To be Truly Indispensable, Make Yourself Dispensable

In the current age of massive technological disruption, the path to success as a knowledge worker is not to work to become indispensable, but to work to become dispensable.

In the long run a robot or even just an algorithm is probably going to come along and make us all completely dispensable, but until then, here’s a few things we can do as knowledge workers to stave off deskilling in our increasingly automated world, and also manage the ever increasing amount of information available.

Forget Indispensable…

We all want to be needed. It feels good. But sometimes we go about becoming indispensable in scarcity-driven ways.

It’s maybe trying to look busy and important, or being involved with everything or across everything. Maybe micromanaging. Maybe not bothering to fix the root cause, because we know how to do the fire fighting when it comes up. Maybe leaving that long tedious processes in place that only we know how to maintain. Maybe not commenting code or documenting systems and processes. Maybe hoarding knowledge instead of sharing it with others.

This is scarcity driven behaviour, and yes we can all probably recall scenarios where being indispensable in this way has been rewarded. But as a knowledge worker in this age of technology…