Daly from IBM as well as Michael Priddis from Faethm, about how they are using technologies to help people understand disruptions before they happen and then how equipped people are to pivot to the next closest available job based upon their skill sets and perhaps their interests.

So that is one way that robots are letting go where we take over.

David Green: Now your book has come out in the midst of the biggest global pandemic for a century. We were joking last week that what you envisaged happening in the next three to five years is actually happening in three to five weeks.

Heather McGowan: Yes I actually just want to point this out. So we picked this book and looked at that image, we just wanted it to look like an image of blasting light and things moving really quickly, but it also looks like a virus. That was not planned because we did not know. And The Adaptation Advantage was one of many titles we went through but that is almost prescient for right now because that is what we are doing at scale.

David Green: You must have had a crystal ball. I know you have written this, so how might COVID-19 be the great catalyst for the business transformation and the future of work?

Heather McGowan: First of all I want to say it is a horrible disease that is taking many lives, putting people who were not at risk before suddenly at risk, so I don't take it lightly when I say it is accelerating the future of work. I want to be sure about that. We are in a world of heart from lives to livelihoods, it is going to take a very long time to recover, particularly those livelihoods. But the silver lining in there, and I think there are a number of silver linings in the virus, if you can absorb the horrific loss of lives and livelihoods. It is forcing us to transform to digital at lightspeed. I was looking across the dimensions of who works, where we work, how we work and what we do BC, before Coronavirus. Two weeks into it, we had transformed every office organisation that we could to remote working, to a virtual organisation. Every K-12 university system we could was teaching online and faculty members who said they would never do it, were doing it and succeeding. And leaders who said, “I do not really want my teams working at home” were surprised to find if they let them work at home, when they trust them, they are getting this sort of trust premium out of it.

So the transformation to digital, which is really just a human transformation, was accelerated by the virus.

David Green: I think you said in the same article in Forbes actually, and when we spoke last week, you described the pandemic as the third existential threat of our lifetimes.

What are the other two and how can we try and solve them together?

Heather McGowan: So our lifetimes, I am in full disclosure I just turned 49 last month, so as I look at a 50 year window or 60-70 year window, something like that, what a lifetime used to be. In our lifetimes. We have had about 50 years of concrete data that shows human activities are warming the planet leading to biodiversity laws, a warming climate, more superstorms, more droughts, more floods, more wildfires, changing settlement patterns, potentially creating as many as 143 million climate refugees in the next decade or so. So the first existential crisis is climate change and despite having James at NASA telling us in 1988 and Al Gore in the early two thousands and Greta, we have had plenty of warnings. We have made them people of the year, we have shined a spotlight as much as we can, we still have not changed human behaviours in a meaningful way. We need to, so we are sort of failing at climate change.

The second is income inequality. I was born in 1971 since about 1970, income inequality has skyrocketed, particularly in developed countries but not so much in the developing countries. Particularly in the US where we have the highest level of income inequality that we have had since the 1920’s, and that has gone up under Republican and Democrats, so it is not a political thing at all. But in this moment that income and equality is laid bare. It is like Warren Buffett says “when the tide goes out you see who is swimming naked“ and we are naked. We have not done a good enough job. We have paid attention to unemployment rates, but not underemployment rates and not labour force participation rates. Because if you were born in 1940 you had a 90% chance of doing better than your parents, if you were born in 1980 a 50% chance. So we do not have the social mobility we once had. In this moment we have the opportunity when we start to restart the economy and unfreeze some aspects of our society to be intentional and insistent that we cross that raging river, which is what I am referring to the virus as, and create pathways that unleash more human potential and we do so in a way that is better for the planet. So if more of us work from home some days a week or all of the time, we are reducing carbon emissions. If we produce more goods locally, use 3D printing, other options that we have to restart the economy in a way that is better for the planet.

Then if we create massive re-skilling and up-skilling, because in the US that 30 some odd million jobs that are lost, some of them are not coming back, they are not. So we need to prepare people for what is ahead in a way for them to contribute in a more meaningful way. So I see the virus as the catalyst that solves all three.

David Green: Yes and it is interesting about income inequality because if we actually look back just 10 years to the last crisis that we had, a very different type of crisis obviously, the actual inequality levels have grown, I am talking about my country in the UK but I know it is the same in the US, we almost missed an opportunity there to try and solve some of those problems around income inequality. And as you said, no one has done anything about the climate crisis, which arguably is the biggest of all of them.

I was reading something this morning, I think it was a McKinsey piece actually, saying this is an opportunity for airlines to actually start looking at carbon free fuels and stuff like that now that they have got a moment to breathe.

Maybe it is not a great moment for them, but sometimes it takes a crisis to try and create change, doesn't it?

So I share your hope that this will be time that we do try and tackle these.

I guess one of the problems about all of those issues are they are very long term and we have a political system that is very short term, whether it is a term of four or five years and in the US trying to be reelected or then about the people's legacy the system is not designed to solve longterm problems.

Heather McGowan: No and maybe it takes place in business and local governments and not at federal governments. Maybe it is companies that are either not public or play by different rules to the public markets, I am not anti business at all I am very pro business, businesses scale solutions, we need business. But if from an income inequality standpoint, if you look at the economy, look at the research that the world economic forum did. In the developed world, when you have more income inequality you have slower GDP growth. So we are not going to grow in the way that we measure growth, if we become more and more unequal.

David Green: We have talked a little bit about the scale of the challenge, but how much harder has the crisis made it?

We were talking last week about some things that this might precipitate, like settlement patterns, real estate strategies with big companies. What are some of the things that you are already seeing?

Heather McGowan: Well, Twitter just announced yesterday or the day before a work from home forever.

Facebook and Google, I think have said until the end of the year. I think it would be helpful for folks out there if you can make a declaration as to how much longer this will go on concrete, you would really help your workers. I am speaking to a lot of folks at different companies who are saying they don't know, they might have to go back soon, and some people do not live near where they work so they have to move back to another city. So there are implications there. But I am also seeing discussions about, how do you make safe places because we can not live in our house in a bubble for years. Maybe this is the way wework reinvents itself, that they make safe space pod offices that allow us to get out, see other people from a social distance, work in a different place, and then come home a couple days a week and they clean them or something.

I know that the virus is going to be here longer than our ability to handle it psychologically so we have to come up with some ways to kind of release the pressure.

David Green: Yes, it is interesting, isn't it? Because there has been a move of people to the cities. I was speaking to a couple of young professionals I know, they are in London, they live together and they live with two other people. Now all of a sudden they are all working from home, it is not quite what they wanted when they moved to the big city. It is making them think about after this do we want to live in London?

Then obviously companies, they go where the talent is, so if you want particular skills you set up big offices in big cities. These are very expensive offices to maintain, could this be a big change?

Heather McGowan: Yes and I have talked to some very very large companies in different parts of the world who are saying, we are rethinking our real estate investment more broadly because do we need these massive buildings? Then that allows you to look at secondary cities and rural areas where on an income and equality standpoint it would be fantastic. Because then you can be located anywhere you can get broadband access and you can travel a couple of times a year, a couple times a month, whatever is needed to an office to meet with people. That then brings the question I think we have not answered yet.

Why do we get together? Why do we get together in person? I think it is important, I think it is important that we see each other, we hug each other. I do not know that we will ever shake hands again but there is something about being in the same space that is different than this virtual thing. So we have to think about not just defaulting to drive to an office, sitting at a desk, and then dial into what the equivalent of zooms in a collective space, but think about why we come together and make that and the office design much more intentional.

David Green: If we think, not just about the crisis but also beyond the crisis, and we look towards the future, certainly the ideas that are in the book and the evidence from all the interviews that you have done around the world and what you have observed, how big is the challenge that we have got the adaptation advantage and are we ready for it?

Heather McGowan: I think the answer to, are we ready for it? I can answer better now than I could when I handed in the manuscript because the virus has showed us how highly adaptable we actually are. In two weeks to remap your supply chains and pivot your product lines, which most of the change happened in the first two weeks, we are 60 some odd days in now. But when I gave one of my first major talks, two weeks in, I had made a list of all the stuff we have changed and how quickly folks who had been resistant to adaptation ended up embracing it and surprising themselves. So I think we are highly adaptive and in that way the virus has also been a silver lining.

What we need to change is our fixation on occupational identity and driving towards the future self. So one of the things we bring up in the book is we ask young kids, what do you want to be when you grow up? Absurd, absurd question. We ask university students to pick a major before they have stepped foot on campus, and there are a huge social mobility implications to that because you pick based on what you are told you are good at in high school, very thin slice of life. If I was limited to that we would not be talking. What your parents do has huge social mobility implications because you can only imagine what you have seen. Sometimes also what we watch on TV because when CSI boomed in the US we had a surge in forensic scientists, we hopefully will have a surge in healthcare practitioners right now because we do have ageing societies in most of the developed world and we need that.

So we ask all those questions and then you look at one of those first things we ask each other, what do you do? Job loss takes twice as long to recover from than the loss of a primary relationship because you have lost everything that you are. Our systems are to drive you towards a singular point of space, at a time that your career is going to be longer and much more volatile.

So one of the main arguments in the book is we need to go back and focus on what are you inherently interested in? What are you curious about? Because that is your fuel source for lifelong learning, and we are all going to have to learn and adapt for life. So you start to learn to nurture your curiosity, your purpose, your passion and then learn to pay attention to what you are good at and constantly adding to it.

That puts us all in a position of better adaptation and then companies have to define themselves by their culture first, why they exist, how the world looks differently, what they will and will not do to us to achieve their vision and mission and then focus on constantly increasing their capacities.

One of the examples we use, I use it in my talks and I think we used it in the book, was Netflix. 1997 Netflix shipped DVD’s by mail. If they defined themselves by that and built a culture around that and only building capacity around that, they would not have been able to make the pivot in 2007 to streaming and then in 2011 to original content, which is now as of the end of 2019 44% of their revenues.

So a business model has more agility if it is defined by culture and increasing capacity. Then individuals focused on their own values, purpose and then expanding their capacity to create alignment. Then we can move together.

David Green: It is interesting. We all met when we were in Paris, we had Peter Hinssen on the show a few weeks ago and he was talking about these Phoenix organisations that have this ability to reinvent themselves. Walmart being a good example and actually what I see from reading your book, it is not actually just about the companies it is about people as well, as you said it is lifelong learning. Actually the big challenge is not necessarily an automation one it is a skills challenge. Because the half life of skills is dropping significantly. I pulled out a lovely stat from your book from IBM, that said the average skill gap was around four days of training in 2014 but by 2018 it was 36 days of training, which is staggering.

So it is a skills challenge and as you said, it is that need for us to reinvent ourselves on a continuous basis.

Heather McGowan: Yes and when we were together in Paris I said learning was the new pension, because if you look at how you make your money everyday, I am using US figures here, but 7% to 15% of what one makes every day, we are really making to put away for retirement. But we do not think about our time similarly in that 4 to 36 days is something like 12% to 15% of your time, about an hour, an hour and a half a day. We are not doing it now and then fast forward, it is going to be 30% to 45% of your time of learning every day.

Does that mean we are going to work half a day and learn half a day? No. Learning is part of work now and it needs to continue to be recognised as part of work because we all should be constantly up-skilling and re-skilling every day. Not just when you are out of a job, because your job is moving, your company is moving. If it is not, it is not going to survive. If you are not, you are not going to survive.

David Green: Yeah. Completely agree. So before we start looking at organisations, your book is in three parts and I will let you explain that in a minute, there is one part dedicated around organisations which I think we can delve into a little bit deeper. Firstly what do you mean by the adaptation advantage and what is it that needs to change?

Heather McGowan: Well for individuals and for organisations, when you look at it organisations are just collections of individuals, we all need to not be set by how we define ourselves and what we do. Whether it is a company defining itself solely by its brand and products, which are just exhausts from its learning and evidence of their culture, and individuals by your title and your processes and the way you have always done it and how you define yourself. Those are limiting factors. In the past it was okay because that lasted the career arc and that lasted the lifespan of a company. But if you look at the Innosight research based on the S&P 500, company time in the S&P 500 is shrinking rapidly.

So not only are products, services and business models not lasting as long, companies are not lasting as long. We are going to have more jobs, whether it is within an organisation or across organisations, a career is probably a decade longer now because of human longevity. So one of the things I talk about is the career arc is longer and more volatile. So you can not spend that first portion of your life learning on a single point in space because that point in space is probably not going to be there or not look like it did when you started. Then you are going to have to rapidly adapt. So the advantage on adaptation is your ability to be agile. In this moment the companies that are doing really well, some of them are lucky because they are in areas that we need right now like Zoom, others are pivoting rapidly.

I have a friend who owns a trade show company and her business is just obliterated, she said, I just stopped and said what are we good at? Where is the need and how quickly can we get there? They refigured they are looking at all sorts of things from helping build testing facilities to building face shields and they are thriving and thriving and I think that is what it is going to take.

David Green: Yes I think the crisis is definitely accelerating the demise of some industries or vocations and accelerating the others, it is forced, it is not good. So the crisis is accelerating that forced transformation of business and the way we work, which was probably going to happen anyway.

Culture, what is the role of culture in the adaptation advantage. I know you pay particular importance to this from an organisation view.

Heather McGowan: When your product lasted decades to the lifespan of your company, you did not have to pay attention to your culture as much. When your product is going to change, your customers might change and your business model might change, what do you hold on to as your touchstone? What you hold on to as your touchstone is why you existed in the first place.

What is your point of existing in the world? Why does the world look differently because you exist? What will or won’t you do in the pursuit of your vision and mission? which are the first two questions I ask. Also how people get attracted to your organisation, is with values alignment.

I am working with this organisation because they believe what I believe and they hired me because I had one of the skill sets they needed. They also hired me because they understood I was interested in constantly upgrading my skill sets to meet the needs of their changing business models.

There is a journey that can take place together, but if it is a company that defines itself on its random products today and seeking only the skills they needed, probably for the last person who did the job, that is driving while looking in the rear view mirror and now the car is going a lot faster. Very dangerous.

We need to fix our gaze out on the horizon as to why do we exist? What will and won't we do? What impact are we trying to make in the world? So we attract people to our shared mission and we will go on these learning tours together.

David Green: And the same is true around leadership and how do leadership styles need to evolve?

Heather McGowan: Leadership was not that long ago about driving productivity because you picked a business model and you just scaled it. John Hagel refers to that as the scalable efficiency era, he says now we are in the scalable learning era and I very much agree with him, quote him many times in the book as well.

So if you are a leader in the scalable learning era what do you need to be to really learn? You need to be comfortable being vulnerable. You need to be comfortable saying, I do not know. So if you are leading teams of people into the unknown and sometimes into the unknown unknowns, that is one of Peter's expressions.

You need to get a team, a group of people with whom you can establish psychological safety, where it is comfortable for people to say, I do not know, let us find out. I am concerned I do not know enough about this. I made a mistake about that. We need to address it. Because if you are a leader leading folks into the unknown unknowns and you are concealing things you do not know, hiding insecurities, you are signalling that to everybody on your team. That is a disaster waiting to happen. But if you can establish trust, psychological safety, dependability and accountability, everybody on the team has to show up. Have shared meaning around the mission and shared purpose with the individuals. That is what Google found in their project Aristotle, the most important factors in accelerated learning, team learning. And for leaders, we quote Brené Brown in there as well, of course she has been championing vulnerability for a long time. Vulnerability is key and it is really key right now. When you can'tt be on top of all your people because your only connection to them is Zoom you have to connect with them on a human level. You have sort to establish trust. You have to establish psychological safety. You have to believe them and have them believe in you and that is a shift in leadership that we have needed for a long time. I think it is one that is going to become a great era in our next period in business, from the shareholder value era to the human capital era.

David Green: And we are seeing it playing out a little bit on the political stage at the moment with different leaders because I guess they are very exposed by this particular crisis. We see certain leadership styles that seem to be having better results than others, we do not need to get into the politics otherwise we would probably be here all night.

But in the book you talk about a shift from IQ to EQ and then what you call AQ, adaptability quotient.

I think our listeners would be really interested in understanding that a little bit more actually.

Heather McGowan: There have been many other champions on adaptability quotient. Some of them I knew about, some of them I did not, the ones I knew about I quoted in the book. I was interviewed by someone a week or two ago that has got an AI based screening for, what is your adaptability quotient? Which I did not know about when I wrote the book, which was a pleasant discovery. Your adaptability quotient is your ability to let go of some things, be vulnerable at times, be reaching up for something you do not know.

Frankly it is hard and it is especially hard if we live in a society of absolute expertise, Dunning kruger kind of problems on the political stage. Ooop there we go, swimming naked again.

David Green: So we have looked at organisations, certainly looked at it from a culture and leadership perspective, and we have talked a little bit about this already, but what does this mean for individual workers in terms of future skills and learning? And the importance of learning?

We talked about the need for it to be continuous, how can organisations support workers through this and how much of it is the responsibility of the individual themselves?

Heather McGowan: So it is both. It is both the organisation and the individual, can not be on all one. We have shifted too much risk over the last couple of decades in the shareholder value era to the individual.

I mean, defined benefits became defined contributions with the rise of the gig worker. So we have shifted a lot of the risk onto the individual. We need to rebalance that. Organisations can provide all the learning in the world but if the individual does not engage, it will not matter, we all know that. So how we shift that is we start screening people, and Frida Polli's stuff with pymetrics is really interesting, started screening people on what is their propensity to learn, how much do they understand about their learning abilities and how they learn. Because you cannot just jump into learning if you do not know how you take in information and how you process information.

When learning was that first third of your life, you just needed to get through school. You needed to just get your degree and start working. Now learning is part of work. You need to know how you learn. You need to know what motivates you. You need to have a boss or a leader who helps you with that motivation and becomes more of a coach. Then we need to screen folks for values alignment, which is really alignment in motivation.

David Green: And I guess it is about agility as well. As you said, screening people’s propensity and agility to learn, and also for organisations it is understanding things like skills adjacency.

If you have got these particular skills it is actually not such a big leap to learn skill three and four and that is very different from how we have operated in the past.

Heather McGowan: Yes and I would mention that is where the visibility comes in again. So the stuff that Faethm AI can do, the stuff that IBM is doing, some of the stuff I believe Frida is doing, will allow you to see, you used to be an accountant and we need fewer of that type of accountant because of the way technology is taking over tasks. Not jobs, but tasks. We need many more people in cyber security and you have got 70% of the skills or 50% of the skills, so you have to shift your mindset, I am an accountant, I am a cyber security person.

Or maybe just do not have that label. Make it easier to for your next pivot and then look to start exploring that.

I also mentioned AT&T in the book, they have done a massive up-skilling of about a hundred thousand people using a somewhat similar process.

David Green: Yes actually that was set out quite nicely for the next question I was going to ask actually.

You are working with a number of organisations, can you provide an example of one that is really successfully adapting? What do you believe are their ingredients of success?

Heather McGowan: I think AT&T is a really good one. It is one of the ones I use in the book and I think they are particularly good because they have first looked at it and said, okay, we have got about 250,000 employees, many of the people joined this company back when you climbed a telephone pole. I mean, you did not have to have a degree. So we were laying the infrastructure of the country and now it is the cloud, it is cyber security, it is a number of other skills that we need completely different types of training.

So out of the 250,000 I think they identified about 100,000 and they said, here are some jobs that you could qualify for if you went through retraining here and they also would show you what the outlook of that job is. One of the most interesting things I think they have put in there is that the job is going to go like this, and then the demand for it is going to go like that.

So it showed you that it was not one time re-skilling but it is going to be a continuous re-skill. They built a massive infrastructure to do that with, I believe it was with Georgia Tech and a few other partners, they have invested about a billion dollars. Not everybody can do that. That is the argument I have heard from folks, we can not all afford to do that.

But there are many other ways you can use open source, MOOCs, you can tap into things. My hope is that during this virus we will start knitting together some of the pieces that are out there to give more people access to learning so more companies can re-skill rather than fill and spill.

When you do that, you lose a massive amount of tacit knowledge. So explicit knowledge is the stuff that can be codified and that is where we tend to focus but tacit knowledge is the stuff that is the knowhow that lives in individuals and only can be transferred from human to human. That really makes companies what they are.

We were hemorrhaging tacit knowledge in a lot of organisations where they just dumped people to lunge at new skill sets and often they are lunging at stuff they needed before but may not need in the future.

David Green: It is interesting, learning usually sits in the domain of HR and when we met at UNLEASH in Paris last October, that feels like a very long time ago now, the world has changed quite a lot since then. Obviously that was mostly HR professionals, HR leaders. How do you see the role of HR evolving and what do HR leaders specifically need to do differently?

Heather McGowan: They need to be in the C suite at the table with, I think it was written in the Economist and you might have pointed this out, your Chief Human Resource Officer in the virus is equivalent and perhaps maybe more important than your Chief Financial Officer in the global financial crisis. I could not agree more. Before the virus I was saying that HR needs to be elevated. You are the engine and the break. At the end of the day, look at every organisation you have got infrastructure, you have got access to capital, we have got some technologies, and then you have got humans.

On the first three things you can scale very quickly in any organisation. It is the humans that make a difference. So that makes HR the engine and the break of a company's success.

David Green: You mentioned IBM and I think the Economist article cited Diane Gherson, the CHRO there. Quite a different sort of profile for a CHRO, a business person at the end of the day, compared to maybe the traditional and prototype CHRO of the past and are you seeing that in some of the organisations you are working with? Like AT&T for example?

Heather McGowan: Yes you see more business people. I would like to see, along with the Chief Human Resource Officer, a chief learning scientist who understands. Because if you start looking ahead to the next 5 to 10 years, every organisation has to be a learning organisation. Learning has to be part of work. We all need to be more adaptable and if you had a Chief Learning Scientist in there they would understand when learning needs to take place and when learning is taking place that you might not be acknowledging, might not be making explicit and might not be socialising.

David Green: Yes and it will be interesting to see how that develops because you can see that learning, as we have talked about throughout the discussion, it is getting more and more important and that is only going to continue.

Heather McGowan: In concepts like having an anthropologist or an ethnographer, Genevieve Bell was an intern 20-30 years ago and that was considered odd.

I can see a lot more Genevieve Bell types out there in organisations because the slowest rate of your change for the rest of your life is right now and it is only going to accelerate. So helping humans adapt to technology change or in this moment a change brought on by a global pandemic or other aspects of globalisation is also going to be key to success. Because we are in a massive mental health crisis, we were in one before this happened, we are going to be in one. So having people mentally healthy, understanding how people adapt to change, understanding how people interact with technology and understanding how people learn. That is all the stuff that I think is the future of work.

David Green: Great. Well that leads on nicely to the last question, which we are asking everyone on the show at the moment.

So AI and automation, we have talked a lot about it today, but do you see them as an opportunity or a threat to HR?

Heather McGowan: I think it is like fire, it can cook your food so you do not die from under cooked meat or vegetables but it can burn your house down. So it is all going to be in how we use it.

I am a hopeful optimist so I see the glass more full than empty. I think that in the right hands, like some of the examples we have cited in this article, of screening better for talent that is more aligned with your culture and more likely to expand their capacity along with the organisation.

Better diversity, we have done a terrible job with all forms of diversity, representative, cognitive, neural diversity. That is going to be the benefit of organisations because the more diversity you have on your team with psychological safety, the more accelerated your learning is. Actually a really good business argument there.

So I think that automation of routine tasks, that is fine. Humans have to let go of something and reach up for the next thing. Technology taking over tasks that are more dangerous, particularly right now, is a good thing to do. But we need to place the human at the centre of this and seek better diversity in our organisations and better learning provisions.

We can release more human potential I think we are just scratching the surface of what humans could do.

David Green: Heather, I think we could probably continue this discussion all afternoon, but unfortunately time dictates we are now allowed to do it.

Thank you very much for being a guest on The Digital HR Leaders podcast.

How can people stay in touch with you and find out more about your book and follow you on social media?

Heather McGowan: You can find a lot of stuff about me on heathermcgowan.com. You can follow me on LinkedIn also Heather McGowan. I am a keynote speaker, I am doing all virtual events lately. The book is The Adaptation Advantage, there is a website, theadaptationadvantage.com, which also shows you all the places you can buy it because Amazon was running out of stock for a while. There will also be an audio book soon and I am doing regular podcasts to connect direct with folks right now in this time that I think humans need more optimistic other side of the river viewpoints.

David Green: Well I for one am very much enjoying the book, what I have read so far, so I definitely would recommend it to anyone in our space. Heather, thank you very much for being a guest and I look forward to hopefully seeing you in person at some point in the future at a conference around the world, or maybe when I am in New York or Boston. So thank you.

Heather McGowan: All right. Great. Thanks so much. Take care.