Episode 281: The 100-Year Life: Rethinking Careers for a Longer Working Life (with Lynda Gratton)
If you knew you might live to 100, how differently would you think about the career you are building today?
Lynda Gratton is Professor of Management Practice in Organisational Behaviour at London Business School, where she's taught for more than thirty years and leads the world's number one ranked programme in human resources. Lynda is also the bestselling co-author of the million selling The 100-Year Life.
Ahead of the publication of her new book, Living the 100-Year Life: How to build a career that lasts and a life you love, Lynda joins David to explore why longer lives are stretching the traditional education, work and retirement model to breaking point, and what this means for individuals and organisations.
In this episode, David and Lynda discuss:
The eight threads Lynda believes can help us build resilient and fulfilling working lives, and why calm is becoming increasingly important
Why “amplification”, our relationship with technology and AI, is one of the eight threads we need to manage deliberately
How AI is reshaping work at the level of tasks, and what that means for the careers we build
Why career architectures, mobility and development models designed for shorter, more predictable working lives need to evolve
How organisations can help people navigate repeated transitions across careers that could span 50 or 60 years
Ultimately, this is a conversation about longevity, technology and human agency, and how individuals and organisations can make the extra years we have been given count.
This episode is sponsored by HiBob.
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Resources:
Living the 100-year old Life: How to build a career that lasts and a life you love
This episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast is brought to you by HiBob.
[00:08] David Green: If you knew you were going to live to 100, how differently would you think about the career you're building today? Because many of the assumptions that shape working life were built for another age: education first, then work, then retirement; a relatively linear career followed by a relatively short retirement. Longer lives are stretching that model to breaking point. Some of us could now be working for five or even six decades through profound shifts in technology, skills and the nature of work itself. Few people have shaped our thinking on this more than my guest today, Lynda Gratton. Lynda is Professor of Management Practice in Organisational Behaviour at London Business School, where she has taught for more than 30 years. She is also the co-author of the international bestseller, The 100-Year Life, which sold more than a million copies and helped put longevity firmly on the agenda for individuals, organisations and governments.
Ten years on, Lynda is returning to the subject with her new book, Living the 100-Year Life: How to build a career that lasts and a life you love. Lynda now describes a working life as a fabric woven from eight threads: mastery, cooperation, knowing, amplification, friendship, intimacy, calm and adventure. So, in today's conversation, Lynda and I explore what it really takes to build a career that can last for 50 or 60 years, and a life you actually want to live alongside it. We also explore why looking at how AI changes individual tasks may be more useful than simply trying to predict which jobs will disappear. And for HR leaders, there is a bigger organisational challenge running through the conversation. There's a lot to explore, so let's get the conversation started.
Lynda, welcome back to the Digital HR Leaders podcast.
[02:05] Lynda Gratton: Thank you, David. Thank you for having me back again.
[02:08] David Green: I was working out before, it's been two years since you last joined me on the show alongside Diane Gherson. Since then, what changes in work and society have most influenced your thinking?
[02:21] Lynda Gratton: I guess, David, that the world changes all the time. I mean, I can't believe it's 15 years ago since I wrote The Shift, which was 2025, what's going to be happening in 2025. And I think some things are pretty predictable: demography, technology, social changes. Of course, the pandemic wasn't predictable. And I think since the last two years, what we've seen is a real acceleration of the technical piece, obviously driven by large language models. But also, years ago, I asked used to ask CHROs about the impact of globalisation, the impact of governments, and that was pretty much low down on the list. I think it's come very high on the list. So, I think we're in a world -- I just teaching a class at London Business School only last week, some of whom were from the Middle East, and they were talking about their offices being bombed. It's a tough time for everyone and a lot of change. And that really means that constant resilience adaption becomes the order of the day.
[03:26] David Green: Yeah, we had that period, didn't we, in the 1990s, when the end of history, I think people were talking about, and maybe we got a little bit complacent. And then, the global financial crisis happens, and it seems we've been on a bit of a roller coaster ever since.
[03:40] Lynda Gratton: Yeah, yeah. I think we've always understood the forces that shape work, we just don't always anticipate the dynamism or the speed of them.
[03:49] David Green: Well, we're here to talk principally -- and actually, Lynda, I think most of our listeners will know you, but again, just maybe a brief introduction to your work at London Business School and the other things that you do, before we get into the conversation.
[04:02] Lynda Gratton: Well, yes. I've been a professor at London Business School now for more than 30 years. I teach the world's leading programme on Human Resource -- we know that, it was just ranked number one in the world -- Human Resource in Transforming Organisations, which is a huge privilege for me. I teach an MBA class about the future of work. I have a consulting practice, HSM, which puts some of that into practice, but I'm primarily a writer. And I've just finished my new book. This is a quick reveal of it for those of you who haven't seen it, and you can see how gorgeous it looks. It's a weave. And as you feel it, it actually is embossed. Oh, it's absolutely lovely.
[04:40] David Green: Oh, fantastic.
[04:41] Lynda Gratton: So, I'm very excited about this. It'll be out on 9 September. So, that's really what I've been up to. Actually, since I last saw you, David, I've been writing that book. It's taken me three years to write it.
[04:53] David Green: Okay. Well, I'm looking forward to reading it. And for those that are listening, we're going to be talking about the book, Living the 100-Year Life, now, and this episode is actually going out a few days, about a week or so before the book comes out. So, you're getting a little bit of a preview here.
[05:09] Lynda Gratton: Yeah.
[05:10] David Green: So, Lynda, the book, Living the 100-Year Life: How to build a career that lasts and a life you love, what prompted you to write this book? And I believe it's about ten years after you partnered with Andrew Scott on The 100-Year Life. So, it's almost like a sequel.
[05:24] Lynda Gratton: Yeah, this was ten years ago. And actually, David, you probably know this was a hugely important book. It sold a million copies, more than a million people read it. It was very influential. I still meet people who said, "It changed my life". And the argument that Andrew and I made -- and you can see it's me and Andrew Scott, and I think that was a really important part of it because Andrew is an economist, I'm a psychologist. And actually, when you think about demography and long working lives, part of the argument is an economic argument. It's about how do you make it work financially. And we were able to look at both those things.
I think in the ten years since The 100-Year Life, a lot has changed. I think the idea that you're going to live longer is now pretty much part of the conversation in most countries. You saw in the UK just recently, announcement that the pension age is going up, entirely predictably in my view. But we're also focusing less on long lives, but actually on good lives, healthy lives, lives that make a difference. And that's really why I wrote this book. I wrote this book because I could see that many of us were sort of struggling with living a long working life. You know, if you live to 100, you're working into your 70s or 80s, and what does that look like? I mean, you look at David Attenborough and he's 100, and you think, "My God, he's astonishing, how does he do it?" But actually, I think for all of us, we're asking, I'm 71, I'm asking myself, "How do I do it? How do I continue doing it?" So, the book is really about that. And what I realised as a writer is that I know my readers, and in fact my students, love metaphors. I mean, I love a metaphor, my students love metaphors. And so, for this book, the metaphor that I brought forth is a metaphor of weaving a life. Hence that you can see the weave there. And the idea is that we don't just plan a life and then move towards it, we actually just weave it day by day, action by action, step by step.
So, what I tried to do in the book was also to get a sense of well, if you weave a life, what are the threads that hold your life together? And I did that, I understood those threads by looking at my own life and thinking about the 71 years that I've been alive, and wrote a lot of stories about my life, which helped me think about my life, other people's lives. And some of those stories, just a few of them, I think 15 of them are in the book. But mostly, I talk about the threads; threads that help us to be productive and threads that help us to nurture ourselves.
[07:55] David Green: Great, and we're going to get into those threads as well in a minute. And then actually, you talked about one of the big challenges that we face as a world is demographics, particularly in developed countries, particularly in Europe, in terms of shrinking working population. But then, as you said, people are living longer, then the working age, the length of your working life is likely to go up. So, maybe that's a bit of a counterbalance to the challenge on demographics, as is probably technology, as we'll get into later. So, I don't know, just your initial thoughts on that before we maybe get into the book itself.
[08:30] Lynda Gratton: Well, I think that's right. The demographics are really fascinating. And the reason that demographics are such an interesting trend to look at is it's very predictable. If you think of what's going to happen in 50 years' time to 50-year-olds, well, they're just being built, they're just being born. So, we sort of know what's going to happen in 50 years to 50-year-olds. They're our children, they're our grandchildren, so we know how many numbers there are, we know how many are born right now. And two things have really shaped demography, and it happens in every developed country. The first is we live longer, primarily because we've looked at the diseases of childhood, the diseases of middle age, and now the diseases that we face, the diseases of long life. So, we're living longer. And the years that we're living healthily have gone up because the years of morbidity, when we feel ill before we die, those have remained pretty much the same. And so, the years of staying healthy have increased.
At the same time, we're having fewer children. And there's a whole set of reasons why that's the case. But in every developed country, we are, and it's happening everywhere. I was with a group of people from Saudi last week, and two of them came from families of over 20 children, two of them, and none of them had more than three kids themselves. I mean, that's an astonishing reduction in family size. And it's because children are no longer an asset, they're a liability. So, we want fewer of them and we want to focus on them, and we want to focus on making them the best they can be. So, we have a world where populations are aging and then they're reducing. And in that world, we have to really celebrate long working lives, not just at the very end of life, but right from the very beginning.
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So, Lynda you organised the book around three key questions: who am I; how am I working now; what actions and promises am I making to my future self? Why do you believe these are the three essential questions for navigating a longer working life?
[11:42] Lynda Gratton: What I love about the metaphor of the weave is that it gives you a sense of dynamism, that actually every single day, every choice you make, every relationship you build or fail to build, every skill you build or don't build, actually adds to your weave. And it seems to me that as you weave your life, these three questions become very important. The first question is about yourself, and it basically says, "Who am I and what am I doing what I'm doing?" And we deep dive in the book into three things. One is, "What's my heritage?" So, for example, I know for myself, David, I can't really understand myself unless I realise that I come from a long history of women who were basically washerwomen. I mean, I come from three generations of women who supported themselves, husbands, children died in the first and second World War. You know, my mother, at the age of 6, her house was destroyed by a bomb in the Liverpool Blitz. And that's made me pretty resilient. I mean, I know my childhood thing is, "Don't make a fuss". That's what my metaphor was, "Don't make a fuss". And of course, I think all of us need to think about our heritage, but also our personality.
For example, in my case, although people are always surprised, I'm pretty introverted. Most writers are introverted. I need time on my own. And then, of course, there's work experience that changes who we are. The fact that I've been a professor for 30 years has changed from if I'd stayed in consulting. You know, 30, 40 years ago, I was in consulting. If I was now running one of the big consulting practices, would I be a different person? Well, I probably would be, to a certain extent. So, knowing yourself is about understanding your heritage, understanding your personality and character, understanding how workers already shaped you. And I think that's an important question that all of us should be asking ourselves.
Then, "Where am I now?" is a threads question. The simple thread question is that there are eight threads that hold your life together, and at any point in time, you want to ask the question, "Which are strong and which are fragile?" Then, the final question, which is, "What action should I take now? What promises should I make to my future self?" is that actually, when we weave our life, we weave it through experiments, through small actions, very rarely through massive decisions. Of course, we make massive decisions. Who am I going to marry is a big decision; where am I going to live is a big decision. But most of the decisions we make are rather the small ones that accumulate over time. So, we need to ask ourselves, "Are there things I need to be doing right now to strengthen my threads?" And the future self is just a really wonderful question, which is to say, in your case, David, if you imagine me being you at the age of 71, what would you wish for me? What would you want for your 71-year-old? And actually, it's quite nice for me now that I'm a little older, because I can stand in a class and say, "Okay, I'm now your future self. Here I am. I'm standing in front of you, I'm 71 years old. What would you promise to your future self?"
So, it's those three questions: who am I; where am I now; what can I promise? And actually, when we think about living and working a long life, that's what you do, you do those three things.
[15:05] David Green: Yeah, it's so important for people to learn who they are. And I don't know, I'm 54 now, so I'd say that's only really happened in the last ten years.
[15:17] Lynda Gratton: Yeah. Well, we find all find our own way. Actually, when I wrote the book, I've got characters in the book that go from the age of 32. And I do think that if I look at my own children now in their mid-30s, or I look at my MBA students in their 30s, I do think you really begin to get a sense of who you are in your 30s, because that's the age when you're making choices, really massive choices; who do I want to be with; who am I; where do I want to live; where do I want to work? In fact, it's a period of enormous choices. And I would hope that the book was read by young people. I'm really hoping that my MBA students -- the ones who've already read it, have loved it -- I'm hoping young people will read it and will love it. And it's not just for people in their 50s and 60s and 70s. The ideas of the book start from the moment you start work.
[16:09] David Green: What does this reveal, do you believe, about conventional ideas that maybe usual or typical career planning actually misses?
[16:18] Lynda Gratton: Yeah. Well, it was very interesting getting the threads. And actually, David, they came out because of my stories. So, I had written, I mean, loads of stories. I spent a whole year just writing stories. I didn't really know what else to do. The book starts with me feeling, "Oh, my goodness, I'm feeling pretty lost in my life, I don't want to continue to do what I've done forever". I'm already way further way further ahead than my father was in terms of the point at which he passed away, and I think lots of people are feeling that; they're living much longer than their parents, so the role model of your parents is no longer available. And looking at those stories, some of the threads were just really absolutely obvious. So, I'd written two books on cooperation, so cooperation was always going to be a thread. I know how important cooperation is. I know how important knowing is, because I'm a teacher and teacher is about knowledge and knowing, and so on. Mastery, again, I've always felt and I've argued for years now that we've got to learn things deeply. This superficial, it just isn't going to happen, and I feel that even more deeply. And of course, amplification is there because you can't write anything at the moment without saying that we are going to be changed by the technology that serves us.
So, those are the productivity threads. And I think, as we think about working lives, we often focus on those. But then there's another set, which we sort of call wellbeing, and I don't like that, I don't think that it's wellbeing. I actually think that they're part of our lives, and they show up in two ways. One is in a relational way, which is our friendships and our intimacy, the people who love. So, those are the two there. But they also show up in our energy, both how we calm ourselves and how we excite ourselves. And the calm is one, and the excitement is what I call adventure. When I looked at my own life, it was the adventures that I remembered. And if I were to ask my 80-year-old self, I mean it's ridiculous me saying this now because I'm just around the corner, but I would always want to say to your future self, "I had great adventures to talk about. I had wonderful things". And so, that's why I've put adventure in.
I have a diagnostic, which is there right now. Hundreds of people have already filled it in. Do put it in the show notes.
[18:47] David Green: Yeah, we will.
[18:48] Lynda Gratton: It's on our website, www.livingthe100yearlife.com. And what I'm learning from that diagnostic, and I really shouldn't tell people, because I don't want to lead you on here, is that the weakest thread, and I notice this when I'm teaching a class as well, the weakest thread is calm. And I think that's a very -- and I've written about that. I have a column in MIT Sloan, and I also write for hbr.org. And in both cases, I've written about calm. And I find that very worrisome really, that at the very time when we're asking ourselves to answer those three questions, which take reflection, they take conversation, we don't have the calm to be able to do that. And I've designed and have now piloted a ten-week programme for executives, a virtual programme, which is based on the book. I just wanted to see how does it work in companies. And we've just finished actually, and I learned a lot from it.
One thing I learned is that when you're given a chance to talk to each other about those three questions: who am I; where am I now; what actions to take and promises to my future self, people find that an incredibly engaging conversation to have. And so, one of the things we're going to be doing at London Business School with our alumni is actually to provide a framework for them to think about that. We think it's such an important three conversations, but to have that, you do need calm. You need to find time in your life when you're not doing your emails, you're not running around, you're not looking at your social media, you're actually calming yourself.
[20:30] David Green: Yeah, very good. Yeah, I must admit, I only do LinkedIn social media, and that's just for work. I don't do personal social media anymore.
[20:38] Lynda Gratton: Well, I think coming back to this thread again, these weaving, I mean one thing that we've all got exactly the same amount of is we've all got the same amount of time. You know, your day is the same length as my day, your year is the same length as my year. I may live less, longer, or shorter than you, we don't know that, but the actual time we're allocated is the same. So, how we decide to use our life, our time, I think is a fundamental question. And some people, as you, don't engage in social media, some people go walking, some people take time off to run, some people spend time thinking. But whatever your habit -- and that, by the way, goes back to your 'who am I?' Who am I tells you how you find calm. I was brought up in the Lake District with a father who walked all the time. So, for me, my calming mechanism is walking. But that's no surprise if you know who I am; that's sort of self-evident. So, that's why knowing who we are is so important, because it helps us to understand how we personally are going to strengthen our threads.
[21:49] David Green: And is calm the most neglected thread, do you believe, in today's workplaces? And if so, what are the consequences for people and organisations?
[22:01] Lynda Gratton: Well, it's certainly coming out; the diagnostic is a workplace diagnostic, so we think about the threads across your whole working life. And it's certainly coming out as the most neglected of the threads. Yeah, I think it's a real challenge. We're just going faster and faster and faster, and I think AI, for all its majesty and extraordinariness, it does speed us up. I noticed that with my own practice. So, if you say with amplification that the most experienced people, like you and I, are six times more productive, which we probably are with using AI, that comes from somewhere. That being six times productive means you're working harder. And so, that actually carving time out to strengthen your threads is really important. And the ones that are particularly susceptible to time are calm, as I've mentioned, but also the two relationship ones, friendship and intimacy, you make and keep friends because you spend time with them; you make and keep intimate, loving relationships because you spend time. These are all things that require time. So, again, the allocation of time becomes so important.
[23:20] David Green: And is that why you've pulled amplification out as a thread on its own, in terms of how people work with technology and AI? Because if you get the amplification bit right and you channel it the right way, you can actually help yourself from a calm perspective, and the intimacy. So, the amplification is an opportunity, arguably, that if we do it right, both individually and as organisations, we can support the other threads.
[23:46] Lynda Gratton: Yeah. Obviously, it's the newest of all the threads. I'm sure if I'd written this book ten years ago, I wouldn't have had amplification in, because AI, we've only been operating with it for a few years. But of course, it's changed our lives, and it's changing our lives on a moment-by-moment basis, as is robotics. So, it had to be there as a thread, and it is a thread that can either help you or really destroy you. One of the things that I did, David, I mean I talked earlier about the diagnostic and the corporate learning journey, which are with the book. The other thing I have is a podcast, which is coming out at the same time as the book is coming out. And in it, each episode is a thread. And so, the thread of amplification is really fascinating actually, because I talked to two of the great experts in the world on how they use AI and what they think about it. And it's very obvious that it's a deliberate process. One of the words that's really coming to mind actually when I think about the future, is that when we had these shorter working lives with three stages: full-time education, full-time work, full-time retirement, we could be pretty passive about what we did. We could sort of go with the flow, institutional flow, age flow. But actually, when you say it's a multi-stage life and you can each live a different life, you have to have so much more agency. And I think that's particularly true for the amplification thread. We have to be much more clear about what we're doing and why we're doing it and how we're doing it and how our relationship with technology changes our world.
[25:34] David Green: And I'd love to get your thoughts on this. Obviously, there's lots of public debate, hyperbole at times, sensationalist headlines, focusing on whether AI will replace jobs. And obviously, history would suggest that every time there's a big industrial revolution, there's certainly a lot of disruption. But it usually, well, it has historically created more jobs than it's replaced. But is the more useful question how AI changes the task? So, it's the disruption piece; it changes tasks, it changes relationships and sources of meaning maybe within a job.
[26:06] Lynda Gratton: It does, it does exactly that. And when I teach this to my MBA class, I always use the sort of David Autor model, which is to say if you think about your work in terms of tasks, some are very routine, some are non-routine, some are manual, some are cognitive. And the piece that we're really excited about is the non-routine cognitive work, which is writing reports, doing analytics, which actually, I go back to doing my PhD, I don't know, 40 years ago, I mean I used a computer that was the size of a medium-sized room. And I put the punch cards in the evening, and of course that could be done on my computer. So, the speed has been completely astonishing. And yeah, so it is reshaping our life at the level of the task.
One thing I think is really important to remember about technology, as we think about the industrial revolutions, and so on, is that we can always relatively reliably predict where jobs will be destroyed. But what we find very difficult to predict is the creation of work. And that's because it's a sort of second-order factor. For example, if you'd seen the very first -- I talk about this in the book actually -- the very first steam engine going past you, you wouldn't really be able to realise that the Gulf states would have huge political leverage 100 years later because of the oil-rich nature of their economy. So, I think it's very difficult to work that out. And so, what I would say to young people is, you can't really predict the future. In my book, The Shift, I predicted 2025. And so, the publishers came back and said, "Lynda, could you do one which predicts another 15 years ahead?" And I just said, "There's no way I could do that". In fact, I don't even write about AI, unless the publication is coming out in the next week or so. Otherwise, you end up looking so completely foolish. It's moving at such speed at the moment. So, you can't predict the future.
So, what you have to do is you have to build the capability to adapt. And I think that's what the threads allow you to do. It's to say, "I don't know what the future is going to be, but whatever it is. I feel as if I can adapt to it".
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So, I think that's quite a nice pivot there a little bit in the conversation to organisations. Longer lives, The 100-Year Life, effectively means that people are going to be working longer and maybe working five, six, maybe more decades. But most organisational systems were designed for much shorter and more linear careers. So, for instance, partners in the Big Four are still required to retire, in most countries, sort of late-50s, early-60s, which is a little bit ridiculous perhaps. So, where are those career systems breaking down? And again, in your work with organisations and HR leaders and the work that you're doing at London Business School and elsewhere, what are the more progressive companies doing about trying to remedy that situation?
[30:23] Lynda Gratton: Well, when we think about the career systems that were put in place, they were basically based on the three-stage life: full-time education, full-time work, full-time retirement. And the reason that was a sort of rather passive system is because everybody went through it at the same age. You're, I don't know, 18, you're going from education to work; you're 60, you're going from work to retirement; and then in the middle, the work piece, you progressed up, and if you didn't progress, then you had to get out. And so, that was a very relative -- I know the HR made a great big deal of it, but actually, to be honest, it was a relatively easy thing to do. We were basically either building or buying. You were either building people up, or you were buying them. I think that the challenge now is that that system isn't working. And I can see that, that individuals are feeling frustrated. I've just run three companies through my corporate programme, and I've listened to all of the people engaged in it, the participants, and they're pretty frustrated about, "Well, what am I supposed to do next? I can't go up, so what am I supposed to do?" And I think what we failed to realise is that we could bring people in from the outside as freelancers, and we also could think about bridging from one part of one type of work to another. So, I think these sort of borrow-and-bridge strategies become much more important from an HR perspective.
I think also, just the ageism thing is so dispiriting. And I've already told you, I don't know, four times, that I'm 71, and it's unusual for a woman to tell her age. But the reason I'm doing that, David, is to say, "For God's sake, get over it", really. You know, David Attenborough, 100 years, just get over it. People are changing all the time. Dach generation, each cohort of 40-year-olds, 50, 60, 70, 80-year-olds, we're all different from previous generations. And that's changing really fast. So, we've got to drop ageism. I find it so upsetting that people find it hard to get a job after the age of 50, David. It's not even 60, it's actually 50. There's a Claire Barrett She's 50. Claer Barrett did a piece in the FT last week about the new pension, and I've just been looking at the comments today. And so many people have commented and said, "I can't get a job. I've got to take ten years off my life". And so, that's the first thing, is forget ageism, just drop it, it's a discrimination just like every other form of discrimination.
Number two, just be more aware that people are living multi-stage lives, and a multi-stage life means that you do more things. And you either do that as multi-stage, by which I mean you take a sabbatical, you learn something new, you start your own business, you volunteer, all the things that you could do sequentially; or people are building portfolios, where that's horizontal. You do it 'and- and', you know, you do your job and you volunteer, and you do this, and you do that. And that's where most people now are seeing their lives. If I talk to people about, "How do you imagine your life will be?" they say, "I can see I'm going to do different things". Because if I say to you, you need to work until you're in your 70s, in my case, probably up into my 80s, I mean obviously, I'm a professor and we have a very particularly nice life. But for many others as well, the first thing you say is, "Well, I don't want to carry on doing what I'm doing until 70 or 80. I've got to do something different". And so, thinking about something different, thinking about what is there in your organisation that's adjacent that you could do, what's the new development you could do? Could you do some more volunteer work? Could you start an interesting project? There's so many things we can do. And I think part of my gift to the world really, I think, and that's how I'm sort of seeing this book and all the other things around it, is to say, "You could be so many different things, it's not just up and out". And HR has got to realise that.
[34:45] David Green: In the book, Living the 100-Year Life, you vividly describe a job as an island, which this definitely resonated, with the water slowly rising around.
[34:54] Lynda Gratton: Well, yeah, the AI.
[34:57] David Green: Yeah, the AI; maybe not so slowly! What should organisations be looking for if they want to recognise that process, before a role becomes unsustainable?
[35:07] Lynda Gratton: Well, I think individuals doing a role know themselves when it's becoming -- I mean it's not difficult, I don't think, to work out which tasks are going to have a high AI component. I mean, there's lots of easy ways of doing that, and I think most people know the tasks that will disappear. I think the more difficult question is to prepare people to jump off the island. If you think about the island as your job and the water's coming up, at some stage you have to jump. And encouraging people to jump, either because they jump up, they go into a job that's better paid, where they use some of the skills but also build new skills; or more likely, jump across, so they're in the same sort of pay grade, but they're doing something that's different, that gives them new skills. And to do that, an HR person has got to provide people with an idea of what jobs are in the organisation that they could jump into.
I think that one of the problems with the three-stage life is it's really created a mindset that the only way is up. Now, the truth is, of course, most of us didn't go up. But it somehow feels that if you didn't go up, it was a failure, when in fact actually, another mindset would be, the only way is across or the only way is jumping. I mean, we need to think about, there's so many other ways that we can work. It isn't just, if you don't make a partner or you don't get to the top, you failed. But actually, what sort of a life are you building for yourself and how are you allocating your time in that life?
[36:47] David Green: Yeah, very good. And actually, I was listening to you then and I was thinking should we still organise work by jobs, or should we be thinking a different way of looking at it now? Should we start with the work? I mean I hear people like Ravin Jesuthasan and John Boudreau talking about starting with the work. I mean I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. And is the job becoming a bit redundant, if you pardon the pun?
[37:11] Lynda Gratton: Yes I think it already is, isn't it, actually? I mean, it's the tasks that you do and the way that you pull those tasks together give you the job. But actually, if you think of so much work now in a company's project work, we're just a project member. You don't come in with a job task, you come in with doing this particular sort of work. You get pulled together to do a project, you're dismantled once the project's finished. Some of the things that you're going to be working with are going to be AI agents. So, I think a job was always a sort of, again, an old-fashioned three-stage way of thinking of things. You know, you had a job, it had 24 tasks. That doesn't really make very much sense. Why would you have that? Because most of us, if I think of how I spend my time, I have so many different tasks I do that are not really related to any particular job, but they're related to me and my skills and how I'm weaving my life.
[38:09] Lynda Gratton: And, I mean obviously, internal mobility is a big focus for organisations for a number of reasons, partly demographics, partly because it's so difficult to find the right skills. And then maybe that lends itself into there. I mean, you can be a data scientist working in HR, but actually you've got data science skills which could be applied across the organisations in different functions. What should organisations maybe change in their approach to internal mobility, job architecture, career pathways, to support maybe repeated transitions, rather than that single upward climb that you mentioned there?
[38:44] Lynda Gratton: Yeah, I think they could do a number of things. First of all, I think they could be clear that transition is a skill. Being able to make a transition to upskill yourself or reskill is a skill that all of us need to learn. Secondly, I think they need to be much clearer about what these jobs need, the skills that they require, because I know some of the companies that I advise, they're quite shocked that there's another part of the company that needs almost the same skills. But because the job title was so different, they hadn't made that connection. And of course, AI helps you to do that, helps you to work out where it is. And then, I think the third thing is to help people feel as if they've got agency, as if they actually could make this switch, make a decision, make this jump. And that's really what I wrote the book for. I wanted to help people, well, as it says on the cover, "Build a career that lasts and a life they love". And to do that, they've got to take control of their life. Most companies aren't going to help them to do that. They might along the way. It might be a sort of nice outcome, but it's not going to be the thing that any company does for any individual. The individual has to do it for themselves.
[39:55] David Green: We're talking a lot about technology here. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, as someone that's studying work for so long, and obviously made the leap with the shift to think about what might happen in the next 15 years. What should remain distinctly human as work becomes increasingly amplified by technology?
[40:16] Lynda Gratton: Yeah. Well, that's why I loved the threads so much, because when I look back at the threads, some of them are so distinctly human. Adventure; I mean, I have a very well-trained large language model, but honestly, it pretends it can have adventures, it pretends it's a real person, but it really isn't. I mean, it really hasn't had any adventures. It hasn't gone out and smelt the sun. I mean, it doesn't do any of those things. So, I think adventure is something that's really human. And I would, for example, with my MBA students now, I used to teach them a semester on the future of work. And now, instead of that, I take them to Tokyo and we look at the future of work sitting in Tokyo, having an adventure in Tokyo, so actually really leaning into the things that humans are, which are: we can see, we can hear, we can smell. That's the first one.
Obviously, intimacy is enormously important, because quite a lot of the burnout people have right through their life is because those intimate relationships start to break down and it causes us such personal stress. I think that friendship is something that we know sustains us through our life. If you look at the long-term studies of happiness in lives, one of the threads that goes through that is the thread of friendship and how you have friends. So, I think that particularly the nurture threads, the adventure, the calm, the intimacy, the friendship, those are threads that are very, very important in an age of AI, and we need to really strengthen them. But of course, there's also judgment and taste and all those other things. I'm very familiar with, I use large language models a lot, partly because I want to see how my students are using it, so I need to be clear about how people are interacting, it's changing all the time. But it doesn't have my taste and it doesn't have my judgment. And really understanding who you are, what you believe in, otherwise you could become entirely overwhelmed by what it is, you know, Claude or ChatGPT will do for you.
[42:27] David Green: I was listening to you there, Lynda, and I love the way you've done it with the amplification piece, because I was thinking obviously, probably like you, you've been using LLMs increasingly over the last sort of three, well, what is it, three or four years now, isn't it? And obviously, they get better and better with each version release. And I've worked too hard, always have worked too hard. But what I've found with the amplification is I'm still working too hard, probably, but I'm giving some of that time back to my intimacy with my children, 17, 16, and my wife, my poor wife who's had to put up with me for years, and friendships. But I still feel I'm being more productive, but I'm actually having more time for those, the intimacy and the friendships.
[43:16] Lynda Gratton: Well, you are a smart person, David, because sadly, I mean this was always the dream, wasn't it, and I've written about the dream of AI on a number of occasions, which says if you become six times productive, then you could do six times less, and it means that you could spend more time with your other threads, particularly your intimacy threads. Of course, the reality and the research is already coming through on that, is people just do six times more things. They do more presentations, they write more books, they just do more and more and they don't take time. And it comes back to the conversation we were having earlier about time and the allocation of time. You're very foolish if you use AI a lot and don't use the time you save to build your nurture threads. That is a foolish person. And I certainly would be very explicit about that with my students, that it's not about just doing more and more, it's also about building your nurture threads. Because these are the threads, the four threads of nurture: intimacy, friendship, calm, and adventure, are going to be the threads that hold your life together in your 70s and 80s, at any stage actually. But really, if you want to be happy in your 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, those are the threads you've got to be building, from the age of 30 onwards.
In my podcast, and it's in the book as well, I talk about my threads of friendship aren't very strong. You know, I've been really focused on mastery and all of that, hugely strong mastery thread. You can see it in everything I've written. But actually, I have got a friend, Shirley, who I've had since I was 10 years old, and it's just a marvellous gift to me. And it's because Shirley is very good at nurturing the thread of friendship. It's she who does it, it's she who remembers it, it's she who sends cards, it's she who texted me this morning and said, "Are you back? How are you?" because I came in from somewhere this morning, "How are you feeling? Let's try and get together". And she's been doing that for the last 60 years.
[45:23] David Green: Listening to you there, Lynda, people like you particularly, and there you're fortunate enough to have a voice in the field, we need to, like you have been, and like I hope I have been, be honest that we are using the amplification to give us some time back, to help us with the intimacy and the friendship and the calm and the adventure, because you need to have that to have better balance. And if you have better balance, then frankly you're going to be better at work, and people that are working for you are going to have a better experience as well. And we have to lead from the front a little bit on this, I think.
[45:56] Lynda Gratton: Yes, you do, you absolutely do. And to keep those threads strong, you need to show that you're keeping them strong. You need to talk about your family, you need to talk about your friends, just as I've told you about Shirley. You need to talk about your adventures, you need to talk about the way that you create calm. These are very important for people to describe to others how they do it. Because if your thread, if any of those is weak or fragile -- and if listeners just go into the diagnostic and do it, I'd love you to do it because I like to look at the data as well -- that's something you really need to invest in, and watching how others do it. So, one of the articles I've written is called The Calm Minority, because when I ask a class, "How many people have this as a strength, calm as a strength?" in a class of 40, maybe three people have it as their strongest thread. And then, I go and ask them, "Tell me about how you do it". And it's just really fascinating, actually. Some of them do it because it's part of their heritage, it's their personality, they've seen somebody else do it. But it's often because they've seen somebody else be calm and they've learned how to do it from them. So, all of us should really be showing people how we keep our threads strong, because others can learn from it.
[47:16] David Green: Really important. We'll definitely put that article in the show notes as well, and I'm going to go off and read it when we've finished talking actually, Lynda!
[47:24] Lynda Gratton: There's another one on adventure that is its twin. I love doing twins. I've got one on adventure, both in MIT, yeah.
[47:31] David Green: MIT, okay. Or we'll put a link to the column that you've got in there as well. So, we talk about calm. I reckon we've got about three questions left, Lynda, looking at the time. And you mentioned data. You couldn't expect to have a conversation with the two of us without talking about data. What data would tell a Chief People Officer whether the organisation is helping to build sustainable careers; and what which measures would you place related to that, maybe on an executive workforce dashboard?
[48:04] Lynda Gratton: Yeah, I don't know actually. I don't know the answer to that question. It's a really good question. I think I'd say a few things. One is, I'd say, retaining people during their 40s. Another really lovely piece I've written since the book is an hbr.org piece about the pivotal 40s. And what I learned from the people who came through my corporate programme is just how difficult the 40s are for people. And that's because it's now the halfway point in a long career. It never used to be, but it now is. And now, you're in your 40s, you're thinking, "What? Is this it? Am I going to have to do this all over again?" So, you actually have to completely rethink. And what I noticed is that the 40s could be a really reflective point. So, I think the first thing I'd say to a CHRO is have a look at what's going on with your 40-year-olds, because if they're leaving you because they're burnt out, something's going really wrong.
I think the second thing I'd say to them is take a look at your horizontal development mechanisms. Is it just that you're building, or can you also bridge? I think the third thing is, just be looking to see whether you're supporting multi-stage lives. I mean, people taking sabbaticals, are they taking time out? And then, you could just also look at the threads of productivity, which is, are people really learning something deeply? The thread of mastery, the thread of cooperation, are people cooperating with each other? So, you could actually build, I'm sure somebody will, a whole sort of dashboard based on the eight threads. I'd basically look at each of the threads, but also across a life. And the 40s turns out to be very pivotal. I think the HBR article in the end was, I think it might have even been called The Pivotal 40s, yeah.
[49:51] David Green: Okay, I'll have a look for that. Yeah, I mean again, looking back to the 40s, for me was having young children, moving, leaving France and coming back to the UK in a new career. There was a lot going on.
[50:06] Lynda Gratton: A lot happening. The 40s are really tough actually, because it's also the point at which you've sort of pushed through your 30s, you're feeling good, "I'm making it, here I am". And the 40s, you go, "Oh my God, you've just told me I'm going to have to work until I'm 70? Argh!" I have to say it's not that bad, you'll be fine.
[50:27] David Green: So, what's one practical example experiment an organisation could begin in the next say six months to help employees build more resilient and more fulfilling working lives?
[50:39] Lynda Gratton: Well, I would actually, I mean, this sounds terribly self-serving, I don't mean it to be, but I would actually ask them to look at their threads and to have a conversation around that. And we've started doing that with companies now. And when the book comes out, you'll notice there's also a workbook that goes with it, which I illustrated it. I'd love to show it to you, but it's still in production. But it will be out on 9 September. And I would actually recommend people do the diagnostic, have a look at their threads, and talk to each other about it. That's what we've been piloting in the last four months with three large companies. And it's been really fascinating actually. So, I think give people a new model of thinking about their lives, the threads is as good as any; give them a sense of where they are now; and then, give them an opportunity to talk to others about that. So, I would actually put in a reflective process.
[51:37] David Green: And I think again, listening to you, Lynda, about the threads and the diagnostic that you brought up, this is something that people can use from an individual basis, but organisations can use as well.
[51:48] Lynda Gratton: In fact, actually, with my books, I tend to have them either written for companies or written for individuals. This absolutely sits right in the middle of the individual. The last book, Redesigning Work, was an organisational book, it told you what a company needs to do. This says, "You're an individual, do the diagnostic, learn about your threads, and if you want to, use the workbook, because the work actually helps you to make notes about what you've learned". My dream for this book is that people create groups to work on it, and I'm going to be doing that. If you go to my website once the book's out, the website's already up and running, but you'll see that I'm going to do more to help teams be creative.
[52:40] David Green: And it's a nice link there, isn't there, between Redesigning Work and Living The 100-Year Life, because they go hand-in-hand.
[52:47] Lynda Gratton: They do. And Redesigning Work, my last book, actually really talks about, "How would you redesign work?" So, it was about tasks and not about jobs, yeah.
[52:57] David Green: Very good. Well, Lynda, we got to the final question. This is the question of the series. So, this episode is going to be the first one of this series, so you're going to be the first person that's going to answer it, and it's definitely in your sweet-spot, Lynda. How should HR redesign work to unlock business value?
[53:18] Lynda Gratton: I think an easy way is to think about work as a series of tasks, and to ask yourself, "Who's best served doing that task? Is it a human; is it a team; is it an AI agent?" And then, really focus on the design of work. I do think that the piece that HR has not got right yet is the design of work. So, I would say learn how to design work.
[53:42] David Green: Great, fantastic. You heard it there then. So, Lynda, absolutely fantastic to talk to you, as it always is.
[53:48] Lynda Gratton: Thank you, David.
[53:50] David Green: Living the 100-Year Life is published on 9 September, so I think that's next week, for those listening to this live; we're recording it a couple of weeks before. Where can listeners learn more about the book, as well as your work at London Business School, and the new initiative you're launching, The Institute for Work, Longevity and Careers, I believe it's called?
[54:11] Lynda Gratton: Yes. So, this is an enormously important institute that has arisen because we have a donor who's fascinated in this. I and Herminia Ibarra will be running it, the dream team, and we're going to help organisations across the world, and individuals, think about how to support long working lives. You can learn about what I do by joining me on LinkedIn. I have a very active LinkedIn. Everything I do is in LinkedIn, so that's the best way to find out what I do. The website for the book is www www.livingthe100yearlife.com. And in it, if you go into it right now, you'll find the diagnostic, the workbook, the podcast. I built a whole ecosystem to support you, because it matters so much to me that we get this right.
[55:02] David Green: Lynda, as ever, it's an absolute pleasure. I wish you best of luck with the book. I don't think you need much luck from me. I'm sure it's going to be a roaring success. And thank you for taking the time to speak to listeners on the Digital HR Leaders podcast.
[55:13] Lynda Gratton: Thank you, thanks.
[55:16] David Green: Lynda, thank you so much again for coming on the show and for being so generous with your thinking on how we build lasting careers and lives that we love. It's a topic that touches every single one of us, and I know our listeners will be reflecting on their own threads long after this episode ends. So, thank you again. Turning to our listeners, thank you for tuning in. I'd love to hear your take on this. Head over to LinkedIn and let me know which of the eight threads feel strongest in your work and life right now, and which one needs a bit more attention. And if you enjoyed this episode, please do share it with a colleague who'd get something out of it. And if you haven't already, hit subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next on the podcast.
One last thing before we go. For those who would like to keep up with what we're working on at Insight222, follow us on LinkedIn or head to insight222.com. You can also sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter on myHRfuture.com to get the latest thinking on HR, people analytics, workforce transformation, and everything shaping our field. Right, that's us for today. Thanks for listening and we'll be back next week with another episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast. Until then, take care and stay well.