The Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book that should be useful for students interested in business, technology, economics, sociology, futurology, and related subjects.
Tomorrowmind: Thriving at Work with Resilience, Creativity, and Connection—Now and in an Uncertain Future is by Gabriella Rosen Kellerman and Martin E. P. Seligman.
The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of working.
Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, MD, was trained in psychiatry and Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research, which measures the small changes in blood flow that occur with brain activity. It may be used to examine which parts of the brain are handling critical functions or to guide brain treatment. Her coauthor, Professor Martin E. P. Seligman teaches at the University of Pennsylvania as director of the Positive Psychology Center.
The TU Library collection includes other books by Dr. Seligman.
As the authors wrote in an article posted online in January, excerpted from the book:
Volatility, uncertainty, and ambiguity, snowballing faster and larger every day, threaten our wellbeing and productivity. There is no precedent for either the pace or the type of change we face at work today—what we call the twin trials. Yet, few, if any, approaches acknowledge and design around this new reality as a major contributor to diminished wellbeing.
Successfully navigating this pace and this type of uncertainty (not simply surviving, but also taking full advantage of it to thrive) requires a unique set of emotional, social, and cognitive skills. Understanding these two dimensions of challenge can prepare us to respond. […]
Industrialization brought change generation by generation. The whitewater world of work brings change so rapidly we will feel it within each generation, several times over. Hard skills already expire every few years. The World Economic Forum, which tracks the evolution of market demand for specific skills, estimates we will have to wholly reinvent ourselves every 10 years. We will learn new job skills, only to see them fall into disuse, or transfer to machines. We will be reinventing ourselves over and over again. And our children and our children’s children can expect to do the same.
If we acknowledge this reality and take it to heart, the project of building wellbeing at work is not about getting through any one era or any one change. It’s about being ready for all of the changes to come.
Not only is the pace of change dramatically faster today, the change itself is of a different type than we have known in the past. This complex type of change first came to be of interest in military and policy circles in the late 20th century. The acronym VUCA, for example, so often used today to describe our business environment, was originally coined by military leaders to describe the unpredictability of the changes triggered by the end of the Cold War. Soldiers had to be prepared for:
- Volatility: Unexpected, unstable challenges of unknown duration
- Uncertainty: Unpredictable events with potential for surprise
- Complexity: An overwhelming number of interconnected variables influencing events
- Ambiguity: Opacity of cause and effect driving events
Many leadership training outlets offer VUCA-based tools to help leaders succeed in our world of work. […]
Another major risk is that automation has profound implications for human loneliness. More of us will spend our days with “co-bots” rather than people. Remote work causes social isolation, and rates of loneliness in the U.S. have doubled since the 1980s. Loneliness is associated with higher rates of depression. It’s more harmful than obesity to our health, and about as bad for us, in terms of mortality risk, as smoking a pack of cigarettes per day.
Right up until the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies remained unconvinced that the new world of work was threatening our health. The pandemic shattered this illusion. The dramatic increases in mental health needs among employees as a result of COVID-19 created a crisis for those in charge of organizational health. Employees found themselves referred to unprepared, overwhelmed service centers. Some companies tried to offer support to those they had laid off; most companies were too preoccupied trying to figure out how to help the workers still on payroll.
Our employers, just like all of us, are at a loss. We did not evolve to work in the VUCA of whitewater, and yet here we are. We know that if we do not take action, many will suffer. We can continue to do exactly what we did with our mental health response to COVID-19—wait until the damage is done, and respond with palliation.
Alternatively, we can make use of our unique advantage, namely: Modern scientific knowledge of how to flourish in uncertainty. What positive behavioral scientists have learned in the last 30 years about the psychological drivers of wellbeing and how to build them offers us hope today of weathering the coming storm. Without this science, we would remain vulnerable to psychological suffering. With this science, we have the opportunity to not only avoid harm, but also to grow stronger.
The coauthors also published an article in the January-February issue of the Harvard Business Review:
Many companies now include creativity as a core competency for employees at all levels—especially those on the front lines—and across all functions, from sales and marketing to accounting and operations to customer service. Individuals and talent managers must therefore get smart about what it takes to foster and manage this skill. Although the science of creativity is young compared with other areas of psychology and cognitive neuroscience, our growing understanding of it points to new directions for creative development. In this article we offer a typology that breaks creative thinking into four types: integration, or showing that two things that appear different are the same; splitting, or seeing how things that look the same are actually different or more usefully divided into parts; figure-ground reversal, or realizing that what is crucial is not in the foreground but in the background; and distal thinking, which involves imagining things that are very different from the here and now.
Most of us tend to think in just one of these four ways, and we benefit from knowing which one comes naturally to us. We can also learn to hone our creativity in the other dimensions. Managers need to understand both their own strengths and how to balance the types of thinking across their teams to execute creative projects. And organizations can use this typology to increase innovation across the workforce.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)