Preparing For The Future Of Work: Deloitte’s Geoff Tuff and Steven Goldbach On The Top Five Trends To Watch In The Future Of Work

There have been major disruptions in recent years that promise to change the very nature of work. From the ongoing shifts caused by the COVID19 pandemic, the impacts caused by automation, and other possible disruptions to the status quo, many wonder what the future holds in terms of employment. For example, a report by the McKinsey Global Institute that estimated automation will eliminate 73 million jobs by 2030.

To address this open question, we reached out to successful leaders in business, government, and labor, as well as thought leaders about the future of work to glean their insights and predictions on the future of work and the workplace.

As a part of this interview series called “Preparing For The Future Of Work”, we had the pleasure to interview Steve Goldbach and Geoff Tuff, co-authors of the Bestselling Books Detonate, and Provoke.

Steven Goldbach is a Principal at Deloitte and serves the U.S. partnership as the firm’s Chief Strategy Officer. Prior to joining Deloitte, Steve was a Partner at Monitor Group and head of its New York Office and head of strategy at Forbes. Steve holds degrees from Queen’s University at Kingston and Columbia Business School.

Geoff Tuff is a Principal at Deloitte, where he holds a variety of leadership roles across its Sustainability, Innovation, and Strategy practices. In the past, he led Doblin, the firm’s innovation practice, and was a Senior Partner at Monitor Group, serving as a member of its global Board of Directors before the company was acquired by Deloitte. He has been with some form of Monitor for close to 30 years. He is a frequent speaker and writer on the topic of growth through innovation and has written for a variety of outlets, including Harvard Business Review. Geoff holds degrees from Dartmouth College and Harvard Business School. Geoff and his wife Martha live in the northeast of the United States with their four sons.

Both of Steve and Geoff’s books, 2018’s Detonate: Why — and How — Corporations Must Blow Up Best Practices (And Bring a Beginner’s Mind) To Survive and 2021’s Provoke: How Leaders Shape the Future by Overcoming Fatal Human Flaws, became immediate national bestsellers and have garnered them nominations for a number of awards in management thinking.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Our readers like to get an idea of who you are and where you came from. Can you tell us a bit about your background? Where do you come from? What are the life experiences that most shaped your current self?

Steve: I grew up in suburban Toronto, in a town called Thornhill. I was very lucky to have a set of parents who were both good role models and shared important life lessons in their own way. As I reflect on what’s shaped me the most, it’s been the failures, not the successes that have been most important. They’ve created a hunger to pursue things that are important to me and a resilience when things invariably go differently than planned. There are no shortage of failures I could share, but the one that probably left the most indelible mark on me was being probably the least successful business school applicant of my era. I applied — and was rejected more times and by more schools than I care to recall. The rejection process, and the shifts that it caused in my life plans ended up serving me a piece of humble pie. I never now assume the plans I have for myself will come to fruition without concerted effort. Professionally, the most important experience I had was working with P&G (while at Monitor, prior to the acquisition by Deloitte) on broad-based transformation in their brand building efforts. I soaked in everything I could, spending days and nights in Cincinnati and take great pride at having helped a great organization like P&G work on some of their thorniest challenges. They were so inviting of external perspective, it really has shaped my point of view of what great leaders need to do regarding pursuing outside perspective.

Geoff: I lived an itinerant childhood. Born in Vancouver and raised until age 9 in the UK, we moved roughly every three years on account of my father’s gradual ascent up the corporate ladder. Constantly landing in new towns and school systems in a variety of spots in Canada, England and the U.S. led me to learn how to create first impressions and (hopefully) make friends quickly. I ended up in a boarding school outside of Toronto for much of my pre-collegiate school years and in a variety of ways that experience developed in me a sense of curiosity and desire for adventure. I came to the US for university and, eventually, business school … and partly on account of my childhood experience, my wife and I decided early on to declare the northeast our home and to put down roots for our kids. We write about one of my seminal life experiences in Provoke: the decision after a couple of years of work to quit my job, sell everything I owned, and take off to backpack around the world for an unspecified amount of time. Thankfully I did that alongside Martha, my wife, and it created a foundation for much of the life we have lived in the roughly quarter century since. Once the wanderlust wore off, Monitor Group ended up being a perfect home for what I wanted to achieve professionally and personally and I have stayed deeply committed to ensuring that we have been able to stay on the forefront of the consulting industry ever since.

What do you expect to be the major disruptions for employers in the next 10–15 years? How should employers pivot to adapt to these disruptions?

It would be pretty easy to assume that the fallout and learnings from the pandemic will be the driving disruptive force for the next little while. And we agree that issues like hybrid work and the continued accelerating evolution of technology are going to be major factors.

However, we think that on balance, the discontinuities we’ve faced due to COVID will be relatively minor compared to the likely challenges of climate change. Major weather events which require planning and risk mitigation, supply chain disruptions, water shortages, potentially food shortages, etc. are all going to become the norm. We don’t yet know the full impact of climate change, nor the likelihood of coordinated and concerted global action to rein it in, but we know it’s got the potential to be highly disruptive to all employers as it brings both business model and physical risk. If you’ve got global operations, you’re likely to be dealing with issues across wildly varying regulatory and social environments; no single strategy or policy is going to be sufficient. If you’re a smaller, local business you need to adapt as you face the possibility of climate change uprooting entire communities. One only needs to look to Fort McMurray, Alberta to see the impact on an entire city as the viability of the local oil market has become massively destabilized. And of course, if you are in an energy-producing industry, or an industry which is a heavy user of energy, you are going to need to overhaul your operations if you are to stay in business.

One way that employers can adapt is by budgeting for carbon, in addition to dollars. It’s clear that it’s a matter of when, not if, there will be some kind of “tax” (and we use that term very loosely) on carbon — whether it’s formal and government imposed — or a series of informal requirements like vendor qualifications, financial statement disclosures or investor demands. Start today by embedding carbon budgeting deep into the organization. An interesting idea is to provide each manager a financial budget and a carbon budget for their teams. This way you’re forcing them to make trade-offs for financial and climate purposes.

The choice as to whether or not a young person should pursue a college degree was once a “no-brainer”. But with the existence of many high profile millionaires (and billionaires) who did not earn degrees, as well as the fact that many graduates are saddled with crushing student loan debt and unable to find jobs it has become a much more complex question. What advice would you give to young adults considering whether or not to go to college?

The most important thing you can do is follow your passions — whether it leads you to college or something else. As you point out, college is too expensive a thing to waste on something that students don’t pursue to the fullest. So if you can’t find something you love to do, don’t waste the money on it. The most important outcome of those formative years — say from 18 to 30 — is to “learn how to learn”, something Steve’s father drilled into him. It’s less important what you study, specifically, and more important that you figure out how to teach yourself something in the future.

We do think this kind of learning can be accomplished in many ways — public service, traveling, working, athletics — in addition to study (these are only a few). The key thing is the pursuit of excellence in something — something — so that people can know what it takes to teach yourself a skill.

Despite the doom and gloom predictions, there are, and likely still will be, jobs available. How do you see job seekers having to change their approaches to finding not only employment, but employment that fits their talents and interests?

We wrote in Detonate that we need to get rid of traditional conversations about career paths. Employers and employees love talking about the theoretical “where will I be in 10 years if I stay with your company”, but in a world that is changing fast and requiring companies to change how they work, current career paths are unlikely to be relevant in 10 years time. We suggest focusing — especially for younger professionals — on skills and experiences you’ll develop over the next 18–24 months. That’s a time period that is a bit more plannable from a developmental perspective. So job-seekers: figure out first what you want to learn and then find a job that helps you learn that. That’s a very different formula than the one we grew up with, when the norm was to find a name-brand company to work for and then figure out what you could learn there.

The statistics of artificial intelligence and automation eliminating millions of jobs, appears frightening to some. For example, Walmart aims to eliminate cashiers altogether and Dominos is instituting pizza delivery via driverless vehicles. How should people plan their careers such that they can hedge their bets against being replaced by automation or robots?

By following the advice in the prior question! If you focus on what you are learning, then you will be constantly developing something that is relevant for the future. You have to assume that the current version of you won’t be as competitive in 25 years (let alone 5), so you have to be constantly in upgrade mode. Can you imagine if we were stuck playing video games from 25 years ago? Steve loved playing NHL ’94 from EA Sports when I was in college; this was the one popularized in the movie Swingers because you could make Wayne Gretzky bleed. But that game just wouldn’t hold up to the version that is available now. People have to take the same approach to career management as software — if you’re not upgrading with some degree of frequency, then people will stop using you and you’ll be relegated to the 7th screen of your phone with all the other apps that don’t get used. But it’s easy get hyperbolic quickly on this subject; some jobs and experiences last for decades and decades and never get old … just ask Geoff who is still going to shows by the same bands he used to see in college!

Technological advances and pandemic restrictions hastened the move to working from home. Do you see this trend continuing? Why or why not?

100% we see the trend continuing. We think the model for hybrid work is so obviously superior to an “all in person” or “all remote” model that we’re shocked by how many companies are arguing at the extremes. Having the flexibility to sometimes work from home and sometimes be in person is demonstrably better from a feasibility, desirability and economic viability perspective. Why would you not choose to have the ability to both give people some time back in their day and work in the comfort of their own home but also be in person when the work dictated that was best?

What companies need to focus on is what version of hybrid is right for them. There is no one-size-fits-all solution and the unique circumstances of the work, workforce and workplace will necessitate different versions of hybrid. But can we drop the ridiculous pretense that a 100% in person or 100% remote model is necessary?

What societal changes do you foresee as necessary to support the fundamental changes to work?

There are myriad possible societal changes that we think are critical to best support successfully working in the future. We’ll focus on three that are particularly important to the two of us:

1) We must radically improve our ability to assemble and retain diverse talent in organizations.
This is critical because we know that cognitively diverse teams are better at solving complex and new problems. In an era of pervasive disruption to business models stemming from advancing technology which enables better and/or cheaper performance, more and more of the problems we’ll face at work will be complex or novel. Therefore, cognitive diversity is a business imperative. And where does cognitive diversity come from? Real world diversity. Diversity in terms of race, ethnicity, background, gender. This diversity contributes to a team’s ability to better see the contours of the uncertainty they face and, resultantly, get more creative solutions.

2) We must eliminate the perception of there being a tradeoff that exists between having a successful career and begin an attentive parent; this is a considerable contributor to the lack of gender diversity we see on corporate boards and executive teams. Over our careers, we have witnessed far too many talented women who felt it was necessary to “slow down” their careers in order to be able to feel like they are being a good parent. (And let’s be honest — while we are encouraged at the trends towards more involved men in parenting, this is a challenge overwhelmingly experienced by women.) As long as this tradeoff exists, we’ll lose too many women who silently recede from the corporate ranks. Businesses can no longer accept this tradeoff as normal. We need to create a system that enables women to do both simultaneously.

3) We must fully cost the impact to our climate in our work, in addition to the economic costs.
As we described above, the cost of carbon is going to be forced upon us in the future whether it’s regulated or through a patchwork of implications. Companies need to be able to have people consider costs from economic and planetary perspectives in their systems. This will dramatically reshape considerations for where and how we work, and the nature of our decisions.

What changes do you think will be the most difficult for employers to accept? What changes do you think will be the most difficult for employees to accept?

None of these three things are easy. There will be, naturally, a spectrum of degrees of acceptance of each of these challenges by employers. Some will (and have) embraced each and some will lag. However, the challenge associated with all of them that we think will separate those who succeed vs those who struggle is the ability to measure and honestly report on outcomes in an objective way, using the same cold-hard-facts approach we use to measure financial results. Generally, we don’t do this very well today; businesses tend to measure themselves based on “effort” (rather than outcomes) on things that are less directly related to bottom line performance. We must change this mindset to make it unacceptable to not make progress on these challenges in the same way it’s unacceptable not to generate sufficient economic returns.

The COVID-19 pandemic helped highlight the inadequate social safety net that many workers at all pay levels have. Is this something that you think should be addressed? In your opinion how should this be addressed?

We have an (unproven) hypothesis that there is a strong correlation between the existence of a social safety net and innovation. Isn’t there a saying that behind every successful entrepreneur there is a spouse with a stable income? As a couple of Canadians, we’ve often wondered why it seems (again, an observation, not defensible research!) that there are so many Canadian comedians. Perhaps we don’t take ourselves that seriously, but we sometimes wonder if Canadians have some greater degree of freedom to pursue passion projects because they know that they aren’t tied to a job for health care access reasons.. Who knows. But we do believe that if people have sufficient access to basic human needs, it will enable them to be more productive members of society and we all will benefit. There is plenty of room to make policy choices on all ends of the political spectrum on how we should achieve, and measure, that objective.

Despite all that we have said earlier, what is your greatest source of optimism about the future of work?

Technology. Technology. Technology. Oh, and human curiosity. It’s absolutely amazing what we can do now that we couldn’t do only a handful of years ago and how much this advance gets taken for granted. And there will undoubtedly continue to be things that come in the future that make our lives even better. Can you imagine if this pandemic had come in an era just 20 or so years ago where the majority of us were still on dial-up internet? We will continue to advance technologically and we will use that to become even more resilient to threats yet to come.

Historically, major disruptions to the status quo in employment, particularly disruptions that result in fewer jobs, are temporary with new jobs replacing the jobs lost. Unfortunately, there has often been a gap between the job losses and the growth of new jobs. What do you think we can do to reduce the length of this gap?

A combination of some of the things we have discussed before. We must challenge our orthodoxy of careers as single “things” with a predetermined path and flip them to be perceived as a series of short-term sprints focused on skills development over a knowable period. Building a strong foundation of skills in our people will help narrow the gap. This must be combined with a more robust ecosystem of reskilling opportunities for people of all ages and capabilities. For instance, what if university degrees came with a lifetime guarantee? So a business graduate from 20 years ago would have some access to education that current business students are receiving if necessary? That would be cool. The technology exists to make it possible and probably affordable.

Okay, wonderful. Here is the main question of our interview. What are your “Top 5 Trends To Watch In the Future of Work?” (Please share a story or example for each.)

Hopefully our discussion up to now will obviate the need for too much explanation of these but here are our top 5 — not necessarily in terms of what we think will absolutely come true, but in terms of what we think will make the future of work more enjoyable and resilient for all.

1. The shift from career paths to modular experiences (e.g. the rise of non-captive rotational programs to accelerate learning beyond the boundaries of a single organization.
2. Climate consciousness driving employee behavior (e.g. the decline of the transatlantic trip for a one-hour meeting not just because it doesn’t make good financial sense but because the traveler speaks up and asserts it’s the wrong thing to do)
3. The rise of widespread cognitive diversity (e.g. the acceleration of dramatic shifts in hiring and talent practices to rebalance the assortment of voices in all types of decisions and become ever-more precise in getting the right mix in place for the nature of the decision)
4. The rebalancing of action and analysis (e.g. increasingly people will be rewarded as much for their ability to frame and quickly execute what we call ‘minimally viable moves’ as for their ability to generate insight from data and analysis)
5. From hybrid to ‘mashup” (e.g. we will increasingly work not just in two modes — from home or at work — but asynchronously and across multiple different spaces and platforms, working in VR/AR and further incorporating artificial intelligence)

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how this quote has shaped your perspective?

Steve: “Always make an error of “commission” rather than an error of omission. This was advice that was given to me by my old boss Jim Berrien, then the President of Forbes Magazine Group. I love that advice because it is so consistent with the Provoke mindset — it drives towards a bias to act in the face of uncertainty.

Geoff: “Meet uncertainty with curiosity and a bias for action instead of worry and a bias for analysis. This too captures the heart of Provoke and for good reason: I came up with it! As questionable as it is for someone to quote themselves, I will say this comes from a poem I wrote for my sons when I turned 50 in an attempt to capture many of my life lessons for them to remember.

We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.

Given there are two of us, we each get to name one, right? ;)

Steve: “I would love to meet Reshma Saujani, the leader of Girls Who Code. I personally love the notion of eradicating the vision of a coder as a boy in a hoodie.”

Geoff: ”Well this is embarrassing to admit in comparison, but mine would be Bob Weir from then Grateful Dead. I have been a Deadhead for most of my life and would love to hear the stories of the early days firsthand. But if Bobby’s not available, Phil Lesh would suffice. Or Trey Anastasio. Or Dave Grohl for that matter.”

Our readers often like to follow our interview subjects’ careers. How can they further follow your work online?

You can reach us both on LinkedIn and Geoff’s Twitter handle is @geofftuff and Steve’s is @steven_goldbach.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this. We wish you continued success and good health.

About the Interviewer: Phil La Duke is a popular speaker & writer with more than 500 works in print. He has contributed to Entrepreneur, Monster, Thrive Global and is published on all inhabited continents. His first book is a visceral, no-holds-barred look at worker safety, I Know My Shoes Are Untied! Mind Your Own Business. An Iconoclast’s View of Workers’ Safety. His most recent book is Lone Gunman: Rewriting the Handbook On Workplace Violence Prevention listed as #16 on Pretty Progressive magazine’s list of 49 books that powerful women study in detail. His third book, Blood In My Pockets Is Blood On Your Hands is expected in March followed by Loving An Addict: Collateral Damage Of the Opioid Epidemic due to be released in June. Follow Phil on Twitter @philladuke or read his weekly blog www.philladuke.wordpress.com