When there’s no instruction manual: Novel and adaptive thinking

The constant stream of new technological developments that augment our daily work makes the future difficult enough to predict. Even tougher to foresee is unexpected behavior on the part of the smart machines and autonomous systems most industries now employ. Because these systems often act on their own and communicate so rapidly, a seemingly small change in one part of the network can have surprising and expensive consequences elsewhere—such as shutting down an entire factory, office, or organization.
As more, increasingly complex systems are adopted each year, and downtime becomes more costly, firms will need workers who can look beyond an instruction manual for solutions. These individuals have mastered novel and adaptive thinking—the ability to navigate through crises for which rote or rule-based responses either won’t help or don’t exist. It’s one of 10 vital skills described in Future Work Skills 2020, a report by the Institute for the Future for Apollo Research Institute.

Because computers can’t diagnose their own emergent behavior with human nuance and creativity, workers who possess novel and adaptive thinking skills will be far tougher to replace. High-skill, abstract tasks, such as arguing a difficult legal case, conducting high-stakes negotiations, or reprogramming malfunctioning factory equipment after a software “upgrade,” are still best performed by people. And smart systems aren’t yet able to anticipate developing forces in society, such as the bankruptcies of financial firms and carmakers during the most recent recession, or the revolutionary activities that swept the Arab world in 2011.

As more incidents like these arise in a not-so-foreseeable future, workers capable of swift innovation will be quite busy in our volatile and unpredictable world.