In the complex world of people development, understanding and anticipating trends is crucial. As Amy Webb, CEO of the Future Today Institute, wisely reminds us, “The future doesn’t simply arrive fully formed overnight but emerges step by step.”
To help our firm and its leaders navigate the future of learning and people development, our Learning and Development (L&D) team drives innovative development approaches for McKinsey colleagues through research, experiments, and academic partnerships. We also track development and technology trends across industries, helping us both influence our leaders’ perspectives and cultivate a generation of futurists within our firm.
Here’s a look at the development themes we are tracking in 2024:
Creating a cohesive people function operating structure
Our research suggests that despite knowing the potential upside of people function integration, only a small percentage of organizations are making meaningful efforts to “de-silo” these functions. A cohesive operating structure with open access to data can unlock the ability to predict changes in workforce needs, increase evidence-based decision-making, and automate how skills are identified, assessed, and verified.
Our firm is working on holistic approaches to solving organization-wide people challenges, such as improving how colleagues give and receive developmental feedback. This—like most development challenges—is not just a learning problem. While the skill level of our colleagues has an impact, a thriving feedback culture is built on many other factors, such as leadership role modeling, reinforcement mechanisms, and psychological safety. A cross-functional team of experts—from learning, leadership, professional development, and technology—came together to diagnose the health of our feedback culture and design interventions that would minimize friction and make giving and receiving feedback easier across the firm.
Disruptive impact of emerging tech
Development professionals are uniquely positioned to lead the ethical and thoughtful use of emerging technologies to enhance human intelligence and expedite skills acquisition. Although many forms of emerging tech require monitoring, in the short term, gen AI is likely to prove the most disruptive. In response , we have observed a pattern for people development professionals that can be applied to all emerging-technology situations: fluency building, upskilling, and risk mitigation. It has become imperative to have a proactive and sustainable approach to discovering new tools and forming a point of view on how they could be used productively or what consequences they might present. This can look like listening to signals (for example, monitoring the vendor landscape), continuous-learning activities (for example, researching and teaching others), safe experimentation (for example, prototyping), and risk management (for example, studying tech regulations).
Our L&D team had been tracking AI’s potential impacts for some time before gen AI became widely available. As its adoption accelerated, we had already built fluency in some team members, and they were prepared to build skills in others. Over just a few months, we facilitated open forums for questions, curated relevant content, identified practical applications, developed prototypes, and collaborated with experts in fields such as legal and compliance to establish safety measures for experimentation. Thanks to these efforts, most of our colleagues now possess a robust understanding of gen AI, and we operate in a risk-aware environment where we can deploy AI tools to tackle our most pressing challenges effectively.
Supporting and nurturing people developers
Even with the proliferation of gen AI, employees continue to seek human-centered development, care, and authenticity. McKinsey’s research found that most middle managers are overburdened by organizational bureaucracy, which hinders them from fostering their employees’ growth and well-being. More than half of managers report feeling overwhelmed by the growth of their responsibilities.
Our team responded by studying the middle managers’ leaders—not the managers themselves, focusing on the role senior leaders play in establishing safe and equitable environments that foster day-to-day apprenticeship. In partnership with our People Analytics and Measurement team, we interviewed over a dozen senior leaders who excel as people developers and deconstructed their behaviors and mindsets. We found that they modeled intentional learning and vulnerability and championed nonhierarchal apprenticeship, leading to distributed learning across the team, increased individual performance, and less burden on middle managers. We’re now using these insights to improve the environment around our middle managers.
Building futurist mindsets and muscles
It is crucial for people professionals to possess futurist competency, enabling them not only to proactively anticipate trends and disruptions that could impact our fields but also to evaluate potential impacts. This future-oriented perspective informs strategic planning. Our trends analysis work exemplifies how we bring this competency to life. Projects like these cultivate futurist capabilities, enhancing our experts’ skills and ensuring our strategic initiatives are guided by the latest predictive insights. This investment in our team’s development is a cornerstone of our strategy.
Developing futurist competencies within the organization is crucial for anticipating trends and disruptions. This proactive and strategic approach is essential for transforming people professionals into agile, innovative partners, driving resilience and growth across the organization, and ultimately securing a competitive edge in an ever-evolving landscape.