The Human Edge
Adaptive Skills Powering a Balanced AI Future
To build into and sustain in the imminent cultural, innovation, and AI landscape, competencies in adaptive skills are more essential than ever. Technical skill alone doesn't get us far enough at all. The future demands a robust set of adaptive skills that equip collectives to work in partnership – with one another, with technology, and at an accelerated pace.
1. Analytical Thinking and Innovating
Able to identify and define problems, ideas, and experiments
Able to extract key information from data and develop workable experiments for ideas and problems
Able to operate in an iterative test-analyse-draw conclusions feedback loop to battle-test, understand, and validate ideas, innovations, problems, and curiosities
Comfortable and discerning with critique of ideas and findings
Able to apply data-driven solutions to advance creative ideas, resolve sticky problems, and innovate solutions effectively
Aspires to safe and productive failure
2. Complex Riddle Solving
Able to understand how components of a system influence each other – and other systems – and therefore, problems within them have no definitive formula or fixed number of potential solutions
Able to break things down into smaller parts and visualise linkages to ideate and propose new thinking
Able to construct methods to invite stakeholders into light-touch processes of ideating, solving, iterating, and proposing
Able to take in constructive critique continuously
Able to apply data and insights to actively iterate further on ideas
3. Critical Thinking and Analysis
Able to raise vital questions, ideas, and problems
Able to formulate questions, ideas, and problems in clear, precise, and compelling ways
Able to gather and critically assess the relevant, the subtle, and the overlooked
Able to use abstract ideas to interpret questions, ideas, and problems with depth, insight, and creative effectiveness
Able to come up with well-reasoned proposals, ideas, solutions, and conclusions that resonate and can endure
Able to test proposals, ideas, solutions, and conclusions against relevant criteria and standards rigorously, objectively, and without fear
4. Progressive Learning
Able to think open-mindedly, within alternative systems of thought, embracing perspectives beyond the confines of the status quo
Able to recognise and assess, as needed, one’s assumptions, the ripple effect of ideas, and their practical implications and consequences
Able to communicate effectively and collaboratively with others to co-create solutions for complex, entrenched problems
Ability to pivot on a dime, shifting course with agility and grace when new insights arise
5. Designing Learning Strategies
Able to design from envisioned outcomes, crafting futures before they unfold
Able to think, design, and cultivate from the user’s perspective and needs, as if walking in their moccasins
Able to design using alternative and varied methods and approaches, daring to break molds and rewrite the rules
Able to design from a blank page, unfettered by precedent or constraint
Able to extract and draw down a structure from a lot of data, insights, and information, weaving order from chaos, patterns from noise, yet without a chokehold
6. Discernment
Able to read a room, sensing undercurrents, unspoken signals, and power dynamics
Able to apply sound judgment, ascertaining risks, opportunities, and breakthroughs
Able to propose, recommend, or challenge with relevance and timing
Able to decode between the lines, extracting and clarifying implicit meaning
Able to hold back, exercising disciplined restraint
Able to listen to one's inner compass, grounding decisions in core principles
Able to map context, setting, questioning, contributing, disrupting, and disturbing with deliberate precision and impact
7. Attention to Detail
Able to line edit, refining clarity, flow, and intent
Able to quickly decipher complex information, parsing nuance without oversimplifying
Able to hear between words, detecting hidden meaning and subtext
Able to anticipate cascading outcomes, foreseeing both intended and collateral effects
Able to think from first-, second-, and third-order implications
Able to command detail amidst ambiguity
Able to elevate machine outputs, applying human judgment to sharpen accuracy and interrogate ethical integrity
Able to proofread with relentless patience
8. Trustworthiness
Able to be unwaveringly dependable and reliable
Able to follow through on commitments proactively, without reminding or needing to be managed
Able to support others with clear empathy, without fostering co- or conditioning dependence
Able to hold information securely, rigorously respect confidentiality
Able to resist misusing information
Able to hold and honour another’s story without judgment, distortion, or bleeding boundaries
Able to speak one’s truth elegantly, without fear or favor
These are merely eight of nearly 30 essential technical human skills required to thrive and compete in the next technological environment.
Are you leading from here? Are you hiring to lead from here? Are you preparing your system architectures to lead and innovate from here? Are you recognising how power is now at the forefront of culture discussions? Do you know how to craft and architect future-facing communication systems? Or are you simply complacent in the same old mental constructs, subjecting yourselves to the machine running you?
Ask yourselves these serious questions. Confront the truth to prepare.