Hello and welcome to another episode of the Working Conversations podcast where we talk all things leadership, business, communication and the future of work. I'm your host, Dr. Janel Anderson.

What if I told you that the future of work isn't about humans versus machines, but about humans doing more of what we're uniquely good at and letting the machines do the rest? You see, it's easy to get caught up in the fear driven headlines that AI is coming for your job, automation will wipe out entire industries and soon we'll all be obsolete. But what if that's not the full story? What if the real opportunity isn't replacement, it's reinforcement or augmentation?

Well, today we're diving into a powerful new framework out of MIT School of Management, the Sloan School that challenges the dominant narrative of AI and its threat to human work. It's called the EPOCH framework and it lays out five core areas where humans outperform AI. Not just now, but likely for a very long time to come. And if we can get clear on what those five areas are, we can start to build a future of work that really does play to our strengths instead of trying to compete with AI and all of the machines that are going to come after it.

So let's get into it. The EPOCH framework was developed by MIT Sloan researchers Robert Rigobin and Isabella Loeza. I'll link up an article that summarizes their research for this framework in the show notes for this episode and you can find that @janelanderson.com/220 for episode 220. Their goal was to better understand how AI really does complement the human mind, rather than compete with the human mind and human work.

Now, EPOCH is an acronym and it stands for Empathy, Presence, Opinion, Creativity and Hope. Each of these represents a dimension of human capability that is really difficult, if not impossible for AI to replicate. And the idea is that while AI can process data faster and it can make predictions oftentimes more accurately than humans, especially based on patterns of data, there are still huge swaths of work that require something that only a human being can bring.

And let's be clear, this isn't just about the feel good soft skills. These are real business critical capabilities that drive innovation, trust and true progress at work. So let's walk through each of these five elements of the EPOCH framework and bring them to life with some concrete examples where humans really do hold a concrete advantage.

All right, empathy. We'll start with empathy, and again, we'll take them in the order of the EPOCH framework. So we start With E. Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person. And it is absolutely at the core of trust, collaboration, and emotional safety and psychological safety at work. Now, whether you're a therapist or a team leader or a customer service representative talking to somebody who's frustrated, empathy makes the interaction feel human.

Now, AI can recognize emotional tone, absolutely, but it doesn't truly feel anything. It can simulate empathy, but it doesn't have. Can even be programmed to say things like, oh, I'm sorry to hear that, but it doesn't truly feel your pain. And people know the difference. And that makes a huge difference when someone is going through something that is tough or challenging, or when teams are trying to navigate the complicated stuff like conflict and handling the future, which is coming at us faster than ever at work, or even just handling change. So let me give you a concrete example of empathy in action. And I think you'll be able to see that AI just simply can't replace it.

So imagine a nurse holding a patient's hand before a scary procedure. The nurse will make eye contact, acknowledge the person's fear, and say, hey, I know this is scary, but these surgeons have done this a million times. Maybe not a million. These surgeons have done this hundreds of times. And you're not alone. I'm going to be right here with you through the whole surgery. Now, no chatbot, no matter how advanced, can replicate the warmth and connection of that moment. That is truly empathy in action. And a machine can't do that for us. Okay, so that's empathy.

Now, the next piece of the EPOCH framework is presence. Now, if you've ever been in a workshop of mine where I give you my definition of communication, which is information times presence equals communication, you've heard me talk about the importance of presence. That is all that nuance that comes along with the information that we're communicating to the other person. Now, presence is all about feeling connected and being connected with someone else. Well, not just someone else, but being connected to the moment, obviously to the people who are sharing that moment with you, and to the larger social and relational context that this is all situated in. So presence is really about being attuned to the people and the dynamics who are in that moment with you. It includes things like reading the room, sensing what's unsaid, and building relational trust with people over time. Now, AI can process language and track sentiment, but it can't feel the energy of a conversation or adapt its approach based on the subtle shifts in tone or in our body Language. Again, this idea of reading the room. AI can't read the room. AI can't sense what's unsaid fact. AI can only respond to the prompts that you give it.

So when you think about the uniquely human characteristics that you have as a human being in sensing that presence, you start to see the distinction. Now, machines are transactional, AI is transactional. And humans, on the other hand, are relational. You and I both know that there is a big difference between reading an email and sitting across the desk from somebody in a room. When we're reading an email, a lot of times we're filling in the gaps, guessing on the presence, but at least we're guessing on it. Now, AI doesn't even have the context of a relationship with somebody in order to guess on the presence that might be represented in the text in that email. Now, when we are sitting across the table from somebody, of course we're going to catch those subtleties like the eyebrow raise, the head tilt, the pause before the person speaks, or the weird energy shift in a room when somebody says something out loud that maybe was meant for them to just keep inside their head. That's presence.

When we feel all of that. And that's one of the things that makes the difference between great leaders and great collaborators and their mediocre counterparts. So when you have that skill of reading the room, sensing what wasn't said, noticing the tilt of the head or the raised eyebrows, that's again the thing that makes the difference between great leaders and mediocre leaders. And what makes the great leaders and the great communicators among us stand out.

Now, let's just put a concrete example to this. Think about a skilled facilitator in a high stakes meeting. She notices when somebody disengages and like sits back and crosses their arms. She maybe pauses to bring them back in. She makes direct eye contact with them. She shifts her body language towards them so they know that they're welcome back into the conversation or that she knows that they have something that they're holding back on. Again, she'll pause to bring them back in. If she senses the group is getting fatigued or tired, she might shift direction. She might take an unplanned break. She might do something to mix up the situation, to re engage people, because she's sensing the presence in the room. Now, AI couldn't catch any of that. It certainly couldn't catch the exasperated sigh, the sideways glance of somebody looking over at their work colleague when they disagree, or the silence in the room that speaks Volumes. All of those things go into presence, and it is uniquely human. So presence is our second part of the EPOCH framework, and AI cannot touch that. All right.

The third piece of the EPOCH framework is opinion. Now, opinion is about judgment, especially when ethical, cultural or contextual nuance is involved. Now, as we get into things like judgment, ethics and decision making, we need to take into account the uncertainty that's inherent in a situation that requires those skills to begin with. And then we need to look at whether AI is up for the task. Now, as I mentioned before, AI is fantastic at pattern recognition, but what it can't do yet, at least not well, is weigh in on values.

It doesn't have a moral compass. It doesn't take into account lived experience, like everything that's happened to you up until right now. It doesn't take into account social values. Oh, of course, unless it's been trained to mimic them, unless the prompts that it has been given has given it that context. But even in the most built out context, I think there are subtleties in values and decision making criteria and so forth that get missed. So AI can't tell you what we should do, it can only tell you what we can do. So when judgments and decisions have that sense of legal, ethical and social implications, we really do need human judgment. So think about handling hiring decisions, crisis management, or deciding how to handle a layoff.

Those aren't just technical things, although they do have technical components to them. They are also deeply human moments and deeply human decisions that carry weight. So again, let's put an example to the opinion side of EPOCH. So a hiring manager reviewing a candidate who looks unconventional on paper, maybe a non traditional education path or large employment gaps, well, AI might automatically flag them as high risk. But a human reviewing those same resumes will see potential. They may see resilience, adaptability, creativity. They may also read the fine print and see that the person stepped off the career path for a specific reason. And then it is up to the human to use their opinions to decide if that candidate is worth bringing in, so that their opinion is rooted in judgment and context, not just in data. So opinion. The third piece of the EPOCH framework.

The fourth, and might I even say the most valuable piece of the EPOCH framework here is creativity. So creativity is more than generating content or combining ideas in new ways. It's about original thought. It's about divergent thinking, and it's about making new connections that didn't exist before. It's making unexpected leaps, breaking rules and pushing boundaries. Now, AI can generate content at Scale, no doubt, but it's drawing from what already exists. AI can remix the past, but humans imagine the future.

Again, AI is great for optimizing what's already been done, but real breakthroughs, things like the iPhone or post it notes or the musical Hamilton, those come from human minds making leaps that machines just wouldn't make. So as a concrete example here, let me use Hamilton, which I just mentioned. So think about Lin Manuel Miranda writing the musical Hamilton. Now, he fused hip hop history and Broadway into something totally original. No algorithm would have predicted that a musical about the founding fathers written in rap would become a cultural phenomenon. Now I would also say that no algorithm would be able to write until after Hamilton was written and could be used as an example by AI but prior to Hamilton being written, AI would not have come up with that because an example of that didn't exist. It wasn't there for it to model after. So it took the human mind of Lin Manuel Miranda to combine things that had never been combined before.

Now that's not remixing. That is radical creativity. Again, creativity, the fourth piece of EPOCH that AI just cannot do. And then finally, the last part of EPOCH is hope. Now, hope is uniquely human. It is our ability to envision a better future and motivate others to bring that unseen future into reality. The ability to paint a picture of what's possible and then inspire people to get after what's possible alongside them. So this is to lead others towards a vision. It's to persevere when things are really hard and still believe that change is possible.

Now, AI well, AI does not believe in anything. It doesn't inspire, it doesn't lead through uncertainty. And AI doesn't dream. That's the job of humans. And in a time of uncertainty and disruption, like we are constantly in right now, hope is a leadership skill that matters more than ever before.

Now picture this. A leader rallying a team after a tough quarter. That leader acknowledges the challenges, the pain, points everything they've been through, and then paints a picture of what's possible now that we've all endured that. And it helps people reconnect to their purpose, whether that's their innate purpose or whether that's the purpose of the team or the broader organization. It's not data that's going to get people to lean back in. It's human hope. And it works only when it's real, when it's human, when it's absolutely heartfelt. So that is the H, the hope in the EPOCH framework.

Now, each of these five capabilities, Empathy, Presence, Opinion, Creativity and Hope. Well, they are more than soft skills, they are strategic advantages. And these are the qualities that we should be cultivating in ourselves as AI takes on more and more of the technical and the transactional tasks around us. If you haven't checked out the episode I did on agentic AI recently, you're going to want to go check that one out, because agentic AI is going to handle all of those routine tasks. But if you think about what we just talked about in this EPOCH framework, agentic AI doesn't handle any of those things.

So getting around to why does this framework matter? Well, this framework gives us a roadmap and hats off to our MIT colleagues who created this framework. Because instead of obsessing over which jobs AI will steal from us, we can now ask which parts of our work will fall into these human domains. Where do we double down on our human edge? And where can we let go of some of the routine tasks that absolutely can be automated? So the researchers also developed an EPOCH index to help organizations evaluate how human dependent a particular job is and how easily it could be augmented or potentially replaced by AI. They even looked at an augmentation score that shows how AI can enhance human performance without eliminating the human role. And that is, I think, where the real, real value of AI comes.

It is the discernment, not only that automated, that tasks can be automated to AI, but what we need to do is to discern which tasks should be automated and then let AI handle those tasks and which tasks should not be handed off to AI. And again, we can think of AI as being staff augmentation handling those routine tasks that it doesn't require a human to do. But then we need to be discerning here. And this augmentation score and this EPOCH as part of the EPOCH index can really help us choose when we're not sure what, what to be done by humans and what to be handed off to AI. Now, this is huge for workforce planning, upskilling, and thinking about how to future proof our careers. And again, we're not going to lead with fear, but we're going to lead with clarity by using tools like the EPOCH Index and the EPOCH framework to help us figure out what we must do and what we can let go of to AI. So let's just put this into context, and I've used a number of examples already, but I'll use a few more examples. So in healthcare, absolutely, AI is great at scanning images and comparing your, let's say CT scan of your brain or your left shoulder or whatever it is that got the CT scan against a whole huge data set so that it can look for anomalies in your brain scan or your shoulder scan and then alert whichever doctor is reading that brain scan to the anomalies or the similarities.

So it might scan images, it might even predict or offer treatment outcomes, but it is really a doctor, first of all, double checking the veracity of the scans against the AI to just make sure that the AI didn't miss anything. But then it is truly the doctor's bedside manner, because let's say the doctor did then have to deliver the bad news that whether it was your brain scan or your shoulder scan had some anomalies in it and they need to do some either additional testing or there is a confirmed whatever it is, it is how the doctor handles that with the patient that makes the difference. It's the empathy, the presence and hope three right there that cannot be outsourced. Three pieces of that EPOCH framework that can't be outsourced.

Now think about IT, in education, AI can grade or generate materials. It can help a professor or elementary school classroom teacher, again, grade papers, grade exams, generate worksheets. But it is a teacher's ability to uniquely connect with that struggling student that makes the difference in that student feeling felt and seen and heard and thusly motivated to then figure out whatever it is that that challenging curriculum is trying to teach them. It is that interaction, that uniquely human interaction between the student and teacher that's going to make the difference.

And then in business, AI might forecast trends or write reports or write rough drafts of things for you. But the decision to change direction in the business, the decision to take a risk, the decision to rally a team through a tough quarter, again, that is absolutely human. Even in tech product designers and UX professionals, people like many of you listening, we rely heavily on presence, opinion and creativity to build solutions that people actually want to use. That is where the design piece of that work comes in. So again, if you just think about design at face value, there is so much of EPOCH that is involved in the design process. So here is the bottom line. The future of work isn't just about keeping up with AI.

It's about letting go of what AI can do really well as augmentation and doubling down on the tasks that are uniquely human and continuing to better at those tasks that are uniquely human. So again, the EPOCH framework is going to give us language, it's going to give us direction to help us do just that.

So let me just quickly recap that EPOCH framework EPOCH stands for Empathy, Presence, Opinion, Creativity and hope. Those five uniquely human things that we need to do and do really, really well so that we can work effectively alongside AI and not be replaced for it. So again, the EPOCH framework gives us language and it gives us direction for where to focus our uniquely human energies and where to grow our skills. It reminds us that the most valuable skills in tomorrow's workplace might not be the most technical, but in fact the most human. So as a former professor, I get to give you homework. Here is your homework my friends.

First of all, reflect. Which of the EPOCH elements do you naturally bring to your work and where do you stand to grow? How can you stay competitive at these five skills so that you are uniquely valuable and not up for replacement by AI? So reflect. First think about yourself. Next share that's another uniquely human thing. So forward this episode to somebody who may be feeling uneasy about AI and their future. Let's give them a new way to think about what's next. Let them know where their real value lies and give them some reassurance that AI won't replace them, especially if they are staying informed about what's capable, what AI is capable of, and where the human touch is absolutely necessary. I'm an actual so choose one area, empathy, presence, opinion, creativity or hope and invest in strengthening in that for yourself this week.

Read a book, attend a workshop, take a LinkedIn learning class, have a conversation with someone about it. When you put new ideas into action, that's where the real value gets delivered both to you and the people that you work with and the clients that you serve. And heck, the people who matter most to you in this world. Now, AI is evolving quickly, but so are we. So let's make sure we're evolving in the direction that is going to keep the best of our humanity in the center. So thanks for tuning in this week and I will see you next week where we keep exploring what's next and what it takes to thrive in a constantly changing world. Now if you learned something in this episode or you simply enjoy this content, I strongly encourage you to subscribe to my channel on YouTube to subscribe to the podcast on your podcast player of choice and follow me over on social media. These are all excellent and no cost ways for you to support me in my work.

You'll find links to my social media over on the show notes page @janelanderson.com/220 for episode 220. As always, stay curious, stay informed and stay ahead of the curve. Until next time, keep thriving and keep working towards that future of work that we all so very much want take care of.