WORK INTELLIGENCE
The capacity to navigate your professional life with purpose
Work Intelligence begins with your perception of work: your philosophy of, and attitude towards, work as a phenomenon and the meaning you attach to it in your whole life.
For one person, work is a way to make money and make possible the life they want. For another, it must come from the heart and resonate with their values and their philosophy of life. There is no right or wrong. Someone with Work Intelligence understands her own attitude to work and what it means in her life.
“Work takes up a third of our daily existence. For many professionals, it takes far more: ten, twelve or fourteen hours a day, and the weekends too. Yet how many of us have ever asked what work actually means in our lives? Without that question, we float like something in a river, going wherever the current takes us. Work Intelligence is the capacity to author your working life instead.”
Why does Work Intelligence matter now?
The nature of work is changing.
Generative AI is reshaping what work is. The professionals I work with follow the news closely, and they are deeply concerned about what will happen to them, to their services and to their work once generative AI arrives at scale.
Communication is no longer optional.
In a high-speed environment, with more information and more interruptions, being a people person is not a luxury any more. Almost everything we produce now depends on many more people than it did twenty years ago.
The people we serve have changed.
A doctor I coach told me her patients now arrive having consulted ChatGPT and podcasts, ready to negotiate. Without new skills of dialogue, empathy and patience, she says, a doctor will fail.
Three dimensions of Work Intelligence
Your attitude to work
What role does work play in your entire life? Is it a financial arrangement, or something more meaningful? Is your working life aligned with your values and your philosophy of life? Does it correspond to your idea of a good and fulfilling life?
Work in a changing world
Irrespective of your attitude, work is changing as an objective phenomenon: in society, in culture, and above all through generative AI. Understanding what is happening to work in the world, outside your control, and your stance towards it, is the second dimension.
Your mindset, skills and tools
The practical side: what you need to respond to the demands of contemporary work. Communication that is concise and honest; cooperation across departments; empathy, because life is tough for everyone; verbal fluency, now an absolute necessity; and the short dialogue, a conversational genre we did not have before
Signs that Work Intelligence is underdeveloped
You are carried by the current.
You float like something in a river, and your environment authors your working life, rather than you.
You bounce from job to job,
from opportunity to opportunity, without a sense of direction.
You feel nervous about the future.
So much is happening, so much knowledge is being produced, and you fear missing out, without knowing how to be ready.
Nothing feels in your control,
and it is draining you, mentally and physically.
You love your work, but it has taken over.
Your flourishing at work is real, yet other parts of your life are missing.
What changes when you develop Work Intelligence?
You author your working life.
Work has meaning when you are an active participant in it, not merely an object carried along. You stop following the current and start choosing your direction.
You think about your life strategically.
You have a sense of direction, in line with your values and the way you want to live. And you are prepared for the future, rather than overtaken by it.
You flourish.
Flourishing is the cradle in which all three dimensions come together. It has a felt quality: a kind of ease and relief, like someone who knows how to skate and is simply gliding. There are still difficulties, but there are moments of flow. Many people do not even know that they should flourish at work at all.
You can see your environment clearly.
Your recognise when it does not allow you to flourish and you decide what to do about it.
Beyond the three dimensions of Work Intelligence lies something deeper:
Authentic Self-Articulation at work. Not simply communicating well, but articulating your essence: your talents, your gifts and your personality. The question is whether your workplace allows them to be expressed. Many people struggle with this.
How we work together:
I work with professionals who are hardworking and ambitious, who have carved their own way towards success. For many of them, work is their whole identity; Work Intelligence almost equals Life Intelligence. They sense that a great deal is happening, feel they are not catching up, and want to be ready.
I begin by listening. Then I invite clients to picture their ideal working life, five years from today, almost as in a meditation, so that the rational mind steps aside. We examine that picture together, in the light of their Philosophy of Life and of where the world is heading.