In the fourth and last of four blogs exploring what we regard as the vital skills required for the future of work, we explore the final subset of essential skills that require prioritisation, focus and consistent practice.
2025 so far shows no let-up in the pace and scale of external forces continuing to confound businesses and their leaders. We have entered very different operating territory and have few or no mental models, frameworks or playbooks for what lies ahead.
Anyone responsible for making decisions that affect business outcomes needs to adapt to a very different way of thinking and acting. This isn’t easy work.
It requires the regular practice and honing of deeply human skills that have, until now, been marginalised in business. ‘Soft skills’ are regularly spoken of but infrequently scoped, and, unsurprisingly, it’s often tricky to articulate exactly what is meant by this vague term.
It’s time to address that as these are precisely the skills required to reimagine business and create better collective futures that are fairer, more equitable and less damaging to the planet we live on.
They are vital skills.
But what are these skills and why do they matter?
In the last of our four-part series on vital skills for the future of work, we explore the final subset of essential skills that need prioritisation, focus and consistent practice.
13. Critical thinking
In a 2001 paper published by Cambridge University Press [1], Dr. Alec Fisher described critical thinking as:
“An ‘active’ process – one in which you think things through for yourself, raise questions yourself, find relevant information yourself…rather than learning it in a largely passive way from someone else.”
Critical thinking requires us to make sense of, understand, synthesise and apply information that we obtain through reading, observation, conversation, reflection and experimentation. It demands curiosity and a broad interest in why things are as they are.
In many ways, the Internet has imperilled our ability to think critically. It has become all-too-easy to search for answers online, and worse, assume the first answer thrown up by our search engine of choice is an indisputable truth.
Why is it important for the future of work?
In the age of generative AI, fake news and escalating misinformation and disinformation, this is dangerous. When we don’t question what we are told or we make assumptions about the truthfulness of information, we run the risk of being deceived, or worse, manipulated.
The challenges business leaders face today are unprecedented, both in volume and scope. AI, the climate crisis, escalating geo-political frictions, shifting attitudes towards work and more, require a reinvention of the way we organise ourselves at work. We must prioritise complex problem solving if our organisations are to survive. The ability to think critically is an increasingly vital business asset.
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14. Imagination
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
Einstein – what a genius! Imagination is the art of mental exploration, allowing us to contemplate both possibility and the unknown. Psychology today describes imagination as ‘the ability to create mental images of things that are not physically present’ [2]; it’s key to our ability to successfully problem-solve, ideate and innovate.
Why is it important for the future of work?
As the realities of climate chaos, resource depletion and disrupted global supply chains become ever more pressing, the business world urgently needs to adapt and reengineer how stakeholder value is defined, created and delivered. Again, it’s no understatement that how we organise ourselves at work needs wholesale reimagining.
The ability to imagine new plausible futures is also key to successful scenario-planning – an invaluable risk mitigation tool. The more we can take ourselves outside of ‘business as usual’ to imagine alternative possible pathways forward, the more we can embed resilience and sustainability into our business operating models.
15. Curiosity
It’s hard to find a single definition of curiosity. But in essence, it’s the desire to find out more about a topic. It underpins the motivation to learn.
Perhaps it’s hard to explain because, as author Ian Leslie has written, “Curiosity is unruly. It doesn’t like rules, or at least, it assumes that all rules are provisional, subject to the laceration of a smart question nobody has yet thought to ask.” [3]
As Einstein suggested in his commentary on imagination above, curiosity supposes that all there is to know about the world is far greater than has currently been documented. It is expansive, and it invites us to play with alternative realities and futures that don’t exist yet.
Yet as Leslie also writes, “A society that values order will above all else seek to suppress curiosity. But a society that believes in progress, innovation and creativity will cultivate it, recognising that the enquiring minds of its people constitute its most valuable asset.”
Why is it important for the future of work?
As global politics increasingly flirts with more authoritarian approaches to governing, it’s clear curiosity isn’t welcome by those who seek to divide and control us. In this regard, it’s a superpower, an act of resistance and a much-needed antidote to the decaying social systems that increasingly only serve those who already wield power.
Our ability to create more equitable, balanced and less environmentally destructive futures depends on our capacity to remain curious to what might be.
16. Creativity
What is creativity? To me, it’s the ability to dream, ideate, imagine and bring to life new ideas, realities and things. It isn’t singularly a mental process; it also requires the will to act and bring the unknown into the known.
Def Jam co-founder Rick Rubin has written, “Creativity is not a rare ability. It is not difficult to access. Creativity is a fundamental aspect of being human. It’s our birthright. And it’s for all of us… To create is to bring into existence something that wasn’t there before.” [4]
We have a creativity emergency. We urgently need new stories, new systems, new ways of being with one another and a new relationship with the planet we inhabit.
But creativity requires two fundamental things. It requires what Megan Reitz and John Higgins call "spaciousness" [5] – the space and time to think expansively. This isn’t easy to find in the era of ‘busyness’. It also requires courage. It’s an act of bravery to start a new project from scratch, knowing you are not an expert (if you were, the ‘thing’ you are creating would already exist) and not knowing if you will succeed.
Why is it important for the future of work?
Again, the pre-existing social systems don’t want us to be creative. Those who dominate them seek to command and control us, rendering us subject to their whimsy. Theirs is a zero-sum game. The world today isn’t set up for us to be creative; it’s set up to be deeply extrapolative and to benefit an increasingly finite cohort of oligarchs.
To thrive in the future of work, businesses need creative minds who can imagine – and bring into existence – new operating models that benefit the many and not just the few.
Conclusion
As I bring this four-part series to a close, I’m mindful of the deep interconnectedness of each of these 16 skills. They weave in and out of one another, to the extent that they are hard to separate. But this is what it means not only to be human, but to exist as biological creatures of nature.
We aren’t meant to exist outside of the natural systems and constraints of the planet; I suspect that’s why so many of us feel increasingly heart-sick right now.
Something is desperately wrong, we can feel it in our bones but we lack the vocabulary to describe it. Existing in silos isn’t how we are meant to live as social creatures. And nor can the characteristics and qualities that define us be compartmentalised into distinct separates either.
This said, my hope is that by giving some shape to these vital skills, we can begin to focus on them, prioritise, hone and nurture them, at school, college and university, at work and in life. These are the deeply human characteristics that will sustain both us and our organisations as we evolve into vastly more technological futures.
As ever, this journey is iterative. If you have enjoyed my exploration of these vital skill, my invitation to you is – what skills would you add?
REFERENCES
[1] https://assets.cambridge.org/052100/9847/sample/0521009847ws.pdf
[2] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/imagination
[3] Leslie, I. (2014). Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It. London: Quercus Publishing Ltd
[4] Rubin, R. (2023). The Creative Act: A way of Being. Canongate Books Ltd: Edinburgh
[5] https://www.meganreitz.com/spaciousness
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