The Adaptation Advantage

12Getting Ready to Seize Your Adaptation Advantage

“The Robots Are Coming! The Robots Are Coming!”

Some version of that hyperbolic headline appears near daily as journalists, pundits, scholars, and politicians, among others, struggle to make sense of a world in the midst of digital transformation. The stories often paint a dystopian scene where automation displaces workers and humans become the subjects of their smarter AI overlords. One pundit once told an audience of academics and executives that with the digital transformation complete, the only jobs left would be “oiling the robots.” We chuckled at the thought, realizing that oiling the robots is a task so utterly routine and predictable that surely another robot could do it. We aren't alone in our skepticism. American scholar and organizational consultant Warren Bennis is reported to have said in the 1990s, “The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.”

This view of work after robots, though, entirely lacks imagination.

In fact, that lazy summation is exactly how we started the conversation that led to this book. We met at an innovation conference that seemed to us steeped in fear of technology and its power to disrupt our lives. Coming at the topic from different directions, we agreed then and still believe that the idea that technology will take down humans is, in a word, absurd. Autodesk's ...