L&D In Action: Winning Strategies from Learning Leaders - Employing Talent, not Jobs, in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Episode Date: April 25, 2023

In this episode of L&D in Action, Host Tyler Lay is joined by Ravin Jesuthasan, Global Leader for Transformation Services at Mercer. He is also a consultant, speaker, and author who has done extensive research on the future of work in the digital economy and artificial intelligence! Together, they discuss how AI and automation is going to change the way we run businesses, and why leaders need to reinvent themselves and their organizations.

You're listening to L&D in Action, winning strategies from learning leaders. This podcast, presented by GetAbstract, brings together the brightest minds in learning and development to discuss the best strategies for fostering employee engagement, maximizing potential, and building a culture of learning in your organization. With an eye on the future and a preference for the practical, we address the most important developments in edtech, leadership strategy, and workflow learning. Let's dive in. Hello and welcome to the L&D in Action podcast. Today I'm speaking with Robin J. Sudhasan. Robin is a consultant, speaker, and author who has done extensive research and scholarship on the future of work,

the digital economy, and artificial intelligence. Robin's most recent work is Work Without Jobs, How to Reboot Your Work Operating System. Robin, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you, Tyler. It's great to be here with you. Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to hear really quickly in your own words a little bit of your work and your life and what you're dedicated to right now. Sure. So I have the great privilege of taking care of Mercer's transformation business globally, but most of the work I do with clients, most of the things I write about related to the future of work, I have written four books on the topic. And I also sit on the World Economic Forum's steering committee on work and employment. That's wonderful. So today we're going to talk

a lot about, as you just said, the future of work. We're going to address AI. Automation is usually the sort of broad term that you and your co-author, John Boudreaux, use to refer to what most people generally speak about as AI, artificial intelligence. And we're going to spend some time discussing the book, Work Without Jobs, and hopefully some of your other works that you just mentioned as well. But to start things off, I'd like to anchor our conversation, if you will, in some numbers. There's a lot of talk constantly in the news, in media, and in social circles at work about AI and automation, more or less, you know, taking over, losing jobs, that sort of thing. I'd like to ask you the question, can you quantify even broadly how many jobs, how many positions will in fact be impacted or changed by automation?

In our third book together that John and I wrote, Reinventing Jobs, we illustrated with about 130 case studies that the organizations who lead with the work, as opposed to who lead with tech, always get to higher order outcomes. Because what they do is they transcend the populist narrative of a binary narrative, if you will, or a binary perspective between the automation that's coming and the talent that's in the job today to actually seeing three very nuanced outcomes. They see where the automation can substitute some of the highly repetitive rules-based tasks, things that perhaps require lower order skills. But what they also see are two, I think, very promising and optimistic dimensions to the impact of automation. They see where AI can augment the human empathy, the critical thinking, the things that are truly

human, making that human almost super productive. And they also see where the presence of automation can create new human work. And so I do think AI and automation will affect virtually every job in some way, shape or form. But I think its impact is going to be far more nuanced and maybe not quite as destructive as we might be led to believe by the popular press. Hopefully not. The conversation is a complex one. And you speak a lot about the political impact that it has and how politicians

utilize AI as a part of their base of their policies. And it is just such a complex question. But at the end of the day, what you've dedicated yourself to is convincing people to reframe the paradigm at the end of the day. And the basis for the restructuring of the conversation is what you refer to as the work operating system. Would you mind just kind of defining that really quickly? Yeah, absolutely. So in my fourth book, which you kindly introduced, Work Without Jobs, John and I set out to basically introduce a new work operating system, one that is not indexed or based on this notion of a job and a job holder, but one that is actually tied to the fundamental tasks and skills, both the ones today and the ones to come.

And in that book, which was published by the MIT Press, we lay out four principles for that operating system. The first being to start with the work, the work that exists today and the work that's to come, and setting aside how we might organize the work. Secondly, as we touched on at the beginning here, for that work, let's figure out the optimal combinations of humans and automation. You know, where does work get substit people to the work? Should it be an employee in a full-time job? Should it be an employee in an agile talent pool? Should it be a gig worker, an outsourcer, etc.?

And then the fourth being, how do we create a system where we are perpetually reinventing work as our needs as a business change, as the needs of our workforce change, and as the external environment changes. And Lord knows, Tyler, that we've seen a lot of change in the external environment, whether it's the pandemic, whether it's the war in Ukraine, whether it's the ongoing climate crisis. And that's just going to be a staple. So how do we, as we articulated in the sports principle, ensure that we've got a mindset of perpetual reinvention? You know, the old days of being able to say, I'm going to transform once every seven years are gone. And what we need are leaders who can keep reinventing themselves and their organizations. So much of your work reflects very deeply on the history of work, going back to the industrial revolutions and taking of change at which technology changes. So in one of your I think a video presentation that I watched, you give like four different sort of distinct points of the changes of hierarchy and structure of work. And it goes from the 18th and

19th century to like the 1920s and the 1960s and the early 2000s. And now it's we're still in the early like 2000s. Theoretically, we're in the 2020s, and we're at that totally new phase now where AI, things like ChatGPT have been released, and all of a sudden the world blows up and we're saying, wow, am I still going to be doing writing? What is this going to change? And do you foresee that there will be this consistently rapid pace of change where five, 10 years from now, I'm sure you will continue to write books, but do you see something even more radical ahead that's going to hit us? Tyler, I really see both the pace and the

quantum of change just not abating. I struggle to see how it slows down because, in large part, because there is so much volatility in the global economy, right? And I think in many respects, the thing that really started us off on this pace of ever-accelerating change is I go back to the early 70s with the oil shocks, right? And we went through a period of pretty steady, maybe even before that in the United States with the civil rights movement, et cetera, in the 60s. But prior to that, from the end of World War II to sort of the early to mid 60s, we had a period of pretty steady, stable growth. And post that, we've just seen ever accelerating velocity and variability with the global economy. And so I struggle to see how we get back to an environment of stability as much

as we may not want it. I think that pace and quantum of change will just continue to increase. Yeah. So let's dive in as to how to address this quantum of change. You use the term letting the talent flow to the work. I'd love for you to expand on that and describe a little bit more what you mean by that term. Yeah, absolutely. And it ties back, Tyler, to that fourth principle where I talked about perpetual reinvention and reducing the frictional cost of work. In the book, we talk about three models for work. Think of them as fixed, flex, and flow. The fixed model is the one that we've had for the last 140 years. A one-to-one relationship between a person and a position things like job architecture is being

used to connect people to work what we're seeing with many large companies now is this flexible model of emerge where you and i might be in jobs but we have the flexibility to express our skills in other parts of the organization where those skills are demanded. And we have the opportunity to go acquire new skills by taking on projects and assignments and gigs. And so we have space, if you will, within our existing jobs to flexibly acquire or express skills. It's one of the reasons why we've seen so many companies introduce talent marketplaces. And then the third model, the flow model, if you will, is one which I think of

as being agile on steroids. And what I mean by that is everyone might be an employee, they might be a gig worker, you know, the form or the construct of the relationship doesn't matter. But the way they connect to work is by continuously connecting to work through assignments and gigs and projects. And this is where you have algorithms continuously matching your skills and your developmental needs to opportunities to express those skills and acquire them. It's where we're seeing this really take off, Tyler, is for within organizations where you have demand for certain skills across the company. Think data scientists, think digital talent, think program managers. I don't want them confined to IT or finance because

I need their skills in marketing, I need their skills in HR, I need their skills in exactly product development, in sales, in customer analytics, in manufacturing. So how do I create a construct which enables them to connect to that work as seamlessly as possible? And what this requires is both the enabling technology, but it also requires managers who can think beyond the job, who can think about redesigning work to enable this talent to connect to work at speed and at scale. This sounds a lot like the dream.

At the end of the day, if I'm focusing on the skills that I value most and I'm able to apply those skills directly to the work that I'm doing in this sort of like almost autonomous way or this exploratory way even, that sounds really incredible. But I fear that in practice, this is challenging. This is not an easy thing to implement. And that may largely just be because of the precedent and the history at which we're kind of fighting back against.

Again, you know, politicians and the history of work is a well-established system and their expectations of hierarchy. And there are plenty of people and plenty of industries that are simply going to push back on this level of freedom that you're describing and the flexibility that we now need. What I see as a critical system to moving this forward is learning and development folks. At the end of the day, I'm a big believer that learning and development leaders are the ones who have the most access and most familiarity with the most people at their organizations in terms of what

every individual is responsible for, how every individual is feeling about what they're doing because of the association with HR. I think that to me, it feels like learning and development folks are going to be a very critical force in moving to this future. Would you agree with me there? Yes. No, I completely agree. I do think learning and development certainly is going to be absolutely pivotal. It is going to require, you know, just thinking about HR more broadly, though, reinvention of many, many of our traditional processes. And that's one of the things that we see with companies as they introduce these ways of working, as they introduce the tech,

it's the surrounding architecture, to your point, that needs to be reinvented. So, surrounding architecture, to your point, that needs to be reinvented. So how we move beyond this notion of degrees and highly structured learning interventions to nano and micro upskilling and reskilling opportunities, to think about how we develop and deploy people to opportunities, to thinking about how do we give people more space and take more risks, right? You know, we've seen companies say, I'm not going to promote you when you're ready. I'm going to promote you when I think you're 60% or 50% ready, because I'm going to take the risk and give you the opportunity to grow and redefine the role in a way that makes it yours.

So I do think L&D is going to be absolutely essential, but I also think it's going to require a significant reinvention of so much of what L&D and HR more broadly have relied on in terms of their architecture. Yeah, I think that will probably come as no surprise to HR and L&D folks just because we've seen the role of HR departments change so much over the past few decades, from focusing on hiring and recruitment to being a pivotal force in culture and community development at companies. And now we're looking at the next thing here. I think it was CEO of Chanel that you once cited who said that HR is going to move from

a force of structure to a force of culture. Is that right? Something along those lines? Yeah, no, that you're remembering well, Tyler. Lina Nair, who used to be the CHO at Unilever and about a year or so ago became the CEO at Chanel. There's someone I've had the privilege of working with for a number of years. And I thought she said it beautifully. As we look at this emerging world of work, we have traditionally led with these structures, right? Organization structure, Java hierarchies, very structured

approaches to how talent is developed and rewarded to increasingly a world where those structures no longer work because they are too inflexible, they don't operate with enough velocity or variability, and increasingly, culture becomes the new structure. Culture becomes the thing that disparate interests binds individuals and and organizations of varied pursuits to a common mission and purpose and i think she was absolutely right i would absolutely agree especially when it comes to disparate workforces like we're seeing and post-pandemic decentralized work and all of that culture really is the driving force the motivating force behind

what i see as successful companies today ultimately this is difficult stuff though when it comes to automation ai and what you focus on in your work or scholarship it's challenging stuff it's esoteric technological work and when new ai tools come out they blow people's minds because of how challenging those things. And that to me is one of the most critical things that we have to address here is how do we teach people to use these things to understand the tools? How do we make sure that those who can benefit most from automation and AI are identifying the best opportunities to do so and then incorporating those changes into their organizations successfully. I think your third book is probably the best for addressing this reinventing jobs. And then there's plenty of frameworks throughout the work that you've done. But first of all, I would like to address, I think there are three trigger points that you mentioned in work without jobs, or maybe there's more than three, but there's a handful of trigger points that you discuss in work without jobs that represent good opportunities to look into adopting automation.

Can you address those? Yeah. So I'll go back to something you said a second ago, right? This, the change we're talking about is not incremental change. The change we're talking about is pretty revolutionary. And so in order for businesses to get comfortable with this new work operating system, with some of its underpinnings, what John and I talk about a set of triggers where it requires you to step back and question your traditional approach to solving a particular problem. And some of those challenges just pick on sort of three things, right? three things, right? One is when you've got an opportunity with new technology, like pick on ChatGPT, right? Because Lord knows since November, that's really dominated the headlines. I spent most of Davos talking to the media about ChatGPT and how companies might... Every LinkedIn post for a month and a half was ChatGPT. Right. And how companies might introduce a new set of guardrails as they introduce it.

And we're going to see, Tyler, these continued evolutions, right? We saw this, what, five, seven years ago with DeepMind. When that first introduced or brought to the mainstream, this notion of neural networks and deep neural networks. And what we're seeing is ChatGPT be an exponential acceleration of some of those core underpinnings. And we're going to keep seeing that over the course of certainly our lifetimes. So one trigger point is new technologies, which we're always going to see.

The other is going to be a bottleneck in a process. It could be a recruitment process. It could be our manufacturing processes. How do we deal with some of the supply chain disruptions that we saw over the last, the previous sort of 12 months or so? And a third might be a shift in organizational priorities. You know, one great example is we've seen in many manufacturing industries specifically, companies going from being traditional manufacturers to more end-to-end service providers. And what does that mean

in terms of now new skills, redefined roles for some of your field service technicians who in the past were just maintaining your existing infrastructure and now are being asked to go sell new services? So to me, those three things are often really good triggers to step back and say, Those three things are often really good triggers to step back and say, how do we not reinvent with the status quo in mind, but how do we reinvent for a much higher order outcome than we might have traditionally gotten? You give a handful of case studies for companies and organizations that have really nailed this, who've done it really, really well. Genentech is one of the biggest ones they developed.

I think it was like the persona system around adopting these sorts of things and changing how their employees work. Can you discuss that, Genentech? Yeah, absolutely. So Genentech was one of the case studies in work without jobs. And the reason they were like the first case study, Tyler, was in April of 2020, their incredibly thoughtful leadership team led by their CEO, Alexander, and their HR team led by Cynthia Birx actually saw this pandemic playing out and said, this is going to be a fundamental change in how we think about work. And is there an opportunity for us to make work more accessible

and inclusive? And they started with this philosophy that, you know, something that organizations even today in 2023 are wrestling with, are we on-site, are we hybrid versus are we remote? And their whole model was to say, we believe there are opportunities for flexibility in all jobs. Let's make sure that we understand the work to identify the optimal options for flexibility. And so instead of saying, Tyler, you're an HR person and you can work from anywhere and Robin, you're a manufacturing or a research person and you have to be in your facility or your lab, actually deconstructing the work to say, let's create, let's deconstruct the work and then let's reconstruct it into a series of personas

that actually show people how there is flexibility in manufacturing work, there's flexibility in research work, etc. But let's not limit ourselves to a job or a title, but rather get to the work and then illustrate how even for that researcher, her work actually looks a lot like that accountant when we deconstruct it and get to its core elements because she's spending 60% of her time doing analyzing third-party research reports, etc. She doesn't need to be in her lab for that, but we don't get that insight till we get to the work.

And so they created these reconstructed personas, if you will, that cut across many different jobs and job families. Again, as part of this narrative of saying, we believe there's opportunities for flexibility in all work. We just need to find the right flexibility and one that balances individual need with organizational demands. The big challenge there, as far as I can tell, is deconstructing the work in an effective way. Again, you've given plenty of guidance on this through the work that you've done. I think one of the core principles is there's three spectra that you give where

determining whether the work is more this or more this, and I believe it's repetitive versus variable, independent versus interactive, and physical versus mental. Is that right? Are those the three spectra that I'm referring to? Yes. I think that's absolutely critical when it comes to deconstructing the jobs. Deconsting work, is understanding from a very minute view, you know, what does it take to do this on a chronological basis and also just, you know, on the personal work basis. I'd love for you to expand on that a little bit and just address, you know, if you have any good examples of how one might break a position down and determine, you know, how you can come

to personas like Genentech did, for example. Yeah, for sure. Firstly, well done remembering the three continuums. Even I forget them. That's how we met several years ago when we discussed that book instead of this book. Indeed. Yeah, that was one of the key points that, of course, I remember just because those spectra are so critical to deconstructing work, which is the real key point here.

Yeah. And, you know, at the heart of it, Tyler, is the opportunity to take a job or a workflow or a process and identify all its component activities and then classifying those activities on those three continuums. And one of the things that we realized at Genentech is if you look at that continuum of independent versus interactive work is how much work, and we've seen this since 2020, how much work that used to be done asynchronously, so what sits in the middle of that continuum, it's basically asynchronous collaboration. We have moved it all the way to

the far right to say, just because we've got Zoom and Teams and all of these different platforms, we default to making the work synchronous collaboration when it doesn't really need to be. And frankly, it raises the stress premiums associated with that work, right? Because in the past, I would work on something and I'd email it to you and you might be in a different time zone and you'd get to it whenever you got to it and it was on your cadence and schedule. Now we've kind of shifted that work to the far right to say, oh, well, Tyler, why don't we jump on a Zoom call and just knock this out now? That gets done, that gets amplified millions of times a day. And it was

really fascinating both at Genentech as well as in other organizations to map out work on these continuums and to understand not just where the work sits and what it means for how we redesign work, but also how it's changed and how we've increased our levels of stress by making some of these sometimes inadvertent choices. So now even beyond this, beyond the way we deconstruct the work, is the way we deconstruct the education. We're going to have to change degrees. We're going to have to change degrees. We're going to have to change school. You know, everything is really going to change that leads to work and that yields good workers that gives you the qualifications that you need to have a job.

How do you see education changing? Yeah, I get asked this question all the time, Tyler, and I've spent time with a number of presidents of universities as well as the consortium of the top 200 MBA programs in the United States. I think there is a real need for education to be reinvented. I've had a number of presidents say to me, we're no longer going to be this place where you just come to acquire technical skills, right? Because if you think of the calculus for education, particularly in the United States, you know, you spend what, $100,000, $150,000 getting, if you're lucky, a four-year degree that in the good old days saw you through a 30-year career or a 40-year career of work. But now that half-life of skills is not going to see you through 30 years. At best,

it might see you through seven years. So the economics and the math just don't work anymore. And so what we've seen with a number of universities, we've seen the Harvard Business School and the National University of Singapore actually provide lifetime education for their graduates to say, if you've paid to come to school here, we're going to give you unfettered access to all of our learning resources so you can stay relevant for a changing world. I've had a number of university persons who we've worked with actually say, we're retooling our proposition such that you're not going to come here to get an engineering degree. That's not the best use of your time. Yeah, you might pick one up along the way, but what you're going to come here to do is to learn how to learn. You're going to come here to ensure your perpetual relevance for a rapidly changing world.

We're going to teach you the ability to look around corners, to become that classic T-shaped or pie-shaped leader, as in the symbol for pie. Leaders who are deep in a couple of areas, but more importantly, have the learning agility and the mental acuity to sort of see connections across different domains, and thus can be relevant and can solve problems as they emerge. And you're going to come here because you're going to be part of a community, a community that's going to learn together, that's going to support each other. So I really see education changing quite dramatically. Probably not as fast as many of us would like, but we're certainly starting to see some of those markers of change. The education system is one of the more old guard institutions, I would argue, in America

specifically. Michelle Weiss is an expert who spent a lot of time on this, and I think she has talked of, I mean, extended careers. As lifespans extend, the career will last much longer, and a degree obviously will not sustain that, even if it arguably does now. You know, I studied literature, and I spent very little time doing what I think a literature degree is most directly conducive to, which is reading classics of fiction. That's what I spent my time doing. But I think this puts a lot of emphasis on, again again learning and development departments and how they will tackle this question of longer lifespans and rapidly changing work do you see partnerships with institutions and education developing and do you see a focus in of investment toward companies and organizations and solutions that are focusing on you know

greater education questions like this within the workforce? Are you seeing? Oh, absolutely. We're starting to see some really interesting collaborations between groups of companies and educational institutions. We've also seen a number of individual companies do some interesting things to solidify the supply of skills.

You know, United Airlines in my hometown, Chicago, has just done an outstanding job of setting up their new flight academy, Aviate. And the thing that it's done is, as we've seen the supply of pilots from the military decline as the military shrunk, it has helped them secure their supply going forward. Equally important is it's helped them actually diversify their talent pool. 80% of their first graduating class were women and minorities, which significantly underrepresented, as we know, in pilot ranks because of what the traditional source of supply was. And so in one fell swoop, they have lifted up a number of communities from disadvantaged communities around the country, but they've also significantly diversified their talent pool while securing their supply of pilots

for the future. That's really fascinating. That's a really interesting sort of byproduct of that sort of endeavor. Let's address leadership now. You spend some time in Work Without Jobs talking about how leaders are going to have to adopt and adapt this is a big challenge working with increasingly disparate workforces taking on and like i said much earlier in the podcast choosing which automation tools which systems to adopt and how to do it effectively how do leaders have to change and do they have to do as much learning as everybody else in this new ecosystem oh absolutely tyler i think we're seeing some really really significant changes in the demands of leaders and i'm going to continue to see that in the book we talked about

five significant shifts and i think they are truly significant you know the first being from hierarchical authority how most leaders have traditionally led this conferred responsibility and authority to increasingly empowerment and alignment. If we think of the leadership brand becoming ever more important from leading something we touched on at the beginning from technical automation, I'm going to automate something because I can, to increasingly, I think, a new set of guardrails, particularly given what we've seen with the advances in chat GPT just the last couple of months, to more of a humanistic perspective

on automation with a new set of guardrails. From an episodic focus on DEI to as we think of these more agile ways of working, more of a continuous focus on DEI, as we think of these more agile ways of working, more of a continuous focus on DEI as we think of how projects teams are mobilized and organized because you've got the volume and velocity of work that's now dramatically different. I think of a really big change is from we've been asking leaders to be digitally savvy. I think what we are raising the bar on that to say it's not just digital savvy, it's real technological fluency. Not just what AI is, but I need you to understand how ChatGPT gets integrated into our business model because of the transformative game-changing power of some of these technologies. And it can't just be at a superficial digital savvy level. It's real

technological fluency. And I think the last change is pretty material. It's from process execution. Coming back to where we started, right, this notion of talent flowing to work, from organizing processes and getting people connected to them in structured fashion, to increasingly being about project guidance, where work is flowing to talent and talent to work ever more seamlessly. So five pretty significant shifts, I think, in what we're going to be asking of leaders. In regards to that last point there, platforms are becoming increasingly critical. Job marketplaces, for instance, they've been on the rise. Upwork and freelance websites and that sort of thing

have played a very critical role for many companies. Do you see the use of those sorts of things increasing and do you see more investment in the creation of those things in the future as well? Absolutely. My second book, you may recall, which was called Lead the Work, Navigating a World Beyond Employment, we looked at these marketplaces. This is way back in 2015. And they have absolutely, I see them just exponentially increasing because we're finding that there are comparative advantages to organizing work in these marketplaces and for companies to be able to engage with them more seamlessly. And so I think one of the key skills of leaders is going to be navigating this plurality of knowing when it makes sense to use talent on a marketplace versus hiring someone for a full-time job. What are the metrics?

Where do I automate more versus use a gig worker or someone with highly specialized skills? One of the toughest questions that learning leaders, L&D professionals often ask is how do we teach without interrupting the flow of work? How do we teach in the flow of work, for instance? And how do we make sure that we're guaranteeing that the learning that we're providing to our employees is exciting, engaging, and they feel like it's valuable? And again, because AI and automation are such challenging topics, what advice can you give to L&D professionals, chief learning officers, and those in charge of organizational learning on how to learn this for themselves, but how to distribute that learning to their organizations? Because you just mentioned that leaders at a

certain point are going to have to learn these things themselves. When I first started using ChatGPT, I realized how little I knew about ChatGPT. And I decided to look into, you know, language modeling and study it a little bit. And again, this is an incredibly expansive sphere of knowledge. It's very esoteric, and it's very, very challenging. And I can see what you mean by having leaders have to understand these things, because in order to decide how effective something is, for how effective chat gpt is versus the many competitors that have already been released or will be released in the next two months five months a year how many we're going to see who knows but it's a challenge to learn these things

if you have little or no background in those specific realms of knowledge so how do you advise learning leaders and managers and leaders in general teach themselves and also teach others within their organizations how to understand this stuff and what to know about this stuff. Yeah, Talon, this is a really important point. It goes back to something we talked about a second ago. As the half-life of so many skills are shrinking, what we need is we need to build in space for both learning and well-being into the flow of work. We have to get out of these inane discussions about work-life balance. We have to get out of this mindset that big upskilling and reskilling interventions are done separately and away from work. My friends at Unilever, who we talked about

earlier, have been really thoughtful about this. They've got a program called You Renew, where people are actually paid to acquire new skills that are important for the company going forward and given the time to do so. And I think that's really, really important. So it requires us, I think L&D has to, in the minds of business leaders, go away from that first line item that they cut when they're approaching a recession or when they see a recession on the horizon to really being the epicenter of the new deal. I'm really thrilled to hear you say that because as you know, in the current economic climate, there's a lot of layoffs going on right now. A lot of people are being let go from major, major companies, all industries. And from what I can tell, L&D and even HR is taking a pretty big

hit right now. And it's upsetting to see. And hopefully, soon enough, over time, leaders will realize the importance education plays right now, especially when it comes to the sort of technology and the potential that it has to optimize organization. I don't think enough people realize the ROI that education can have for an organization when it comes to these sorts of things. How, again, how to make the best decisions for adopting AI, adopting automation, and adapting to that technology. It comes from, first of all, learning and spreading that education throughout the organization. And then it comes from making the right choices. So I'm really thrilled to hear you say that you think that those positions should be cut as much as they

have been lately. And this reminds me of something that Greg Till said. You did a video call with him a while back. I think it was about a year ago. And he is one of your case studies as well, I think, what you've written. He said that HR professionals are in the best position that they've been in in a while. And this was a little bit farther back. This wasn't very recent. So this was probably before many of the layoffs that are happening right now. But he said that there's never been a better time to be an HR professional, essentially. And I definitely would say that I agree with him. Although I think it comes with the caveat that is all that we've been talking about today is

if you can learn effectively, and if you can really, truly make those correct decisions as to what to adopt, how to adjust, how to adapt, how to change, where you need to pivot amid all of this wild technological advancement that we're seeing. So what would be your best pieces of advice to HR professionals to capitalize on this incredibly powerful moment that we're in right now? Yeah. So Greg Fesley is just an unbelievable HR leader for your listeners, Tyler. He's the chief HR officer of Providence Health, which is one of the major case studies in the book. And Greg has done some amazing things because I think the HR leaders who have really thrived, who have blazed a trail forward, the Greg Tales's, the Lena Nair's at Unilever, now at CEO at Chanel, the Diane Gieson's at IBM recently retired. Diane said, I think quite

appropriately, if the CFOs were the heroes of the financial crisis, then the CHROs were the heroes of the pandemic. And she was right, because organizations had to deal with a hand that was dealt that they had never experienced before and you had HR leaders you know across the board just step up and help navigate through this I do hope that's not sort of forgotten as companies think that we're going back to 2018 or 2019 where we could maybe treat people as disposable you know yes we might be in a recession. Yes, perhaps the bargaining power of the talent might have slightly declined, although I'm not sure that's universally true, maybe true in isolated pockets. But the fact of the matter is, skills shortages and labor

shortages are going to be with us even in the face of what may be a steep recession. That's just not going away because of the various structural factors underlying that. And I do think CHROs like Greg are worth their weight in gold because they are perpetuating and developing new and fundamentally different solutions to how to reinvent the work and the workforce for the next of work. And I do think we're seeing across the board more and more of these great HR leaders emerge. And I hope it'll be the start of what I personally think, and I'm firmly with Greg on this, it could really be the golden age of this profession if we give it the opportunity to

thrive. And so I do hope business leaders around see that there is some real opportunity here to sort of not perpetuate our grandfather's HR, but a very different vision and a very different perspective on this function. I hope the same, Robin. I truly do. Thank you so much for chatting with me today. This has been a great conversation. I fully expect that we will meet each other once again soon, once you've written a new book on the most recent advent to hit us in the near future. So thank you so much for joining us.

I really appreciate it. Thank you, Tyler. Always a pleasure. And for everybody else listening at home, thank you for joining us. We will see you on the next episode. Cheers. You've been listening to L&D in Action, a show from Get Abstract. Subscribe to the show and your favorite podcast player

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