The Future of Advice and Mentorship: A Leadership Living Lab

Hi, I'm Nola Simon, and I'm the host of the Hope and Possibilities podcast. I'm embarking on a new series where we talk about careers and the future of work and it's honestly the easiest version of futurism that people have available to them. People are used to thinking about how jobs will lead them to be able to satisfy goals, how it will lead them to be able to afford the lifestyle that they want to engage with.

But they're also used to actually giving advice to other people about how work will build a future. And so commonly, it is a question that futurists get, which is: how do I advise my kid? What do I advise my kid to study? What skills are going to be in demand once my kid graduates from school? That's a really approachable way to engage in futurism because it's so applicable, and it's so pervasive, and it's something that happens for everyone at every stage of life throughout history, right?

But the general frame of it, a lot of people understand parenting to be a futurism project. How do you prepare one generation for the next? And that's really what it comes down to. And that can be directly for people who are parents, but can also be people who influence those kids. Your niece, your nephew, your neighbors godchildren, however you have family connections. But even just as a leader even if you aren't necessarily, deeply involved in close family ties, as a leader, you're constantly exposed to people who are making decisions for the future and people are going to ask your perspectives.

So how do you mentor, and how do you give advice in a way that helps people prepare for the future? And that's really where the opportunity of this living lab is how can we take our specific experience and advise others when we don't know the future. We have uncertainty about what is possible. The advent of AI is going to probably influence how things change and develop in the world of work and we really don't know what that looks like.

And it's everywhere. It's pervasive. But what are the things that are not going to change? And what will change? We don't know for sure, right? So how do we prepare for something that we don't exactly know the shape of. And I heard Margaret Heffernan, who's a professor, who is also an author of many books. She actually has been brought in to do leadership practices with, police or some kind of security force.

What she was saying is when you're actually dealing with an event like a bomb or something that is supposed to explode and has immediate risk, if you don't make decisions in the moment without sufficient data, the bomb goes off. People die. So how do you make decisions in the moment that don't feel safe or secure? And, your work might not involve that level of risk, but that uncertainty, that ambiguity, we can all get better at making decisions in the face of that.

So I'm gonna give you an example of how I advised my daughter when it came to university. So initially, she wanted to go to school for science. So over the years, we had prepped. She knew what courses to take what she would need to have in her toolkit to be able to qualify for the programs that she was looking at. So that meant that she took a lot more math than she was ever happy with.

But when we came to the reality of signing up and enrolling in a university what we found was when we toured the campuses and we talked to the people who were involved in the science program she was considering, all of it made her desperately unhappy. Those tours were not positive tours. She hated the whole experience. And for me, I'm looking at this going, "You may have it in your head that science is where you fit, but your body is really telling you a different story, and you're not happy with how this is going to look like to live on a daily basis.

So you might be able to go to school and enroll in this but the reality of showing up at class every day and doing all of the work that's going to get you to the degree, not to mention even if you finish the degree, this is the type of work that you're gonna do. Is this going to really make you happy? And so her expectation that she had prepared for years was something that she actually decided to let go of in the face of the reality of imagining what the day-to-day would actually look like.

And so she actually let that go and decided to take a gap year so she would have the space and time to be able to think about what she really wanted and what she really valued. And she ends up studying social work. And initially she wasn't sure if she actually wanted to take a minor in art, but again, the reality of actually combining social work and art it's a really challenging combination to find in Canadian universities.

You wouldn't think it would be. But also the way that those degrees and the mentality of the two different departments works and the process involved and how you actually do the work and what's required just the time frames, the type of commitment levels involved. The two programs don't combine very well. And so she decided to leave art as a nice-to-have, a hobby, something that she could use to decompress from the other work that she had to do.

And so you go from a theoretical and, overall prep for an imagined future, looking at the reality of what it would be like to live, and you end up in a completely different program. This also happens at work, right? I took math, and I minored in history, and I ended up in financial services in account management dealing with American customers not exactly a straight line, right?

So how many people really end up in jobs that their degrees prepare them for? Now, if you add in AI, what changes? So I'd argue that the reality of how you live the day-to-day is really where it's going to come down to. It's you can prepare as much as you want. You can test out, you can experiment with AI but it's really when you're doing the work, how does that make you feel, right?

When you wake up in the morning, where do you go for work? What does your day-to-day look like? What do your meetings look like? How many people are you engaged with during the day? Are you solely involved in a screen? How does that make your body feel? How do you feel validated? What questions do you have? Who do you turn to for advice? How does that build in a network? And how does that feel fulfilling?

Who do you trust? A lot of that really is what we're looking at, and that's how we give advice, right? And a lot of times what happens when we're mentoring and we're giving advice to people who are younger than us we're recycling what worked for us. The, the old adage of, you know, go in early, stay late. Does it really matter if nobody's actually in the office? Nobody sees you staying late and there's nobody to actually go to a bar with after work because everybody's working from home on Friday.

It looks very different, and it's going to be different, and it's going to continue changing as the world evolves, as social norms change. And then so how do we advise people? A lot of it is based in identity. Who are you? You would never advise somebody to go in and take a typing test and figure out how fast they could type because nobody cares, because you can actually dictate how do you unlearn the skills that we spent a lot of time learning but are no longer relevant?

And how do we let go of the identity pieces that built a career and built a livelihood, but won't help anybody else build a future that's based on the reality that we've got now and that is developing currently. That's really what the challenge is, and that's what I envision the Living Lab to be. How do we break down the skills involved sharing what works, and unlearning what's not helpful any longer?

That's really what I'm looking at. So join me. This is the first episode, and we'll go from there. And I'd love to hear your feedback and your questions and your advice. This always works better when we've got interaction and we can look at the specific things that you submit. So if you wanna do that, you can email me, nola@nolasimon.com. You can comment on social media, just make sure you're tagging me, it's @nolasimonsayings everywhere.

And you could review the podcast and include your questions you are looking for an example of a Living Lab, I have a version of this on my website, which is nolasimon.com/podcast. There's a section on the Living Lab that I've done for AI. I will link it in the show notes. Thanks for tuning in.