The Digital Mindset will be the fuel fo restart. I have good and bad news. I’ll start with the bad one: it nothing will go back to being as it was, but I think this doesn’t come as news to you, and so it’s bad news up to a certain point. The good thing is that: you had a taste of how technology can help you in your everyday work because perhaps it is not always necessary to travel by car for km on end just for a meeting and because via zoom you have to strive to be effective in 40 minutes otherwise, if you don’t have a subscription, the line drops. All right, let’s start from here now. In this period, free training on the internet has increased not only in terms of offer but also of quality and in front of you you have a buffet of pastries of all kinds, you are spoiled for choice. Let’s start from here, from the first agility of the Digital Mindset: the Behavioral Agility, the agility that allows you to have technology at your service and that is often confused with the Digital Mindset, when instead it is only one of the five agility that you need to manage your future at best, whether you are a student, a worker, an unemployed person or retired.
Six skewers to eat the whale
The number six has been dear to me since the day I discovered that exactly six seconds pass between an instinctive reaction and a conscious one. Six miserable seconds can make a tremendous difference. In my book I write about the six years it takes to lose your job and be replaced by a Robot if we continue to face our future based on six encrusted beliefs, six subtle emotions and six harmful actions as a logical consequence of the contamination of the first two . At this point I just have to add: these six years have become six months, and now in another six we have to start again, those who get on the Hyperloop will have a nice trip but those who remain anchored to the old vintage habits are likely to remain seated on the bench of an empty station, because the steam train no longer passes.
We do not start from scratch, but from the experience of these months
If a few months ago someone had told us that we would have to manage our companies in smart-working, we would have certainly replied that it was impossible, salespeople would have replied that the customers want to see you, and those who train would have said that you can only do micro- 5 minutes pills because e-learning is not experienced as a real training. Instead, we found out, albeit with great effort, that it is feasible and that if we are forced, everyone can do it. This is exactly the point. Change seems to be possible only when something that forces us to do it takes place, with a side effect, however: we feel compelled to do it and we passively suffer it. If I asked you now, for a week, to put your watch on the opposite wrist from where you usually wear it, what do you think will happen in a week? You will put it back in its place, you will try to restore its original state. Covid19 however forces us not to restore the original state, but has also given us many ideas to reflect on. What would we have done without the technology during the complete Lockdown? Let’s be honest, wouldn’t we have gone mad if our wifi had stopped working?
Technology is like the discovery of fire. We were afraid of burning ourselves, then some steak fell on the grill and thus the restaurants were born and now we have the Delivery or Take Away through the Apps, which – considering we could not go out – didn’t exactly suck.
Now we just have to take technology seriously as something that, not only have we created, but that can also help us live better, to do it we must 1) know what technology can do 2) let technology help us to have more time to devote ourselves to what man can do better than any robot: relationships. I personally prefer to program a washing machine and play more with my son than to go to the village fountain to wash clothes.
We can find ourselves in front of a wall that seems insurmountable, or we can try to climb over it by placing a ladder next to it and climbing one step at a time without looking down so as not to get dizzy. I prefer the second mode.
The suggestions don’t matter, and recipes are not as good for everyone like for diets, but I can tell you what I find useful, you’ll think about the rest, free will is the basis of every restart. In this article I will focus on the first agility and what I would do to face an elephant that looks big: I would slice it up. I have never eaten an elephant and so I imagine Behavioral Agility as a fat whale and here come the six skewers with which I would face the mammoth animal of Behavioral Agility: the technical competence, the one that everyone confuses with the digital mindset when instead it is only one of the five agility of the Digital Mindset.
First skewer: we have to get used to schedule our activities by appointment. Queues will have to be avoided and therefore municipalities, administrations, police headquarters but also banks and insurance companies, will receive more and more exclusively by appointment. To do this you sometimes need to have a SPID or a PEC. So if before it was already a step forward to have an email now you must prepare yourself to have your SPID, your PEC and your digital signature at hand. As you have learned to create your own email or download zoom to talk to your friends, you will be able to do this too, better that you immediately begin to understand how it works in order to avoid having to figure out your retirement situation or renew your license and having to wait months for a physical appointment. Soon every service will be accessible online, so better prepare in time rather than being told: “Go to the INPS site with your Spid and you will find all the necessary information.” Better to spend a few hours now to figure out how to have a pec or get a SPID, right?
Click here to find out the top 5 ID Trends shaping 2020.
Second skewer: Contactless payments with mobile phone and Paypal account (free and connected to your credit card) for immediate transfer of money are two payment methods that you will have to get used to, quickly. In this way you will not have to withdraw money, you will not have to queue in the bank or in front of the ATM, you will not have to touch money, pos and wallet, you will further reduce a useless transmission of bacteria.
Third skewer: Take at least one course per week that improves your skills. You can’t stay behind, you can’t not read, you can’t not continuously learn, if you stop you’re out, whatever your age, nothing guarantees your employability (i.e. the ability to have and keep your job) like your learnability ( or your ability to learn continuously) and less and less companies will be able to offer you all the training you really need to keep up with the times. There are many platforms that I find particularly effective and which also strive to improve your English, since the courses are often in English. This is nothing but further evidence of what you cannot do without languages. As tired as you are and little desire that you have to attend a course in the evening it may be useful to listen to the courses in English while you go to work and watch Netflix movies in the original language, at best with subtitles so you also train cognitive agility , the one we will discuss in another article. In short, you get to kill two birds with one stone.
Some of the most interesting e-learning platforms for me: Coursera, DigitalUpdate (also courses in Italian), and Udemy (Italian and English), if you subscribe to Linkedin Premium you also have the Linkedin Learning platform available and once you have taken the course you can get a badge that goes directly to your profile on Linkedin.
Fourth skewer: help your children go beyond school books, and explore homeschooling platforms with them. Learn about a subject that both of you might like together. You can indulge yourself with many free platforms and help your child study independently as well as find interesting courses, for example, to approach computer science and technology yourself: from Kahn Academy (completely free) to Duolingo to learn languages, from BrainPop to BBC Bitesize . Create moments of exploration on the web with your children, it will help the curiosity and learning of both within what it is possible to learn today without buying school books and training his/her and your mind to exploit the resources of the web as resources of continuous learning.
Fifth skewer: social media will always be not only of morbid curiosity and ostentation of our selfies but real means of communication. Learning to use them intelligently is a fundamental skill for you as for your children. Do not simply try to limit the use of the mobile phone but support them to use mobile phones and social media as a means of sharing valuable content and formats that are also beautiful to look at and that stand out from the crowd. A course to know how to use Youtube for example with ID-tech Camp can be a useful gift and that will develop kids not only to use a social network in an intelligent way but also to speak in public. Is public speaking a sore point? There are Toastmasters: you can find them in every city and with them you can train not only to speak in public but also to do it in English. Discover on Facebook the one closest to where you live.
Sixth skewer: One App a day takes anxiety away and trains our Behavioral Agility. Download at least one App a week that you think can facilitate your life, from BookBuddy to catalog our books, to MyFoody to avoid food waste and save money, exploring the Apps helps us explore technology and find out what can be useful to us.
Learn to learn to restart
If you are still sure convinced what digital skills you need, check out what the European Union provides and what it takes to be digital citizens and then explore the Manpower PowerUdigital platform, where in collaboration with Deloitte and Intesa, eight modules (in english) are offered for free to develop eight skills digital the first of all happens by chance: learning to learn. Let’s start from here: learning to learn, from our mistakes first of all.
See you in a week with the second agility: Cognitive Agility. If, moreover, this article has intrigued you, in my book you will find insights and practical examples to live your future well.