Pavel Luksha on the Future of Skills

You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast, where we unpack what is new and innovative in education. I’m your host, Jessica, and today, Tom is sitting down again with Pavel Lukeshev. Pavel is a leading education futurist. He’s a professor of practice at Moscow School of Management and director of Global Education

Futures. What drives Pavel is creating a world that works for everyone. He recently contributed to a new Future of Skills report that is one of the best we’ve seen on the subject. The report was a collaboration between Global Education Futures, World Skills Russia, and

World Skills International. Let’s listen in as Tom and Pavel discuss what learners need to know and why we live in a VUCA place. Pavel Lukeshev, welcome to the Getting Smart podcast. Pavel, it’s so great to have you on again, but I went to bed last night thinking of all

the spectacular places that we have met in the past, from Russia to the Stanford campus and Birkenstock, Switzerland and Copenhagen. I miss seeing you. Yes, yes. Actually, like I said, I feel it’s a great place.

You could be with me here now. I am in Leo Tolstoy estate and it’s where he wrote his books like War and Peace and it’s where he started this humanistic pedagogy. The School of Tolstoy is also here. So it’s like a fatherland of humanistic pedagogy in Russia.

Pavel, you’re my favorite futurist on the planet and you typically travel all over the world. How has the last year been without any international travel? Well, I guess it feels a little bit like a junkie without a dose. I really need my kicks off connecting to people internationally. We did a lot of very intense work on Zoom and other platforms.

We did amazing work with people from 49 countries that I’m about to share with you, Tom. But yeah, I feel like the physical connection should be there. I do too. You know, I usually visit about 100 schools a year and I haven’t been in a school in a year and I really miss that.

Well, I hope it will get better this year because vaccination has started and I hope that the pandemics in general should be over by summer, probably. Pavel, we’re talking because you recently released an extraordinary study. It’s called the Future Skills for the 2020s. And it’s a huge volume and it summarizes interviews that you did with people all over the world.

How in the world did you mount this study in the middle of a pandemic? Well, actually, we were lucky in a way. Well, of course, all other circumstances are not so great. But the fact that people are staying home creates an incentive for them to share over remote discussions.

So we had really amazing sessions with people from all over the planet. Australia, New Zealand, South America, North America, Africa, anywhere. And we could just bring a lot of amazing experts online in collaborative sessions because everyone was at home. We ran about 20 massive sessions and had about 800 people contributing to the report overall.

Pavel, for a decade, you’ve talked about the VUCO world volatile on certain complex and ambiguous and people may not have appreciated that until 2020. But I think almost everybody around the world now fully experienced what a VUCO world is about, right? Yeah.

And actually, the picture with which I usually illustrated it, one of the images was people in masks. So I spoke about the risk of pandemics as one of manifestations of VUCO, but nobody was taking it seriously, indeed, until last year. Right.

Now, I think you and Bill Gates were out front on talking about that risk. Pavel, this is really the, I think, the best future skills report that I’ve ever seen. And we’re going to encourage our listeners to dive into that report. The summary really talks about three skills that I’d love to have you talk about to collaborate, to embrace future orientations, and to embody well-being.

Those are sort of the overarching skills. Maybe you could take a minute and talk about each of those. Why is collaboration and particularly the ability to adapt and transform an organization? Why is it so critical? Well, exactly the pandemics highlights the deficit of these two critical competences.

So for example, the fact that the US constantly being ranked as top country in terms of its healthcare system came unprepared for pandemics like the one that’s going through right now, shows the lack of that strategic, what they say, strategic foresight, the anticipation of possible undesired risks, and making preparations. And actually, as we’re moving ahead and the world indeed is becoming increasingly complex,

we need decision makers. But really, we need also people, let’s say, at the front, people, people that are doing the job to really understand what’s going on, to anticipate, to prepare themselves and prepare their organizations to cope with these risks. So that’s why future anticipation becomes so critical, coupled with system thinking.

And of course, collaboration, because in situations when things start to change dynamically, you hardly can do anything alone. You need others to support you, to work and team, to collectively solve any problem that emerges. So it’s actually about collective problem-solving ability that is increasingly required in the

world. And of course, when we talk about pandemics, it’s only one of the risks. And there is a very interesting recurring study by World Economic Forum that trains the global risks. They were showing the risk of pandemics.

It was like a medium-level risk with a medium impact. Now they have some high-level possibility and high-impact risks related to climate change, the biodiversity loss and so on. And really, a lot of experts anticipate that these risks can materialize in the next decade or let’s say a couple of decades, with very, very severe consequences.

So the question is, is your organization ready? Is the economy ready for situations like this? So that’s why we need to develop this ability to collaborate with one another and to solve problems. And of course, when you think about where and how to solve problems, that’s the issue

of universal well-being. Because first of all, it’s not about us contributing to economy or contributing to ourselves. It’s about the ability to restore ourselves for sake of economy, for sake of our society. And actually, if we think about the well-being of planet, the solving of climate crisis, for example, it’s not possible to address it unless we also learn how to take care of

ourselves. And so actually, the mindfulness in terms of actually being able to empathize with other, to build up relationships, to start caring about one another, begins with learning how to take care of oneself. So that’s why universal well-being becomes so important.

I think the one thing I’ve appreciated about your work for the last decade is this sense of mutuality, the cosmopolitan values. I remember you interviewed, you did a talk on cosmopolitan values in Switzerland last time we were together. I think in the last year, more and more people around the globe have gained this sense of

mutuality because we’re in climate change together. We’re seeing inequities grow in every developed economy of the world. And we’re suddenly in a pandemic together. And so many people are experiencing this new sense of mutuality. And you’ve been talking about that for 10 years.

But it’s front and center in your report. We appreciate that. There is this very interesting counter-trends happening. It’s happening in the US. It’s happening all over the world right now.

We’re on one hand, pandemics provokes people to become more, let’s say, nation-oriented, even locality-oriented. For a good reason because if you’re thinking about trying to rely your kind of essential, supply, food supply, and so on on the global economy to provide to you, something like pandemics happens and supply stops and the food security is not guaranteed and medical

supplies are not guaranteed. So a lot of countries, a lot of regions start to think about more self-reliance, so to say, strategies. Similarly, they start to think that we probably should think about our own priorities first. But when you think again about this global risk and the global well-being, it is more

important than the personal or the local well-being or at least as important. So learning how to work in this new reality where, of course, we become more separated on one hand, but we need to learn how to reconnect. So that will be a big process for the next decade. I think that’s particularly true for education leaders and civic leaders who can benefit

from the trend towards mutuality, towards embracing well-being, but who are dealing with the counter trends that you talked about. So I appreciate that. Pablo, the report talks about a couple of megatrends that have a high or a medium-high impact on almost every sector, digitalization, globalization, and environmentalization.

Say a word about each of those megatrends. Well, we actually see indeed these megatrends that are transforming the nature of global economy. And the topic of digitalization has been with us at least for the last 30 years since Internet has started.

Well, probably before that, but increasingly with the spread of Internet and with the spread of smartphones for the last decade, it became like, let’s say, relevant to anyone on the planet. Still, in terms of our actual processes, how our life was organized, how, for example, education was organized, so social processes, collaboration was still, let’s say, pre-digitalized.

And what we say in the report is that COVID situation became a trigger, like a catalyst for a very rapid digitalization that started to take on even in sectors that were refrained for a minute. And again, an example from education, we know that last spring, over the period of just six weeks, the whole world, it was over 90% of the whole population of learners, about

one and a half billion students, moved into the mode of remote learning, or one billion moved into online learning. Six weeks, just six weeks. So it was an unprecedented shift in such a short period of time when people were talking about decades of a possibility.

Now the system started to learn. So that’s digitalization. That’s how systems learn to use digital tools and really use them in a more natural way. It doesn’t mean that we’re going to replace our face-to-face connections with remote connections, but it definitely gives a new level of flexibility, a new whole dimension of opportunities to

learners. Well, you’re a big proponent of that. Our automation, it’s another process that, again, is happening maybe for centuries because that’s the essence of an industrial economy. But with the new wave of technologies such as machine learning, it opens up a totally

new possibilities. Like a single person can run a whole enterprise with just a few digital solutions. So of course, this is coming up. And again, COVID provoked to use increasingly digitalization, automation including use of robotics, which becoming also increasingly cheap and accessible.

And that means that in the next decade, we’re going to see a lot of robotics used in urban environments, in factories, in rural areas. So that becomes, again, part of the new norm. But this whole transformation doesn’t mean like we’re going on the path that was set up like decades ago.

This new factor of environmentalization is about how do we deal with this climate risk, with ecology risk, with biodiversity loss risk. We need to change the modality in which our economy operates. We really make it nature friendly, really learn how to cooperate with the planet instead of destroying it.

And this brings the new topic of regenerative economy, which means that instead of extracting from the planet, let’s say, from nature, we learn how to restore nature. And that opens up a whole world of, let’s say, new types of activities in the economy. But it also requires a completely new set of skills. Main skills, universal well-being skills, collaboration skills that are required to

build up regenerative economy. So these things are starting to happen. We see that COVID is triggering the change. And it starts to accelerate around this decade. I love the sounds of that, Pavel.

You talk about life-centered, transformative, regenerative, circular economies. Say a little bit more about the life-centered. What does that mean? What does that look like? Well, it’s a very interesting transition that we start to envisage.

Because for many, many centuries, if not millennia, humans thought of themselves being like superior to any other forms on this planet of life. But we start to see how our own life is really dependent on our, let’s say, very intense collaboration and co-evolution with all other forms. For example, how many types of bacteria are living in our body and just sustain it?

It’s like 99% of our genome is not ours. It’s of symbiotic bacteria that live in our body. We need to learn how to be friends with them to survive. Same is about the external environment, forests, rivers, grass, and so on. We need to learn how to actually maintain the biodiversity in order for this planet to

keep the climate, keep the atmosphere in place, keep the quality of water, and so on. So really, we depend on life more than it depends on us. It can move beyond us, but we will definitely need a life that we need biosphere to sustain as a species. So that means that we need to rethink our economy.

We need to make it life-centered rather than life opposing the life. For a few last centuries, it’s been actually like all kinds of technologies we were using. They were kind of more life-destroying than life-embracing. So learning how to make our economy life-friendly in the end life-centered to really perpetuate life, to work as life works is something that we’re going to learn through this century,

but it begins now. Pablo, we have a lot of education leaders that listen to this podcast. One of the sectors that you look at in your report is education. So what advice would you give to education leaders? What are the two or three factors that they should be thinking about for the 2020s?

We actually created a whole separate section in our report dedicated to strategies of different types of stakeholders, starting with learners and teachers. And we think that it’s the time when teachers can manifest their potential for system change. Of course, it’s good to empower if you’re an administrator, especially if you’re a school leader, you can empower teachers to experiment.

It’s also a great time. In the time of uncertainty, the choices you are making are actually shaping the future. They are creating new trends. So my first advice is to be bold, to try and experiment with whatever is possible to emerge and learn how to create these elements of the future that you want to see in the world.

And that’s like the constant message that I try also to perpetuate, not only in education, but I think that’s also the way to create this life-centered economy, human-centered society and so on. Second is that I think we need to really put learners at the center of this process and create learning processes with the idea that they are going to last for a lifetime.

So it means that we need to focus on more on what we call existential skills, the skills that actually allow people to live their life better. And part of these existential skills is also ability to learn, ability to empathize with other, ability to make decisions, to be entrepreneurial, open-minded and so on. So these are all basically competences that we can learn and we can learn how to change

our life by mastering those competences. So that’s my second advice. And third advice, of course, is collaboration. I started with this, but I wanted to again emphasize it because where we are shifting is this much more network-based type of education with the idea that we will not be able to

only provide everything within like one institution, one school to really nurture a leader or an expert or a professional. We need to create a lot of possible trajectories for learners, which means that we need to create networks of opportunities for learners from different types of institutions working together to provide these trajectories and pathways and journeys.

That means that the better we collaborate, the better, as we say, we weave. We’ve this process, connect all these different opportunities, the better it really starts to serve learners. Thank you. You also encourage education leaders to lean into artificial intelligence, big data, exponential

technologies, both from a technology skill standpoint, but also to help learners begin to understand ethical and economic implications. Well, I think we should not see technology as an enemy of educators and of humans in general, but we also should not see it as a kind of way to, let’s say, replace who we are. It’s a tool, it’s a very advanced tool that is emerging right now.

And it gives us a lot of opportunities. And we wish, well, actually, as they say, knowledge is power. And the better we understand what these tools provide to us, the better we know how to use them. So the next stage of evolution of our civilization will also be done by embodying and engaging

with these technological opportunities that are provided. Of course, moving in this direction of being more life centered and human centered. So yes, I believe that AI and digital technologies and data science are absolutely essential. And for example, just to give you one example, the opportunities that complex data science analysis provides in terms of assessing evaluating learners is, let’s say, orders beyond whatever

is available to current models of assessment. We are using models that are outdated by decades. They’ve been all created in 1950s, 1960s. Now Google and Facebook know more about these learners than a school because they create digital twin, digital model of a learner who constantly interacts with these digital

environments. Now the school is able to collect all this data, to analyze it, to really serve better each student in a more personalized, more kind of student centered manner. And that’s what is needed as part of the solution. We’re talking to Pavel Luksa about his report, the future skills for the 2020s.

If any listeners are working on a new portrait of a graduate or a graduate profile, thinking about the skills that your learners will need in the 2020s, this is a must read report. Pavel, I appreciated the fact that the report highlighted the need for basic skills for human adaptability, future readiness, human skills that increase personal and collective resilience and productivity, the new tech skills to address the fourth industrial revolution, and then

finally the green and universal well-being skills. I think your report is the first to really do a nice job of enumerating those. It’s a great summary of the required skills of the 2020s. As Pavel said, it also looks sector by sector at which of those skills are going to be slightly more important.

I just wanted to highlight this because we really saw also why we wanted to go sectoral. We saw a great deal of variants across multiple sectors. So when we think about a career of an artist or a career of engineer, of course, they require a different set of skills. But there is also a lot of convergence, for example, because artists are increasingly becoming

social leaders. They are becoming engineers to create a next stage of the art. And so we might think about convergence of skills and really what we talk about, this fundamental skill set, is like the skills that are required all across these multiple sectors. Again, still there is a lot of variety in the sector.

And really, when you want to understand the nature of specific, the sectors are quite aggregated, agriculture, cultural industries, and so on. You need to look into the specifics as well. Pavel, around the same time you also released a report on learning ecosystems. This is probably the most in-depth look at learning ecosystems around the world that’s

ever been produced. What’s a learning ecosystem and why are they worth studying? Well, the way we are seeing it, we actually think that learning ecosystem is the next stage of what we call a system of education. It’s what we probably should see as a system of education in the 21st century.

Educational system was created in roughly around the early or middle of the 19th century in different countries. And it was modeled as an industrial enterprise. And we all know this discourse, how they were created to really serve the rapidly growing industrial economies.

So they are focused on standardization. They are focused on standard students, standard tests, and so on. Now, the new model requires a much more diverse and unique trajectories or pathways of learning. It requires lifelong learning, it requires individual as well as collaborative, community-based,

organization-based, online, offline modalities of learning. So we really need some new, let’s say, vessel to hold this. And it cannot be hierarchically governed. It needs to be much more network-based. They need to connect all the learning opportunities for learners, individual and

collective ones, because organizations and communities and teams, they also learn. So what is that holding vessel? We think it’s a learning ecosystem. It’s actually a network of these learning providers and learners and all kinds of opportunities and resources available to them in a constant and dynamically changing

and constantly evolving form. Where it’s not kind of, there’s no blueprint to actually tell what the ecosystem is. It exists in the stage of evolution. So learning ecosystems are actually, they’re using the name that is taken from biology. And when we look into biology, we realize that ecosystems are like ubiquitous.

They are everywhere. Every place has an ecosystem of its own. And it’s not random that nature’s selected or chose ecosystems over other types of organization. Evidently created a lot of different forms, including hierarchies, including

formats where some species is dominating others and so on. Still, it prefers this format which embraces diversity, embraces connection. There is no ministry of education or ministry whatsoever in a real ecosystem, in the forest, in the ocean. They all are interdependent species collaborating with each other.

I must say that collaboration is the essence of an ecosystem. It was discovered, firstly, it was discovered by the way by Peter Krabotkin, who was also Russian in late 19th century and then rediscovered by Harvard scientists of Erlich in like late 1960s. So the nature of ecosystem is built on mutualistic relationship, the win-win

relationships that are formed by different players. So when we see the ascendance of ecosystems in education, we start to see how different entities, because of the interest in getting, let’s say, better quality learners, more unique talents nurtured and so on, they start partnering with one another. Like employers start to partner with complementary education, with online platforms, with cities,

to create these multiple learning experiences, really hybrid learning environments, where students can receive all kinds of experiences and cultivate these qualities that are more standardized, let’s say, type of learning is not able to provide, including, for example, entrepreneurial education. So all of these requires a much more diverse learning environments.

There is an old proverb in Africa that says, it takes a village to raise a child. It’s like the whole village needs to interact with the child to really make a child a human being. Something similar is happening in our education. We need like a whole ecosystem of many, many players, interact with our learners to really

cultivate the holistic learning, develop all these human abilities that are required to work in this very complex and sophisticated economy and rapidly evolving economy, this VUCA world. We need, that’s why we need ecosystems. I appreciate how that report looks at sort of concentric circles of ecosystems that are very personal, they’re place-based, but they recognize their role in a planetary system.

Is that right? Yes, and actually it also talks about the fact that anyone who steps as an educator into a job of creating or catalyzing an ecosystem needs to look at these three levels, recognizing that it’s being done for a community like myself, my group, my team, my family, to live in a different environment which is much more human-friendly, supportive, regenerative,

and so on. I want a specific change to happen in my community to make a society that is more just to address all kinds of injustices and really provide opportunities to learners to really move to a more just society, to regenerate nature, to create opportunities for urban learners. That’s like a local.

And then we are talking about this as a more civilizational shift because we spoke with you, Tom, just a few minutes ago about these challenges such as climate crisis and whatnot that are threatening the future of our civilization. So part of the response, not the whole response, is to create different models of learning that can hold and search for responses on the local and global level.

So we need these diversified and network-based systems of learning that are searching for new approaches and new ways of being, living, acting. We’re talking to a Russian teacher, Pavloksha, about his learning ecosystems report. Pavlo, the report is a practical guide for ecosystem tribalists. I love that.

It’s a case study of about 40 ecosystems around the world. Could you give us an example of a healthy learning ecosystem? I know you’ve case studied so many, but give us one or two good examples to illustrate what an ecosystem is. Well, I think they’re really quite diverse.

So we think about, for example, a system that is based in Colombia done by Luis Camargo, who actually is not only about creating the network of schools that are learning these all kinds of green skills. He is basing the whole education on what they call nature-based learning. So what Luis has created is create these programs that connect communities of schools

for learners from these schools to really go on all kinds of nature-connecting experiences and then creating different types of projects in the city of Bogota in Colombia. And why is it an ecosystem, essentially? Because it depends on all kinds of partnerships to really work. It depends on partnerships with many schools.

It depends on partnerships with providers of resources that really can allow students to do these kinds of projects, including municipalities. And really students start by, and also partnerships with rural communities, where they would go for deep connection experiences with nature. So he has some kind of essence, this pedagogy that he wants to promote.

He uses it to really create unique experiences for students. And then that exists as a kind of complementary education that starts to connect with the whole community of learners and schools and social leaders and municipalities into some kind of social change. So yeah, I could give another, I think another very inspiring example from India is this group called Dream a Dream. I think they were highlighted as a top educational innovation in 2018 by Finnish group 100.

So they have this kind of experience. They provide to, let’s say, poor slice of population in Mumbai and also in other Indian states to offer children opportunities for cultivating what they call existential skills or life skills that will allow them then to thrive as they become adults and really to find jobs and so on. And it all, it actually works as a network of different like opportunities where these learners

start to learn and connecting them to, let’s say, practical experiences to adult mentors to supporting peer circle and so on. So it’s a really diverse experience, again, following that proverb of the whole village raising a child. But this is where the village is much more intentionally orchestrated to really create that holistic experience. And that allows them to actually, I think they already reached out to over a million kids in India

really changing their life trajectory, opening up opportunities for them. Bob, the last question is, you seem to be a frantic learner. You’re a very productive human being. How do you keep learning? How do you stay focused even the middle of a global pandemic?

What is keeping you learning and productive? Well, first of all, I would say I’m really grateful to this last year. I think I was learning more than ever. I was working with several mentors that I found through this year. Most of them I work with remotely.

With remotely, they’re international mentors on different aspects, including my health. I started to learn guitar. And again, I never learned how to play guitar. I’m now actively learning guitar. And again, I’m learning online in an online platform.

I’m learning all kinds of things in a remote way. I think it’s really online gives us so many opportunities to connect with best experts around the world. What keeps me motivated? Well, I really think that this learning really opens up new opportunities for us. Because when we learn things, like for example, take the example of guitar, I love listening to music.

Now I can play music. I can finally kind of all my favorite tunes instead of like just singing along with a singer. I can really play them. And it’s like so exciting. And I’m thinking about all other things I’m learning to really open up opportunities for myself.

That’s why I’m so inspired by education. I think it’s actually the best, let’s say human empowering tool on one hand. On the other hand, for our society, for civilization, it’s also changing the faith potentially. Because when we’re thinking about the wrong trajectories of our society and the right trajectories, that will kind of lead us into more thriving, more inspiring future.

Education is the key to really program the ones that are more inspiring and more life embracing. Pavel Luxe, I wish I could go to dinner with you there at Tolstoy’s Estate. We really appreciate you being with us this evening. Pavel is the author of Future Skills for the 2020 and a great report on learning ecosystems.

Pavel, what a treat to reconnect. Thank you. Thank you, Tom. I really enjoyed it as always. Thanks so much for Pavel for joining us again on this week’s episode.

We appreciate his leadership in the field of futurism, a valuable calibration for what we should be prioritizing for learners. If you want to hear another conversation with him, be sure to check out Episode 223 on educating for purpose, potential, and the planet. All right, that’s it for today, listeners.

Remember to hit subscribe so you get each weekly episode ready to go on Wednesdays and be sure to leave us a review. For the Getting Smart podcast, this is Jessica signing off.