In the Future of Work, Learning Is Beautiful

I have seen the future, and I want to tell you about it.

I'd spent years researching and sharing approaches for readying the workforce for what was coming. The models were sound. The skills were practical, human-centered, intuitive. The only thing nobody could pin down was when. It was always just "the future." Estimates from people I worked with ranged from ten to fifteen years. A few optimists said five.

Nobody predicted days.

That's what this piece is about. In spring 2020 the future of work stopped being a forecast and became the present, with no transition period. Everything we'd been designing for arrived at once, and organizations that had treated it as a long-term planning exercise discovered they had no time left to plan.

The title isn't ironic, though I understand why it might read that way given when it was written. What I found genuinely beautiful was watching how fast people adapted once they had to. Capabilities we'd been describing in future tense turned out to already exist. They'd simply never been demanded.

That observation has shaped how I think about readiness ever since. The gap usually isn't capability. It's the absence of a reason to use it, and that's a much more solvable problem than a skills shortage.

For anyone whose long-range workforce plan got overtaken by events, then and since.