Insights > Leading in the Great Transition
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Waves of business transformation – what will the Great Transition bring?

According to the World Economic Forum (@worldeconomicforum) we are amid the 3rd industrial revolution and at the precipice of the 4th Industrial revolution.

According to Daugherty and Wilson we are amid the 2nd and 3rd wave of business transformation within the 3rd industrial revolution, going into the 4th. The four industrial revolutions consist of:

  1. The introduction of the steam engine for automation
  2. The introduction of electricity improving speed and capacity
  3. The introduction of computers and technology for automation
  4. Combining the digital, physical and biological, think the Genome Project for mapping genes and genetics or the Human Connectome Project for mapping the brain.

What I’m calling The GREAT TRANSITION is moving from the 2nd wave of automation through the 3rd wave of adaptation and from the 3rd into the 4th industrial revolution. During this period, we as employees and leaders will now be in a constant state of learning and transition trying to keep up with the technological advancements. However, the surest way to slow this Great Transition down is to ignore the human’s propensity to resist change, adoption and adaptation and to ignore the need to achieve organizational readiness from the individual, teams, groups and divisions.

Most organizations, large, medium and small, are not early adopters and even those that are, have a significant portion of the workforce that are struggling to work effectively within the 2nd wave of business transformation. Increasing the speed of or improving automated processes are keeping managers and employees in a constant state of change. However, most change is not well thought out or communicated effectively to the people affected by the change and is causing change burnout throughout many organizations. Effective change management will help these processes of adoption and adaptation move more smoothly.

Consequently, there are some basic human intellectual soft skills (context, critical thinking, judgment, reimagination, and leadership) that need to be re-awoken in your current workforce. This article reviews the human soft skills needed to adopt and adapt to the technology that is here and coming within the 2nd and 3rd waves of business transformation. These soft skills are the basis for working through every evolutionary technological phase that will be introduced into businesses processes.

These skills also include human behavioral characteristics (building trust, emotional intelligence (EI), and mindset) that are relevant to wherever you are in this transitional workforce, in the 2nd wave middle, the 3rd wave missing middle, or developing for the 4th industrial revolution.

The first step in any transition is to be ready behaviorally, mindset, especially as we humans learn simultaneously with technology how to automate and to be continually adaptive. A self-evident truth is that we all, employees and leaders, can better relate and adapt our behaviors to be more engaging when we connect to each other, EI, through technology, when technology relates to us, or when we relate to each other. Carol Dweck’s book on the Growth Mindset is a great resource for reframing how to see and manage change while achieving high-performance standards.

This 2nd wave middle is represented as the act of being torn between your technology and your “real” work; the work you are responsible for on your desk/computer (wherever that desk/computer may be).

For this series, we talk about the interaction of personality, stress and the amount of virtual work most people currently engage in while interweaving how to engage your personal soft skill power tools to better be positioned to evolve. You’ll see interwoven into the series how the personal power tools of mindset and developing better judgment, context, critical thinking and building trust will prepare the workforce better for these inevitable changes. These tools develop our behavioral mindsets to be positioned for success within any revolution, wave or evolution.

Knowledge seeking, and adaptation is the new normal. Careers are no longer myopic, they are dynamic. This series begins with the basics, starting where most companies still are in the 2nd wave of automation, while preparing and/or developing the personal soft skill power tools to launch the 3rd wave of adaptation.

Earlier articles defined the Great Transition, the difference between working through technology and face-to-face work, and the idiosyncrasies of personalities at work. As a reminder, the 2nd wave middle consists of most workers, at all levels, who are straddling greater workloads with no extra help, but with more technological resources that make us more connected to more people. The 3rd wave missing middle is a concept explained in Daugherty and Wilson’s book in Human + Machine: Reimaging Work in the Age of AI.

In the 2nd wave and throughout the Great Transition that mindset, judgement, critical, thinking and building trust are basic skills the entire workforce need to reengage for growth and innovation. Leadership and reimagination are the two other skills all workers will have to develop fully as we move through the reimaging work processes in this new era of adaptation of business transformation and the integration of the digital, physical and biological in the 4th industrial revolution as defined by Schwab and Davis in Shaping the Future for The Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Daugherty and Wilson provide a framework based on the acronym MELDS as areas of need for the technological evolution. M = mindset (curiosity and attitude), E = experimentation (boldness and knowledge in failure), L = leadership (evolving and encompassing), D = data (science and management), and S = skills (unique to new business models). They too express the need to:

  1. Develop a growth and change mindset through reimagination and design thinking.
  2. Be bold in experimentation and fearlessness in gaining knowledge through experiencing the new systems in action which will be required for rethinking business in new possibilities unlimited by traditional restrictions.
  3. Evolve leadership skills to evolve leading people through transition, while developing new machines and processes, and finding the most opportune ways to meld human + machines for the greatest individual and organizational benefit.
  4. Mine, manage, clean, and adjusted raw data and machine learning to avoid bias, encourage and appreciate diversity and while being sensitive to ethical values, laws, regulations, politics and geo-social, geo-cultural, and geopolitical sensitivities.
  5. Prepare the workforce for the new skills that will be required for future adoptive processes. The fusion skills Daugherty and Wilson support for the 3rd wave are:
    1. Rehumanizing Time – identifying human tasks of interpersonal interactions, creativity, and decision-making
    2. Responsible Normalizing – shaping the purpose and perception of human-machine interactions
    3. Judgment Integration – identifying course of action when machine needs direction
    4. Intelligent Interrogation – knowing how to ask AI questions to get needed results
    5. Bot-based Empowerment – extending human capabilities into AI agents
    6. Holistic Melding – robust mental models of AI agents to improve outcomes
    7. Reciprocal Apprenticing – teaching AI-agent new skills and vice versa
    8. Relentless Reimaging – rethinking how business is down without prior restriction

For more information on Daugherty and Wilson’s skills and the 3rd wave I encourage you to read their book.

That said, to be able to get to and through this 3rd wave of business transformation and into and through the 4th industrial revolution, to perform these future challenges requires the reinforcement of the following seven personal skills mindset, context, critical thinking, judgment, trust building, reimagination and leadership.