The Future Belongs to the Comprehensivist

The only thing we can be certain of is that change will happen increasingly rapidly for all of us.

I believe that anything that can be done by robots will be, and by robots I mean automated systems, programmes, software and machines. In essence, my conjecture is that many jobs performed by humans today will not be available for today’s students.

Many schools are preparing students perfectly for a job in 1970. But the world has changed and we can either compete for an ever decreasing slice of the old world, or we can start going after the huge abundance of opportunity that has not yet even been conceived.

Do we think there is likely to be the same demand for accountants, lawyers, politicians, journalists, teachers, architects, engineers over the next 50 years as the last 50? It’s certain that much of the routine side of even these ‘professional’ occupations will be taken care of by technology. But every change brings opportunity for those who are prepared. Medicine, Transport, Energy, Biotech — these are all industries that are wide open for innovation and we need to train people how to get involved.

The one domain which is the preserve of humanity is the domain of creativity. I am confident that humans will always be required to apply their creative genius to situations which are uncertain, indeterminate, or at the very least ‘not determinable by the current set of available evidence.’

The people who are able to see the bigger picture will be those that thrive in the future. It appears to me to be self-evident that the future belongs to the comprehensivist, not the specialist.

A comprehensivist is a person who can connect the dots, who can see the bigger picture, who can look beyond their specific specialism and ‘see how it all joins up.’ I am confident that an individual who retains the capacity to connect the evidence from a wide variety of sources and piece together what it all might mean for the future, will be highly successful in such a rapidly changing world.

Let us have a look at the animal kingdom for a second: organisms became increasingly specialised in order to adapt to their environment. This made tremendous sense when the environment was changing slowly, since a particular adaptation would confer specific advantage upon the organism. This situation would then result in a virtuous circle, whereby the more successfully adapted organisms would survive for longer, breed more frequently, and therefore thrive as a result.

However, we can observe many examples where over-specialisation has been a disaster for organisms. For when their environments changed and their adaptations were no longer so advantageous, they dwindled in numbers and in some cases even ended up becoming extinct. Dinosaurs, pandas, sabre-toothed tigers…

This characteristic of specialisation is particularly relevant in an environment which is changing very rapidly, such as the one in which we find ourselves today.

There certainly was a time where an individual could become skilled at a specific operation and remain valuable for the duration of their working life as a result of this particular skill. We don’t have to go too far back in history to consider the case of a blacksmith who was an expert at making horseshoes, or to look at the technician who devoted her life to becoming expert at manufacturing vinyl in a Record-producing plant.

I suspect that it is highly unlikely that we will return to a situation where humans can remain in a single career for the duration of their lives, and therefore it seems sensible to conclude that training people up to become specialists is probably not going to serve them adequately over the duration of their professional lives.

Consequently, we believe that we will best serve the students of today by preparing them to position themselves as comprehensivists, as people who can join up the dots, who can see the bigger picture, who can see where things are going, and who can anticipate where they might add the most value both to themselves, to their employer, and/or to their community.

I believe we have a duty to train students in such a way that they continually seek out what this means at a higher level, that they search for how they can contribute in a design-thinking way to where this will end up.

We will be serving our students most effectively if we can train them to see the world as an exciting place for those who are prepared to look at the bigger picture and to abandon the idea of becoming a specialist, one who masters a specific skill or body of knowledge and becomes expert in such a narrow field.

We will best serve the students of today if we can train them not to know one thing the best, but to be able to learn new things the quickest, and to be able to anticipate the benefit of doing things in a way which might be still 10 years away from becoming mainstream.

Part 2: The ‘HOW’

So, this is all great, but I’m sure that you will now want to know HOW we are going to do it.

Given that the world is changing at an ever-increasing rate, we favour the ‘learning by doing’ approach to actually getting things done:

Do — Review — Adapt

DO. Try it, provided we have measured the risk and agreed that it is acceptable.

REVIEW. See how it goes. Measure the results as quickly and comprehensively as possible.

ADAPT. Learn fast, changing as you go. Improve continuously. Like learning to walk.