Future Resilience — Navigating and Directing the Focus of Future (Real) Skills
“An organisation’s fitness is the product of its compatibility with its environment.” General Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams.
As I drive around my town, I frequently see signage out the front of schools that claim “future-proofing”. I’ve long wondered what this means and I suspect, it’s different for each site. Perhaps you’ve done the same. We can’t future-proof anything these days and certainly, no school can create a “future-proof” individual. But schools can develop “future resilient” young people and we desperately need them to.
When asked my motivations for my work, I often respond with the same comment, “I don’t believe we’re preparing our students for the future. We haven’t for a long time. I mean to change that.” In fact, the future of humans living in our world occupies a significant amount of my thinking, listening and reading time and here’s why:
In Australia, nearly a third of young people are unemployed or under-employed and it’s taking almost 5 years to transition from full-time education to full-time work. Not only that, but nearly two-thirds of the courses our young people study are jobs set to be profoundly altered through automation (Foundation for Young Australians, 2018, The New Work Reality).
So. What do we do?
Some of these changes may be frightening but they may also be exciting and full of possibility.
It all depends on whether we believe that the future happens to us or whether we believe that we can design our own future.
Personally, I choose to believe the latter but we need to be equipped.
There’s a lot of information out there about how our world is now and what will likely happen in our world. Here’s a few you might like to scroll through:
- The Future of Education and Skills: Education 2030, OECD, 2018
- The New Basics, Foundation for Young Australians, 2016
- The Paradigm Shift: redefining Education — Deloitte, 2018
- Future Work Skills: 2020 — Institute for the Future for the University of Phoenix Research Institute, 2011
- STEM Skills in The Workplace: What Do Employers Want? — Prinsley & Baranyai, 2015
- Forecasting Skills for changing work generation facing work 4.0, 2018 — Siddhartha Saxena
- Friction is Fiction: The Future of Content, Media & Business — Gerd Leonhard, 2010
- Farsighted — Steven Johnson, 2018
- Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries — Safi Bahcall, 2019
- Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialised World, David Epstein, 2019
At NoTosh, we’ve synthesised these readings and many others to develop formative list for Future Resilience. In this blog series, released every Friday for the next 10 weeks, we’ll address each element in detail with practical ways you can enact each one in your classroom and school. We’ll be focussing on various skillsets in which we’ll borrow the term “real-skills” from Seth Godin as well as mindsets and toolsets.
A word on ducks. Have you ever wondered how their feathers don’t get water-logged causing them to flounder and sink?
Some time ago, I learnt that ducks have a special gland (uropygial) that produces an oil that ducks use to spread over their feathers. This oil contains a complex mixture of substances including waxes, acids and alcohols. By spreading this oil over their feathers, they effectively are resistant to water — it just slips right off and the duck is able to float.
Like water off a duck’s back.
Imagine this Future Resilient list as that oil; skillsets, mindsets and toolsets that help each of us to glide and thrive into the future.
