The Skill Code

From one of the world's top researchers on work and technology comes an insightful and surprising guide to protecting your skill in a world filling with AI and robots. Think of your most valuable skill, the thing you can reliably do under pressure to deliver results. How did you learn it? Whatever your job – plumber, attorney, teacher, surgeon – decades of research show that you achieved mastery by working with someone who knew more than you did. Formal learning—school and books—gave you conceptual knowledge, but you developed your skill by working with an expert. Today, this essential bond is under threat. In our grail-like quest to optimize productivity with intelligent technologies like AI and robots, we are separating junior workers from experts in workplaces around the world. It's a looming multi-trillion-dollar problem that few are addressing, until now. In The Skill Code, researcher and technologist Matt Beane reveals the hidden code that underwrites every successful expert-novice relationship. Beane has spent the last decade examining this unique bond in a variety of settings, from warehouses to surgical suites. He's found that just as the four amino acids are the building blocks of DNA, the three C's—challenge, complexity, and connection—are the basic components of how we develop our most valuable skills. Whether you're an expert or a novice, this book will show you how to build skill more effectively – and how to make intelligent technologies part of the solution, not the problem. The Skill Code is an insightful must-read, with significant implications for how we will work and build skill in the twenty-first century—a guide to help you not only survive but thrive.

Matt Beane does field research on work involving robots and AI to uncover systematic positive exceptions that we use across the broader world of work. He has published in top management journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly and Harvard Business Review, and spoken on the Ted stage. He also took a two-year hiatus from his doctoral studies to help found and fund Humatics, an MIT-connected, full-stack IoT startup. Beane is an Assistant Professor in the Technology Management Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a Digital Fellow with Stanford's Digital Economy Lab and MIT's Institute for the Digital Economy. He received his PhD from the MIT Sloan School of Management.