Rachel Burnham writes: I was very pleased to see that Daniel Susskind is speaking at the forthcoming CIPD L&D Show in May. Do take the opportunity to hear him if you can. I was fortunate to hear him speak last autumn at CIPD’s Annual Conference in Manchester on the impact of technology on the professions and found his session engaging and thought-provoking. In fact, I was so impressed that I bought the book that he co-authored with his father ‘The Future of the Professions’, which I have not long finished reading. Before this turns into something reminiscent of a razor commercial (& letting slip my age!), let tell you a bit about their ideas.
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| Sketchnote from Daniel Susskind's session at CIPD Annual Conference 2016 |
The Susskinds have
been exploring what the professions are for and why we need the professions, as
well as how the professions are changing, particularly with the impact of
technology. They see the professions as
a way of managing access to practical expertise. In a print-based society they argue that the
privileges and responsibilities placed upon the professions made sense and
balanced each other out. But in an
internet-based society, where information and knowledge is created and
accessible in many different ways, this ‘grand-bargain’ is being increasingly challenged
and is no longer sustainable. They argue
that many professional fields are creaking - being too costly, inaccessible to
many, disempowering, under-performing and inscrutable. What a catalogue of
criticisms! Think about how many people
in the world have inadequate access to good quality medical care – not just in
poorer countries. Think about how access
to the law is rationed in many ways by people’s ability to pay. Consider how
access to high quality education is stretched thin around the world, at a time
when we know that we are going to need to keep on learning throughout the whole
of our lives.
Daniel & Richard
Susskind focused their research on 8 professional fields: health, education,
divinity, law, journalism, management consultancy, tax and audit, and
architecture. They explore the challenges these fields are
facing, how the ‘vanguard’ are responding to these challenges and in particular
how they are tapping into and making imaginative use of technology to transform
their profession. Within each
profession they identify that there are different priorities in the challenges
and differing ways that these are being responded to, so that patterns of
change vary between the professions.
From our point of
view it may seem a shame that HR and L&D weren’t also studied, but many (if
not all) of these criticisms of the professions are often also aimed at our
field – indeed often this is self-criticism from within the field. And when I pondered the sorts of changes
they picked out as developments in the these other professions, I could
immediately begin to parallel these with changes taking place in our own field
such as routinization, labour arbitrage, new specialisms, on-line self-help,
personalization, online collaboration etc etc.
These changes are
already impacting on all the professions studied and the Susskinds suggest that
they will lead to a substantial and continuing change to the professions, so
that these professional fields may be near unrecognisable before too long. They
argue that each of these professions needs to be engaging with this agenda and
actively experimenting with how to make the most of the opportunities that
technology offers to enable us to provide better, more accessible, more
affordable services. But also that each
of the professions and wider society needs to be considering carefully what
kind of future we want – a key issue
being ‘who should own and control practical expertise in a technology-based
Internet society?’ (pp. 304)
I found particularly interesting
two fallacies that the Susskinds picked out.
Firstly, that often professionals when introduced to these issues are
quick to acknowledge that indeed these are the challenges faced and these are
the sorts of changes emerging – but only for other professions not their
own!
The second is in
relation to the emergence of ‘increasingly capable machines’ which is how the
Susskinds describe the new ways that AI (artificial intelligence) is developing. This is now developing immensely fast and in
surprising ways, so things that only a short while ago seemed most improbable
are now practical realities. Driver-less
cars being just one example. The other
fallacy they pick out, is that often we assume that machines/computers will
need to tackle tasks in the way a human does and therefore dismiss the
likelihood of many tasks being possible for a machine to do. However, very many of the break-throughs in
what machines can do, have come from tackling tasks in a very different way to
the way that humans would do that task.
Our imagination is limiting us, from seeing just what might be possible
and how fundamentally ‘increasingly capable machines’ will change the world of
work and indeed the wider world.
I do recommend that
you read this book. And take the
opportunity to listen to Daniel Susskind at the CIPD L&D Show or follow the session on Twitter via #cipdldshow. There is a lot for L&D professionals to
consider in the Susskinds ideas both in relation to our own professional field
HR/L&D and also in relation to the professions that we may work with in the
health, education, management consultancy, law and other fields.
Rachel Burnham
14 /4/17
Burnham L & D Consultancy helps L&D professionals update
and refresh their skills. I am particularly interested in blended
learning, the use of digital skills for learning, evaluation and anything that
improves the impact of learning on performance.
