Outcomes from Harvard Kennedy School Fellowship, 2018-2019

As my 2018-19 DigitalHKS fellowship with the Harvard Kennedy School focused on the Future of Work comes to a formal close this week I wanted to take a moment to share a consolidated list of the resulting products publicly released to date.

This fellowship has been an incredibly productive and informative chapter in my life, allowing me to spend nearly two years working with amazing thought leaders, a world class fellowship manager (Vanessa Rhinesmith), and my exceptional research assistant (Carlos Teixeira) to experiment with new methods for exploring and developing solutions for the implications of the future of work, workplaces, and workforces on society. Specifically:

  • In collaboration with Deloitte’s Center for Government Insights (Bill Eggers, Amrita Datar), we developed tools and methods to redesign work for the future, with a focus on the public sector, including:

    • A step-by-step guide to optimize human-machine collaboration in the public sector.

    • A collection of hypothetical government jobs of the future, that envision how government work could practically become higher impact by leveraging technology, workforce and workplace trends.

    • A workshop approach that walks public sector organizations through a process to visualize the impact of technology and trends on work to empower organizations, employees, and individuals to create the future of work.

  • In collaboration with the Stanford Cyber Initiative (Dan Correa), IDEO CoLab (Susan O’Malley, Becca Carroll and Joanne Cheung), and non-affiliated thought leaders (Megan Brewster) we developed tools and methods, by applying design thinking and policy entrepreneurship practices, to develop future of work policy solutions. Specifically:

    • Convened a future of work policy and prototyping makeathon to develop interdisciplinary and cross-sector policy solutions to enable Americans to thrive in this emerging, dynamic future work environment. (A JOINT REPORT describing the methods and outcomes is in development and will be released in Fall/Winter 2019)

  • Delivered plenary remarks and keynotes on the future of work across the globe at events including:

    • Boston, MA: MIT’s EmTech NEXT 2018 (Video)

    • Melbourne, Australia: University of Melbourne’s Center for Workplace Leadership’s Future of Work Summit 2018 (Video)

    • Glasgow, Scotland: Venture Fest CanDo Innovation Summit 2019 (November 2019)

This topic has become a passion that I expect to stay engaged in and will increasingly seek opportunities to work more intentionally on. I look forward helping to shape the fourth industrial revolution in a positive direction through investments in new capabilities and marketplaces supporting better work as well as intentional interdisciplinary and cross sector collaborations.

(Note/ Disclaimer: The digitalHKS fellowship items described in this note have been part-time. They have been conducted outside of, and unaffiliated with, my full-time duties at NASA Headquarters which I continued throughout the fellowship period and will continue after the conclusion of this fellowship.)