Workers beyond 2023 must use knowledge, AI, art and wisdom.
Knowledge? Tomato is a fruit. Wisdom? Don’t put it in fruit salad.
Scott Galloway, Chip Conley — Reframing Aging, Mid-Life Chrysalis, and Maintaining a Growth Mindset, Podchaser (light edits)
This is a true story. I love this story because now having a wisdom school, it's sort of weird that I was doing this 34 years ago. But at age 20, I wrote on the cover of this book, “my wisdom book.”
And for every weekend for 34 years now, I sit down for 20 minutes and I write a series of bullet points about what I'd learned that week.
What felt like a “light bulb” and “epiphany” are so obvious to me today.
Like if you're gonna pitch an idea to your leadership, and there's a couple of people who are the natural critics, show it to them first, have them give you some thoughts on it, so that their fingerprints are on it.
So when you present it to the whole group, they're more likely to be at least neutral at, you know, if not positive.
That's such an obvious thing to me now at age 62, but not obvious back then.
If you actually do this exercise, you start to accelerate your wisdom.
Because all you're doing is, you're turning your painful life lessons into raw material of your future wisdom.
And then do that with a team. Once a quarter, we sit down and we say, “what was your biggest lesson of the quarter?” And each person gets to offer their lesson of the quarter.
And then we actually talk as a team, like,“what was our biggest team lesson in the quarter?”
What that does is, it helps us to get wiser, also more honest, about what we're learning, because wisdom is not taught, it's shared.
Peter Drucker was the person who coined the term “knowledge worker” in 1959 (in the book The Landmarks of Tomorrow). Nobody knew what the hell he was talking about because most people hadn't had any exposure to computers.
But by the 1980s, knowledge management was a practice and a discipline.
I actually think what we're going to see in the next 20 to 30 years, especially in the era of AI, is wisdom workers.
And they're going to have a different set of qualities in terms of what makes them different.
ingenuity
creativity
intuition
empathy
They're going to be embedded in organizations. Wisdom management and wisdom practices are going to be something that people look at.
And the wisdom practice I just described of a quarterly review of the key lessons each player has had, and then what's the team lesson, is I think part of the future for us.
In an era of AI hysteria, the calming and inspiring human wisdom that we have within us is going to be a great balance for it.
ACTION POINT: Workers beyond 2023 must use knowledge, AI, art and wisdom.
