Ravin Jesuthasan: The Skills Powered Organization

Kelly connects with Ravin Jesuthasan, a recognized futurist and authority on the future of work, human capital and automation. He is Senior Partner and Global Leader for Transformation Services at Mercer and a member of the World Economic Forum’s steering committee on work and employment. He is the author of many books and his latest is called “The Skills Powered Organization.”

You posit that the entire nature of work – it’s structures and systems – has to fundamentally change for the future.

“These large established organizations where you’ve got these deep legacies of routines and culture. My friend Gary Boles talks about skill set, mindset, and tool set – and I think it absolutely encompasses those things that shape an organization and its culture. But, pivoting the way people think about work and doing things fundamentally differently, right? And we talk about this in the book: bending the demand curve of work in a fundamentally different way, because every organization is going to need to increasingly decouple future growth from resource intensity.”

As you know, there’s a lot of fear with AI – but there are many ways in which AI can actually help humans achieve even more potential at work.

“You’re absolutely right, and you’re alluding Kelly to one of the experiments we referenced in the book, right? Where at the World Economic Forum, we asked people to tell us the skills they had and the in the pilot in a prototype in the consumer goods sector, the average person came up with a list of 7. They listed almost all the technical skills that they and we all over index to. And then when we had the algorithm go in it found skills from their previous work, history of the teams they’d worked on, from the education they’d gotten. The average list was close to 28. And I think that’s where the power of AI is. When appropriately harnessed, it can be a real asset”

You also talk about the need for us to move away from ‘jobs’ and move towards ‘skills.’

“More and more organizations are moving from what we call fixed roles to flexible roles. Flexible roles are where you and I might be in a job, but we have the flexibility to express our skills in different domains. So, if I’m a data scientist, I might take on a project with finance to develop a new planning application – because my skills are being deployed in a different domain. But I’m expressing the skills that I have, or I might work with Human Resources, to design a workforce planning application, because that’s where my skills are needed.”

Photo Credit: Mercer