LinkedIn enters the freelancer service marketplace: the implications

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LinkedIn has today entered the service marketplace business. This is substantial news in the rapidly evolving work landscape.

Now anyone can use LinkedIn’s ‘Open to Work’ feature at the top of their profile to indicate availability to provide services, either local or remote, across 250 pre-defined categories (shortly expanding to 500), with for now no fees (or direct invoicing) for freelancers or clients. LinkedIn’s intention is to develop the feature substantially.
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Nancy White on powerful facilitation practices: self-awareness, don’t do it alone, experiment, commitment

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Facilitation is arguably the most valuable skill in the world. If you can help people to be collectively more intelligent, you unlock vast wealth. Facilitation can also be applied to individuals, in assisting them to apply their capabilities to achieve what they want.

‘Facilitate’ means to make easier. If you can ease the path to people working well together, beautiful things can happen.

A while ago on The Virtual Excellence Show I interviewed Nancy White, recognized by many as a master facilitator in both virtual and physical spaces for the last couple of decades.

Here is a segment of our broad-ranging conversation in which Nancy shares deep insights into developing facilitation skills. Recommended! Watch the video, or read the full transcript below.
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The future of customer experience: Spotify (and most products) need a serendipity dial

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Driven by frustration with the Spotify algorithm I have just posted an Idea Submission on the Spotify community website titled Introduce a serendipity dial. What I wrote is copied below, click on the link and vote it up if you like it!
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Innovation Strategy Cheat Sheet: a succinct guide to setting your innovation course

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On Friday I spoke at the Distinguished Leadership & Innovation Conference organized by the Caribbean’s premier business school Arthur Lok Jack Global School of Business.

I delivered the opening keynote on Shaping the Future of Business and also a workshop on Building and Implementing an Innovation Strategy.

Since it was a brief workshop to cover a very big topic I shared an Innovation Strategy Cheat Sheet with attendees, shown below, and as an interactive workshop took them through the issues they need to consider in creating an effective innovation strategy. Click here or on the image below to download the full page pdf.
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Responsible AI: selecting degrees of transparency and highlighting potential for bias

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As the power of AI soars, the ethics of how we use AI is becoming an increasingly pressing issue, which as a futurist I speak about frequently.

In working with the intelligent automation company Pega I have learned about some of their extremely interesting approaches to ‘Responsible AI’.
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deepmind protein folding

An evolutionary leap for life sciences: when AI transcends human crowds

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The announcement that Google’s DeepMind has won the Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction challenge is important in a number of ways.

Being able to predict a protein’s shape from its amino acid sequence could massively accelerate the development of new medicines. Speaking to Nature:
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customer service journey

Weaving together microjourneys to create compelling customer service journeys

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The phrase “customer journey” has become part of everyday business vernacular, bringing a customer-centered and design thinking perspective to the mainstream.

Customer engagement and intelligent automation company Pega uses the phrase “microjourney” to focus on the elements that comprise the customer journey. This is useful both in being able to design a better experience for customers, but also in optimizing each of those elements so they can be woven together effectively across situations existing and new.
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future of work

Five important charts to understand the future of work and society

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MIT’s Taskforce on the Work of the Future provides some of the most well-researched insights we have on the future landscape of work.

It has just released two very interesting reports: The Work of the Future: Shaping Technology and Institutions and The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines.

The latter report in particular provides deep insights and updated research on key factors driving the future landscape of work, culminating in a series of policy recommendations that should be required reading for politicians and government leaders.
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The shift from reactive to proactive to preemptive customer service

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In healthcare the biggest – and very long overdue – shift is from reactive to proactive healthcare: instead of fixing people when they get sick, helping to keep them healthy.

This idea of shifting from reactive to proactive is also being applied to customer service by the very interesting enterprise technology vendor Pega , which pushes it further to frame “preemptive” customer service, avoiding any need for customers to seek assistance.
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