In the Future Work Skills 2020 report, the Institute for the Future identified 10 skills that will be vital for success in the workforce for the next decade. This perspective focuses on one of these 10 vital skills: Sense-making.
Read the full Future Work Skills 2020 report.
What is sense-making?
- Ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed
Why this skill will be vital for workforce success
- As smart machines take over routine manufacturing and service jobs, there will be an increasing demand for the kinds of skills that remain difficult for machines to perform.
- These higher-level thinking skills that cannot yet be codified are called sense-making, and help us create unique insights that are critical to decision making.
How sense-making may impact the world of work
- The rise of smart machines goes hand in hand with the emerging deluge of data, which incorporates flows of sensor measurements.
- Data-mining tools can now crunch millions of these measurements at once to find correlating factors that can help identify the critical issues strongly associated with desired outcomes.
- However, although data-mining and analytics tools can be effective at finding these kinds of connections, they cannot effectively contextualize these findings.
- It takes a human to assemble data and correlations and turn them into rich stories that garner attention.
- Humans also integrate values, morals, ethics, and other preferences in decision making.
- Digital systems are generally much better at modeling objective measurements than subjective preferences.
- For example, a digital system designed to crunch financial opportunities wouldn't recognize that tobacco or arms manufacturers are undesirable investments for many people. It would take a human programmer to take this into account.
- Perhaps the most powerful application of sense-making is the ability to generalize principles that can be applied to novel situations.
- Looking again at the financial-analysis example, digital pattern recognition can successfully tease out hundreds of useful correlations from historical data, but cannot effectively project the results of a significant qualitative legal change.
- To intuitively understand a human system well enough to project the impact of changes in underlying motivations or approach is the exclusive domain of human sense-making.
Topic: Workforce Preparedness
