The Human Symphony: Futurist Heather E. McGowan On Belonging, Optimism, And The Emerging Human Era

27 Aug , 2025 podcasts

 

Discover a powerful path to human flourishing in a rapidly changing world. Speaker and author Heather E. McGowan, known for her expertise in the future of work, dives into why optimism is essential. She explains how to combat the loneliness epidemic by transforming transactions into interactions. Heather also discusses vital shifts in leadership. These shifts prioritize collective intelligence and human values. She shares insights from her books, The Adaptation Advantage and The Empathy Advantage. Heather offers guidance on navigating today’s dynamic business landscape.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

The Human Symphony: Futurist Heather E. McGowan On Belonging, Optimism, And The Emerging Human Era

Moving From Loneliness And Disconnection Into Collective Wisdom And Human Spirit

Welcome to The Lab. On the show, I’m in conversation with someone who truly believes in the world we can create together. Future-of-work strategist Heather McGowan helps leaders prepare their people and organizations for this new world of work. It’s not just about the workplace. It’s really about how we co-create the next human era. Ranked as LinkedIn’s number one global voice for education and one of Forbes’ Top 50 Female Futurists, Heather has been described as the Oasis when it comes to insights into the future of work by the New York Times.

Often quoted in the media, Heather is the bestselling author of The Adaptation Advantage, which reached number three in business management books on Amazon, and was named one of the best business books of 2021 by SoundView. Her latest book, The Empathy Advantage: Leading the Empowered Workforce, is a finalist for the Next Big Idea Book Club and has been identified as a top ten business book to read in 2023 by Business Chief. Heather also earned an MBA from Babson College and a BFA in Industrial Design from Rhode Island School of Design.

She was also awarded an honorary doctorate from Pennsylvania College of Art and Design. In 2019, she was appointed as a faculty member of the Swinburne University Center for the New Workforce and currently serves on the advisory board for Sparks & Honey, a New York-based culture-focused agency. Heather joined us at a leadership conference. I have to tell you. Her insights were a true catalyst for conversation. I appreciate her passion for optimism and her grounded belief in what we can accomplish when we unlock the power of the human spirit. Please enjoy the conversation with a true architect of the future, Heather McGowan.

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Heather, it’s so great to see you again. I know we were together not that long ago in Napa. We are so grateful that you joined us for the CEO Summit. It was amazing. You were so generous to agree to this conversation. Thank you so much.

Thanks so much for having me. It’s my privilege to be here with you.

The Optimist’s Origin Story: A Journey Into The Future Of Work

Let’s get into it. We’ve got a lot to talk about. Of all the speakers we had at the summit, we had so much interest in your content. Personally, being involved in The Compassion Lab, it is all about culture. It’s all about people and understanding how we work and how we can flourish and thrive. A lot of what we’re going to talk about is exactly that. There’s a lot that you have to say about this topic of culture, change, and the future of work, but I want to begin and ground the audience with who you are. What was it about, whether it was your childhood, your formative years, or something that happened in your life, that drove you into this conversation?

First of all, I had no idea what a speaker was many years ago. I had no idea it was my future. I’ve written a couple of books, but I never took a writing class outside of high school and never took a single speech class. That came about organically. What drives me is when I say I’m a belligerent optimist. Where that comes from, I realized upon reflection, is when I was eighteen years old, and my brother was seventeen years old, he got diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. He was adopted from Korea. His life could only be saved by a bone marrow transplant. That was 1992.

Nobody matched him, and so we were like, “I got to save my brother’s life.” I decided that was my mission. I don’t know why I thought I could do that, but I started running testing drives to find a donor for him. I spoke at college campuses all over the US. I guess that’s where speaking started. I did it out of necessity. I spoke to the Korean student associations because my brother is Korean. After about eighteen months, no social media, no internet, no cell phones, and I was on pay phones and flying places, almost 8,000 people rolled up their sleeves and got tested. They gave a vial of blood to save the life of someone they had never met. You can’t have that experience and not be on Team Human.

That’s where my optimism comes from. It turns out we did not find a match for my brother, but friends of ours went around Korea and went door to door in the village where he was relinquished. They found his biological mother. She came over, and she was his donor. In 1992, I believe it was, he got an extra 30 years on his life. He died a couple of years ago when his cancer came back, but he got 30 years that no one ever expected him to have. My parents were optimists, too, because we were living in Boston. The Boston Hospital said they couldn’t treat him anymore. My parents took binders with his health files and flew around the country to try to find a research center that would take on his case as an experiment.

The University of Kentucky did. He had an experimental bone marrow transplant at the University of Kentucky in 1992 and got an extra 30 years on his life. When you’re going from being a child to an adult, you can’t have that experience and not end up being a belligerent optimist. You just can’t. You can’t not be on Team Human. That’s where my sense of optimism and my ideas about championing humans in what I call the learning centric future work.

When folks say, “Why are you so optimistic about humans? Why is it about humans?” I’m like, “Why the hell else would we be doing all this? We’re the only species that would invent things that would imprison us, enslave us, or make us redundant.” We have to think differently about the opportunities we have in front of us. That’s what started my optimism. I found myself in every job that I had that I was explaining to people what was going on. I realized I was the navigator for folks, no matter what I was doing. It was mostly consulting, corporate, and some academic.

 

In 2014, I wrote an article on LinkedIn, and 100,000 people read it in 24 hours. I started getting speaking requests from all over the world. The first one was in Australia. I went there. They had 39 internationally well-known speakers and me. It was my first talk. They ranked the speakers, and I was number two or number three out of the entire global event. Videos of that went viral. I met our friend Peter Sheahan, and that little fast-forwarding lands us here.

The rest is history. Thank you for sharing that story. That is a very powerful story. What I think about as you share it is, yes, how can you not be an optimist when you have a story like that? There was something about you that felt that you could go out and do this. What you did was extraordinary. You do know that. You did not accept the situation. You went out in an environment where you didn’t have all the tools we do today to try to save him. That’s amazing.

It tells you the power of a compelling story. That’s what we’re trying to do here. Some of the things we talked about prior and some of the things we talked about at the summit are, “What’s the opportunity in front of us?” Your loneliness is one of the things I’m sure we’ll talk about. The industry you’re in or the industries we spoke at the event are where most people get their first jobs, which means you teach humans how to be adults. You have probably one of the greatest exposures to a broad swath of humans that are out there. You have the ability to make an impact like you can’t in any other industry.

Both of my sons are starting in food service, which is natural, considering what I do. That is the place where you learn. With Gen Z, and I know we’ll probably touch on some of the dynamics of Gen Z in this conversation, there are all the videos and screens. When you get into a restaurant situation, they’re interacting with people. It’s a whole different dynamic. I want to express my gratitude for your mission and for your optimism.

The world needs people like you because we are surrounded by information that would tell us that we’re doomed, things are bad, and we need to be in fear. Fear and love can’t exist at the same time. We need people who share words of the power of the human spirit, and that we can co-create something different. That’s exactly what you’re doing.

It’s activating people, but it’s in people. I tell people all the time, “I just came in from an airport.” That’s probably how I start almost every conversation because I’m always coming in from an airport. An airport’s like Hunger Games. Everybody is trying to get to their gate, get their food, or get their coffee. Every time I’m in the airport, I watch people, and somebody inevitably falls. There’s an elderly person, or somebody trips over something.

When I tell people that story, they’re like, “Everybody walked over them, right?” I said, “No, everybody stopped to help them.” We are hardwired to help each other. We’ve got a lot of messages that tell us it’s not true and encourage different behaviors. In the moment, most people want to do the right thing. They roll up their sleeves to give that vial of blood. They pick up and help the person who tripped. We have to give each other permission to do that more broadly.

Navigating Economic Storms: Adapting To Change And Uncertainty

That’s beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. Let’s get into some of the dynamics of the work that you do and the conversations that we had at the summit and that you have in other arenas. I want to start large with the macroeconomic environment and what we see in the world. The fact of the matter is, we’ve never experienced this much change. It’s getting faster and faster. That’s something we hear all the time. You’ve got a convergence of all these different things going on, and it’s stressful. I know you shared at the summit, and maybe you can repeat that for this conversation. It creates the level of uncertainty right now. What does that do to our physiology and our brains?

We have a lot of change. We have a lot of uncertainty. We have a lot of ambiguity. We have a lot of instability. There’s an economic policy uncertainty index. There are a few different ones, but they all point in the same direction. The highest rate of economic uncertainty that we have had, unrecorded history, because we’ve got fifteen years of slowly increasing economic uncertainty, was in COVID. What’s happened since then is that it came down a little bit after the height of COVID, the first year, eighteen months of it. It spiked up the last 3 to 6 months.

There are changes in the US policy, sure, but globally, a lot of stuff is happening. We’re almost double that level. We’re way off the charts on that. That has huge implications in business. You’re delaying your travel. You’re delaying investments. You’re freezing hiring. You’re maybe downsizing. Maybe you’re laying off because you can’t quite figure out where the wind is blowing. That’s going on. That has a real physiological response on our body. In our brains, we go into our amygdala. We go into our reptilian brains. We go into fight or flight. Our bodies flood with cortisol, which is like getting a big shot of Red Bull. You get a lot of energy, but then you’re fatigued. You’ve got health issues afterwards. Our worst biases come to the front in those moments.

What I encourage people to do is, one, realize it’s happening. Two, stop and say, “What is it I can control? What is it I can’t control? How can I break down?” The further something is away, the more abstract it becomes and the scarier it becomes. “How can I make it more concrete in the moment? What are the things I can tackle? Where can I feel like I’m making progress?” You feel like you have some control because indeed you do, over some of the things around you, that when you take them into their abstractions and further out, it seems scary. In the day-to-day, we’re okay. We’re doing okay.

We are hardwired to help each other, but many messages tell us it's not true, encouraging different behaviors. Share on X

That’s such an important distinction. In a lot of our sessions we do in The Compassion Lab, we’re trying to teach how to stay in a place of grounded peace, no matter what’s going on. Some of that is having that internal self-talk about, “Let’s look in the immediate surroundings. Are we safe? Are we okay?” We take all the messages coming in to us from the world. We allow it to overwhelm us and put us into that fight-flight-free state, which is not a healthy place to play. It’s learning how to navigate the chaos without getting lost in it. That is a skill. That’s a whole emerging skill that we’re still trying to figure out, especially in business.

One of the things I do is I try to get folks to talk about COVID. They’re like, “We don’t want to talk about COVID. It’s over.” I said, “COVID was one of the biggest learning moments.” In the first two weeks we went into COVID, things we could never imagine happening started happening. In the first month we were into COVID, we leapt forward five years in digital transformation. We put courses online and education online. IT offices went from supporting five central offices to 100,000 home offices. We did an incredible adaptation in that moment. Did we do everything right? Certainly not. Did some people get hurt and injured? Absolutely. Did we make some mistakes? Tons of them. We rose to that occasion that was fairly unprecedented.

It is funny, though. I saw that. During COVID, not only did we have the technological shifts. It was so funny. We launched the whole video chat on Teams in our company. The Teams platform came out weeks before the lockdown. It was almost like, “This is very strange that this just launched before this happened.” We were having Zoom calls where people were like, “How are you doing?”

When the George Floyd thing happened, we were having calls about understanding race relations and how people were feeling. People were talking. They were vulnerable. They were connected even though we were far away. After we got through that, whenever we would bring it up, “That’s done. That’s over.” We don’t want to talk about it anymore. What is it about that? Why do we do that?

I interviewed the person who wrote the most well-known book about the 1918 flu. Chris Shipley and I were writing our book, The Adaptation Advantage, as we got to interview her. I said, “If more people died in the 1918 flu than in World War II, or they’re about the same, why are there a million movies about World War II and there’s one book and no movies about the 1918 flu?” She said to me, “I have spent years, decades, trying to figure that out. I have finally come to the thesis that World War II is something that was experienced by some people.”

It was an abstraction of most of us. They sold us on the theater and the bravery of it all, so we wanted to mythologize that. We wanted to create stories about that because we didn’t all experience it, at least the major component of it, the real face-to-face pieces of it. We all experienced the flu, like we’re all experiencing COVID. At the time, she said to me, “My theory is that as soon as we’re done with this, nobody is going to want to talk about it again because we all experienced it. It was group trauma. We wanted to lock the box and put it away, whereas, opposed to the thing that only a small percentage of people experienced, we wanted to write stories, tell stories, and try to make sense of that thing.”

That makes a ton of sense. We can also sadly romanticize the war situation. It unfolds in drama versus a collective situation of the flu or COVID. There was a documentary. I don’t know if you saw it. I don’t remember the name. I don’t remember the streaming platform. It might have been on Apple. It was what happened to the animals and nature during COVID. Do you know what I’m talking about?

I remember the stories about it, but I didn’t know the documentary. They were flourishing in certain areas.

They talked about what happened to the whale migrations when the cruise ships weren’t at sea and what happened in major cities with the surrounding animals. It was some beautiful stories about how nature flourished during that time. I just don’t wonder, instead of just packing away that trauma, if we can look back at what, take all the politics out of it and all the other things, and say, “How did we grow? What did we learn? How are we better than it?” For some reason, we haven’t done that.

That’s a conversation I keep trying to have with folks. “No, don’t talk about COVID.” The other thing is that COVID happened to us. Worse, we make decisions about making that happen. We have to feel better about the decisions we made. That’s why we need to romanticize it. That’s another piece of it.

The Loneliness Cure: Building Connection In A Disconnected World

It’s very interesting. During COVID, we had this disconnection, yet we were more vulnerable and checking in on each other. You mentioned at the beginning of our conversation, this whole epidemic of loneliness. Heather got a T-shirt about, “The cure for loneliness is us.” Let’s spend a little bit of time on loneliness in The Compassion Lab. Part of it is community. It’s not that we have the answers to everything, but people are coming together to acknowledge the challenge and to share in their challenges and in their learnings on these practices. Share a little bit about the whole loneliness dynamic and what you think we can do to shift that.

Loneliness, just like uncertainty, does the same thing to your brain. It pulls you into your amygdala. You go into fight or flight because we’re a social species. We only survive because of our ability to socially collaborate, socially learn, and create community. That’s very essential to our being, just like food and water. One of the statistics I learned since I spoke with you was a report that came out. I think it was the United Nations. Eight hundred seventy-one thousand people die every year of loneliness. That’s 100 people every single hour.

They’re direct. It’s like obesity leading to something else. It’s an underlying condition in cardiac disease, suicides, and a lot of other ways that people die. We are the only people who can solve it. This is one of the challenges I gave at your event. I want to tell you something that happened with your photographer. I’ve tried to do it at every event since. I would love this to go viral, like the Ice Bucket Challenge. For the next 24 hours, I ask folks to turn every transaction into an interaction. In the food service industry, it’s 50 to 300 people an hour that they interact with, that could be moments of connection if you look somebody in the eye.

You think about it. Go for 24 hours. Just go through your day, and take a mental note. You step on an elevator. You pay for your groceries. You step into an Uber. You get on a flight. Whatever it is you do, you interact with a lot of humans. You will realize you are no longer looking in the eye. You’re no longer saying, “Hello. Good morning.” If they’ve got a name badge on and you say their name, that does something chemically to their brain. They feel more seen and heard. Right now, something like 38% of the US is doing gig work. That’s not everybody’s full-time job, so to slice out which percentage of folks that’s a full-time job.

For a lot of folks, that’s what’s called anonymous work, which means you’re delivering an Amazon package. You’re not talking to anybody. Nobody knows your name. You’re not celebrating your birthday. You’re not going out for drinks afterwards. You don’t have coworkers. You’re driving an Uber. You’re the back of a head. Nobody ever talks to you. We’ve anonymized so much of our work. We’ve turned people into human vending machines. Those folks are the folks who are suffering. For the next 24 hours, turn every transaction into an interaction. I challenge the folks on the stage to do that. I talked to your photographer at the event because I always talk to everybody. Before I spoke, I asked him what it was like to do the work that he did.

At the dinner afterwards, he said to me, “You were one of the few people who talked to me. Everybody else treated me like a piece of furniture to avoid. After you gave that challenge, almost everybody came up and introduced themselves to me. That was the first time I felt seen and heard. I’m usually the invisible person at an event. In some ways, I’m supposed to be invisible to capture it, but I feel different now than I did a few hours ago.” I said, “I bet they feel different, too.” It’s a challenge I’d like to see people take on. Just 24 hours, say hello to everybody. Don’t freak yourself out, but say hello. Lock eyes with everybody. Say thank you. Say their name if you can read their name badge. You get their name. There are so many people who never hear their own name.

That’s so simple and powerful. It makes me think we should run an initiative in the food service industry. We’re going to solve the loneliness epidemic by making sure that everyone in our restaurants and stores interacts with the customer in a more human way, not just a transactional way.

I told you folks a story about Kate, the bartender in Boston. My friends had to go to this chain restaurant, and they weren’t chain restaurant kind of guys. I went to the restaurant. Suddenly, one or two days a week, we were going to that restaurant. I met my accountant there. Every person who stepped into that bar, Kate saw them. She knew who you were. She knew your name. She knew how you liked your food. She knew what things you were interested in. She would introduce you to somebody else. “You’re a kid. Go play soccer over here,” or “You might want to do business with this person.” She was a connector. She went bar to bar around Boston. There was never an empty bar seat at Kate’s bar. That’s what you’ve got to hire for, too.

It’s so huge. It’s funny, Heather. This is an embarrassing story and not a good one, but it had an impact on me as I was thinking about how I went through the day and the way I do things now. I was in a Starbucks. This goes back several years. I was in the usual. I was running, trying to get to a meeting, and with something going on. I ordered my coffee. I was on the phone. They write your name on the cup. On my cup, they wrote “cell phone.” I picked it up. It was a moment of shame because they were just like, “I don’t know your name. You’re in your own thing.” It had a profound impact on me to change the way I have these micro interactions throughout my day to be much more present with them. It’s very powerful.

I realized it because I’m probably the biggest offender. I was sleepwalking through my days, staring at my phone, and not making eye contact with a person when I was getting groceries, ordering a coffee, or having all those other interactions. I don’t always do it, but I try very hard to do it. Once I started doing it, I realized how infrequently I was doing it. That’s the most startling thing.

We’re throwing down this challenge to anyone tuning in to this conversation to go make a difference in someone’s life. That’s very powerful.

Hashtag, we can end loneliness.

Bridging Divides In Society And Work

Tangent to that, but very connected, we’re living in this world of such polarization, finger-pointing, I’m in this camp, you’re in that camp, the politics, and all of these things. How is that affecting us, too? That’s fueling this as you start to feel an us and them versus a we.

That makes total sense because our brain is priming us to do that. Our brain is going to make us versus them, fight or flight. One of the examples I use to folks when I speak on stage is, because I’m not going to talk about politics, I say, “I’m originally from Boston. When you’re from Boston, you root for two teams. You root for the Red Sox and whoever beats the Yankees. We’ve become a country of Red Sox fans and Yankees fans. They can’t talk about how they love baseball. They got to talk about other Red Sox fans or Yankees fans.”

We've anonymized so much of work, turning people into human vending machines. Those are the folks who are really suffering. Share on X

We have so much more in common than we have in difference. There’s a curiosity to certainty dial. I think it was created by the Braver Angels. It asks you to ask yourself how you feel about the other person. It can be useful whether it’s people or ideas, but the same ideas. How certain are you that you think you know everything about them? If you are, you’re not listening. If you think you know everything about the idea that’s proposed, you’re also not listening.

If you get over on the other side, where you’re more curious, you’re open to learning something about them or learning something about the idea. That’s what we’ve got to do. Our brain clings to certainty, especially with high degrees of uncertainty, change, ambiguity, and stability. That’s what our reptilian brain does. We want to be right. We want to already know. We want to decide if you’re with me or against me before you’ve even given yourself and the other person the benefit of an exploration and a conversation.

A Wellspring Of Community: Belonging In The Modern Workplace

All of this is playing out in the workplace. It’s playing out in the coffee shops and in the restaurants, but it’s playing out in the workplace because so much has changed there. I want to narrow in a little bit to what’s happened to the business climate and how that is shifting because of this loneliness, this separation, and these questions. One of the things that you shared with us at the summit that was so surprising to me was how work has become such a source of community and belonging, where other places used to fill that. Can you talk a little bit about that and how that shifted?

We form our community by family, which is socialization with our family, friends, which we often find through clubs, religious affiliations, and work. Those were our four pillars that would make our community. We’re spending three times as many people are living alone. We’re spending 30% more time alone on average. We’ve all but lost our clubs and civic groups. Religious affiliations have declined to way below any other number that Pew has reported since they’ve been tracking it. It’s dropped below 50% when it was once at 80%. It’s not about the belief so much. It’s the belonging. Work has come in to fill that void.

One of the things that has been fueling the decline in those three other areas is that we used to move more. We used to physically move more. Years ago, about 25% of us changed addresses every single year. We did that because we had lower home ownership, and moving was an act of optimism. “I’m getting a bigger apartment. I’m getting a better home.” Somebody else is moving in a minute. We were having this collective moment of social and financial advancement. When you go into a new community, what do you do? You make new ties. You join the church. You join the bowling league. You get engaged in the community, and you trust.

When you don’t move, and things around you start to change, and you feel like it’s happening to you, you feel less agency. You have a decline in trust. That’s the backstory on why those circles. Social media and algorithms have exacerbated, and COVID made things worse, but it wasn’t COVID or social media. We need belonging. A lot of folks are looking for work to fill that void, as I mentioned, which is why you hear more and more folks say, “I want my job that expresses my values. I’ve got to express my full, authentic self at work.” It is because we’re getting so much more out of work than we used to. The tragic thing is the folks that I mentioned before, who are doing the anonymous work, are not getting any of it.

Business Adaptation For Human Flourishing

It’s a real problem. I am Gen X. I’ve been in the workforce for 37 years. I’ve even seen the early days of more linear command and control because I’ve been in a corporate environment a long time. You have the head, and then you follow what you need to do. Now, there’s more creativity. The lines are blurred. We have to be more inventive. Everything is shifting. How do we learn how to deal with this new environment? What has been your observation of how business has changed and still needs to change in order to be relevant now?

In the last several years, we’ve seen a real shift in leadership, and we haven’t made that shift. We used to hire set experts. We hired people for the things you knew and the things you got right. You were managing a team of people who largely had the skills and knowledge that you did. You could make decisions uncertainly. You could be an unquestioned expert. If you do that today, you’re a liability because most people are managing teams of people who have skills and knowledge that they lack. That’s different. It’s a shift from a know-it-all to a learn-it-all. It’s a shift from individual intelligence to collective intelligence.

That’s one of the shifts we’re still struggling to make. Within that, you can’t just motivate people by extrinsic pressure. It’s not just carrots and sticks. It doesn’t work. It especially doesn’t work when you need to get that collective intelligence out of people. You don’t need to get them to just do the thing you already know how to do because a leader isn’t just directing work anymore. The leader is now developing their people, enabling success, creating connections, and that thing. It’s a different skillset. I don’t think we’ve caught. I spent a lot of time talking about that because most people haven’t even gotten that fundamental piece of it.

Even at the summit, Accenture, when they were talking about it, the pace of change is so fast that so many of us as leaders, the change is going to outpace us, and all of a sudden, our capabilities. We’re falling behind what used to be mastery in something several years ago. Now, the rules of the game have shifted. How do we play it in the right way? We can’t play it without the next generations coming up who are maybe better masters at some of this than we are.

It’s fascinating to live in this change, but going back to where we started, being an optimist, it’s also exciting. It means we can invent a new way of being. We can do things in a different way. I wrote this down. I told you before we hit record that I thought this was so beautifully said. In one of your interviews, you talked about a symphony of collective cognition. I thought that word choice was so brilliant because it is like a symphony. Everyone is playing and using gifts. How do you harmonize? How do you integrate?

 

The leader is much more of a conductor than they were once as a soloist. We need to focus on individuals who can. It’s a different leadership profile because if you look at how a lot of leaders were selected and a lot of times self-selected, it was somebody who wanted to be in charge, sometimes not always for the right reasons. It was somebody who seemed to have all the answers, could take commands and exert their ideas, and wanted to see them out in the world.

The people who questioned a little bit more, who asked other people what they thought, and weren’t as quick to answer in the decision, were seen as weak leaders. Those are the leaders we need because those are the leaders who say, “Wait a minute. I don’t know. You don’t know either. We need to think about this a little more. I want to ask a few more people. I want to ask some more questions.” They’re not always the ones who come off as immediately the most decisive, but they’re the ones who are harnessing that symphony of cognition.

It’s so interesting because we’re trying to find a language and a position for this. You talked about in another interview, the change that happened in 2019. I think it was a business round table calling out the fact that shareholder value as the North Star was not working anymore, and that we had to move into a more human value paradigm. There were still, when things were black and white, linear reporting structures. You go left. You don’t go right. Here’s the right answer.

It gets a lot more fluid. It gets a little squishy. We even try to figure out, as we go forth in The Compassion Lab to figure out the language we use to understand that this isn’t just touchy-feely. This is powerful because we’re tapping into personal mission, personal fire that people have. Can you talk a little bit more about how business has to adapt to a new paradigm of human flourishing?

One of the things we do is we’ve got to extend the timeline. Part of the problem is when we’re quarter to quarter to quarter, we can make decisions which will look good in March and terrible in August, but we’ve got to March. A lot of times, when you’re looking at unleashing human potential, investing in the future, and building humans that are engaged in your organization who want to be there, who want to contribute, and who want to invest in their skills, their capacity, and by extension your capacity, it isn’t something that you can bottom line. When we were at the summit, what was essential was giving the information on how AI is going to be able to do these things, or how AI is going to change these jobs. It had a chart.

If I speak about it in abstract terms, I hope it makes sense. On the left-hand side of the page, you had all the current skills that humans have. On the right-hand side of the page, it was how they were going to change, and AI was going to consume some of those skills. At the bottom, they had a graph that would show you what I would call excess capacity. What are we going to do with this excess capacity? We don’t need humans to do these things anymore.

Two things about that. One, you need a different human on the right-hand side than on the left-hand side. Not everybody is going to make that leap. Second, if you’re seeing the excess capacity as simply profit, you’re missing a huge opportunity because we’re not in a utopian situation right now. A lot of it was restaurants and hospitality. Can you imagine if you took that excess of capacity and you said, “How do we invest in people having a better experience in our restaurant so they want to be super loyal to it?” Sure, some of it is going to go to profit. I get that. We’re a capitalist society. If we immediately just think of, “That’s all profit,” we’re missing an opportunity to make a better product, make a better experience, and make better workers. That’s where we have to get a little more long-term about it.

It feels like an energy shift because you had mentioned previously about this cognitive offload. You don’t have to remember your phone number. You can have ChatGPT or AI do something for you. You have freed up potential. That freed-up potential can go to sit on the couch and eat potato chips, or you could go reinvest that energy into something that grows you in a whole new way. We’re at a choice point. We don’t have to villainize AI that’s going to take away all the jobs. It’s just going to shift the way we work.

Not that long ago, 90% of us made our food. Now, 2% of us made our make our food, and we have more food. We can advance the human condition by offloading some of these things. AI isn’t the answer to everything. It’s amazing, and we’re just beginning to understand what it can do. If we just had AI replace all the things humans do, it would be a complete and utter failure. It’s a lack of imagination. What can we do more because of that? How can we improve the human condition? How can we improve human thriving? How can we make better products? How can we ultimately make more profit long-term by sacrificing some in the short term?

The 5 M’s Of The New Work Contract

We’re going to learn so much in the coming years about how to integrate and balance all of those dynamics. One of the other things I wanted to touch on is this emerging social contract that you talk about in the workplace, the five M’s. If you’re a leader reading this, even if you’re not a leader, and you’re thinking about, “How do I navigate the business world right now?” How do you see these five M’s come into play?

The work contract, this tacit agreement used to be around work, is that you give me your loyalty, and I will give you security. You’re loyal to the organization, not just on a daily basis, but work is your priority. You look at emails at night. We’re top of mind all the time. That contract has eroded over the last several decades because we haven’t had security. We just haven’t. It’s not realistic. We used to interview people like we were getting married for life.

If we immediately think, 'oh, that's all profit,' we're missing an opportunity to make a better product, a better experience, better workers. Share on X

There would be that day that you had to let somebody go, either because they no longer fit, there was a downsizing, a change in skills, or whatever it is. That happens, and it will continue to happen. I love to read Hoffman’s idea of tours of duty. “I’m hiring you to do this specific project. It’s going to be 3 to 5 years.” We’re much more explicit about our mutual contact. Out of a lot of that thinking and listening a lot to what I heard a lot of folks from Generation Z saying they wanted out of work, I came up with the five M’s because it gives you alliteration.

First, it became clearer and clearer to me that we need more transparency around money. They’re asking for it. We’re starting to see it. It’s not that this person makes this much and this person makes a different amount to do the same job. That’s going to eventually be over. Next up is the mission. People want to be part of something larger than themselves in part because they don’t have it somewhere else. In part, it is because “I’m going to spend a third of my life doing this. I want to make a dent in the universe. I want to have impact.”

Not every company has the most admirable mission, but they do something in the world. They do something where they can connect to impact because when people feel a connection to the people they serve, they work harder, they’re more invested, and they do better work. Articulating what your mission and impact in the world is, money, mission, and then meaningful work. What I will do every day, and what my job is as part of that mission, has to be something that feels like self-expression. I’m uniquely using my skills and talents. My efforts are contributing to the mission.

It’s mentorship because Gen Z has seen the world move faster than anybody else. Apple will probably be more so. They know it’s as important to learn as it is to earn. That’s what makes you more valuable tomorrow than it is today. Don’t pick a job. Pick a boss. Pick somebody who is going to help you figure out your career path, which is going to involve many companies in many roles. Finally, it’s a membership because it is a place of belonging. It’s an important place for belonging for a lot of folks. It is money, mission, meaningful work, mentorship, and membership.

I love that. I do see that change emerging within our organization. We’re in this phase of adapting and figuring out how to create the new world together. There are many reasons to believe that it can be a much better one than where we’ve been. Speaking of adaptation, I know you’ve written two books, one, The Adaptation Advantage, and The Empathy Advantage. Can you share a little bit about those books? I know it’s a way for people who could gain some of your wisdom by reading what you’ve put out into the world.

Both books were written by my co-author, Chris Shipley. The first one, The Adaptation Advantage, I wrote primarily looking at how technology was changing us in the early 2010s, and how we needed to move away from occupational identity. That was probably the first a-ha. We ask young people where they want to be when they grow up. We ask high school students if they’re going to go to university, what they’re going to study, and if they’re going to go into the trades, what they’re going to be.

The first thing we ask each other is often, “What do you do?” Before we say each other’s names, particularly here in the US, that creates a fixed occupational identity. At a time, we need people to be much more fluid about who they are and what they do in terms of their occupation. There were some studies that I read around 2018 about that loss. Involuntary job loss can be harder to recover from than the loss of a primary relationship.

Some people never recover to the same level of well-being because, “You just lost everything that we’ve been telling you since you were a little kid that you are.” The Adaptation Advantage was around how to become more adaptable. Thinking about yourself, how do you lead people so they’re more adaptable? How do you become a more adaptable leader? That was the first book.

The second book was the five M’s. I was starting to see that leaders couldn’t be the unquestioned experts anymore. That command and control wasn’t working, and as one interviewer asked me about empathy, “Isn’t that when you get to understand somebody and then expect less of them?” I said, “No, that’s when you try to understand what motivates people so you can motivate them to get more out of them, not less out of them.” The Empathy Advantage came out.

The Adaptation Advantage came out in 2020. It became an accidental guide to the pandemic. I didn’t plan the book launch then, but I was right in the middle of it. The Empathy Advantage came out just as the tail end of people were getting fed up with the compassion they had had during COVID. I met with a lot of conversations where people were like, “Empathy is over.” I was like, “How on Earth is empathy ever going to be over?”

Empathy cannot be over. If empathy is over, we are all in big trouble. Heather, if people wanted to learn more about you in general or book you for speaking, where would they go?

 

I have a great website that was done, and my new one, by Candid Goat. It’s called HeatherMcGowan.com. I am very active on LinkedIn. I wish LinkedIn would have realized that they’re not a place to find jobs, they’re a learning community, and they would focus more on that, because that’s where I get a lot of my great information. I have some 30,000 people who select articles I should read and tag me in things. I post what I’m reading. Join me there because that’s where I’m doing some of my most fruitful learning.

That’s fantastic. I love that. Your website is beautiful. It is very nicely done.

They did a nice job.

Why Optimism Fuels Our Future: Believing In A Better World

They did a great job. I want to come full circle as we start to wrap up our conversation into where we began, as I think about your brother’s situation and the optimism you took to say, “I will help find a solution.” What would you tell people now as a reason to believe that we can create something better here in the world?

It’s because I’ve seen it. I’ve heard so many examples of it. We are the solution. We’ve got to put our fists down, stop trying to fight with each other, look each other in the eye, and find things in common. I say in almost every room I stand in, “I don’t care how you voted or where you stand on a social issue. If we went out there and had a beer, a glass of wine, a cup of coffee, tea, or whatever you want, I guarantee we will find so much more in common than we have in difference.” That’s true.

My friend, David Allison, does value graphics work. It’s all about finding what people have in common. What are the core human values? In that research, he found belonging is number one in the US and number four in the world. That’s something we have in common. That’s something we can build. We can end loneliness if we’re intentional about it, and I think we should be.

It is across the world. The basic human needs are not cultural. They’re human. We do forget that we’re all trying to do the same thing. We get lost in the arguments and lost in the belief systems where we are united in so many ways.

Red Sox and Yankees fans both love baseball.

Heather, I want to express my gratitude to you for being a warrior for optimism and for a new way of being, because the future is created by us. It doesn’t happen to us. It is created. We have choice points. People like you are guides along the way to help us choose wisely about what we want to do in the future. I want to say thank you for that.

Thanks so much for having me. This has been a great conversation.

Let’s do it again.

 

 

Important Links

• Heather McGowan’s Website
• Heather McGowan on LinkedIn
• The Adaptation Advantage: Let Go, Learn Fast, and Thrive in the Future of Work
• The Empathy Advantage: Leading the Empowered Workforce
• Sparks & Honey
• Peter Sheahan’s Website
• Chris Shipley’s Website
• Candid Goat
• David Allison’s Website

 

About Heather E. McGowan

 The pandemic completely upended who, what, where, why, and how we work. Future-of-work strategist Heather E. McGowan helps leaders prepare their people and organizations for this new world of work. She is a sense maker, dot connector, big thinker, and pattern matcher whose ground-breaking approach leaves employees more fulfilled and innovative, leaders more potent and empathetic, and businesses more effective in a rapidly evolving market.

Ranked as LinkedIn’s #1 global voice for education and as one of Forbes’ Top 50 Female Futurists, McGowan has been described as “the oasis” when it comes to insights into the future of work by the New York Times. She is an in-demand keynote speaker whose audiences have ranged from startups to government organizations, universities to publicly traded Fortune 100 companies. Past clients have included AMP Financial, SAP, Biogen, Fidelity, Mastercard, AT&T, Financial Times, Siemens, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, JPMorgan Chase, MassMutual, MetLife, the US Army, Accor Hotels, Paramount, and the World Bank, among many others.

Often quoted in the media, McGowan is the bestselling author of The Adaptation Advantage: Let Go, Learn Fast, and Thrive in the Future of Work, which reached number three in business management books on Amazon and was named one of the best business books of 2021 by Soundview. Her latest book, The Empathy Advantage: Leading the Empowered Workforce, is a finalist for the Next Big Idea Book Club and has been identified as a top ten business book to read in 2023 by Business Chief.

McGowan earned an MBA from Babson College and a BFA in industrial design from Rhode Island School of Design. She was also awarded an honorary doctorate from Pennsylvania College of Art and Design. Her academic work has included roles at Rhode Island School of Design and Jefferson University, where she was the strategic architect of the first undergraduate college focused exclusively on innovation. In 2019, she was appointed as a faculty member of the Swinburne University Centre for the New Workforce and currently serves on the advisory board for Sparks & Honey, a New York-based culture-focused agency.

 

 

Belligerent Optimism, Collective Cognition, Future Of Work, Loneliness Epidemic, The Adaptation Advantage, The Empathy Advantage

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