The Future of Jobs Series - Part 1: Analytical Thinking and Innovation
Oct 11, 2021The Future of Jobs Series - Part 1: Analytical Thinking and Innovation
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report suggests that the top ten skills for 2025 are going to be:
- Analytical thinking and Innovation
- Active Learning and learning strategies
- Complex problem-solving
- Critical thinking and analysis
- Creativity, originality and initiative
- Leadership and social influence
- Technology use, monitoring and control
- Technology design and programming
- Resilience, stress tolerance and flexibility
- Reasoning, problem-solving and ideation
This is a pretty abstract list. There is very little detail on the various behaviours, cognitive processes, traits, attitudes, experiences etc that would contribute to any of these “big picture” skills.
This leaves those with hiring and talent development responsibilities in a bind. How do you identify the sub-skills of such abstract categories? How do you develop them?
Our panel:
Dr. Gemma Jiang
Innovation: Dr Gemma Jiang is the founder and Director of Organizational Innovation at the Swanson School of Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. She designs, models and facilitates the convergence process for the transdisciplinary Collaborative Research: Convergence Around the Circular Economy project.
She bridges the "knowing-doing gap” between complexity leadership research and organizational practices via creating enabling conditions for emergence and innovation, such as:
- u.lab hub: delivering Theory U learning and practice at Pitt
- Adaptive Spaces: building community capacity for complex social challenge
- Conversation Cafe: enabling diverse team members to relate personally
- Three-Minute Pitch: powering research ideation processes
Kailash Awati, Ph.D
Analytical Thinking: Kailash Awati is a Senior Lecturer in Data Science at the University of Technology, Sydney, and the co-author of two well-regarded books on managing complex problems in organisations, The Heretic's Guide to Best Practice and The Heretic's Guide to Management.
He helps organisations tackle complex problems using a range of sensemaking and analytical techniques, including:
- Sensemaking: problem framing, decision making under uncertainty and collaborative approaches to managing organisational change.
- Analytics and data science: data-supported approaches to achieving better business outcomes.
- Building data science and decision making capabilities in organisations using approaches based on emergent design.
Dr. Richard Claydon
Moderator: Dr Richard Claydon is the co-founder of EQ Lab, and the designer of the Future of Leadership module at Macquarie Business School’s Global MBA Program (ranked #6 globally by CEO Magazine).
He was awarded the highest achievable marks for a Ph.D in behavioural science. A Harvard Top-200 Management expert and business columnists for the Guardian newspaper have described this research as “a touchstone for the future work in management and organisation”, “outstanding in daring imagination” and “at the forefront of modern discussion and debate.”
