The Adaptation Advantage

7Learning Fast: Why an Agile Learning Mindset Is Essential

Key Ideas

1. To thrive in the future of work, we must be agile and resilient, adept at both learning and unlearning to continuously adapt to change.
2. Skills alone are not enough to adapt in the future of work. We must also work to build resilient and adaptable identities, develop an agile learning mindset, and focus on the uniquely human skills that enable us to collaborate effectively.
3. In the midst of accelerated change, businesses must shift focus from extracting value with limited resources to creating new value by scaling organizational learning.

Learn Fast—What Does That Even Mean?

We are in the greatest velocity of change in human history, and somehow we've got to keep up. The thing is, we will never keep pace by doing the same things faster. In fact, that will only get us farther behind. Why? Because it is the modality of the past. To keep up with this quickening pace, we need to focus not on speed and efficiency, but on agility and adaptability.

We are emerging from decades of work formed around what Deloitte's Center for the Edge founder John Hagel calls “scalable efficiency.” In this model, a company triumphed in the marketplace by making goods faster, cheaper, and overall more efficiently. They extracted the greatest value by optimizing every aspect of the production process. That method worked when business models and product lifecycles lasted a long time. Workers could perform similar tasks over longer ...