按: 读完这篇文章，你将了解到社交技能在未来社会的重要性(也许是人类比机器人为数不多有优势的地方之一)；看到有前瞻性的国外大公司包括UTC、微软、AT＆T等正想方设法培训自己的员工来增强竞争力；以及对自己的思维过程更加有意识能够提升学习能力(by the way, 冥想是提高此元认知能力的有效途径之一)

阅读时思考:
如何用英语表达:

• 想出
• 让人类相形见绌
• 非常重视
• 提升自己
• 没有附加条件
• 修订标准
• 员工流失
• 胡萝卜加大棒
• 发起倡议

终身学习

Cognition switch

What employers can do to encourage their workers to retrain

Companies are embracing learning as a core skill
Jan 14th 2017

1. A STRANGE-LOOKING SMALL room full of vintage furniture—an armchair, a chest of drawers, a table—was being built in the middle of Infosys’s Palo Alto offices when your correspondent visited in November. Tweed jackets hung from a clothes rack; a piano was due to be delivered shortly. The structure was rough and unfinished. And that, according to Sanjay Rajagopalan, was largely the point.
   1）当你们的记者在11月访问时，Infosys的Palo Alto办公室正在建造一个充满古董家具的房间，一个扶手椅，一个带抽屉的衣橱，一张桌子。花呢夹克挂在衣架上；一架钢琴将很快运来。整个结构是半成品、未完成的。根据Sanjay Rajagopalan的说法，这在很大程度上正是要点所在。

印孚瑟斯（Infosys Ltd），是一家总部在印度班加罗尔的一家全球技术服务公司。这家公司在2011年财富印度500强中列第27名。Infosys在29个国家设有办公室并在印度、美国、中国、澳大利亚、英国、加拿大、日本等地设有研发中心。公司在超过30个国家提供商业咨询、技术、工程及外包服务。

2. Mr Rajagopalan is head of research and design at the Indian business-services firm. He is a disciple of “design thinking”, a problem-solving methodology rooted in observation of successful innovators. His goal is an ambitious one: to turn a firm that built a global offshoring business by following client specifications into one that can set the terms of its projects for itself.
3. Rajagopalan先生是印度商业服务公司的研究和设计主管。他是“设计思维”的拥护者。“设计思考”是一个解决问题的方法，植根于成功创新者们的观察。他有一个雄心勃勃的目标：把公司从遵循客户规范而建立的全球离岸外包业务的公司，变成可以为自己设定合同条款的公司。

** 设计思考（Design Thinking）**是一个以人为本的解决问题方法论，透过从人的需求出发，为各种议题寻求创新解决方案，并创造更多的可能性。IDEO设计公司总裁蒂姆·布朗曾在《哈佛商业评论》定义：“设计思考是以人为本的设计精神与方法，考虑人的需求、行为，也考量科技或商业的可行性。”
设计思考，与分析式思考（analytical thinking）相较之下，在“理性分析”层面是有很大不同的，设计思考是一种较为“感性分析”，并注重“了解”、“发想”、“构思”、“执行”的过程。目前多数教学都将设计思考过程，浓缩成五大步骤“同理心”、“需求定义”、“创意动脑”、“制作原型”、“实际测试”。
——来自维基百科(更多介绍参考: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%A8%AD%E8%A8%88%E6%80%9D%E8%80%83)

3. Design thinking emphasises action over planning and encourages its followers to look at problems through the eyes of the people affected. Around 100,000 Infosys employees have gone through a series of workshops on it. The first such workshop sets the participants a task: for example, to improve the experience of digital photography. That involves moving from the idea of making a better camera to considering why people value photographs in the first place, as a way of capturing memories. As ideas flow, people taking part in the workshops immediately start producing prototypes with simple materials like cardboard and paper. “The tendency is to plan at length before building,” says Mr Rajagopalan. “Our approach is to build, build, build, test and then plan.”
   3）设计思考强调基于计划的行动，鼓励其追随者通过受影响的人的视角看待问题。大约100,000名Infosys员工参加了一系列的研讨会。第一个这样的研讨会为参与者设置了一个任务：例如，改善数字摄影的体验。这涉及到从制作一个更好的相机到思考最初为什么人们觉得照片有价值，作为一种捕捉记忆的方式。随着想法不断产生，参加工作坊的人们立即开始用简单的材料（如纸板和纸）制作原型。 Rajagopalan先生说：“这种趋势是在构建前进行长时间的计划。 我们的方法是构建，构建，构建，测试，然后计划。”

Prototype（制作原型）:在设计流程之中，采用制作一个原型（Prototype）之意，透过一个具体的呈现方法，可以作为团队内部或是与使用者沟通的工具，并可透过做的过程让思考更加明确，是一个动手思考的过程。此外，可以由简略的草图呈现，进一步不断修整进而达到更完美的效果。在本阶段的产出结果，会作为测试之用。——维基百科

4. That baffling structure in Palo Alto was another teaching tool. Mr Rajagopalan had charged a small team with reimagining the digital retail experience. Instead of coming up with yet another e-commerce site, they were experimenting with technologies to liven up a physical space. (If a weary shopper sat in the chair, say, a pot of tea on an adjacent table would automatically brew up.) The construction of the shop prototype in Infosys’s offices was being documented so that employees could see design thinking in action.

5. 在帕洛阿尔托那令人困惑的结构是另一种教学工具。 Rajagopalan先生指示一个小团队重新想象数字化零售体验。他们不是想出另一个电子商务网站，而是尝试使用技术来充实物理空间。 （如果一个疲惫的购物者坐在椅子上，例如，一个相邻桌子上的一壶茶会自动煮开。）Infosys的办公室的店铺原型的建造过程被记录，使员工可以看到设计思维运用在实际中。

6. Infosys is grappling with a vital question: what do people need to be good at to succeed in their work? Whatever the job, the answer is always going to involve some technical and specific skills, based on knowledge and experience of a particular industry. But with design thinking, Infosys is focusing on “foundational skills” like creativity, problem-solving and empathy. When machines can put humans to shame in performing the routine job-specific tasks that Infosys once took offshore, it makes sense to think about the skills that computers find harder to learn.
   5）Infosys正在解决一个重要的问题：人们需要做什么才能在他们的工作中取得成功？无论什么工作，答案总是涉及一些技术和具体的技能，这些基于一个特定行业的知识和经验。但是在设计思维方面，Infosys专注于“基础技能”，如创造力，解决问题的能力和同理心。当机器可以在执行日常工作任务(Infosys曾经把它们离岸外包)时让人类相形见绌时，去思考一些计算机难以学习的技能就变得有意义了。

7. David Deming of Harvard University has shown that the labour market is already rewarding people in occupations that require social skills. Since 1980 growth in employment and pay has been fastest in professions across the income scale that put a high premium on social skills (see chart).

8. 哈佛大学的David Deming表示，劳动力市场已经在奖励那些需要社交技能的职业。自1980年以来，在整个收入范围中，非常重视社交技能的职业就业和薪酬的增长是最快的。

9. Social skills are important for a wide range of jobs, not just for health-care workers, therapists and others who are close to their customers. Mr Deming thinks their main value lies in the relationship between colleagues: people who can divide up tasks quickly and effectively between them form more productive teams. If work in future will increasingly be done by contractors and freelancers, that capacity for co-operation will become even more important. Even geeks have to learn these skills. Ryan Roslansky, who oversees LinkedIn’s push into online education, notes that many software engineers are taking management and communications courses on the site in order to round themselves out.
   7）社交技能对于许多工作都非常重要，不仅仅是对卫生保健工作者、治疗师和其他需要接近客户的工作来说。Deming先生认为它们的主要价值在于同事之间的关系：能够快速有效地分配任务的人们会形成更有效率的团队。如果将来的工作越来越多地由承包商和自由职业者完成，那么合作能力将变得更加重要。即使极客也要学习这些技能。负责LinkedIn推广在线教育的 Ryan Roslansky注意到许多软件工程师正在网站上学习管理和沟通的课程来提升自己。

Building a better learner

8. Another skill that increasingly matters in finding and keeping a job is the ability to keep learning. When technology is changing in unpredictable ways, and jobs are hybridising, humans need to be able to pick up new skills. At Infosys, Mr Rajagopalan emphasises “learning velocity”—the process of going from a question to a good idea in a matter of days or weeks. Eric Schmidt, now executive chairman of Alphabet, a tech holding company in which Google is the biggest component, has talked of Google’s recruitment focus on “learning animals”. Mark Zuckerberg, one of Facebook’s founders, sets himself new personal learning goals each year.
   8）另一个在寻找和保持工作中日益重要的技能是继续学习的能力。当技术以不可预测的方式改变，工作正在变得混合型时，人类需要能够获得新的技能。在Infosys，Rajagopalan强调“学习速度”—— 在几天或几个星期内从一个问题转变为一个好主意的过程。Alphabet(谷歌是这家技术控股公司的最大的组成部分)的执行主席埃里克•施密特（Eric Sc​​hmidt)谈到谷歌的“学习动物”的招聘。 Facebook的创始人马克·扎克伯格（Mark Zuckerberg）每年都设定自己新的个人学习目标。

9. An emphasis on learning has long been a hallmark of United Technologies (UTC), a conglomerate whose businesses include Pratt & Whitney, a maker of aircraft engines, and Otis, a lift manufacturer. Since 1996 UTC has been running a programme under which its employees can take part-time degrees and have tuition fees of up to $12,000 a year paid for them, no strings attached. Employers often balk at training staff because they might leave for rivals, taking their expensively gained skills with them. But Gail Jackson, the firm’s vice-president of human resources, takes a different view. “We want people who are intellectually curious,” she says. “It is better to train and have them leave than not to train and have them stay.”
   9）强调学习一直是联合技术（UTC）的标志，联合技术公司的业务包括飞机发动机制造商Pratt＆Whitney和电梯制造商Otis。自1996年以来，UTC一直在执行一个计划，根据该计划，员工可以获得兼职学位，每年支付高达12000美元的学费，没有附加条件。雇主经常拒绝培训工作人员，因为他们可能离开去竞争对手那里，把他们花大价钱获得的技能带走。但是，该公司人力资源副总裁盖尔·杰克逊则持不同观点。 “我们希望在智力上有好奇心的人，”她说。 “最好培训他们即使他们有天离开，好过于不培训而让他们留下。”

10. Such attitudes are becoming more common. When Satya Nadella took over as boss of Microsoft in 2014, he drew on the work of Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University, to push the firm’s culture in a new direction. Ms Dweck divides students into two camps: those who think that ability is innate and fixed (dampening motivation to learn) and those who believe that abilities can be improved through learning. This “growth mindset” is what the firm is trying to encourage. It has amended its performance-review criteria to include an appraisal of how employees have learned from others and then applied that knowledge. It has also set up an internal portal that integrates Lynda, the training provider bought by LinkedIn (which Microsoft itself is now buying).
    10）这种态度越来越普遍。当Satya Nadella在2014年接手微软的老板位子时，他援引了斯坦福大学心理学教授Carol Dweck的著作，将公司的文化推向新的方向。 Dweck女士将学生分成两个类：那些认为能力是天生的和固定的（抑制的学习动机）和那些相信能力可以通过学习提高的人。这种“成长心态”是这家企业正在努力鼓励的。微软修订了其绩效考核标准，加入了对员工如何从他人那里学习知识并应用该知识的评估。它还设立了一个内部门户，集成了由LinkedIn购买的培训提供商Lynda（微软本身现在正在购买LinkedIn）。

11. AT&T, a telecoms and media firm with around 300,000 employees, faces two big workforce problems: rapidly changing skills requirements in an era of big data and cloud computing, and constant employee churn that leaves the company having to fill 50,000 jobs a year. Recruiting from outside is difficult, expensive and liable to cause ill-feeling among existing staff. The firm’s answer is an ambitious plan to reskill its own people.
    11）AT＆T是一家拥有大约30万员工的电信和媒体公司，面临两大劳动力方面的问题：大数据和云计算时代快速变化的技能需求，以及员工不断的流失，使公司不得不每年填补50,000个工作空缺。从外部招聘是困难的、昂贵的，并且可能导致现有工作人员的不适。这家公司的答案是制定一个雄心勃勃的计划来重新培训自己的雇员。

12. Employees each have a career profile that they maintain themselves, which contains a record of their skills and training. They also have access to a database called “career intelligence”, which shows them the jobs on offer within the company, what skills they require and how much demand there is for them. The firm has developed short courses called nanodegrees with Udacity, the MOOC provider, and is also working with universities on developing course curriculums. Employees work in their own time to build their skills. But AT&T applies both carrot and stick to encourage them, by way of generous help with tuition fees (totalling $30m in 2015) for those who take courses and negative appraisal ratings for those who show no interest.
    12）每个员工都有一个自己留存的职业档案，其中包含他们的技能和培训记录。他们还可以访问一个名为“职业智能”的数据库，上面显示公司内提供的工作，他们需要什么技能和对他们的技能要求有多少。该公司已经与MOOC提供商Udacity开发了名为nanodegrees的短期课程，并与大学合作开发各种课程。员工在自己的业余时间来学习技能。但AT＆T 运用胡萝卜加大棒来鼓励他们，通过慷慨地资助学费（2015年共计3000万美元）给那些上课的员工，对那些没有兴趣的员工给予负面评价等级。

13. As continued learning becomes a corporate priority, two questions arise. First, is it possible for firms to screen candidates and employees on the basis of curiosity, or what psychologists call “need for cognition”? Getting through university is one very rough proxy for this sort of foundational skill, which helps explain why so many employers stipulate degrees for jobs which on the face of it do not require them.
    13）随着继续学习成为公司的优先事项，两个问题出现了。首先，公司是否有可能根据好奇心或心理学家所说的“认知需求”来测试面试者和员工？大学毕业是具备这种基础技能的一个非常粗略的代表，这有助于解释为什么这么多雇主规定工作所需的学位，尽管表面上看并不需要这些学位。

Curiouser and curiouser

14. More data-driven approaches are also being tried. Manpower, a human-resources consultancy, is currently running trials on an app that will score individuals on their “learnability”. Knack, a startup, offers a series of apps that are, in effect, gamified psychological tests. In Dashi Dash, for example, participants play the part of waiters and are asked to take the orders of customers on the basis of (often hard to read) expressions. As more and more customers arrive, the job of managing the workflow gets tougher. Every decision and every minute change in strategy is captured as a data point and sent to the cloud, where machine-learning algorithms analyse players’ aptitudes against a reference population of 25,000 people. An ability to read expressions wins points for empathy; a decision always to serve customers in the order in which they arrive in the game, for example, might serve as an indicator of integrity. Intellectual curiosity is one of the traits that Knack tests for.
    14）更多的数据驱动方法正在被尝试着。 Manpower是一家人力资源咨询公司，目前正在对一个应用程序进行测试，该应用程序将对个人的“学习能力”进行评分。 Knack，一个创业公司，提供了一系列的应用程序，实际上是游戏化的心理测试。例如，在Dashi Dash，参与者扮演服务员的角色，并被要求在（通常很难读懂的）表情的基础上接受客户的订单。随着越来越多的客户到达，管理工作流的工作变得更加困难。战略中的每一个决策和每一分钟变化都被捕获为一个数据点，并被发送到云端，其中机器学习算法以25,000人的数据为参考，分析玩家的能力。读表情的能力赢得同情这一项的分；例如，总是根据客户在游戏中到达的顺序为他们提供服务可以作为诚实的指标。知识上的好奇心也是Knack测试的特质之一。

15. The second question is whether it is possible to train people to learn. Imaging techniques are helping unlock what goes on in the mind of someone who is curious. In a study published in 2014 in Neuron, a neuroscience journal, participants were first asked to rate their curiosity to learn the answers to various questions. Later they were shown answers to those questions, as well as a picture of a stranger’s face; finally, they were tested on their recall of the answers and given a face-recognition test. Greater curiosity led to better retention on both tests; brain scans showed increased activity in the mesolimbic dopamine system, a reward pathway, and in the hippocampus, a region that matters for forming new memories.

16. 第二个问题是是否可以培训人们学习。成像技术正在帮助解锁有好奇心的人脑子里在想什么。在2014年在神经科学杂志Neuron上发表的一项研究中，参与者首先被要求评价他们学习各种问题的答案的好奇心。接着向他们展示了这些问题的答案，以及一个陌生人的脸的图片；最后，给他们进行回忆答案的测试，并进行面部识别测试。更大的好奇心导致两个测试中表现出更好的记忆力；脑扫描显示在中脑边缘多巴胺系统（大脑奖励途径）和海马体（一种对形成新记忆有重要意义的区域）中的活性增加。

17. It is too early to know whether traits such as curiosity can be taught. But it is becoming easier to turn individuals into more effective learners by making them more aware of their own thought processes. Hypotheses about what works in education and learning have become easier to test because of the rise of online learning. MIT has launched an initiative to conduct interdisciplinary research into the mechanics of learning and to apply the conclusions to its own teaching, both online and offline. It uses its own online platforms, including a MOOC co-founded with Harvard University called edX, to test ideas. When MOOC participants were required to write down their plans for undertaking a course, for example, they were 29% more likely to complete the course than a control group who did not have to do so.
    16）现在还不知道好奇心这样的特质能否被教授。但是，通过使人们更加意识到自己的思维过程，将他们变成更有效的学习者变得越来越容易。由于在线学习的兴起，使得教育和学习中起作用的假设变得更容易被测试。麻省理工学院发起了一项倡议，对学习机制进行跨学科研究，并将结论应用于其在线和离线的教学。它使用自己的在线平台，包括与哈佛大学共同创办的一个MOOC——edX来测试想法。例如，当MOOC参与者被要求写下他们的课程计划，他们完成课程的可能性比没有这样做的控制组多出29％。

18. Information about effective learning strategies can be personalised, too. The Open University, a British distance-learning institution, already uses dashboards to monitor individual students’ online behaviour and performance. Knewton, whose platform captures data on 10m current American students, recommends personalised content to them. Helping people to be more aware of their own thought processes when they learn makes it more likely they can acquire new skills later in life.
    17）有效学习策略的信息也可以个性化。英国远程学习机构“开放大学”已经使用仪表板来监控学生个体的在线行为和表现。 Knewton，其平台捕获1000万当前美国学生的数据，向他们推荐个性化内容。帮助人们在学习时更了解自己的思维过程使他们更有可能在之后的生活中获得新的技能。
    This article appeared in the Special report section of the print edition under the headline “Cognition switch”

原文出处：经济学人网站

译者：安东Anton

本译文仅供个人研习、欣赏语言之用，谢绝任何转载及用于任何商业用途。本译文所涉法律后果均由本人承担。本人同意简书平台在接获有关著作权人的通知后，删除文章。