Transcript
Aidan McCullen: Today’s guest delivers a practical strategy guide for attracting, retaining, and empowering the talent you need to drive your business forward. He describes the contemporary reality of work, how it is evolving, and how it represents a new opportunity for leaders to create organisations capable of innovation and growth. He explains how to straddle the challenge of building a company that is both a hyper efficient machine and a healthy living organism. It’s a pleasure to welcome the author of Future Work World, How Leaders Can Create Destinations for Talent that Excite, Entice, and Engage. Chief Strategy Officer at CPL and Head of the Future of Work Institute. Barry Winkless, welcome to the show.
Barry Winkless: Thank you very much, Aidan. And full transparency, Barry and I used to work together. So it’s great to see you writing, Barry, and getting this out to the world because you were constantly moving towards this. It was only a matter of time.
Aidan McCullen: Why did you write this book?
Barry Winkless: We did a white paper six years ago in the Future Work Institute because we really recognised there was no definition of what the future of work was, or a user guide for the future of work. So we tried to develop a relatively simple white paper around what it is, what’s it about, what it contains, et cetera. And then I think we started talking a couple of years ago, really through the work that we’ve done in the Future Work Institute. The white papers that we’d written and then some of the conversations we had. And I also felt, to be honest with you, it was a good time to do a book about work when you consider all the changes that are happening around us through technology and other societal impacts as well. So it’s finally good to have it out there.
Aidan McCullen: The one thing I know is you’re not a boring writer and you didn’t create a boring book. Even though people might hear it’s a playbook for the world of work or the future of work, your personality is very much in it. And I know music has a huge influence on your writing and your thinking as well. You told me you learned the guitar during COVID. Maybe we’ll talk about the musical influence because it’s throughout the book.
Barry Winkless: Yeah. Obviously I think there’s a couple of things. I think what ends up happening when you do your first draft of a book, you realise, is there enough of me in the book? And to be honest with you, I felt no, not really. So I ended up going back to, well, what do I really love? I love music. I love things like science fiction. I love writing, I love all these various types of things. So the book is a little bit of a smorgasbord of all of those ideas. Right down to the point that at the back of the book, I call out a number of albums that you should listen to whilst reading the book. That’s how far I went on that side.
I think the biggest influence on me, and you know this well, is I have a huge appreciation for immersive storytelling. So in the book, it’s like a journey. It’s been broken up into four parts. Each part is unique, so you can read each part on its own. I’m always mindful of keeping people engaged. It goes from mindset — how do we need to think about the future of work — to the meta waves, which are the big underlying trends. But then I go into a lot of the work that we developed as part of the Future Work Institute around this idea of a mixed desk. What are the 16 areas that we can innovate around how we design our worlds of work? And then finally into this idea of move — how can we utilise immersive storytelling to emotionally move people?
Throughout the book I tried to sprinkle that little bit of me in there. There are nine jumps into the near future of work that are fictional stories that highlight different aspects of the future of work based on our research. So there’s a bit of everything in there. Even in my introduction, I compare my first book to a first album. It’s definitely a pretty accessible book. I did an interview yesterday where the guy who read it said it’s a book for business leaders, but it’s actually a book for everyone. I really love that feedback because, as you know, in trying to write something that engages people but also is relatively universal, it is quite a difficult thing to do, particularly when you actually sit down to do it.
Aidan McCullen: Well, one other thing I found interesting — and I was delighted to see this — was that you did start with mindset. Because no matter what you’re talking about, I heard this great saying recently that you can’t force a horse to water, but actually worse than that, you can’t waterboard a horse. A leadership team needs to have the right mindset before they even look at what the future of work is for their organisation.
Barry Winkless: Yeah, absolutely. And I know this is a big focus area of yours over the last few years. What I was finding is in the projects that we were doing as part of the Future Work Institute, it was almost as though we were going into a project without giving the leaders the dictionary. So they didn’t know the language or the reason we were doing things. And that’s why — I had also read a couple of books that had focused in on level-setting your mind — I wanted to bring three very unique aspects of the mindset to bear.
One is called the Destination Designer. One is called the Societal Whisperer. And the other one is the Systems Architect. They came out of working with various HR teams, particularly leadership teams involved in the world of talent, recognising that those three areas were the level-setting needed before you could go on the journey. I was very mindful of that. Really halfway through writing the book, I recognised that if somebody was coming to this book called Future Work World, would they get the maximum value out of this supposed user manual? And that’s when I said, this is what we found from the companies we work with.
And as I’ve said, and we worked together — a lot of it is mindset. Even in the book I say, look, we can talk about skills all we like, but the most important skill set for the future of work is a mindset. And I’m really, really passionate about that. The mindsets are almost like vessels. As long as you adopt these principles, you can fill these with new methods and new tools. I didn’t want to get too caught up in toolkits, but I wanted to make sure there was enough that was universal enough.
I’ve seen a lot of people talking about how HR aren’t strategic enough. I’d look at it slightly differently. I would say that HR aren’t holistic enough in the way that they look at challenges or opportunities. And never before has there been such an opportunity for HR leaders to really help craft a world of work. I just love that idea of bringing new language into sectors that maybe wouldn’t be used to these types of approaches.
Aidan McCullen: The mixing desk really resonated with me. We had a lady on the show, Frederika Fabritius, and she has this term called a neuro signature — the idea that everybody has a unique setting, like a graphical equaliser. Everyone experiences the world very uniquely to themselves. And the reason I share that is, when you were talking about the different mindsets, like the Systems Architect, different people in an organisation have a very different idea of what HR does. Therefore the setting of the organisation is very unique.
Barry Winkless: That’s exactly it. The easiest way I can describe the mixed desk is: here are 16 equalisers. We know that these are the important ones from a workplace of the now and next — but play around based on your context. That whole section around the mixed desk is literally a whole methodology for how to bring this into your organisation. You can have a little bit too much right brain, and if you don’t have a bit of the left brain, things can go off course. So I was mindful of making sure that what I’d learned in my team and through our work projects was also reflected in there.
I wanted to keep it accessible. People who are more creatively inclined will resonate with the fictional stories. People who are more practically inclined will resonate with the model. But the idea was that you could utilise the book — and between those four sections, you almost have a user guide that you can apply tomorrow, really, no matter what size your organisation is. And I always like to say that, just to come back to the equaliser analogy, no matter what type of organisation you are or how tight things are, you can at least move one of those equalisers. I’ve seen companies that are really good at one particular area — and that’s enough, in terms of what they’re about.
Aidan McCullen: Share the meta waves, because mindset was one thing, but meta waves were almost like lenses that you can try on and see how the world looks through that lens and see does it fit your organisational setting, your mixed desk setting. And some of them I loved. I loved the term “work type salad.”
Barry Winkless: Everybody loves that one! I’ll tell you where that one came from. I’m a big fan of Disney, particularly the Imagineering side of things — the theme park design side. There’s a very famous Imagineer called Marty Sklar. Actually, the one I reference is Ly Crump — he was one of Walt Disney’s right-hand men, and he talked about the fact that Disneyland was like the perfect salad. Perfectly mixed, everything blended together. He said other amusement parks are just like lettuce and tomato. And it really stuck with me.
So when I talk about this idea of work type salad, if you think about the modern workforce, it’s actually made up of all types of employees — permanent employees, temporary staff, contractors, consultants, pay-by-day or gig workers. But what I’m finding often in organisations I’m working with is that they’re not using these types of employment for real competitive advantage. So for example, asking questions like: what if we had a pay-by-the-hour R&D team? What could that bring to us? What if we utilised a new temporary working model to tap into a diverse group of society that wouldn’t normally work with an organisation like ours?
That’s what I meant about the work types. How do we utilise all of these different types of working and employment, mix them into something that’s really connected, convergent, and meaningful? I think the real opportunity for modern organisations is to really stand back and think about what employment type will work for us based on our context. And then how will that tap into this globally diverse group of people? If organisations want to attract and work with people like you, Aidan — people who like a freeform portfolio type of working — they have to think about that. But equally, if there’s another person who is a deep engineering technical expert who wants security, the company also has to think about that. Getting those things to work together — there’s real magic there.
Aidan McCullen: I love this idea of the wisdom world concept and an organisation creating their own wisdom world. Share a bit about that.
Barry Winkless: Skills come up a lot in terms of organisations, and I wasn’t trying to be different, but I feel when we talk about a skills-first organisation, a skills-based organisation — what I was focused more on is what are we actually trying to get to with all of this stuff? And I came up with this idea of a wisdom world. How are we actually understanding people’s skills at scale? How are we actually empowering people to learn in the quickest, most immersive way possible? And then also, how are we actually tapping into all of the amazing tacit knowledge that’s in organisations — that leaves when people go?
I’ve worked with a few organisations where you know very distinct ideas and perspectives leave with the people who hold them. And for legacy — the actual ideas behind it are gone. So for me there was something around this idea of how do we utilise technologies like AI to understand and infer skills? For example, if Aidan is a guitarist and he’s in a band, we can utilise AI to infer that it’s likely that Aidan is good with people, it’s likely that he’s a decent communicator, likely that he’s a decent presenter. One of the things that people don’t really talk about enough with AI in the talent world is the strength of inference.
Once you get to that point, then it becomes around how do we actually quickly understand how good Aidan is at that particular skill? We need gamified tools, immersive experiences that can quickly understand how good someone is at a skill. We can think about ourselves as this wisdom world — not just about being a broad skills-based organisation, but really using AI tools to understand skills, tapping into immersive reality properly to help people understand and improve their skill level.
I spoke with an organisation in Switzerland called Insight Sphere who have basically created an AI-based immersive experience for improving communication. It extracts information from all the TEDx talks around the world and gives you a kind of avatar around how you’re doing. And there’s a company in Ireland called Merx Technologies that creates really amazing immersive experiences in terms of medical device design — because you’re obviously dealing with very high-value pieces of equipment that you don’t want to mess around with.
And you’ve probably heard of a company called Slick Plus — they’re big into how to capture implicit knowledge within an organisation. When we bring all of those things together, I’m really interested in utilising experiential learning types, using AI at scale, using new platforms to capture implicit knowledge — to create meaningful wisdom worlds where the level of knowledge is massively growing in an organisation over time. We talk a lot about skills development, but we don’t necessarily talk about the chain from inference through to development through to retention.
Aidan McCullen: One last one I’d love to share — you and I both share a love for Joseph Campbell and his work, Hero with a Thousand Faces, and all the myth stuff. And by the way, as a listener or viewer — read anything by Joseph Campbell. Even look at his stuff on YouTube. It’s absolutely fascinating about how to understand the structure of stories. You see it in Star Wars, you see it everywhere. Once you know it, it’s a set of lenses through which to see the world.
I loved what you talked about — and it’s something we talk a lot about on the show when we discuss the future of the world of work — this idea that the 40-and-40 is dead. The idea of going to school for four years and working for an organisation for 40. It’s now more like the opposite — 40 years and you’re constantly moving. Maybe you’re working for four industries at the same time. And you talk about the new hero’s journey for work. I thought that would be a great place to conclude.
Barry Winkless: Yeah. First and foremost, you’re absolutely right. I have this very simple concept in my head that we’ve gone from a mono to a poly career. And there are loads of different people talking about different versions of the same thing. The career is a squiggle, the career is this, the career is that. The most interesting conversation I had was with Connor Lynch — he talks about career as asset development, which is a really interesting concept. This idea of doing ten things, but you’re building assets over time. You might have a book — you’re building an asset there. You might have a new tool that you’ve developed, a side hustle, a full-time job, some investments going along too. It all points towards this idea of the polymath, the poly career, the poly experience, the poly journey.
And the reason I mentioned the hero’s journey is that it used to be a case where organisations were the heroes, and we were part of their journey. In my view, it is turning the other way now — we are the heroes and organisations are part of our hero’s journey. That’s really interesting because it forces organisations to think more and more like designers and think about how can we actually compel people like Aidan and Barry to work with us on certain projects or on special things? And I’m really interested in that.
There’s a level of maximum experience that an organisation can create for an individual, at which point the individual on their own can probably create more by jumping to a more experiential career. So I’m really interested in that blend of poly stuff that’s going on — where people like ourselves might be working with one organisation two days a week whilst doing a book, whilst being part of a broader network.
And you look at the younger generations and their love for collectivism. We’re seeing a massive growth in cooperative businesses — businesses owned by the people who work in them. That’s all part of breaking through this barrier of the work experience plateau into something broader. In Europe, fifteen to twenty percent of us are now working on our own in some shape or form — much bigger in America. And new technologies, new types of networks, super networks — they’re all going to drive different questions around what it means to work with an organisation versus working for one.
If I were to sum up where I believe it’s going — it’s “with” versus “for.” It used to be about working for. Now we use the phrase working with.
Aidan McCullen: Such a brilliant book for that, even for the individual who wants to jump the curve but is maybe a bit reticent and unsure about it. It helps you go, well, this is the way the world’s going. Barry, for those who want to reach out to you for talks, keynotes, workshops, or to find out more about the book, where’s the best place?
Barry Winkless: BarryWinkless.com, and also on LinkedIn — we all love LinkedIn at this stage. And the book is on Amazon, it’s in Barnes and Noble, it’s on all the big sites. And I want to congratulate you on your Thinkers 50 as well — I know that was a big goal of yours for a number of years. There’s an example of the hero’s journey in action.
Aidan McCullen: Author of Future Work World, How Leaders Can Create Destinations for Talent that Excite, Entice, and Engage. Chief Strategy Officer at CPL and Head of the Future of Work Institute — Barry Winkless. Thanks, Barry.
Barry Winkless: Thanks, Aidan.
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