A lot of different people are talking about what work is going to look like a number of years from now. It’s not just idle speculation; it’s a profound discussion that will eventually help us shape the new paradigms that will define work in the future. In this episode, we talk with Cassie Solomon, a leading change consultant and futurist specializing in disruptive technology, digital transformation and the future of work. Cassie discusses various topics, including the importance of adaptability to change in personal and professional life, the positive and negative impacts of technology on work, the potential of blockchain technology, the evolving concept of ownership towards sharing resources, financial inclusion initiatives using technology, the prospects and challenges of universal basic income, and optimistic views on leveraging technology for positive societal impact. The conversation explores the intersection of technology, work, and societal trends, reflecting on both challenges and opportunities in the changing landscape. Tune in for more!

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The Future Of Work – A Conversation With Cassie Solomon

In this episode, we are talking about the future but talking in the present with Cassie Solomon, who is a professor at Wharton Business School, as well as the Executive and President at The New Group Consulting, which is a consulting firm that focuses on a whole number of different things. What I’m most interested in talking with Cassie about is the future work, especially in the news. A lot of different people are talking about what work is going to look like in the future. Cassie, tell us a little bit about what you’re doing and some insights that you might have.

Thanks, Doctor Awesome. It’s nice to meet you. It’s great to be here. I appreciate the chance to talk to you. I started my career as an organizational change expert. That’s my family of origin study. I was also looking at it from a systems perspective. I wrote a book with a Wharton colleague, Greg Shea, called Leading Successful Change. I always thought that it should be titled Designing Successful Change because it is a system change model.

Somewhere in 2016, I became fascinated by all of this disruptive technology that’s coming at us and the idea that it was going to be transformative and change our systems and everything about our society. I started studying it seriously with a couple of my clients. I ended up going off to the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto to study how to be a futurist, which is an unknown phrase.

It stops traffic dead at cocktail parties when you tell people you’re a futurist and they always want to know what stocks they should buy but futurists don’t predict the future. They help people think about the future in more sophisticated and imaginative ways so that they’re ready when it comes. That’s changed my practice quite a lot, from all organizational change to strategy work. A number of my clients have said, “Come talk to us about the future and help us figure out what we should be doing for the next several years.”

When you’re telling people to think about the future, can you give me an example that a layperson would understand about how you come in and guide people to predict that?

 

 

I loved what you said, Doctor Awesome, about talking about the future but doing it in the present. There’s a famous quote from a science fiction writer that you’ve probably known, William Gibson. He says, “The future is already here. It just isn’t evenly distributed.” Future is talk about looking for signals, things that are not fiction, and things that are happening now but they’re on the fringe. That’s Amy Webb’s term.

They’re not in the mainstream yet. One of the things we try to encourage our clients to do is to start actively looking for signals in the environment for things that are going to affect their business and the way that their business is going to change. That could be any kind of business from media entertainment to healthcare to banking. Looking at the signals all around us is part of what we practice.

Futurists don’t actually predict the future. They help people think about the future in more imaginative ways so that they’re ready when it comes.

Give me an example of that from a healthcare perspective. If you come into an organization and someone says, “We want to think about what’s coming in the future and be prepared for that,” what would be something that you would be incorporating into that organization?

This is a signal that I love and it’s several years old but it’s still not in the mainstream. There’s a diagnostic device called IDx-DR, which is the first FDA-authorized device that could make a diagnosis all by itself. The diagnosis is in the machine instead of being in the healthcare provider. A diagnosis is diabetic retinopathy, which is the disease that makes diabetics go blind.

This ties to one of my passions, which is the way that these changes are going to improve access. This is a device that you put your head into it. It takes a picture of your retina. It compares that picture to its library of machine-learning images, and it can render the diagnosis on the spot. Do you have diabetic retinopathy or not?

About 50% of the diabetics in this country don’t get screened for this as they are supposed to do annually because the only way you can get screened for it is in an ophthalmologist’s office. With this device, everybody can get screened in their primary care office or even in a grocery store. They put them in grocery stores in Delaware. It can be operated by high school tech.

This is not going to put ophthalmologists out of business because if you screen 50% more of the population, many of those people are going to be positive, and they’re going need to go to the ophthalmologist to have their retinopathy taken care of. It’s an example of how the combination of AI and machine learning is beginning to put more of the human judgment that we think of as only resident in humans into the machine and can do that more broadly for more people. That’s the positive news about it.

That signal of diagnosis is being leveraged with AI and making it easier for clinicians to focus on the more procedural aspects or, the more empathetic aspects of healthcare that are coming down the pipeline. I agree with that. Let’s say some big hospital system says, “Come in. We see the signal happening.” How would you prepare us for that? What would you say to them? What would you set up for them?

We have a method, and part of it is, do you have a disciplined search function? How are you learning about what’s going on around you? I was on the phone with someone who’s concerned about their health system because they’re building a new patient tower. She thinks that they’re building a to-be state-of-the-art 2023.

By the time it opens in several years, it’s going to be dated from the minute the ribbon is cut. They’re going to put tens of millions of dollars into this building. How do you anticipate the functionality that you want to have in it? I said, “Call vendors and have vendors come in and present to you.” I gave her a couple of examples. It’s free. They’ll all come and talk to your healthcare system. They’d love to but you need a function inside the company that is looking around and collecting these signals. That’s one thing.

We do a lot of work in scenarios. We were staying on the healthcare side for a moment. Several years ago, when we started developing this method, we said, “Let’s do a perioperative patient journey. What will that look like in ten years from the moment of the first symptom to the post-op rehab? How might it be different with all this new technology that we’re learning about?”

We did another scenario that was a day in the life of a provider. How would their journey be different in the way that they cared for patients? We often go out for several years because it liberates people. They’re more imaginative and creative. They’re less stuck, “We could never imagine that. That’s crazy talk.” Ten years is usually going to arrive within the next several years, given the disruptive pace of change that we’re seeing.

The next piece is considering the implications. If we had devices that could take care of all of the rote screening and ophthalmologists could do real top-of-license work that they’re uniquely suited for, how would that change the whole healthcare system? It will travel throughout the whole principle. Looking at privileges for CRNAs and ORs, that’s an ongoing debate. If you look at the kinds of devices that they’re developing for surgery and the titrating of the anesthesia, the anesthesiologist will be supervising ten rooms in the future instead of 2 or 5 rooms.

From a ground-level perspective, the usage of operating rooms is very difficult to obtain as a surgeon. There are not enough operating rooms for A) Amount of procedures that need to be done, and B) The amount of surgeons that are in a hospital system. I look forward to the day when we’ve become more efficient. We haven’t leveraged a lot of the tech existing technology enough but I want to know from a broad perspective, where do you see the future of work going? The idea of me going into the OR and doing these surgeries.

In Star Trek, that could be done on another planet. I could be operating through robots. That’s a pie-in-the-sky type of scenario. Coming more down to earth, operating from a robot in another room is no different than that. That’s available. We have all these “signals.” I’d love to know. What do you think that not only a surgeon’s life is going to be like but an entry-level employee is? Are we still going to have to show up to work and be from home? What is it going to look like?

We have to step back and consider the effect of COVID for a moment. I did a scenario with a bunch of banking regulators. They said, “Go out several years. We’re not going to have to go into the banks to examine them. We’re going to do all of it remotely.” This was six months before COVID hit. If I only had a dollar for every one of them who called me and said, “Cassie, we did that ten-year scenario in August, and now it’s March of 2022. We’re all examining remotely.”

Geography is becoming less relevant. We saw a huge increase in telemedicine and telework. All of the remote work things that surged during COVID are in this fight to the death with hybrid work. How much can I do from home? I’m in Philadelphia. You’re in Boston. Here we are. We talked before we got on about the Mark Zuckerberg interview on the Lex Fridman Podcast. They’re doing the technology so that we don’t even have to be on our Zoom camera together. We can be together across time and space as our avatars. They look and sound like us.

The trend is permanently established. It’s going to be optional to be in person. We’re going to have to think carefully about what we do that’s better in person versus what we can accomplish remotely. I know that there will be some things that will still be better but I don’t think surgery is one of them, Doctor Awesome.

You said it. The Da Vinci robot means that you’re no longer standing at the patient’s side and you’re not at the bedside. This is another signal. The Army is already doing remote surgeries across country lines because you can, and the implications for access. What about all of the places where they don’t have enough surgeons? How do we take care of those people? We don’t suddenly manufacture 5 million more surgeons. We drop them into Sub-Saharan Africa. We use this remote capability and work with the people who are on the ground, and the surgeon is sitting back at the robot in Germany.

I wonder how long it’s going to trickle down because I feel like that is something where the quality of being in person is still higher than telepresence. Being a surgeon and beholden to a hospital is not a big deal. It concerns me that I can’t pick up and move to Bali if I want to. The fact is I like being in one location but most people don’t.

Most people have been given the option to work from home but it’s still a luxury. It’s still a white-collar-only type of situation. Elon Musk had a conversation where he made a moral argument for it. How can we ask these people who are making the cars to come in, whereas the executives are staying from home? That’s why he mandated a Tesla. How do you feel about that?

There’s an awful lot of double standards going on in the world. It explains some of the angriness and resentment of people. There’s a good book I want to recommend called The Future of the Professions by an economist named Daniel Susskind. His thesis is worth thinking about, which is at the lower end, where the work is manual. A lot of those jobs are going to remain.

We’ve got Amazon warehouse robots taking over some of that heavy lifting still. If it’s fine motor skill, especially surgery, and it’s manual, that job and the highest level jobs are going to be preserved. It’s going to hollow out the middle. We saw that during COVID with first responders and people who were considered the heroes and who kept the grocery stores full of food for those of us who wanted to remote shop.

It’s going to take longer to replace the manual tasks but the blending of robotics plus AI, which is starting to happen, is profound. We have our Roombas that sense where the table furniture is but that’s the least of it. The greatest examples of it are probably in manufacturing. We’ve lost a lot of manufacturing jobs as a result of that automation.

It’s going to take longer to replace the manual tasks, but the blending of robotics plus AI, which is starting to happen, is pretty profound.

I tell people this all the time. The one thing that I’m looking forward to is the human-type robots that are able to clean our rooms, do our laundry, and do all of the menial and administrative tasks. Instead of bringing an adult human in 2023, have the robot do it. I can’t wait until that day happens. That’s going to be a great day.

It’s going to allow us to have more free time and meaningful relationships because all of the administrative work will be taken over by robots. If we zoom out and our work is not just our job and it’s all of the tasks that we have to do per day, It’s a rosy outlook. There’s a lot of negative when it comes to our actual careers. That’s where a lot of the negativity comes from.

The only thing thing that I need to worry about is showing up and doing surgery. I don’t have to worry about any of the paperwork and cleaning my desk when I get to my office. Robots are doing that for me. That’s going to be an enviable future. Do you see that happening relatively soon? Are we ways away from that?

There’s the whole adoption curve. They’re early adopters and pioneers with all of these technologies. They also start not being good. We have to always remember. We carry our iPhones around and we’re casual about the fact that they have more brain power than the entire ENIAC computer had at the University of Pennsylvania. The original cell phones weighed 10 pounds. It’s all happened quickly. I can go into a room and ask people, “Did any of you carry something that was called a Motorola bag phone?” A lot of hands go up.

The early adopters are the people who are willing to tolerate the glitchiness and the badness. We’re seeing it with ChatGPT, which we should talk about language models. They hallucinate and break down after 4 or 5 queries but they’re a signal. Where that’s going? Is it about as different as the 10-pound Motorola phone to the iPhone? We have to be able to imagine how much better it’s going to get and the middle part of that bell curve of adoption. I’m not an early adopter. I’m a fast follower. I want you to try it first. After all the annoying glitches are out of it, I’ll come along. My husband will never get there. He’s lagging. He’s at the end of the bell curve.

The other thing is we look at collapse scenarios for industries. There’s something called residual assets at the end. If you think about digital photography versus film, that was a rapid transition and it cost Kodak its primary business. There are still film people. Some of my daughter’s friends will only shoot films. They think it’s better. There’s a small group of people who still play phonograph records. They like the sound quality.

When a new software comes out, you say you’re a fast follower. Can you give me an example of when you got into something maybe a little bit earlier than your husband, and you got a lot of profound benefits from it but he didn’t get that same benefit, and it was a more difficult experience for him?

I’ll quote Kevin Kelly here because he’s one of my favorite writers. It got me started on this road. He said, “Imagine how much harder it is if you don’t keep upgrading your phone. If you miss one upgrade, it’s not bad. If you miss ten upgrades, all of a sudden, it’s a different machine and you’re lost.” I was badgering my husband and saying, “You got to get off the button. You have to move to the swipe. You can’t be one of the people who never got off the button train because that train is not going anywhere.” Kelly says, which is comforting to me, “We’re all newbies. We will always be adapting to new technology. We will never get it to the point where we’re comfortable and we’re finished. I can settle in here because it’s going to keep changing on us.” We have to get you being newbies all the time.

We’re all newbies. We will always be adapting to new technology. We will never get it to the point where we’re comfortable.

That’s the norm. Even for careers, you have to learn and relearn. If you’re not up to speed, certainly in my field, you’re going to be left behind. That gives people a lot of worry about technology. They’re worried that they might not be able to keep up. What would you say to those people, especially when it comes to working? Is it more of like, “You listen and buckle up buttercup, you better get it done?” Is it more like, “You can be the type of person that only listens to phonograph records? There’s going to be a space for you.”

Listening to the phonograph crowd is going to be a personal choice. I don’t think it’s going to be a choice. We can make it work. I’m a buckle-up buttercup person in my messaging. In my organizational change work, sometimes people come in and complain that they’re having to adapt to a new computer system. I say, “Get good at that because this is not the last time you’re going to have to go through one of many times you’ll go through this.” It does pay to become better at both personal changes because careers are not as static as they were. When it was IBM white shirt stay at one company your whole life, there’s a lot of encouragement to retool, rethink, and re-skill yourself. It’s an important pressure, given the change is huge.

 

 

What I wanted to talk to you about also is that I know that you’ve made a name for yourself and instituting organizational change but I wonder, because of the amount of change that’s happening on a more rapid basis, are most people becoming more adept at the pace of change or is it still that normal bell curve? What I mean by that is that the bell curve shifts to the left because people have to evolve. Is it the same as it always was? You’re always going to have people that are left behind.

The reason why I ask that is that if you’re teaching organizational change, I’m sure that you’ve had to institute a lot of organizational change. You see that firsthand. This is something that maybe a company might have directed but to the layperson, it’s the same as if society directed that to them or a company tells you, “You need to get on electronic medical records.” Whether it’s coming from the company or society, it’s the same experience for the person at the bottom. Do you feel like more people at the bottom are becoming more adept at change? Is it still like that same bell curve that it always ever was?

People are becoming more adept. The other thing I want to address is I don’t think it’s about age because often people say, “We have all these aging Boomers. They’re not going to be able to keep up.” One of my favorite clients said, “No, I have a surgeon who still doesn’t want to type his emails but he learned how to do everything new in the OR because it made his life easier.” That is the dividing line.

When I tell people the potential of this technology is to take the drudgery work away from you, they get pretty excited. There’s still a lot of drudgery left, especially in banking, and the idea of automating that and having that taken away so you could do more interesting things. AI is like a Pac-Man. Imagine the Super Mario Brothers Pac-Man. It’s going to eat your job from the bottom up. You’re going to be so happy. The bottom parts of your job are not the parts that you enjoy and they’re not the parts that you want to do. The EMR is an exception to that because that was misery but that’s going to get better with scribing and voice-to-text.

The reason why I say that is because, respectfully, I’ve had a different experience. Not to be ageist but a lot of the people before the internet or mass adoption of computers have a much more difficult time with keeping up the pace of change. Realistically, that’s because of the amount of change that they experienced as opposed to the amount of change that is happening.

It’s easy for me to teach a young kid how to use new software to develop a new surgical technique to its fullest capacity. That’s coming from somebody who teaches surgeons. You have some of these non-traditional people. Even though there’s an age difference, if they’re after the internet boom, they’re still as moldable as somebody who is coming out fresh out of school.

The digital native divide for fun is considered to be 1996 but that has changed again. There are an awful lot of us that went through that particular transition. I was alive before 1996 and even my daughters were alive between 1996 but when you look at two-year-olds on planes with their iPads, it’s amazing. Nine-month-olds can pick up their parent’s phone and they know how to swipe already. I’m saying to my husband, “Get over here and watch the two-year-old swipe. It’s not that hard. You can figure it out.”

It does depend. We ran a single group for regulators. We teased the oldest member of it. We called him the venerable because he was up there. He was one of the most creative thinkers in the group. He was able to imagine all of this and the implications of all of this as well, if not better than the younger people in the group.

We get the user interface such that it can be a voice-to-text or interaction with not a human being but an artificial intelligence that can guide a person like that because the conversation has been the way that we’ve learned throughout history. Before, there was written word and conversation. Something that’s going to be interesting is that once we have the ability to converse with computers the way that you and I are conversing, that’s going to be interesting, especially for the older population. How do you feel about that?

 

 

I was thinking of a friend. She’s much younger but their entire interface with technology is voice. They said, “We would never be able to figure this out.” We can’t say, “Google, turn on the Super Bowl. Siri, GPS me to the grocery store.” If they can’t imagine doing all the buttons, I do think that makes it more accessible. We are, and thanks to the large language models, able to have conversations.

You’re almost talking about what I’ve been hearing about, which is intelligent agents. All of us will have this companion AI, which may or may not have a physical robotic form. They’ll travel around with us in augmented reality. The digital world and the physical world will blend. An early signal is Pokemon Go. I can see the little Pokemon but I can still see the sidewalk. That’s come a long way since Pokemon Go. A lot is going on in that space. It’s not for everyone yet. Sooner and later, it will be.

Do you agree with Jamie Dimon? Do you think we’re going to be at a three-day workweek?

This is where futurists don’t tell the future. They help people imagine a variety of futures. We should be speculating about a three-day workweek. I remember and have read about the predictions that we would have a paperless office when computers came along. I don’t know about your office but my office has plenty of paper.

Jobs will be transformed more than they will be eliminated. Before, if we were talking, you would’ve said, “What is a prompt engineer?” Now, there are job ads for prompt engineers to help me talk to ChatGPT and Bard more effectively and leverage their power. I can hire a person to do that and you can go to school for that.

Jobs will be transformed more than they will be eliminated.

Do you think, culturally, the concept of work is going to be different depending on what country you’re in? We might, and Europe might be trending towards a three-day work week. Are Africa and China going to do that? I don’t know. Is that something that you’ve noticed? You lecture in lots of different places. Do you feel like it’s different depending on whatever country you’re in?

I would draw a distinction between developed countries and less developed countries. It’s also the case that some of the interesting innovations are starting in places like Africa. Classic Clayton Christensen, where does the disruption start? It starts away from legacy systems. You’ve got a company like Zipline, which started in Rwanda, delivering blood to rural areas with drones because they didn’t have the infrastructure of roads. There’s an amazing video that I could send you. They’re coming into the US market and they’re not going to be delivering blood with their drones but they are starting to work with the healthcare system to deliver supplies from one location to another.

I was in that situation where we had to get one instrument from one hospital to another. They’re using couriers. It took us about three hours to get this instrument. I feel like if I were to get into an Uber, walk over there, pick it up, and come back, it would’ve been twenty minutes.

The drone would be even faster. That’s coming very quickly. We’re getting proof of concept with some of the big health systems on that but it’s such a good idea. It’s going to be so much more efficient. The uptake will be like that.

You work in banking a little bit also. What are your thoughts on cryptocurrency and its position in the market?

The people that I talk to that I consider to be experts in this space are not so high on cryptocurrency. It’s like trading in tulips in Holland. It was hot. They’re big on blockchain. With the underlying technology and the idea of a distributed ledger, what can you do with that? That’s a mind-blowing technology that we’re still trying to figure out what are the implications for that.

There are some interesting, weird signals. There’s a county in Wyoming that uses blockchain to register deeds that can’t be changed. It’s a permanent record. It has interesting potential to move alongside the institutional banking system. FinTech was supposed to challenge the banks. What’s evolved instead is that FinTechs and banks are partnering. I’m cautiously optimistic that there won’t be a system based on blockchain that eliminates the US financial institutions.

It’s a litmus test that I use to see if somebody is serious or not. If somebody is in a blockchain, I’m like, ‘I should second guess some of his other thoughts.”

I was sitting in a room full of regulators. One of the older regulators said, “I don’t understand crypto.” I asked the room and everybody on the staff there, “How many people have crypto wallets?” About twelve people raised their hands and they were all younger staff members. I said, “Go ask them.” This is this interesting inversion that’s going on in companies.

You get to be the leader because you have years of experience. You have judgment based on that experience. Hopefully, you have some wisdom but you are the least qualified person in the room to think about the new technology. How do we partner you with your newest employees and the ones that came out of college? That can be very helpful to you in thinking these things through, which is why I get a lot of people in the room.

Coming back to the cryptocurrency thing, it’s going to be helpful when it comes to ownership of something. Deeds, liens, and car titles are going to be good to have a clear-cut, uneditable ledger. That’s going to be interesting but the concept of ownership is changing. One of the things that I wanted to talk with you about is that there’s this whole idea about owning nothing, being happy, and going forward. How do you feel about that? Work and ownership are closely related. We work so hard to gain access to funds that allow us to own things. How do you feel about this whole idea of ownership changing?

We developed a model, which I don’t think is locked, called the Long Waves. It’s a series of things that we want people to think through while they’re thinking about the future and the technology that’s coming. One of the long waves has to do with access and sharing. An example is Zipcar. Do I need to own a car when I live in Manhattan if I can walk over down the block, get in a Zipcar, drive it to dinner, leave it, and come back? At one point, they were renting umbrellas like that in Japan, which I thought was taking the concept about as far as you could take it. It would be great for me because I never have an umbrella when I need one.

We are potentially going to see more of those commons-level things. In my mind, it’s related to the way Wikipedia is written. When they started Wikipedia, they hired PhDs to write the articles and they ran out of money. They had 1,000 articles. They said, “Let’s do something crazy. Let’s throw it open, open source it, and let anybody write an article.” It’s almost the craziest thing I ever heard.

It turns out to be the most cited source in the world. It drove Encyclopedia Britannica out of business. That’s an interesting example of the commons becoming the way that people get things done. It could apply to ownership. Airbnb is the closest thing we can come to for real estate. I’m not giving my house up anytime soon. I love that I can open a computer and look at renting a house anywhere in the world.

Renting has become much more accepted. People are not able to afford a home. They’re renting more later on in life. Honestly, I’m in a situation where I could afford a home but I don’t want to. It’s not something that I want to put my interest in. I don’t want to come home at the end of the day and have to fix the thermostat. I like living in a building where I can call maintenance. They can come up and do it. That’s relatively new. That’s what everybody in my parents’ generation is telling me. That was the first thing that they told me when I came out of residency. They’re like, “It’s time to save up to buy a house.” It’s a generational change with ownership in general.

There’s a lot to be said. I’m not worried about you. You’re a surgeon but what creates intergenerational wealth in America is home ownership and small business. If you look at financial inclusion issues, opening access to people to buy that first home or get a loan to support a small business, there’s a long way to improve in this country. Technology is helping.

There are some exciting applications of algorithms, big data, and technology to improve financial inclusion along those lines. It’s a good idea for you to rent but if you were in a lower, middle, moderate income, or LMI community and you didn’t have access to the funds to buy, you’d be typical of a lot of Americans. It wouldn’t be good for you long-term.

I didn’t know realistically how easy it was for those people. You’re saying that there are programs that are out there. I would say the majority of people that I know that are in that situation, the low to middle-income situation, whether it’s people that work for me or family members, look at it as the world is stacked against them. That’s very difficult to move up. That’s why ideas like universal basic income become popular. They feel like the system is broken. I don’t think it is but that’s a biased viewpoint. I’m looking at it from my eyes, being in a relatively privileged position.

I did want to talk about some of the ideas that work is getting harder and the system is broken. There are pessimistic ideas but on the same token, you have universal basic income, which is an optimistic idea. I like to focus on the optimistic ideas that you might have access to for those young people or people who are in those situations. Here are some ideas that are coming down the pipeline that you might be interested in and that might be able to help you. First off, how do you feel about universal basic income? Second off, are there any other optimistic views of capitalism that might be a little bit more equitable for people who are in those situations?

Universal basic income is conceptually interesting but politically fraught. If you say, “What’s the world going to look like in several years, Cassie?” I’m going to tell you that we’re going to have universal basic income. It will be an idea with more appeal in several years as we’ve watched some of these jobs be overrun by automation. If Jamie’s writing is a 3-day work week and no one is making money the other 4 days of the week, the idea will have more traction in several years. It’s going to be a tough idea to put forth but in the meantime, there’s lots of good news.

Universal basic income is conceptually interesting but politically fraught.

The companies that I’m aware of and got excited about are people that are expanding creditworthiness. If you think about it, the FICO score was created in 1989. It is an ancient history. It’s based on what it’s based on. There’s a new version of it but it doesn’t happen to include, do you pay your rent on time? That’s not included in the FICO score.

If you’re someone who’s renting like you are, you’re not going to get any credit for being someone who pays their rent on time. There are lots of other things that also aren’t included. A company like FairPlay AI comes along and says, “Let’s take a look at the implications of your credit models on protected classes like African Americans, Hispanics, women, and American Indians.” They can show you a systemic redlining that’s still going on. Even though we’re working hard to do everything in a fair way, we built these models in 1989 and they’re not working.

They have what they call a second-look model. They take more data than the FICO score. They can increase your mortgage portfolio by 10% to 20%. There’s no additional risk. This is a win-win all the way around. There’s another company called Prism Data that does the same thing for bank and small business loan lending. There’s a lot of interest in this convergence of technology and financial inclusion.

The University of Delaware is starting a financial inclusion FinTech incubator. Maryland is starting a venture capital fund to fund FinTechs that are going to work in their LMI communities because people are starting to get it. We can use this technology to open the aperture of lending and make it available to more people with no higher level of risk and harm to the banks or the mortgage companies. At some point, we’ll hit a wall on that but there’s a lot of good to be done between now and that moment.

The number one bankruptcy in America is due to medical bankruptcies. I was doing a deep dive into the patient experience for us. A lot of the reasons why people don’t pursue surgery, even though they might need to or want to, is because of the financial implications of it. There are some companies out there. I don’t know if you’re familiar with CareCredit or any of those types of companies. It’s like healthcare-only lending. They’re ridiculously difficult to get into. They might have high interest rates. Not everybody qualifies for them. I hope that there’s stuff that’s coming down the pipeline that makes access to healthcare more affordable.

I don’t know enough about FinTech to weigh in on it. It’s nice to have somebody like you that has some insight into that. We are getting to the end of our hour together. I appreciate this conversation. I did want to do what we do with all of my other guests. I have three similar questions that I asked to gain some insight into how they think. The first question that I start with is where you gain your inspiration from.

As you can see from my background, science fiction is a big part of where I gain my inspiration. Everybody focuses a lot on dystopian science fiction but utopian science fiction is great. For example, a lot of the things that we were talking about is Star Trek, which always comes to mind. It is my favorite Utopian science fiction because it’s a post-scarcity society. There are no financial tragedy actions anymore. Our whole goal in life is to maximize our potential in whatever we do. What do you gain inspiration from? If it is science fiction, I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.

I love science fiction. It’s what I read to relax. I’m not sure it counts as my inspiration. This is nerdy but I’m excited when I find a signal. Maybe that’s the connection between something that I might have been thinking about because of science fiction. When I see something that’s happening that’s rare, that is telling it. It shows you where we’re going. I get all excited. I jump online. I try to find a YouTube video about it and make sure that people hear about it. That kind of research keeps me going. It’s evergreen because there’s new stuff all the time and that makes it fun.

Is there any book of choice at all that you would recommend to me?

The one I love the most about AI and transformation is sitting on my desk, which is why I’m looking over here. This is going to sound bad. It’s not science fiction. There’s power and prediction of the disruptive economics of artificial intelligence. It’s by Agrawal, Gans, and Goldfarb. We have a great HBR article that was drawn from the book.

They talk about the difference between AI being a point solution, which solves one small problem in your life without touching any of the other processes around it, an application solution, which changes a few things, or a total system overhaul, a system solution. The system solutions are the ones that are fascinating to try to think about and come up with. They also do a deep dive into the transition from steam to electricity, which is very interesting if you’re into the future. The way that evolved between 1880 and 1920 is a fascinating lesson in how things get adopted.

For the second question, I’d like to know a little bit more about what you did in Palo Alto that you felt brought you into being a futurist. I call myself that but I don’t know if there’s any training. It’s something that I feel like I think about a lot but you call yourself that. What did you do over there? What brought you to this path?

There were three things I took away from that experience, other than the fact that I was there with some fabulous people. The head of innovation for the World Bank was in my cohort. It was amazing to be with the people that were there. One was this idea of foresight, in which we talked about signals. The second one is the idea of working in scenarios.

I tell companies, and thanks to that experience, that they can’t have one strategy. They need a portfolio of strategies because we’re not sure what’s coming. You want to imagine multiple futures. Prepare for them by identifying experiments that you can run. What are some things I can do to learn? An early example in my career was the health system I was working with.

You can’t really have one strategy you need a portfolio of strategies because we’re not sure what’s coming.

The CFO said, “We’re going to do telemedicine even though it doesn’t get reimbursed because we’re paying our tuition. We want to learn about how that works.” That was years before COVID. They were much better equipped to jump into that space when COVID hit. Those modest experiments teach you some things you think might be worth knowing in the future.

Last question. You have kids. I have kids. What do you hope their work life will look like when your kids are in their 30s? What do you hope that work looks like?

We didn’t talk about ChatGPT. I’m going to work that into my answer. There’s a slew of new research about ChatGPT and they’re putting it down in different places. What they’re learning is that it’s beneficial to lower-skilled people. It doesn’t do that much for highly skilled people. It improves the performance of new people, coming up the learning curve, whose language isn’t as good, or who are not as highly skilled. It improves it by 30%. One of the studies is on lawyers and low-performing law students versus high-performers. It’s going to have a very profound impact on the future of work.

Remember when they introduced calculators in the classroom, and there was this huge hue and cry like, “Kids won’t learn how to do math anymore if we let them have the calculators in the classroom?” The lesson for us is don’t send our kids to school to memorize anything. Think about the implications for medical education for a minute. It’ll blow your mind. Teach them how to be lifelong and continuous learners because that’s the world that they’re growing up in.

At our core, that’s what work is all about. One of my old attendings used to call it polishing a stone. There’s always a little bit more that you can polish, learn, and get better. Once we offload a lot of these more menial tasks to things like ChatGPT and use it as an adjunct to improve our performance, it’s going to be an interesting world for them.

Thank you so much, Cassie, for joining us. This was interesting and illuminating. We appreciate having you here. For those of our regular readers, thanks for coming again as always. For those of our new readers, please like and subscribe at the bottom. Everybody, all included, we will see you in the future. Have a great day, everybody.

Thanks so much, Dr. Awesome.

 

Important Links

• The New Group Consulting
• Leading Successful Change
• The Future of the Professions

 

About Cassie Solomon

She is the founder and president of The New Group Consulting, a firm dedicated to helping leaders design and implement successful change. Her book, Leading Successful Change: 8 Keys to Making Change Work, co-authored with Greg Shea, is now updated for 2020 and beyond to help leaders successfully navigate the ever-increasing pace of change (2013 and 2020/Wharton School Press.

Cassie is the co-founder of the Mid-Atlantic AI Alliance and a founding member of the Society of Healthcare Innovation. She is trained as a futurist and brings that perspective to her strategic planning work, helping organizations understand disruptive technology, digital transformation and the future of work. Cassie holds an MBA in Operations from the Wharton School of Business and a degree in Organizational Behavior from Yale University. She teaches at the Wharton School’s Aresty Institute for Executive Education.