We are professionals working in the field of Human Resources, believing that in this field more than in others, foresight thinking is necessary, because generating change and impact in people management is often a process that takes years.
And we are scholars of foresight, i.e., that discipline that explores possible future scenarios and allows for directing “anticipatory” strategic decisions, i.e., working in advance of future scenarios, to “prepare” for what will happen or to “influence” what might happen, in the direction of preferred or desirable futures (generating a competitive advantage for the organization).
With this in mind, we wondered about the future of knowledge and skills in organizations.
The challenges of today and tomorrow
There is a lot of talk about the “skill shortage,” i.e., the fact that companies do not find the skills they are looking for (mismatch between skills supply and demand) and, as a result, lose business opportunities.
There is a lot of talk about upskilling / reskilling, i.e., education and training plans to retrain and rebuild the professionalism and employability of people who used to do trades that are no longer needed today, with skills that are no longer expendable, and conversely can be trained and re-employed in new trades or trades that are needed.
There is also a lot of talk about artificial intelligence , and the fact that generative artificial intelligence, combined with LLM (Large Language Model) i.e., the ability to interact with AI through natural language (for simplicity we refer to ChatGPT and surroundings) seems to be able to have answers to all questions, from the simplest to the most complex.
We put these thoughts together and tried to take a “leap forward” into a future 15-20 years from now. In the working world there will be those who are going through their studies today, with AI as a tool at their fingertips.
Technologies will have further evolved and become even more reliable (for example, AI will no longer hallucinate¹ and supervision will be done by the AI itself …). And skills will be even more volatile.
Will it still be important to have acquired skills?
In this scenario, we asked ourselves: but will people still need to have “own” skills? That is, to memorize concepts and instructions, make them their own, metabolize them, in order to do their jobs? Or can we hypothesize a scenario where the real professional “competence” will be to know how to correctly query AI?
Problem solving: can it exist without expertise?
Today, we do not realize that our ability to reason, think, solve problems, “connect the dots,” have strategic and systemic thinking, comes from the amount of information we “hold,” that is, that we have memorized, but also metabolized, because we have experienced and applied it.
The more knowledge and experience we have, the more our brains are able to think in ways that address and solve complex problems.
But how would we function if we did not “hold” more knowledge, and had abdicated to artificial intelligence the role of a “storehouse” of knowledge, to be interrogated when necessary? Would we still know how to think? Would we still know how to solve complex problems? Would we still know how to innovate?
Today we have no answers to these questions. We know that the brain has its own plasticity and develops in the functions we ask it to act and train most frequently.
So today with respect to this scenario we are left with great doubt and few certainties (as is often the case in foresight).
How will training change? The word from companies
This new knowledge paradigm could generate major impacts in companies as well: will technical training still exist in the future? Will the challenge of obsolescence of technical professional skills exist? What about the need to retrain staff to new skills? Will the competitive advantage given by knowledge still be there?
We involved a group of HR Directors and Professional Development managers in this reflection. The “source” companies (all large companies with HQ and/or a strong presence in Italy) belong to different sectors: technology, financial services, fashion, personal products, FMCG, etc).
The professionals involved brought solid professional experience and expertise to the table. The panel was enriched and enhanced by a group of “young” university researchers or students in high specialization (Normale di Pisa, PhD, etc), to bring a point of view with less anchorage to the past and more ability to think of the future.
First we conducted the individual interviews, then we involved people in a (virtual) workshop of future scenario exploration. The interview, concentrated in seven key questions, generated very significant insights in the respondents.
During the workshop, key insights from the interviews were returned in aggregate view, going to identify, for example, the themes perceived as most relevant, within the question posed, anchors and “lessons” from the past, visions of desirable and dystopian futures (interestingly, the same future scenario was perceived as desirable by some of the participants and dystopian by others), and an expanded view of the stakeholder map.
We reasoned together about foresight, i.e., what decisions, as human resource and professional development managers, can or should be made early on in their respective organizations to prepare for the future and choose to direct it.
Practicing Foresight: an indispensable exercise for HR.
Experimenting with foresight methods has not been an easy exercise for those involved. It was generally perceived as “uncomfortable” but “insightful,” full of “enlightening” insights.
People had to use skills (imagination, vision, visualization, systemic thinking, etc.) that are too often untrained, so caught up (we all are) in the day-to-day, the problems of today.
As HR professionals, we must begin to understand that thinking about possible future scenarios, on medium- to long-term horizons, is part of our profession. Making decisions in light of this, too, should be part of the HR profession.
Handling concepts of complexity, uncertainty, discontinuity, exploration, places us in a zone of “uncomfortableness” whereby we often – while understanding their relevance – prefer to move into the comfort zone of today’s problems, at most next year’s, and if we really broaden the horizon we reach the three-year horizon.
We have to take the courage to make the leap, from forecasting to foresight.
In forecasting we reason about short-term future scenario. We often prefer to stay within this perimeter, where we can use data and quantitative evidence to estimate impacts and make decisions. This makes us feel we are in control, ensuring pragmatism and tangible results. But we often fail to see that this is what we tell ourselves, not what is really needed.
In foresight we look beyond, we enter the cone of possible futures, we assume discontinuities from the past. The data can no longer help us, and so we enter the dimension of uncertainty and exploration, making use of our imaginative capacity, and hypothesizing scenarios that may be high impact (high relevance), even though they have a high level of uncertainty.
When, with respect to a scenario, we cannot estimate its probability, we have to assume that perhaps it will never happen, but we still have to ask, “If it did happen, what would be the consequences?”
If the answer is that the consequences would be extremely significant, despite the high level of uncertainty, we need to make decisions early on to equip ourselves with respect to that scenario.
To ensure a strategic approach to HR management in business, we must also include “Strategic foresight” in our discipline, learning how to work with foresight from an anticipatory perspective.
At this time in history of great change and uncertainty, this approach allows us to develop a vision and guide organizations strategically, playing as the HR function a key steering role.
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