Will a Robot Take My Job? Maybe.
Here’s How to Protect Yourself
In almost all professions there is a growing concern about AI (artificial intelligence) and robotics, how they will impact the workplace, and which jobs will be impacted, specifically.
In many areas of life we embrace AI and robotics, such as our smart-home devices, navigation devices, and robot vacuums; for the most part those devices have enhanced our lives, without taking jobs away (unless you were a professional map reader).
On the other hand, AI and robots are encroaching on and eliminating jobs in many industries such as banking (many banks now have video conferencing at ATM machines, which enables a teller to assist with more complex transactions and allows the bank to eliminate the brick and mortar location – and the employees), car sales (Carvana has been selling used cars from vending machines for six years), and the production of steel (over 100,000 jobs lost in the industry in the last 20 years, due to automation).
Many skilled and tenured employees are wondering: Will a robot take my job? And the answer is: Yes, quite possibly.
There is almost no telling where an AI technology can be used to supplant a skilled employee. While the most obvious jobs to be impacted are those that are transactional and repetitive (bank teller, fast food worker, cashier), more skilled professions can be impacted as well such as a surgeon or design engineer.
Human-Only Skills are Needed
According to the Future of Jobs Report published by the World Economic Forum, the “jobs of the future” will rely on critical behavioral skills (not technical skills) such as problem-solving, critical thinking, and creativity.[i]
A more recent study published by IBM[ii], which surveyed over 5800 senior business leaders in 50 countries identified “ability to work effectively in a team environment” and “ability to communicate effectively in a business environment,” as two of the top five skills needed in business today.
What these studies show is that 21st-century work is about thinking and contributing, not just about doing and certainly not about following directions. More than having the right skills, future workers need to possess the right behaviors, and behaviors are not something corporate America teaches.
How to Protect Yourself
If you would like to protect yourself from robot-replacement you need to develop the types of behaviors listed above. Your function may be replaced, but you will not, because you will be making a uniquely human contribution to the organization. Here are 3 skills which will help you stay employable in the 21st century – and how you can demonstrate them.
Creativity
Most people think creativity refers to being able to conjure something up from nothing, like an artist or author. But in business, creativity means recognizing that there is no “right answer” to most dilemmas and the creative individual will look for multiple solutions before deciding up on the best one – not the right one. To develop creativity, be sure to not accept the first answer or solution that presents itself; use phrases like, “What else is possible?” “Let’s think about this and revisit it in a few days.” or “How can we break this?”
If you’d like a free 3-page guide to increasing creativity in the workplace, visit https://www.trainingdr.com/special-reports/ways-to-boost-creative-thinking/
Critical Thinking
Critical thinking is ancillary to creativity; it is another way of ensuring that the first reasonable solution isn’t seized upon. One way to think more critically is to conduct research – who else has encountered the same type of issue? what do your customers think? can you test-drive the solution in some way? One of my favorite ways to think more critically is to answer the question “What could go wrong?” People are naturally inclined to think their ideas or solutions are sure-fire winners, but a critical thinker will look at the idea from all angles and consider how the outcome might not be ideal.
Ability to Work in a Team Environment
More and more, output is accomplished by teams. Even if you work remotely, from your home, it’s likely you are part of a team. Although young people have often participated on teams, being on a team is not the same as working as a team. And teaming is not a skill that is taught in corporate America. In order to be a successful team contributor you’ll need good listening, paraphrasing, and feedback skills. Asking for, and respecting, other people’s opinions is also critical; people feel more a part of a team when they feel they’ve been heard and considered, even if ultimately their input isn’t utilized.
Conclusion
Being able to stay ahead of the robots means being able to contribute those “uniquely human skills that cannot be done by machines,” says HR researcher and analyst, Josh Bersin. Computers can only manipulate and react to data, while humans have curiosity, perception, possibility, and communication on their side.
The future is not that far-off – think about how quickly smartphones have become a must-have device for almost everyone you know. The time to prepare yourself for your future job is now when you have the ability to plan your career success, rather than waiting to see if a robot will take your job or not.
Updated June 19 2020
According to The International Federation of Robotics, for every 10,000 workers, the following countries have robotics:
Singapore - 831
South Korea 774
Germany 338
US 217
3 Ways "We" Have Destroyed Young People's Ability to Think
Here are three ways education has undermined thinking in theyounger generations:
The primary education system has changed quite a bit in thelast 50 years and many of those changes have resulted in young people'sinability to think critically and instead to rely on cues and memorization.
1 - Memorization
For decades we’ve been lulled into believing that memorizingand recalling information is learning. And perhaps, in anindustrialized world, recall was all that was necessary. When theindustrial age was ruled by manufacturing and work was repetitive, perhapsremembering the steps in a process and executing them properly was "theskill." We are now in a knowledge economy (and have been for at least 20years!). We pay people to think. We pay people to make decisions,solve problems, innovate and synthesize. In direct opposition to this, oureducational system (and generally our corporate training system) focuses onteaching learners to memorize information so that, with the proper prompt, itcan be recalled; educating/training does not teach us how to useinformation in a variety of ways and circumstances or (heavens!) use it in away that wasn’t taught at all (extrapolating).
2 - Cramming
Somewhere along the line, we have lured young learners intobelieving that “cramming” is a proper methodology for learning. Duringexam week at colleges, the libraries and dining halls stay open around theclock to accommodate the learners who are staying up around the clock studying– this only reinforces the idea that the last-push to learn is a crucial time.
Typically young people prepare for a test or exam the day beforethe exam – which means that they are simply working from short term memory,which generally is good enough if the measure of one’s learning is being ableto spot the right answer on a multiple-choice test - but not enough if weexpect them to use that knowledge "out in the real world."
Real-world application is built from learning over multipleexposures to a concept or process, not a cursory review of the keypoints.
3 - Testing
Thanks to the introduction of Scantron Bubble Sheets in the50's and 60's - everything became a multiple-choice test. The bubble sheetswere extremely helpful to teachers and administrators as class sizes grew andrecord-keeping became more stringent. Unfortunately, they took morethan they gave. This type of testing fueled the usage of the 2"learning" strategies discussed above AND undermined the value of theteacher's input into student's testing.
Prior to a machine grading tests, teachers had to read eachresponse, giving the answer critical thought. Very often they would addcommentary to the grade, rather than simply marking an answer wrong. They mightremind the student where the correct information was found or help them toremember how the concept they got wrong was similar to what they werethinking. Sometimes they would give partial credit if the student was onthe right track but then veered off before their final summation (this is theonly way I passed geometry, believe me).
Prior to a machine grading tests, even when a student got ananswer wrong - they were learning. They had coaching, correction andrefinement from their teacher based on how the teacher graded thetest. Once the Scantron bubble sheet became de rigueur in public schooleducation, students simply received their grade with little to no explanationor intervention.
Unfortunately, I can spot factors that led to the demise of thinking skills (and there may well be more that you are thinking of!) but I am not sure what the remedy should be to reverse the trend. Given class-size and teacher pay, it's not reasonable to take efficiencies away from public school teachers. Instituting "study skills" classes in college is smart - but it's usually an elective and addresses a small population of the students (plus, by the time students are in college, it is remedial - we should be teaching study skills at about age 11 and continue it until the end of high school - see my article on 3 Keys to Ensuring Learning for more on this topic).
I think the rise of AI and machine learning will make theseshortcomings even more apparent in coming years, as all of the "easy tospot" answers will be gobbled up by robots and the critical thinking willbe the domain of humans.
Your thoughts?
Note: This article was originally published on LinkedIn.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/3-ways-we-have-destroyed-young-peoples-ability-think-miner-ed-d-
Are you smarter than a six year old? Maybe not.
are you smarter than a six year old?
When my daughter was six years old, she was railing against me for some reason or another and, in conclusion, she proclaimed that she was smarter than me. My mother-in-law, who was with us, chuckled and said, "I don't think so, honey." Well, it turns out the six year old may have been right!
Crystallized and Fluid Intelligence
According to the Cattell-Horn theory of fluid and crystallized intelligence, intelligence is composed of different abilities that work together to produce overall individual intelligence.
Gf - known as fluid intelligence, is characterized as the ability to deal with novel intellectual problems - which is something that children are particularly good at, since everything is new to them.
Gc - known as crystallized intelligence, is the ability to use things you already know, to solve for things you haven't previously encountered - something that adults can do with their years of experience and learning.
The ability to "reason" is considered to be a characteristic of fluid intelligence because reasoning can be applied to (almost) any problem. You would think it would be characteristic of crystallized intelligence because one is capable of reasoning due to the quantities of "known information" one can relate the new dilemma to. But you would be wrong. Fluid intelligence helps us to be capable of reasoning, analyzing and solving problems precisely because we cannot rely on preexisting knowledge (a 'la children). We have to "think it through.
"Warning!Fluid intelligence diminishes as we get older. This is probably why grandparents always think their grandchildren are "so smart!" It's because the young'un is using their reasoning skills to figure out new things every day. That is an amazing thing to see happen right before your eyes.
On the other hand, crystallized intelligence continues to grow as we get older and have a broader range of experiences and learning opportunities to draw upon. Crystallized intelligence is a measure of the knowledge, understanding, and abilities we have already acquired. Which is why, by the time we are in our 20's, we never run with scissors (most of us, anyway).
Fluid and crystallized intelligence can work together to help you be a better thinker. Together they give you the breadth of knowledge you need, as well as the open-mindedness required to decipher complex and unknown situations.
To achieve "optimal thinking ability," you have to keep nurturing your fluid intelligence as you get older. According to author Mike Clayton, "It takes wisdom to understand how to deal with situations where the rules no longer apply, in complex, evolving domains, where the patterns are subtle and new;" and to grow wisdom you need to maintain your fluid intelligence.
So, in fact, your six year old may be smarter than you are (today).
Who "Gets" Leadership Development?
Why Not Everyone?
A question we are frequently asked - and frequently wrestle with in conjunction with new clients is - who "gets" to attend thinking skills / leadership development? It's a tough question to answer because on the one hand, the logical answer is "everyone." Why wouldn't you want everyone in the organization to work smarter, make good decisions, understand the vision and mission of your organization, etc.? On the other hand, unless you are a small company of 150 people or less, that would be a prohibitively expensive endeavor. So the tough question is - how do we make the cut? Who makes the cut? Here are some "arguments" - none is "the best."
Argument #1
As stated in the headline - why not everyone? Simple things - not full blown curriculums - could be enmeshed in everyday work responsibilities (much like Google's now defunct 20% time). Sending a business / industry article out each week via email, or leaving copies of it on the lunch tables, can help to ensure everyone has the same industry knowledge. By leaving articles on the lunch tables, spontaneous discussions can begin about the content and merits of the article. Managers can hold short, 20 minute, meetings two days after the articles are issued asking for feedback or questions about the article.
To help managers, the department that issues the article can include 3 or 4 discussion questions they'd like the employees to focus on. This article sharing can be rotated throughout the organization. Much like "it's your week for carpool," it could be "your week for article sharing."
Let's say your company works in manufacturing or healthcare - while there are plenty of articles about the industry itself, there are department-specific articles as well - manufacturing operations, healthcare marketing, etc.
This is just one small and easily do-able activity that can be rolled out throughout the organization. Why not increase the knowledge and capabilities of all your employees?
Argument #2
Focus on leaders in the organization. We've spent so many years making individuals experts (through training) in their fields that they often don't have a big picture view of their organization or their role. Sales Managers often don't appreciate the need for profitability which is a finance-department focus. Charge nurses often don't appreciate customer service which is an operations (and accreditation) focus. By directly impacting the thinking skills and thereby the leadership skills of leaders in an organization there will be an immediate and beneficial impact on the departments that they run and the individuals that they manage.
Argument #3
Include all new hires - starting now. If everyone who joins your organization is indoctrinated into a thinking curriculum from day one, they will grow in to your (smartest) future leaders. Over a planned development process of 3 years, 5 years, or 20 years, you will have an organization chock-full of individuals who not only understand how the organization is run (because they will have had linear exposure to the organization), but they will also be knowledgeable and skilled in critical business topics such as communication, teamwork, risk management, continuous improvement, fiscal management and much, much more.
Because they have been brought-up in cohorts (The Training Doctor's branded design), they will have relationships and the ability to communicate with other departments and individuals in other disciplines.
The choice for every individual company will be different. Increase everyone's skills just a little bit? Deep dive for leaders who will return the most immediate ROI? Or plan a long-tail approach to enmesh employees in "lifetime" development to create a leadership pipeline?
Ways to Ensure Reading Comprehension
Reading is probably the #1 thinking skill, yet it has become a lost art. The ability to read and comprehend is so important for getting ahead in the business world, yet we never receive any formal training in it. If you can read – and comprehend – you pretty much have the key to success.
BUT reading has to be done correctly. Print materials are best. There is a significant difference in comprehension and retention between reading on screen (poor) and reading in print (best). It has to do with neuroscience and the ability to make references and associations between paragraphs, pages, etc.
Here are 5 Tactics for Reading Comprehension
(We will assume you are reading a professional piece such as in a trade journal, newspaper, or text.)
Read the headings first, to get the main points – think of them as a road map for the readin
Look at pictures and figures and their explanatory text – they are there to illustrate the points of the text and help you to better comprehend
There are two benefits to highlighting 1) it means that you were able to separate out the important stuff from the filler and 2) when you need to review and summarize, you’ll be able to skim for the highlighted parts
Use the margins to give yourself clues to the context, such as: stars for key points, question marks for things you don’t understand or want to look up elsewhere, exclamation points for things that resonate with you (think of it as giving a virtual high-five to the author)
Write a summary. If you have comprehended what you read, you should be able to write a 3 – 5 sentence summary of the text or explain it to a friend
When you get REALLY good at comprehension, you’ll be able to evaluate and synthesize what you’ve read and integrate it with your own opinions, experiences, or research. (Hello Adult Learning and Bloom's Taxonomy) Try these tips this week and see if you don’t feel smarter immediately.
Continuous Improvement Teaches Thinking
Continuous Improvement is an ongoing effort to improve. The improvement might be to a product or service, or in one's own abilities. Improvement can be incremental or come rapidly in a "breakthrough."
Not only is continuous improvement an important skill to work at, but it is an important life skill. It teaches one to look critically and analytically at the "present state" and imagine it being done a different way - more quickly, more cheaply, more accurately, etc. AI and robotics aside, at some point someone looked at the laborious process of hand-processed transactions - such as in banks or at airport check-in desks and asked "Does someone physically have to do this job?"
In many instances the answer is no... so what are alternative methods of completing the same transactions? I was recently at an airport where I printed my own luggage tag and affixed it to my own bag! (Very poorly, I might add. There is a skill in lining all the sticky-stuff up correctly.)
Being skilled at continuous improvement also means you can take things "apart" and see them for their component parts. Oftentimes when we analyze various components of the whole, we see a potential incremental improvement. Health conscious individuals like to cook at home - but that requires various other processes such as planning, shopping and prepping. Companies such as Blue Apron and Hello Fresh identified those various component parts and then asked "How can we eliminate one or two of these for the home-cook?" Voila! Entirely new business models were born.
One of the "instead of" / "try thinking" statements on the image is this: I'm not good at this vs What am I missing? That's a great way to identify incremental improvements that can be achieved on an individual level.
Personally, I try to incrementally improve my work each year. In the past I've spent a year learning more about neuroscience and how the brain works in order to be a better designer of learning. I've also taken courses, read books, and analyzed graphic design in print materials and online in order to create content in a more visual (and thereby more easily understood) way for the learner. In fact, here is a recently released report, by Salesforce, regarding the appeal of colors in our visuals and how they contribute to understanding. It may inform the way you make your slides and job aids for training purposes.
Continuous improvement helps to develop thinking skills because it forces one to not accept the status quo and instead to look at things from a new perspective. When we think about things differently we often do things differently - to the benefit of both ourselves and our companies.
If you'd like to try a continuous improvement activity with your learners, try this Re-imagining the Hotel Experience exercise you can find on our website. It's generic and familiar enough for any group to use and really helps the learner to separate the experience in to pieces.
Can You Develop Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional intelligence (EI) is one of those “sciences” that might be the key to success., or it might be a bunch of hooey. Who’s to know? While it might be hard to define emotional intelligence (although I have below, keep reading) we definitely know when it isn’t being exhibited. A three year old lying on the floor screaming “Nooo” lacks emotional intelligence. So does the forty year old who says “You can’t fire me because I quit!”
In today’s fast paced and tumultuous business climate, emotional intelligence is an important skill to have. We need to be able to accept challenges and frustrations, work with others cooperatively, accomplish assignments independently, participate in activities we might rather not, and so much more.
Talent Smart has been able to equate high performance in the workplace with high EI (and likewise poor performance with low EI [also known as EQ]). John Mayer, professor of psychology at the University of New Hampshire, is one of those who thinks that claim is hooey. But let’s assume that emotional intelligence IS a definable and measurable skill and that we’d like to develop it in our workforce.
Emotional Intelligence Defined
There are five “domains” or competencies of emotional intelligence:
Self-awareness (recognizing emotion and its effect, knowing one’s strengths and limitations)
Self-regulation (conscientiousness, adaptability, comfort with ambiguity)
Self-motivation (goal setting, commitment, optimism)
Social awareness (interest in others, empathy, understanding power relationships)
Social skill (communication, conflict management, leadership, etc.)
Each of these can be further broken down. For instance, conscientiousness can be further defined as keeping promises, fulfilling commitments, and holding oneself accountable.If we believe Talent Smart’s claims, these would be nifty markers on a performance evaluation, don’t you think? Do we assess people on their ability to complete their work correctly and in a timely fashion or are they really being assessed on their conscientiousness? Correcting poor performance would be quite different depending on whether you were assessing the visible output or the EI that underlies it.
Developing Emotional Intelligence
If we want to develop better performers in the workplace, it behooves us to examine whether we can develop emotional intelligence. Many of the things that we do when Teaching Thinking naturally align with increasing emotional intelligence. For instance. being open to and examining different perspectives. Let’s assume your company announced that there will be no bonuses this year. People with poor EI will think “that’s not fair!” while people with higher EI will realize the business climate has changed and the company acted accordingly.
To “teach” this skill we can include higher-order, open-ended questions in our training. Coaching and mentoring also help to develop emotional intelligence because coaches and mentors ask open-ended questions aimed at getting people to self-examine. Questions such as, What would you do differently next time? Who could be an ally? and What did you learn from this? get at examining and developing self-awareness – an important EI skill.
Another way to develop EI is to turn the coaching / mentoring idea around and have your trainees act as a coach / mentor. This assignment requires social awareness and the ability to empathize with others. The coach / mentor doesn’t have to be an expert. For example, providing feedback about an upcoming presentation requires the coach / mentor to consider the developmental needs of the presenter, frame feedback in a constructive way – taking in to consideration the emotions of the other person, and provide emotional support (you can do this!) – all EI skills. These are all great leadership skills too… but I digress.
So whether EI can be developed in others or not may be nebulous, the skills that lead to EI can and should be incorporated in to many aspects of the workplace (training, managing, performance reviews, and more).If you’d like to assess your own Emotional Intelligence, check out this short, on-line assessment.
Can You Teach Someone to Be Happy? Yale does...
Recently the New York Times ran an article titled Yale's Most Popular Class Ever Teaches Students How to be Happy.
More than 25% of undergrads have signed up for the class this semester. From the article: The course focuses both on positive psychology - the characteristics that allow humans to flourish... and behavioral change, or how to live by those lessons in real life. It teaches habits such as procrastinating less and being grateful.
Titled Psychology and the Good Life, this course has me wondering: Isn't this really a course in "self-management?"
What is Self-Management?
Self-management is the capacity and ability to assess and manage one's reaction to situations and people. It is very akin to EQ or Emotional Intelligence. Self-management leads to higher levels of overall happiness (in both personal and business life) and less anxiety, stress and depression - all things that this Yale course purports to teach.
In 1999 Peter Drucker wrote an extensive Harvard Business Review article titled Managing Oneself. He saw self-management as critical to success at work. In the article he asks the reader to consider questions such as What are my values? What are my strengths? How do I prefer to work?
There is no magical formula for happiness - as I presume the Yale students are looking for - but rather a process for managing how one approaches life and its events. Can the process be taught? I think so. It's part of our Thinking Curriculum in a big way. It starts with self-assessments in order to gain insight in to the things that Drucker spoke of.
Once someone has an objective self-awareness they can begin to build skills in the types of things that lead to better self-management, such as communication skills, appreciating differences, accepting feedback and more. Better self-management then leads to better relationships, more confidence, and leadership ability.
It's an Important Topic
The structure of organizations has changed dramatically in the last few decades. The ratio of manager-to-worker has shrunk, virtual workers exist in fields you wouldn't even think possible, and individual autonomy has increased. It is predicted that these changes will continue and that more "organizational" decisions will be made by teams (rather than top-down) and that "leadership" will be an expectation of everyone - which means self-management skills will be critical in all roles in an organization.
Call it happiness, the good life, or self-management - it's a necessary skill that all business people must possess.
Want to test your cognitive abilities?
TestMyBrain is a not-for-profit initiative dedicated to collaborating with citizen scientists throughout the world by providing measurement tools that allow people to engage in science and learn about themselves. Currently the organization has tested over 1.5 million individuals in over 240 countries / territories.
Recent findings have identified that our cognitive abilities change as we age - and can tell you when you'll be the smartest.
If you'd like to participate, you'll not only be advancing research but you'll receive personalized feedback too (you'll see how you compare to the "average" person) !Tests change frequently, depending on the research being conducted and, sometimes, as the tests are being refined, the test itself may change from one day to the next.
Currently the website has tests for facial recognition, the ability to concentrate for periods of time and multiple memory types, among others. Begin testing YOUR brain today at: www.TestMyBrain.org
Note: this research was started by Harvard University but is now supported and managed by the nonprofit Many Brains Project, the Laboratory for Brain and Cognitive Health Technology at McLean Hospital & Harvard Medical School, and the Human Variation Lab at Wellesley College.
Teaching Thinking through Changing Perspective
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One of the ways you can help people to improve their thinking skills is to ask them to change their perspective on a topic. To think about it from another point of view. This is very easy to do in a training situation - since we have folks captive and can ask them to try an activity in a way they are not naturally inclined to.
Unfortunately, we often miss this opportunity in training and instead ask our participants to answer a question based on their own perspective or opinion. For example, how often does your training program ask something along the lines of: Now that you have read the case study, what are the three main factors affecting the situation? Since people respond with their own opinion, we never tell them that they are wrong, of course (nor are they wrong), but do we ever conduct "round 2" of the questioning / debrief and ask the learners, What if you were the banker, contractor, pilot in the situation? THEN what would you say are the three most important factors?
Here are two techniques for getting people to change their perspective on a topic:
1. Collaboration - Having learners work in groups is an easy and natural way to hear more than one perspective. Some care needs to be given to structuring the collaborative activity so that "minority viewpoints" aren't ignored. Perhaps rewarding the group with the most perspectives? Or the most unique perspective?
2. Suggest the other viewpoint - Credit here goes to MindGym and Sebastian Bailey for this simple exercise presented at a conference in 2015. In this type of activity you'll tell the learner exactly the perspective you want them to take. Bailey's exercise went like this: Close your eyes and picture your living room for 30 seconds. Now, picture it again, from the perspective of an interior designer. Again, think of your living room, from this perspective, for 30 seconds. Once more, think of your living room, and this time from the perspective of a robber. What are your insights? What do you see differently? What “Ah-ha” moments have you had? What did you "see" as the interior decorator that you didn't see before? What about from the perspective of the robber?
Interestingly, asking people to change the way they view a situation is something that develops with maturity. It is almost impossible to ask anyone under the age of 18 to change their perspective on a situation. Once someone IS able to look at things from various points of view however, it is wise to continually build that muscle and it will expand their thinking abilities in all areas of their life.
Teaching Thinking through Analogous Associations
not fitting
Analogous: Comparable in certain respects.
The story goes that James Dyson - the founder of Dyson vacuums - hit upon his innovative vacuum design by observing how a grain processor got rid of the "dust" (answer: through a funnel / vortex).
One of the deficiencies in our society is that even when we bring the smartest people together to solve a problem, they are often the smartest people on the same topic. Thinking capability can be greatly expanded by looking to analogous fields. Possibilities abound when we contemplate "similar but different" perspectives..
When considering community planning, include sports managers, biologists, and airport general managers for their insights into shared and coordinated spaces..
When tackling photography, include astronomers, glass blowers, and forensic scientists, who all understand how light and shapes are intertwined.
For newer, better ways to "crunch numbers" look to national security intelligence, proficient gamblers, and infographic artists who all see numbers as a representation of something else.
In our experience, expanding your thinking through including analogous fields suddenly makes you the "smartest person in the room."
Teaching Thinking Through Self Assessments and Inventories
Thinking
We all learned Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and the fact that the pinnacle is self actualization - but what does that actually mean?
Self actualization: the realization or fulfillment of one's talents and potentialities...
Unfortunately most people don't reach the pinnacle of self actualization because they have not been taught a way to achieve it. Using self assessments such as Gregorc, Myers-Briggs or Glenn Parker's Teams and Team Players, can greatly assist individuals in thinking introspectively.
Myers-Briggs helps you realize that not everyone sees the world the same as you or reacts to things in the same way as you do. It helps one to contemplate whether there are alternate forms of response to certain situations. It also helps in understanding that a response which is different from yours is not in any way incorrect.
The Gregorc inventory helps an individual understand their working style preference which can assist in playing to one's strengths as well as helping an individual understand reasons why they might be getting stuck. For instance, an individual who is concrete-sequential may be an excellent worker but may appear as though they cannot manage multiple priorities due to their need for completion of activities in sequence.
Sparking an individual's ability to think introspectively, to appreciate their strengths and weaknesses - as well as others, enables individuals to think in a more broad manner about their actions and those that they work with in order to achieve the best workplace outcomes. Understanding and appreciating that we are not working at odds but rather have complimentary skills is a huge breakthrough in thinking for many individuals.