Episode 377 – Guest: Gabriella Rosen Kellerman
Guest: Gabriella Rosen Kellerman

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Kelly sits down with MD and Chief Innovation Officer at BetterUP, Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, to discuss her new book co-authored with Martin Seligman: “Tomorrowmind: Thriving at Work – Now and in an Uncertain Future.”

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You start this book about the future of work at the dawn of humanity and you do that for a reason, right?

“We want to really get the point across that the work that we are quote unquote, designed for, the work we’re designed to do, the work our brains evolved in relationship to is foraging and hunting and gathering. We’re naturally good at those things. What does that mean? We’re going to naturally struggle with and gain a little perspective from what it was like to originally shift from that world of work, first to farming and then to factory life. It helps to give us a sense of compassion for what we’re going through today, which is really important. There’s an opportunity to draw all these important learnings about how not to fall into a state of low well-being through these transitions. And then, above all, we want to be able to look at this as an opportunity to get back to some of those beautiful native abilities around creativity, cognitive agility, exploring opportunities.”

Another big thing you talk about is how technology and the speed of technology has fundamentally changed what work is.

“More and more work is being done by machines. And the fact that it’s happening really quickly so we are going to need to adjust our careers, our forms of work, not just once, but possibly several times over the course of our careers as adults. This contrasts greatly with our parents are grandparents’ generation where they might be in the same role for their entire career. In fact, my father’s been with the same employer for 50 years of his career. He’s shifted roles a little bit, but basically, it’s the same work. And that is now a thing of the past. More and more of our work is being automated, which means we need to reinvent ourselves. This is obviously compounded by the overall fast pace of change which is also being driven by technology and automation. But that accelerates market disruption. It accelerates the pace at which we need to go from one industry to another where we wouldn’t have ever had to do that before.”

And if work is changing our training for work should be changing.

“To me this is the absolute core of what we all need to understand. We need to understand our own operating systems, right? Like, what’s more important than that? Once upon a time there was the introduction of physical health education, right? Why do we not have the same for the emotional wellbeing of our mental health? Even just for these higher order, cognitive functions like decision making, of course we should be trained in that.”

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Photo credit: Diana Ragland