The end of the expert with Ian Beacraft – episode 7

Episode 7 summary

November 5, 2024 // 32 min, 11 sec

We’ve spent decades valuing our input into work: the toil; the hours; the expertise. In the future, the focus will be on results: outputs, not these inputs. With AI disrupting the process of work, the skill will lie in knowing how to delegate and orchestrate work. Today’s technical specialist will be replaced by the creative generalist who brings imagination to the use these new resources.​

In this episode:

Marissa is joined by founder of innovation consultancy Signal and Cipher, Ian Beacraft, to discuss a world where creativity replaces toil and technical know-how as the currency of work.​

• By 2050 AI will be as pervasive and unexceptional as 'digital' is today. What will happen to the technical expert in a world where knowledge is commodified?​
• Are ‘creative generalists’ born or made? How do we skill ourselves for this future?​
• Will we all have to become AI natives to run businesses top-down, or will changing to run them bottom-up allow us to learn from a new, AI-native generation?​
• With businesses no longer needing huge infrastructure or large workforces to scale fast, what will happen to the number, role and value of companies themselves?

Episode transcript

Marissa Geist 

Welcome to The Talent Time Machine, the podcast for talent leaders that takes you on a trip to work in 2050. We're going to think about trends, possibilities, and new realities for talent.  

Today we'll be exploring the future world of work, where it is the creative generalist who succeeds and not the professional specialist we value so highly today. I'm Marissa Geist, and I'm joined by strategist, technologist and futurist Ian Beacraft, founder of the consultancy Signal and Cipher. 

Ian, welcome. 

Ian Beacraft 

Marissa, it's a pleasure to be here. 

Marissa Geist 

So, Ian, from your background and your creative industries, what drew you into focusing on the world of work? 

Ian Beacraft 

So I'd been studying technology for the longest time. I worked a lot in new and emerging technologies for like 15 years, agency side and with brands. And the one thing that I always felt was missing from a lot of the work I'd seen in that space was the focus on people.  

It was all about, you know, “This new technology can do this amazing thing. Take a look at this. So we should go use this.” 

And the conversation was less about how does it affect the people that are working with it? How does it change the work that I do? How does it change the way I do my work? And I found especially with the last five years as I’ve leaned more into how we actually adopt these technologies and bring them into an organization, the most important part of the equation is not the technology. It's the people. It's the structures we build around them. It's the way that we integrate them. And there's a big difference between technological capability and practical reality.  

And I wanted to lean into what made it possible for people to adopt technologies that were beneficial. And how do we create a positive sum game for everybody, rather than just focusing on how cool certain technology is, which obviously is a pretty prescient argument for where AI is right now. 

Marissa Geist 

Yes, I did notice in your podcast you said or one of the videos you said, “If you're talking about the competitive advantage of AI, just forget it, because in six months it's going to be irrelevant.” So if that's in six months, what in 2050? Are we just going to be using technology in a different way, our work looks totally different? 

What does a day in the life look like for someone in 2050? 

Ian Beacraft 

The challenge with making predictions is we as humans are pretty bad at it. And even as a futurist, I'll say right away, our goal isn’t to predict the future, but it's to enable us to understand what the potential patterns are that we can reflect upon.  

And I'll start with some really good company. Back in 1992, Bill Gates said we'll have spam figured out in two years. We haven't gotten that so if Bill Gates can get this wrong, I'm already prefacing with that fact that I'm going to get this wrong. When we're hanging out in 2050, we can laugh about it.  

But the difference between where we are and where we'll be in 2050 is there's going to be multiple revolutions in human and technology relations, and what it means to use technology.  

As a society, we tend to think about the revolution we're in as kind of the final frontier, like this is as advanced as we're going to get. There might be some basic breakthroughs that are relatively close to what we have. So right now the focus is on AI, and eventually AI is just going to become another form of digital. We're going to talk about it the same way we do digital technologies. 

It's just, it's a given. It's an expectation. We don't even think about it as an advantage. You mentioned earlier like if you're an AI based company, you've got six months for that to really matter as an advantage or a differentiator because it's going to become infrastructure. Yes, it's a tool. It's something that can help accelerate workflows and create new opportunities. 

But in a very short period time, way less time than it took for the digital revolution to occur. AI is going to be a part of literally everything that we do, and there will be new forms of technologies that start to capture the human imagination. So I think almost every prediction about 2050 right now is going to lean very heavily on AI, including my own, because of that saturation and that bias. 

But if I were to take a look at it, it would be with a grain of salt around how fast that acceleration is happening. So if you take a look at that exponential curve, by 2050, which is 26 years from now, we will essentially be encountering 100 years of change at today's rate every five years. 

Marissa Geist 

That's crazy. I mean, you think about the change in the past years where people in the 1900s could be born before cars existed, and when the internet and people are on the moon and, you know, all of that change that seems so rapid.  

As opposed to somebody who would read the equivalent of, you know, The New York Times and that was all the news they had for their entire lifetime. And that was, what, in the 1700s.  

So I can see the rate of change, I can't see it. I'm not an exponential thinker. I think that's a really limiting factor as you've mentioned in your research, humans can't even see that. You just cannot contextualize how big that change is going to be. 

So I have four boys who I talk about often, and my youngest just turned ten, and the way he already uses AI as a given is so different. He doesn't see it as a threat. He doesn't see it as anything other than just the way he does things, either to ask questions, to create content. And we talk about now as a non-native user, I talk about in my business, you know, we're into finding talent and attracting talent. 

We have people using AI to write your resume or your CV. We have people to help AI with applying a job, and then you have automation reviewing the application and the job. And for us we're grappling with this. It's the AI rating the AI. How do we even figure out what that looks like? And I know by 2050 none of that will even exist, because we'll be so far past that point. 

But our reality kind of limits us to thinking about what that is. So how will the future of work change? If AI is creating and reviewing and iterating on its own without humans, where do humans fit in that equation? 

Ian Beacraft 

That's a great question. The challenge in seeing through where we are right now is because we're in this stage where the infrastructure behind the technology hasn’t really been built out. That's why we go from this peak of inflated expectations like, oh my gosh, your AI will take your kids to school and make their lunches and fix your golf swing. And, you know, also do all your work for you.  

And we see sparks of that. And that's part of why it still remains easy to connect to. Like, we see all these different humanoid robots that are being put out onto market. And the fact that, you know, in three years, I could actually have a humanoid robot in my home that does my laundry and my dishes. Oh, man, I'm all here for it. 

So we think that we're there, but we're not. We have bits and pieces of it that show us that we're getting close. But the infrastructure that shows us how all this works together isn't there. And until it is, we won't see what that life looks like. 

Marissa Geist 

That's fascinating, because I'm sure people, when they thought of it in the past, the work of the home, homemaker was 40 hours of work on average for women at the turn of the 1900s, and now you split the work more equitably, hopefully in the home between whoever's using the home, but a dishwasher isn't a humanoid washing my dishes, it's a dishwasher. 

And I would never think I need a humanoid to come in and do that. So it is even thinking about what it will look like, we tend to put it in the frame we know. And I guess that leads to the discussion of the shifting expectations. We're still putting our very now frame on what we’ll prize in the workplace in the future. 

But if you're really good at iterating and iterating and iterating, in 2050, what's even going to be important at work, without the bias of today's “This is how I see it in the future”? 

Ian Beacraft 

Absolutely. This is, I think, one of the most important issues that people are grappling with right now. And it leads directly to that sense of anxiety around value at work, because what we're seeing in the moment is that tasks that were responsible are being rapidly automated and that puts workers in a place where they're seeing value that they're responsible for being essentially extracted from their roles. 

While the organization is not really evolving around them to support them and say, “Hey, we see this changing, here's how we're going to help you, here's going to support you, and here's how we're going to change your role and your responsibilities.”  

That's phase one. And the way I see things is oftentimes in these societal shifts, things need to break in order for people to decide to fix them. 

People don't spend the billions of dollars in venture capital on new solutions, or in private equity investments or internal investments, unless there is a massive pain to fix.  

Marissa Geist 

Actually, that's a really salient point because now it looks like it's all benefit. So nothing's going to change, but something's going to break. 

Ian Beacraft 

Absolutely. 

Marissa Geist 

So what's going to break?  

Ian Beacraft 

I think the first thing to break is the sense of value in work. And what I mean is that we all value the work that we do, but there's going to be this separation between the act of doing the work or the toil associated with work, and the value that comes at the end of that work. 

A good association you just mentioned earlier, like washing the dishes, is something that we used to put our physical muscle as an input into getting the dishes done. We don't do that anymore, you know. Or if we do, it's minimal compared to what we used to do. We're doing the same thing with a lot of the things we do at work, the admin work that we do, the writing and documentation that we do. For designers, a lot of the work within like making the actual output. 

We are responsible for that. And that's why there's a very popular time and materials style business model. There are a lot of business models that are built around: how much effort does it take to do this work?  

And when it goes from this takes six hours, ten hours or 15 years of expertise, plus that ten hours, all that gets collapsed by AI models that are getting more and more effective at doing that work in seconds, at volume of an army of people, rather than one person doing one version of it in three weeks. 

That threatens the value of the way the system is currently designed. If nothing else changes, then there's mass unemployment, which is why people are scared. The thing is, it's not that simple. Things are changing around that, and that's what's not getting discussed or as well diagnosed. And that's why there's a sense of fear and anxiety. Because people are only seeing that one piece changing and not the others. 

Marissa Geist 

And I'm sure it's the same as the Industrial Revolution, taking away things that were core to people's identity. Your last name, Beacraft, if I'm not mistaken, is for beekeeping. So people were so tied to their work that their surnames were actually the work they did. Smith, as you know, I mean, it's pervasive. So now what about the context of our work will change? 

How will we introduce ourselves in the new world? What is going to be the sense of pride and connection we have to the work we do? If it's not time or materials, what will it become? 

Ian Beacraft 

My greatest hope for society, especially Western society—because it's definitely an American thing but I've noticed it all across the northern and southern hemisphere—is that when someone asks you who you are and asks you to introduce yourself, you don't start with “I am: job title.” That is very much a way of looking at the way of work now. 

And to your point, it gets to our roots of our family identities being built around these trades. But I'm hoping that we can get more to a point of us bring our whole person to that discussion as an introduction of like, here is all of me in a way that's relevant to this discussion.  

But speaking to work specifically, I think that the way that we'll look at work is going to change dramatically, rather than being the ones responsible for the toil associated with the final output, we'll be focusing on the skill sets of orchestration and delegation.  

And that's what we're seeing internally at Signal and Cipher. When we start to look at how the work is starting to change with using these tools effectively, a lot of people with specialties are saying, I can lean on this to help kind of break these things down, and then use agents to do a lot of the work and then come back to me with checking in as the human in the loop. 

So I'm still orchestrating and delegating. Think of it a little bit like Mickey in Fantasia being able to essentially work with the brooms and the water. 

Marissa Geist 

That ended so well for him, ha-ha.  

Ian Beacraft 

And the thing is, if you don't do it properly, that's exactly where it goes, because we don't have the infrastructure just yet. The tools are showing those signs of effectiveness, but they can easily go off the rails if they aren't checking. And what happens is exactly that when you just assume the tools will do the work for you. 

So we're in this in-between stage of again, we see the promise of it, but people just automatically assume it's going to do it without any effort and learning curve. And then we see that it doesn't or it goes off the rails. We get disappointed and we say we're not going to do it.  

But the people who really lean in and really spend the time to get to know how these things work and the impact they can have on their work are just absolutely blowing by everybody else in terms of their effectiveness and their scale, because they're spending the time and they're getting the reps with these tools to start to see how the landscape is going to shape out. 

So as we're talking about the concept of a creative generalist, these people who have depth of expertise in a couple areas, but more specifically, this cross section of interests, exposure and hobbies that make them adaptable to different scenarios, we're seeing that is really what's providing a lot of advantage with adopting new tool sets, but especially something with AI, which abstracts a lot of the years of discipline necessary to understand a skill. 

This changes the game in terms of what we value.  

And I'm curious, Marissa, as you work with organizations around the world, you're seeing a lot of these trends and a lot of the shifts. What are you seeing in terms of what's working for organizations? 

Marissa Geist 

It's a really interesting question, because I think companies are knowing that they need to do something different than have a job or a job description. Do jobs exist? That's a question we're having all the time. Should we continue this job structure? 

Should we move more to skills based? And what is skills based? And we're at the really early stages of thinking about work in terms of skills, in terms of immediacy of access to those skills, versus here's my job, here's where you report to here's what I pay you for that is a huge shift within companies. But the discussion has started. 

And at this time we're seeing a lot of people saying, “I need good analytical skills,” which is actually not what you need. The AI does most of the analyzing. So analytical skills is a proxy, I think, for what you articulated as a creative generalist. And that's someone that you could just plug in and say “Take a look at what this is, process it, come up with a recommendation and then help us move forward.” 

But companies are not ready to do that yet. And also, everyone defining their own way of articulating and creating a taxonomy for skills is probably not a good use of anyone's time. You think about just standard ways of talking about different skills. Someone like an IBM or one of the big data houses will come up with the taxonomy that we'll all end up using. 

So us creating these like small specialist ways of working, it seems a bit premature. So what we're saying is don't try to build your own. We're not that far away from having a different language, having a different way of working. Once we kind of get the bones of the house put out to market and usable for the data sets and for the big platforms that existing in companies, we can take that and use that now. 

So people are asking about it. They know there's something different. They really can’t articulate it. They might be 10% off the mark, but they're trying to do something now to get ready for it. So we're trying to make sure that they're not engineering for something that's going to be just obliterated when a big data set comes through and says, “No, this is the way we're doing it,” that's just wasted effort. 

So that's what companies are seeing. They know something is changing. They need to do something differently. We're still probably thinking too close to the paradigm that we have today.  

Having people be generalist conductors versus doers, or I like the, you know, the toil factor is taken away. So you need to be really comfortable orchestrating and delegating. That's a new skill set.  

That's not something that people that grew up in the repetition or the memorization era, I know they struggle with us accessing data versus memorizing data, and this is like the same type of leap then to say how we teach, how we learn, what we ask our kids to do, what we value in school… that really changes if we value generalists and not specialists.  

So do you see that starting now, where people are starting to value those skills? Or do you think we're still so stuck in where we're at that we can't see it yet in the education system and workplace? 

Ian Beacraft 

It's interesting, I think that the education system had the biggest backlash, or at least public backlash to a lot of this new technology, but they’ve also very quickly adopted it. I was impressed by how quickly the narrative turned around from “We'll never allow this in the classroom.” to, “Okay, it's just the way the world is now.” And they, for the most part, have responded. 

There's a long, long way to go. But they've done a better job than most corporations have. Most corporations are still in the phase of “Well, you know, I heard a lot about this metaverse thing and this big data thing and, you know, all these other things and they were just fads,” and they're treating AI as a business trend, or they're seeing it as something, as a technology initiative, both of which are true, but it misses the real important part. 

And that is: this is not an IT initiative. This is something that requires every single leader, from every single corner of the organization, to bring their own perspective and input into. Because this affects human resources more than any other technologies I've ever seen in my life. This affects operations, IT, creative, content, every single leader. And you all have to be aligned on how you're going to move forward. 

What kind of organization do you want to be with AI? What do you want AI to do for you? And we're just starting to see organizations come to that reality now. Most said, “Oh hey, everyone's buying ChatGPT. Let's get a bunch of licenses to see what it does and go with it.” And now that we're coming to the end of the 6 or 12 month cycle for companies who've done that, they're like, “Okay, so what are the results?” 

And it's a lot of, “We don't know.” 

Marissa Geist 

When you mention that businesses are not ready for it, it goes back to that point of; we work to the system. And I think just like education, businesses are set up to have a task, reward for a task, reward for behaviors that are driven to, I mean, we can see it struggling with like return to office. We don't have that policy as a company because we unbound the office from the work pretty much before Covid. 

But then certainly Covid was the end of it. But people still have that old paradigm of how hard you work is how much value you provide to the company. And even that idea of like, can I have a part time job? Well, if work is just orchestrating and delegating, and certainly identity is not tied to work the way it has been in the past, I, you know, again, I go back to my kids. 

They would never say when I say, “What do you want to do?” They talk about the life experiences they'd like to do and they're going to fit work into it. They're not gonna identify work as synonymous with their being, and also their work isn't going to be linear and it's not going to be task based. So how do we prepare them now? 

And certainly as a company I know we struggle with how do you pay people? How do you reward them? What is a benefit when I don't want to have a 401K, I want to have I want to have a sabbatical. I want to have pet care. I want to have something else. So our systems are not designed to deal with that reality. 

Our legislation is not designed to deal with that reality. I mean, you think about the antiquated exempt versus nonexempt in the US. That has to change if like your work doesn't revolve around hours or tasks. So I think right now we can't even see how much it's going to revolutionize what we do. But when you think about, going back to orchestrating and delegating, how do you start building around the ability to see that, recognize it, build it as a company, as a human? 

How do you start to move towards that versus I'm very good at this technical area of expertise. 

Ian Beacraft 

Well, I think it starts with something you identified a minute ago, and that is we build towards goals and understanding and tasks like there's structure around expectations of the work that you do, and that is based on the type of value your company provides. It's the standard operating procedures in your company. It's the North Star or the mission. 

All those things are pretty clearly articulated within your company. The challenge is, when the environment changes, all of that changes too. And we're talking about total systems change. The only way to get there, to a place where everyone can see it, is the leadership has to grapple with what their new North Star is going to be, and that doesn't happen right away. 

That takes time. But the first thing that most aren't doing right now is figuring out what do we want AI to be for us in the short and mid-term. We can think long term, and we could be right. Potentially we could be wrong. But in the short to mid-term, we need to make a decision that brings everybody together and gets us aligned on like, this is what we're doing as a company. 

That type of clarity gives people A, a sense of calm that we are looking into this. We have a plan, we have an idea. It's not just that, you know, “Whatever happens with AI is going to happen to us. And, you know, we're at the whims of this and we're going to be shaped by it.” It's like, “We're going to take charge of our own destiny. And this is the course there.” 

When that happens, people can start to see where their part is going to play in that. And that's something that has to cascade down from leadership is, okay at each level of the organization, what does this mean for you? So when you're starting to get to the individual contributors and you're like, “Okay, your work now looks like this.”  

It needs to be a partnership between management and individual contributors of how does this re-engineer the work that you do? How does this impact the work that you do? And get into the nuance of that. 

And we need people to understand what their value is going to be in that. But we can't do that unless they get hands on with it. But we don't want people to just get hands on with it willy nilly. They need a North Star, so you need to come at it from both ends of the spectrum. 

And that's when people start to understand, “Oh, this is how things are different. This is what it means to delegate some of this to the bots that can take away some of the toil and put myself in a place where I'm thinking more strategically about the impact I can have.”  

One of the things that we talk with our clients on is that we say one of the biggest shifts is not just managing down and out, but a much, much bigger emphasis on managing upwards and across. 

And that's going to be one of the biggest ways that this technology gets spread throughout the organization is the leadership tends to be a little bit more mature. They're a little bit less likely to want to adopt new technologies.  

Whereas the younger part of the workforce, the individual contributors, are more likely to be natives in this space. And these tools actually make it really easy to essentially encapsulate some of the value you provide as an individual and push that up to your boss and say, “Hey, you know, this thing I did for you that I've done like 100 times I've automated this and now it's available for you as a superpower.” 

And that becomes part of your value of pushing and managing up and essentially without them having to be, you know, learning these new skills, which often they won't, you as an individual contributor or a more junior employee are creating value, making them look good, getting them in the right places.  

And that's how you get promoted. We all know that. But it's that infusion from the bottom to the top whereas the strategy needs to come from the top to the bottom, and that's where we have to have this contract between all employees and management of, “We're going to work this together. Here's what I'm going to give you. Here's what I need from you.” 

Marissa Geist 

That makes total sense. And the native user, I think everyone not having to become as proficient as a native user is probably a breath of relief for some of us who did not grow up in this way. I think about that idea that I would have to work in that way is terrifying, quite frankly. Is that what's going to come to work? 

Makes sense to say, no. The corporate paradigm is we’re the strategy, where the leadership of what we want to be, and we're welcoming those new ways of working. And not everyone has to be as proficient at bringing that to bear, but they have to be welcoming and making sure that we don't hold on to ways of working that aren't as good as the ones that the new users are bringing to us. 

And that actually seems like a much more realistic idea than all of us learning how to do what somebody who grew up with AI and never would think of not using it for a task would do. And that actually, that's the agreement. That's the corporate paradigm shift. Strategy from the top. Culture in a lot of ways, what you're saying, like reward that, make sure that it's talked about and visible. 

And then from the bottom up, it's make sure you bridge it into the real work. And you don't just do something cool that doesn't have an outcome. Is that kind of what I'm hearing that you're seeing that the reality looks like? 

Ian Beacraft 

That's bang on. I think that any company that approaches it like that at this point in time is going to be way ahead of the game. 

Marissa Geist 

Okay, so before we end, I have a few quick-fire questions for you. Are you up for them? 

Ian Beacraft 

Let's do it. 

Marissa Geist 

Okay. Am I being too conservative in thinking it might take until 2050 to change from specialists to generalists, from toil to orchestration? Think it's going to be faster? 

Ian Beacraft 

I think that the companies that succeed the fastest will happen faster. But societal change takes a long time. There's a massive difference between technological possibility and practical reality.

So we as a species, we don't like change. We don't do that instantly within our own generation. So yeah, I don't think there's any reason to say that it would happen before then, but I think that what we'll do is we will lionize those companies that do it a lot faster, because they’ll have adapted to be native to the new environment, that doesn't mean the other ones will be irrelevant. 

It just means that the scale, the growth, the speed of the success that those embrace it will probably be much faster. 

Marissa Geist 

With fewer people needing to be in any given company, where will the work come from? Will there be more companies? Less companies? Will the concept of company disappear entirely? What does that look like? 

Ian Beacraft 

Absolutely. So I think we're starting to see some signals of what that work is going to look like already. We've seen the trend towards freelancing growing over the last decade and a half, and that's only going to be supercharged with things like AI as our copilot. But what I think is going to happen is the definition of business success, of being on the S&P 500 for 50 years straight is going to change. 

There's going to be a larger spectrum of what a business is and isn't. There'll be some businesses that are spun up for a couple of weeks for a special project or businesses that are around for a couple of years and kind of spun up around specific teams, and that's fine.  

It doesn’t mean that one is more valuable than the other, I just think that with the ability for AI to augment the skills of individuals and augment the skills of small teams, the impact of small teams is going to be far greater.  

So we're going to see this massive fragmentation and we'll see more companies than we’ve ever seen before by orders of magnitude more than we do now. And I think the idea of an organization that requires 250,000 people across the globe is going to be a relic of the past. 

I do think that these large organizations will be able to do what they do now with significantly less resources, but I don't think that the downsizing of those types of organizations is going to permanently put people on the breadline. I think it's going to create the opportunity for the fragmentation of these businesses and opportunity at a much smaller level, as well. 

That won't all happen overnight, and it won’t all be, you know, a walk in the park. But I do think that that spectrum is going to be much more robust over time with that. 

Marissa Geist 

There’s some political and sort of governmental regulatory dynamics to that with being able to spin up companies, take workers from one company lend to another, some employment situations, some incorporation legislation is more conducive to that. Do you see any place where they have the natural advantage, just sitting with what they have in terms of the ability to shift work? 

Or I guess, conversely, are there places where it's just so much more of a societal change to get into that mode? Does anyone have sort of a native advantage of that? 

Ian Beacraft 

I struggle to see a native advantage in any one particular place, because I think every single difference in approach comes with its pros and cons. In the US, our benefit and our challenge around the technology side is it's always innovation above all else.  

I'd put that more as a challenge at the moment, honestly. We're seeing so much progress in the technology, but we're not seeing the implementation and effective adoption across society, and that's driving a lot of the anxiety. 

If you take a look at Europe and they're putting a lot of legislation forward and saying, “Hey, the innovation is great, but there's other stuff that matters more and you have to go around that first.” And I think there's a lot of value in that.  

But I think that what we're going to get from both of those approaches is I think we’re going to get both the most catastrophic breaks in some cases from the technology gone wrong, as well as some of the benefits of the slow walking of some of the stuff down the road. 

And it's good that we have a variety. I think that we're going to learn a lot from each other. I hope that we are heeding those lessons, but I wouldn't say that any one particular place has a native advantage. If you took a look at it purely from a technical perspective, the US is far ahead of everybody else. 

If you take a look at it from a societal perspective, I would say the EU is doing a better job. Some people would say the exact opposite, that they're actually doing everything they can to stifle the growth, and that is impacting the adoption. And there's some truth to all of that.  

But I think the era of just saying, “All technology is great, we should just go for it because it's advancing.” is over.  

We need to second guess these things. We need to be strategic in how we roll these out, because otherwise we are going to let the machines win. And that's not the world we want to be living in. 

Marissa Geist 

No Skynet, we do not want Skynet. Okay, last question. In this new world, the generalists or the delegators/orchestrators, are they born or are they made? And can we all be one? Can I transition into one? 

Ian Beacraft 

Absolutely. So can people become creative generalists? I absolutely believe that they can. It's just like anything else. There are some people that are more predisposed to it than others and more innately talented in that mode of operation, but it's the kind of thing that everyone's going to have the ability to use. 

And I think that the tools that are being built right now are going to facilitate that in ways we haven't seen before, kind of like the tools we have today with Teams, Riverside, Zoom, the cloud computing, everything we have today versus what we had in like 2002 is so wildly different but is built for the types and the mode of operation we have in work.  

So just like the previous technology, innovations and automations made it so that I didn't have to do the manual work of typing, you know, on a calculator to get to a formula that’s 16,000 rows long. Now, I have technology that is facilitating all these different discussions and technical documentations that I don't need to know about in order to get to an end goal that is much larger, more strategic on my behalf. 

So for now, I think that for the next 5 to 10 years, it's going to be something that those who are innately better are going to have an advantage. But I think the tools are going to essentially close that gap and that advantage over time, and kind of bring that opportunity to everybody. 

Marissa Geist 

That makes so much sense, because I think about what a technologist was in 1996. It was somebody who knew how to use like AOL, and now no one's better at their job because they know how to log on to the internet. But that was a thing back in the day. You had to, you know, you had to know how to access the tools, and now it's just pervasive. 

So that makes sense. 

Okay, well thank you Ian, this was really, really insightful. And I think some of the points we took away about the difference in skill, moving from someone who is task and toil oriented to orchestrater or delegator.  

Your point about progress without implementation and that gap that causes the anxiety in societies and in companies is really something we could talk about today. 

What are you talking about that is potentially scary for people or something that they don't know how to pull down and use in their everyday life, and really closing that mental gap in terms of what we want to be as a company.  

And finally, your point about the corporation being the top-down idea of strategy and what type of organization you'd like to live at and work at, but then in combining it with the bottoms-up adoption and innovation and creating a space for that, those two places come together and everyone feels empowered to be a part of the progress. Really insightful and probably something we could do before 2050, should be doing now.  

So Ian Beacraft, futurist and founder of the consultancy Signal and Cipher, thanks for joining us on this episode of The Talent Time Machine. 

Ian Beacraft 

Cheers, Marissa. Thank you so much. 

Marissa Geist 

Join me next time on the trip to work 2050 in the Talent Time Machine. To catch the next episode or hear from my previous guests, be sure to follow us on your favorite podcast platform.  

This episode was edited by Matt Covarrubias and produced by Dusty Weis at Podcamp Media, with the support of Sarah Smelik, John McCarron, and Laura Pykett of Heavenly and the team at Cielo of Sally Hunter, Annamarie Andrews, and Susie Schuppel-Paul.  

For Cielo, thanks for listening. I'm Marissa Geist.