They Won’t Solve It the Way You Did. That’s the Leadership Opportunity

A growing workforce of digital problem solvers is changing not only how work gets done, but what leadership needs to make possible

Written by: Adelee Penner

Abstract

A growing number of people are entering the workforce having spent much of their lives solving problems in digitally mediated environments.

When they encounter something they do not know, the response may be immediate: search, compare, ask a network, watch a demonstration, test a tool, prompt an AI system, prototype something, discard it, and try again.

That does not automatically make younger workers more digitally competent. Research strongly cautions against the old “digital native” assumption that growing up with technology confers sophisticated digital knowledge.

But something important is changing.

Recent OECD evidence shows that younger adults tend to demonstrate greater proficiency in adaptive problem-solving—the capacity to navigate dynamic situations in which the solution is not immediately available. Meanwhile, employers increasingly identify technological literacy, analytical and creative thinking, adaptability, curiosity, and lifelong learning as crucial workforce capabilities.

Perhaps the leadership challenge is therefore not to make the next generation solve problems the way we did.

Perhaps it is to ask:

What becomes possible when digital fluency, adaptive problem-solving, experience, judgment, and human insight work together?

I have been thinking about what happens when a new generation enters the workplace, having learned to solve problems in a fundamentally different information environment.

For much of my own professional life, knowing where to find the answer was part of expertise.

There were manuals.

Policies.

Binders.

Courses.

People who had been around longer.

Professional networks you developed over the years.

Information often travelled through identifiable channels, and experience helped you know which channel to use.

That world has not disappeared.

But another one has emerged alongside it.

Today, when many people encounter a problem, information scarcity is often not the first challenge.

Information abundance is.

The question is less likely to be:

Where could I possibly find something about this?

And increasingly:

Which of the 4,000 things I can find in the next thirty seconds should I trust?

That is a very different problem-solving environment.

And it may be creating a different kind of problem solver.

Watch What Happens When the Answer Is Not Obvious

Think about how people increasingly approach an unfamiliar task.

They search.

They compare.

They open several tabs.

They watch someone demonstrate it.

They ask a professional network.

They post a question.

They try a tool.

They ask an AI system.

They adjust the prompt.

They build a rough version.

They test it.

They find another example.

They revise.

They abandon the first approach and try something else.

The process is often nonlinear, multimodal, fast, networked, and iterative.

For many younger people in particular, this is not an unusual way of working.

It is simply how information environments have always behaved.

But before we go too far with that observation, we need an important caution.

Being Born Into a Digital World Does Not Make Someone Digitally Competent

For years, young people have been described as “digital natives.”

The idea is appealing: if you grow up surrounded by technology, surely sophisticated digital skills simply develop along the way.

The research is much less certain.

Kreuder, Frick, Rakoczy, and Schlittmeier (2024) conducted a substantial scoping review of research examining digital competence among adolescents and young adults. After screening more than 3,600 articles, they examined 230 studies of young people's digital competence.

Their conclusion complicates the digital-native story.

Frequent use of digital tools does not necessarily produce a deep understanding of technology, critical information skills, privacy and security knowledge, self-regulation, or sophisticated digital judgement.

Young people can be exceptionally fluent users of particular applications and still have important gaps in broader digital competence.

That distinction matters.

Because fluency is not the same as competence.

And competence is not the same as judgement.

(Nature)

RESEARCH DEEP DIVE

What Younger Adults Appear to Be Better At: Adaptive Problem Solving

The OECD's 2023 Survey of Adult Skills gives us a more useful way of thinking about what may actually be changing.

Rather than asking whether younger adults are “good with technology,” the OECD measures adaptive problem solving.

Adaptive problem-solving is the capacity to pursue a goal in a dynamic situation when the method for achieving that goal is not immediately available.

That requires people to:

identify and define the problem,

search for relevant information,

select among physical, social, and digital resources,

try possible solutions,

monitor what is happening,

and modify their approach when conditions change.

That sounds remarkably like modern work.

The age patterns are particularly interesting.

Across the participating countries and economies, adults aged 16–24 achieved the highest average adaptive problem-solving scores in 16 of 31 cases. Adults aged 25–34 were the highest-performing group in another 14.

Adults aged 25–34 significantly outperformed adults aged 55–65 in every participating country except one.

That does not tell us that younger people are inherently smarter.

It does not prove that technology caused the difference.

And it certainly does not mean experience no longer matters.

But it does tell us something worth paying attention to:

A substantial portion of the emerging workforce appears comfortable solving problems where the path is not predetermined and where information and resources must be continually reconsidered.

That capability also has economic value. Across OECD countries, higher adaptive problem-solving proficiency is associated with both greater labour-force participation and higher hourly wages.

(OECD)

The Workforce Is Not Becoming More Technical. It Is Becoming More Hybrid

There is another shift that I think leaders need to notice.

We sometimes discuss the future of work as though employees will divide neatly into two camps:

people with technical skills,

and people with human skills.

The evidence increasingly suggests that the distinction makes less sense.

The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 identifies analytical thinking as the most commonly cited core skill among employers.

But look at what sits around it:

resilience, flexibility, and agility;

leadership and social influence;

creative thinking;

technological literacy;

empathy and active listening;

curiosity and lifelong learning;

AI and big data;

and systems thinking.

The fastest-growing capabilities are not simply technical.

They are combinations.

Technology plus judgement.

Data plus interpretation.

AI plus critical thinking.

Networks plus relationships.

Speed plus discernment.

Creativity plus execution.

The future problem solver is not simply someone who knows how to use more tools.

It is someone increasingly expected to decide which tools matter, when to use them, what their output means, and what should happen next.

(World Economic Forum)

That Changes the Meaning of Expertise

This creates an interesting tension in organizations.

Traditionally, expertise has often accumulated through experience.

You became more valuable because you had encountered more situations.

You knew the history.

You recognized patterns.

You knew what had been tried before.

You understood that the apparently simple decision would create three unintended consequences elsewhere.

That knowledge remains extraordinarily valuable.

But digital problem solvers bring a different kind of capability.

They may be quicker to ask:

Is there another way to do this?

Has somebody already solved this somewhere else?

Could we automate part of it?

Can I test this before we build the whole thing?

What does the data say?

Can AI help me produce a first version?

Who outside this organization knows something about this?

Why are we still doing this manually?

Those questions can feel disruptive.

Sometimes they are.

But disruption and disrespect are not the same thing.

A person asking why a twenty-step process exists may be demonstrating naiveté.

Or they may be revealing that nobody has asked why it exists for fifteen years.

The leadership challenge is knowing the difference.

Experience Knows Why. Digital Fluency Asks Why Not

This may be where intergenerational workplaces become particularly interesting.

Experienced professionals often carry something technology cannot quickly reproduce:

context.

They know why a policy was designed the way it was.

They remember the previous implementation.

They understand relationships that are invisible on the organizational chart.

They recognize political realities.

They have experienced consequences.

They can look at a technically elegant solution and say:

That will never work here—and here is what you are missing.

That is not resistance to innovation.

That can be wisdom.

But the reverse is also true.

Institutional knowledge can become institutional habit.

We tried that before.

That isn't how we do it.

You need to understand the history.

We've always had that process.

Those statements may contain wisdom.

Or they may be protecting yesterday's solution from today's question.

This is why I do not think the future belongs to the youngest people in the organization.

Nor does it belong to the most experienced.

It belongs to organizations capable of combining different forms of knowing.

Experience can contribute:

context, pattern recognition, judgement, relationships, history, and consequence.

Digital fluency can contribute:

search, connection, experimentation, speed, iteration, automation, and access to distributed knowledge.

Put those together well and the organization becomes more intelligent.

Force one to submit entirely to the other and we lose something.

The Leadership Risk: Making New Problem Solvers Use Old Problem-Solving Architecture

Here is where I think leadership enters the argument.

It is possible to recruit people for their creativity, digital fluency, initiative, and problem-solving ability— and then place them inside systems where they are required to wait for approval to use any of it.

Organizations do this all the time.

We tell people:

Be innovative.

Then require six approvals.

We tell them:

Solve problems.

Then criticize them for not following the established process.

We tell them:

Use technology.

Then block the tools.

We tell them:

Take initiative.

Then make decisions at levels far removed from the work.

We tell them:

Think differently.

Then become uncomfortable when they do.

The problem may not be that younger employees have unrealistic expectations of work.

Sometimes the problem may be that our organizational architecture was designed around assumptions that no longer hold.

Information no longer needs to travel through a hierarchy simply because the hierarchy once controlled access to information.

Expertise is increasingly distributed.

Solutions can be prototyped before they are perfected.

Knowledge can be accessed outside organizational boundaries.

And employees increasingly have tools that expand what one person or one small team can accomplish.

That changes power.

And leadership always becomes interesting when power changes.

Leadership Needs Digital Competence Too

Recent leadership research helps make this more concrete.

Op 't Roodt, Bracht, van Dick, and Hernandez Bark (2025) developed and tested a measure of leader digital competence across four independent samples.

Their definition is useful because leader digital competence does not mean being the organization's best technologist.

They describe it as the leader's ability and inclination to choose, promote, and enable the use of technology and digital media among employees.

Their framework identifies three areas:

Digital interaction — choosing and using digital media appropriately for the people, purpose, and situation.

Digital openness — remaining open to technological developments and encouraging thoughtful exploration of new possibilities.

Digital role modelling — helping establish norms, structures, and behaviours that enable others to use technology effectively.

I like that framing because leadership does not become a race to master every new platform.

The leader's role becomes one of enablement.

Can people access useful tools?

Can they experiment safely?

Do they know the boundaries?

Can they discuss failure?

Do they have sufficient autonomy to solve work-related problems?

Are we modelling responsible use?

Are we distinguishing sensible risk from recklessness?

Are we helping people develop judgment rather than simply compliance?

That is a much more sustainable conception of digital leadership.

(Springer)

Digital Skill Is Bigger Than Tool Use

Audrin, Audrin, and Salamin's (2024) research provides another helpful correction.

In developing a validated framework for digital skills at work, they identified eight dimensions:

• technology use,

• cybersecurity,

• content management,

• communication and collaboration,

• critical inquiry,

• responsibility,

• well-being,

• and identity and development.

Look at that list again.

Only part of it is about operating technology.

Digital competence includes questioning information.

Managing oneself.

Collaborating.

Understanding responsibility.

Protecting people and information.

Continuing to develop.

That is important because organizations sometimes respond to digital transformation by investing in software training.

Here is the new platform.

Here are the buttons.

Here is how you log in.

Those things matter.

But they are not enough.

The deeper workforce question is:

Can our people think well in digitally saturated environments?

(ScienceDirect)

AI Makes This Question More Urgent

Generative AI accelerates all of this.

The cost of producing a first draft, prototype, analysis, image, summary, piece of code, set of options, or possible solution has fallen dramatically.

That changes problem-solving.

The bottleneck increasingly moves.

Producing something may become easier.

Determining whether it is good becomes harder.

Which means judgment becomes more—not less—important.

A digitally fluent employee may be able to generate 10 approaches before an experienced colleague finishes drafting the first.

Wonderful.

Now we need someone who can ask:

Which one fits the context?

What is missing?

What assumption has the technology made?

Whose perspective is absent?

What could go wrong?

What evidence supports this?

Is it ethical?

Is it lawful?

Does it solve the actual problem?

What happens downstream?

Speed without judgment creates risk.

Judgement without openness creates stagnation.

We are going to need both.

TRY THIS IN PRACTICE

Give the Problem Before You Give the Process

The next time you assign a piece of work, try something different.

Instead of beginning with the established process, begin with the problem.

Say:

“Here is what we are trying to accomplish. Show me how you would approach it.”

Then watch.

What information do people seek?

Who do they involve?

What tools do they choose?

What assumptions do they make?

What do they automate?

Where do they need help?

What do they see that you did not?

Only after that, introduce the organizational constraints that genuinely matter.

The objective is not to remove standards, policy, safety, ethics, or accountability.

It is to distinguish those things from habit.

You may discover that part of your process exists for an excellent reason.

Explain it.

That transfers institutional knowledge.

You may also discover that another part of the process exists because nobody has reconsidered it.

Change it.

That transfers agency.

Don't Ask Young Employees to Be Innovative and Then Reward Imitation

There is a particular contradiction I think leaders need to watch.

We often recruit younger employees because we want:

new thinking,

new skills,

new technologies,

new perspectives,

energy,

and innovation.

Then we evaluate their professional maturity partly by how closely they reproduce the habits of the people already there.

There is wisdom in learning from those who came before us.

Mentorship matters.

Professional standards matter.

History matters.

Craft matters.

But learning from experience should not require replicating experience.

A strong workplace should be able to say:

Here is what we have learned. Now show us what you can see from where you stand.

That is a very different invitation.

Perhaps the Real Leadership Skill Is Translation

As I think about this more, I wonder whether one of the most important leadership capabilities in a multigenerational, digitally transforming workplace will be translation.

Helping an experienced employee understand that experimentation is not necessarily irresponsible.

Helping a digitally fluent employee understand that speed is not the same as wisdom.

Helping one generation see the value in institutional memory.

Helping another see when institutional memory has become a constraint.

Helping technical specialists communicate with people who understand clients.

Helping data specialists talk with people who understand relationships.

Helping AI users understand accountability.

Helping decision-makers understand what new tools actually make possible.

Leadership becomes the work of connecting forms of intelligence that do not naturally speak the same language.

That may be far more valuable than deciding which generation has the better approach.

The Question Is Not Whether They Are Ready for Our Workplace

We frequently hear discussions about whether young people are “workforce ready.”

I understand the question.

But I think there is another question leaders should be asking at exactly the same time:

Is our workplace ready for them?

Not because every expectation of a younger employee is reasonable.

Not because experience no longer matters.

Not because everyone under thirty is a brilliant digital problem solver.

And certainly not because every new technology deserves adoption.

But because the information environment has changed.

Problem-solving has changed.

Access to expertise has changed.

The speed of experimentation has changed.

The boundaries between human and technological capability are changing.

And organizations cannot expect to capture the benefits of those shifts while leaving the underlying architecture of work untouched.

The emerging workforce does not simply need to learn how our organizations work.

Our organizations may need to learn from how they work, too.

A Final Provocation

What if the employee who refuses to solve the problem the way you did is not resisting your expertise—but showing you what expertise will look like next?

The answer will not always be yes.

Sometimes the old way is better.

Sometimes experience knows something the new solution has missed.

Sometimes the fastest solution is not the wisest.

But leaders need enough curiosity to find out.

Because the real opportunity is not choosing between experienced problem solvers and digital problem solvers.

It is building workplaces where each makes the other better.

Reflective Questions

When someone in your organization encounters a problem, how much freedom do they have to determine how to solve it?

Where have organizational processes become confused with organizational standards?

What valuable knowledge do your most experienced people carry that needs to be transferred rather than merely documented?

What approaches to search, experimentation, automation, AI, or networking are newer employees using that others in the organization could learn from?

Where might digital fluency be mistaken for genuine digital competence?

Where might experience be mistaken for unquestionable expertise?

Do your leaders know how to choose, enable, and model effective technology use—or are digital decisions routinely delegated elsewhere?

How does your organization help people develop judgment alongside access to increasingly powerful tools?

And perhaps most importantly:

Are we preparing people for the workplace we inherited—or designing the workplace they will need next?

Let's talk again soon. Take good care of yourself.

Adelee

References

Audrin, B., Audrin, C., & Salamin, X. (2024). Digital skills at work—Conceptual development and empirical validation of a measurement scale. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 202, 123279. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2024.123279

Kreuder, A., Frick, U., Rakoczy, K., & Schlittmeier, S. J. (2024). Digital competence in adolescents and young adults: A critical analysis of concomitant variables, methodologies and intervention strategies. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 11, Article 48. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-02501-4

OECD. (2024). Do adults have the skills they need to thrive in a changing world? Survey of Adult Skills 2023. OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/b263dc5d-en

op ’t Roodt, H., Bracht, E. M., van Dick, R., & Hernandez Bark, A. S. (2025). Navigating through the digital workplace: Measuring leader digital competence. Journal of Business and Psychology, 40(1), 179–205. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-024-09947-6

World Economic Forum. (2025). The future of jobs report 2025. World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/