Lynda Gratton - The Future of Work

The Skill Gap: Asian Style

One of the paradoxes of contemporary business life is that, just as unemployment soars, the number of unfilled vacancies increases. In the USA right now there are over 3 million unfilled jobs, while in countries like Spain, youth unemployment stands at a jaw dropping 47%. The extent of the gap between what employers need and what the labour market provides in terms of skills and talents seems to be continuously widening.

 

Why the skill gap is here to stay.

This is not a surprise. There are three trends that we believe will only gather momentum and, as they converge, will continue to impact on the extent of the skill gap. None of these trends will go away fast; in fact, our research suggests that they will only accelerate in their velocity.

The most obvious creator of the gap is technological advancement within work. This has been felt most in semi-skilled work, where business analytics have replaced many clerical activities, while much service work has been outsourced from the high-cost West.

Historically, these were jobs that those with minimum educational qualifications could perform.  But it’s not just about technology replacing semi-skilled work. Increasingly, the knowledge and skills that high value jobs demand has shifted to engineering, IT and the sciences. This is good news for countries like Germany and India, where these disciplines are considered a good professional choice – but bad news for the UK and the USA, where fewer students take these options. To make matters worse, the Asian students who fill the science classrooms of the West are increasingly likely to take the first plane back after graduating, rather than staying and filling those vacancies as they might have in the past.

Demography is also playing a hand in the skill gap: Over the next decade, the largest workforce cohort the world has ever seen - the Baby Boomers - will rete in their millions. Many will take with them the deep tacit knowledge that has come from a lifetime of experience, and which they have often failed to bequest to those members of Gen X who follow them. This demographic time bomb is particularly deadly in sectors such as aerospace and pharmaceuticals, which have traditionally had long apprenticeships.

 

The Asian Response

Anxieties about the skill gap are no less prevalent in Asia. With 15% compound growth rates and, in many countries, a missing management class, companies across the region are deeply aware that this could prove a significant barrier to growth.

However, what is interesting is the speed, depth and complexity of their response. Take Singapore: here is a country, with few resources save its people, with aspirations to play a significant role in the industrial life of Asia. For them, closing the skill gap is crucial. This is achieved by actively creating close ties and a constant information flow between the key stakeholders, be they in companies, the government or educational establishments. The Ministry of Manpower and the Economic Development Board have the role of coordinating this flow of information, and provide the resources to  ‘nudge’ when necessary. This could mean, for example, supporting Unilever’s opening of a major leadership campus, funding scholarships in high value skills, or working closely with pharmaceutical companies and Western universities to build a cluster around bioengineering.

In India, the speed and scale of the response has taken a very different form, spearheaded not by government, but by the private sector. Indian companies face a huge potential skill gap for, while the technical education in the Indian Institutes of Technology is of a high level, the general education standards across the country are poor. For Indian’s rapidly growing IT sector, represented by companies such as Wipro, Infosys and TCS, this could be a disaster. Yet instead of accepting this, these companies have reached out into communities across the continent to significantly impact the development millions of youngsters. Executives at Wipro, for example, work with tens of thousands of colleges across India to train teachers to develop IT skills, build state-of-the-art curricula, and encourage students to become what they term ‘work-ready’. With a recruitment target in 2011/12 of 60,000, the teams at TCS play a similar role in helping young people across India understand from an early age what the most valuable skills for the future are, and how best to acquire them. Like Infosys they also work closely with hundreds of thousands of teenagers to actively increase their skills.

The global skill gap is here to stay for as long as technological advances, globalisation and demography continue to redefine work. For some countries, it will be the government that takes the initiative to bridge the gaps. For others, it will be companies themselves who will step up to the challenge. What is clear is that, if neither of these stakeholders are actively engaged nor prepared to put significant resources into the problem, the unemployment rates now seen in Spain could become the norm for many countries in the West.

It's Education, Stupid

It’s that time of year when I spend much of my time reading the books that have been nominated for the FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year. It’s a judging duty that is both a pleasure and a pain. The pain is the sheer amount of time it takes to wade through thousands of pages.  The pleasure is reading books that would not necessarily cross my path. This year, as with the last, many of these books are written by economists and, understandably, focus on the state of the world economy. It is interesting to read how many agree that education and training are crucial to long-term economic success, for individuals, companies and countries. I made a similar argument in my most recent book The Shift, focusing in particular on the types of education and training that create specialization. Here are the two reasons why it has never been so critical to become educated:

• Rampaging connectivity - will see at least five billion people around the world using some form of mobile device to download information, access knowledge and coach and teach each other. Some will have the intellectual capacity and motivation to really make something of this extraordinary opportunity, wherever they happen to be born. These people will want to join the global talent pool and, if possible, migrate to creative and vibrant cities. By doing so, this vast crowd of talented people will increasingly compete with each other, continuously upping the stakes for what it takes to succeed.

• The technological revolution - brought mobile devices to billions, and is now transforming how work gets done. Robots are taking the place of unskilled and semi-skilled workers, while business analytics, modelling and collaborative technologies are taking away much of what has traditionally been the role of the middle manager. However, while technology may be replacing the mechanical aspects of work, it is not replacing the more complex, skilled work that involves creativity and innovation. That’s the high value piece that remains, and it is once that requires education and training. 

As high quality education becomes more of a premium, we can expect the sector to begin to transform itself even more rapidly. Just what this transformation will look like is difficult to predict with accuracy. But here are two emerging trends that I believe will shape it over the coming decades:

The Gutenberg Project: the race is on to digitalise many of the books and articles of the world, while the professors of academic institutions such as MIT are making their key lectures available on the web. Combined with hyper connectivity and the potentially global reach of the Cloud, this means that knowledge and wisdom will be available to anyone with access to the Internet. This could see the development of new ways of educating that leapfrog those of normal educational institutions, creating more fluid, virtual and vibrant networks of learning. 

Virtual Schools and Universities: there has been a great deal of research over the last decade focusing on how people learn. This has looked at e-learning, face-to-face teaching and over-the-phone coaching. What has become clear is that none of these on their own are the best; it’s the combination of all three that has the greatest impact. This is important for educational strategies since at least two of these processes are virtual, and F2F can largely be substituted by video conferencing. I saw the speed of this transformation recently when I visited UOC (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) in Barcelona. Its sleek headquarters are the hub of a virtual university that has 60,000 students (and growing) taught by a faculty of over 3,000 virtual educators. Using simulations, games and collaborative environments, the institution is building deep expertise in supporting education across the world.

Some have argued that, of all the institutional forms, education has changed least over the past few decades. It looks as if the need for deeper knowledge and rapid advances in learning technologies may change all that.

When Time Fragments

In last week’s blog I rallied against the 40% of time at work that seems to be spent "working on projects that had no significance, going to meetings that had no outcomes" and made some suggestions for solving the paradox at the heart of work.

My question about what to do was answered in part by Kevin Ball. His experience makes him wonder if this is a problem that needs to be solved; if there is not some universal truth about people in all this ‘wasted’ effort.

"The knowledge that some part of your day can be spent in pointless activity is really rather relaxing and it can be accomplished guilt-free if you can explain it as ‘necessary’ to comply, conform and cooperate with the organisation around you. For the early days of my working in the spare bedroom, this meant suppressing the protestant work-ethic and doing some housework in the ‘working’ day; it meant measuring the output rather than the hours spent on input and it meant wrestling myself into a position of accepting that it was OK to be unproductive sometimes."

He has been influenced by Oliver Burkeman’s piece in the Guardian about the extent to which busyness is good. Oliver quotes economist Todd Buchholz: "What you really want is to chase your tail, even if you never catch it". His view is that alternative theory: that calm is the enemy of happiness, and that it's busyness on which we thrive. Railing at the calm advocates he calls "Edenists", he proposes that striving keeps us neurologically fit: "The people who sit back and relax… those are the people who become truly miserable." Research, he notes, suggests that retirement prompts a reduction in cognitive abilities. "What you really want," he insists, "is to chase your tail, even if you never catch it."

He quotes the physicist Richard Feynman who experienced the logical consequence of the dominance of productivity over all other concerns. Feynman found he didn’t envy the geniuses at Princeton who occupied a clutter-free environment where they were allowed to think without interruption: "These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves. So they don’t get any ideas for a while… a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you… and nothing happens."

But it seems to me that the choice is not between mindless busyness and tranquil edium – but rather about the extent to which we can focus and concentrate. It’s a process that is central to my new book The Shift: How The Future of Work is Already Here – the idea that what’s really crucial is that we are prepared to concentrate, focus and, from this, to master something – that could be a skill, a knowledge area, an understanding of a particular network. It’s this focus and concentration that will be increasingly crucial for the future. Focus does not need tranquility – but it does need long periods of undisturbed time – when concentration is possible. What is tough about busyness is not that it stops tranquility – but rather that it fragments work into such tiny slithers that the concentration needed to learn something deeply is gone. 

My guess is that Richard Feynman was wrong about the geniuses at Princeton when he saw "those poor bastards" sitting on their own. What they were actually experiencing was the marvelous luxury of undisturbed time, unbroken into fragments, providing them with an opportunity to develop deep mastery.

Busyness is fine - it’s the three-minute fragments that so often comes with busyness that is the curse of modern work.

Looking to the developing countries for the next CEO

Who will lead our organizations in the future? As the trajectory of the five shifts which will shape our work is becoming clearer – so too are the competencies that will sit at the heart of leadership effectiveness.

Those engaged in our Future of Work consortium believe that leading in the future will require two core competencies: the capacity to tolerate the ambiguity that many will face in this fast changing world; and intercultural sensitivity as the joining up of the world brings greater numbers of nationalities into the frame.

Both are fiendishly difficult to develop since they go way beyond the theoretical framing of much executive development. There may indeed be models and theories of tolerance of ambiguity and cultural sensitivity – but simply knowing these will not get budding CEOs very far. These competencies are not built through theory or classroom lessons – they are both fundamentally experience-based competencies. You have to experience it to learn it – and whilst role-playing and exercises have their place – the real developmental leap comes when you have to deal with these in your every day life. It’s way nigh impossible to become tolerant of ambiguity if your life has been structured and predictable, and it’s hard to become interculturally sensitive if you have only grown up with people just like you. I wonder to what extent structure, predictability and homogeneity is the day-to-day experience of many of the young adults growing up in the developing economies, and to what extent this narrowness of experience will potentially stunt their potential as future executives?

I was reminded of the puzzle of developing executives for the future as I sat with a senior team of Infosys last week in their campus in Bangalore. It began to dawn on me that becoming a leader in developing countries like India is essentially a daily lesson in the tolerance of ambiguity. In Mumbai, the choking traffic makes concepts of punctuality almost impossible; the power cuts in many Indian cities mean that it’s tough to plan with precision; whilst the growing chasm between the rich and the poor forces every executive to confront the ambiguity of the distribution of riches. Under these circumstances ambiguity is rife, and tolerance the most adapted response.

Often in these developing countries these every day situations are not black and white. I remember last year in Mumbai stepping out from one of the wealthy family apartments that are springing up across the city, to find myself confronted by a child no more than three years old sleeping on the pavement in front of me. Like all those around me I picked up my foot and carefully stepped over him. That is ambiguity with a capital A..  Whether of course one can tolerate it is another question. But the fact remains that these developing economies are awash with ambiguity and it seems to me that the daily experience of these ambiguities may go a long way to developing the depth of experience and understanding and the capacity to consider paradoxes that will be crucial for future leaders.

And it’s not just tolerance of ambiguity that developing countries like India may have a lead on. It’s also cultural sensitivity. As we toured the campus of Infosys, our guide told us that the canteen serves over 40 different types of Indian food. Those from Maharashtra for example will not eat fish or meat, the Jains will not eat anything that has been dug from the ground and could have a living insect on it – so potatoes, garlic and onions are out – the list is endless. Each region of India has its own language, own food, and own customs, even its own preferred deity. There is no one homogenous culture that envelops them all. So when young people join Infosys or Wipro or TCS from across the subcontinent they are put with people who may look superficially like them, but in reality are very different – and it is in working with these differences that cultural sensitivity emerges.

What this suggests, is that as we look for the talent pools where future CEOs may be developing, we would be wise to look to the developing countries. It is in these places that life’s daily experiences of ambiguity and diversity may well be creating the crucibles of experience from which the next generation of CEOs will emerge.

 

 

 

 

The Globalisation of Burn Out

In Mumbai this weekend, my eye was caught by the headline on the front page of Sunday’s Economic Times - ‘At 45 – over with the rat race’ – going on to say ‘As salaries hit a high, career graphs peak faster and burnout becomes real, more execs are considering early retirement and planning towards it’. Indian executives have experienced a boom in their salaries with annual increments in the 15% to 20% bracket – so they are feeling wealthier – and working harder. The article also quotes a whole swath of executives saying ‘many people feel they are missing out on their families’ and ‘unlike earlier, when people switch off from work, today we are working much longer hours’

Sounds familiar to those of us work in the west? Across the world, those who have joined the global talent pool – like these executives in India, are feeling the pinch of globalisation – 24/7 work, constantly on-line, and always striving to keep their place in the global talent pool.

It was not always like this. The workplace that dominated most of the twentieth century allowed producers and sellers a fairly relaxed existence. Thinking back to my first real job – as a psychologist for British Airways, much of the world was broken into relatively stable markets. BA had a near monopoly on the UK travelling passenger, and if the company did not make its predicted revenue, the UK Government, as the owner of the airline was there to bail it out. I recall getting into the office at 9.00, taking a one-hour break in the staff canteen on the other side of the airport, and then leaving my desk at 5.30 for a leisurely trip home. No work was expected at the weekend, the holidays were good, and of course I had the pleasure of deeply discounted travel perks- Oh and did I tell you about the BA pension scheme?

Economies of scale and stable markets (often supported by monopolies, oligopolies and regulations) protected large companies like BA from competition. If you worked for a smaller company, then you only competed with other local services and industries. The focus of these companies was on the production of goods and services at a reasonable price and in a form that consumers would not reject out of hand. Research and development departments did exist, but they tended to change around the margin, and costs could be planned for, thanks to unions negotiating wage rates for entire industries. That model held for much of the world until about a decade ago where first employees in the private sector and increasingly those in the public sector felt the cold winds of global competition.

So, it is no surprise that those in the global talent pool in Mumbai are now feeling as ‘burnt out’ as those in New York or London. Whilst being a member of the global talent pool has enormous financial advantages – it does come at a cost. And as I mentioned in an earlier blog ‘Are the kids alright’ – it’s the youngest members of the global talent pool who are probably feeling the pressure most.

So, what’s the solution? The Economic Times sees the solution in early retirement – citing between 50 – 55 as the age when those in the global talent pool will hit the buffers. I’d say ‘dream on’. It’s the old fashioned view that work is like a cliff that you climb until you are 55, and then jump off. It’s simply not going to happen. Those in the Indian global talent pool may feel financially secure right now with rapidly rising property prices, bank savings rates of 9%, and a booming equity market. But as the western Baby Boomers have found – it only takes a couple of economic crises and a bust in the property markets to wipe out the growth – and by the way – when you are living to 90….. It’s not surprise that this week the UK Government passed legislation banning forced retirement at 65.

The solution is not jumping off the cliff – it’s understanding that working life is a marathon not a sprint, and that building time to relax and re-charge within a longer working period is more important than simply stopping earlier. That’s going to put a premium on flexible working, job share and sabbaticals –and the companies that get this first will have their pick of the global talent pool.

Are the kids all right?

I bumped into a girlfriend this week on the flight back to London after a New York meeting. Immediately she began to tell me about her 26-year-old son’s work hours. That week he had not made it home until after 1.00am in the morning and was needed in the office by 7.00am. She was proud of the salary he is earning, but also aghast at the pressure he is under.

I’ve been pondering on her words because I had been in New York to meet up with a team from the University of Southern California to talk about what we really know about the current aspirations and experiences of Gen Y. What we do know is that they are in a tough place. Some don’t have work – and many of those who do, particularly those working in investment banking, law or management consulting - are working ‘like slaves’ (that’s the phrase my normally hard-headed business women friend used of her son).

They are having a miserable time. Over promised, over worked – it’s a generation who don’t trust their leaders or big business, and who have seen wage differentials soar in the last decade. It’s no surprise that my girlfriend’s son says he will leave his company in one more year – and he is not alone. In companies around the world, turnover rates for talented Gen Y are running between 15% to 20%.

Why is this happening? It seems to me that the kids are not all right. Without really realizing it, we (that’s the Gen X and Baby Boomers of this world) are failing to look after the kids at the very time in their working lives when they need support and counsel. It seems to me that there are four ways we have failed them.

The first failure is a direct result of the joined-up global world that they are living and working in.  This hyper connectivity means that there is always a client, a project, or a task that has to be finished. When your clients work around the world – there is always one time-zone that buzzing. We have left them at the mercy of extraordinary pressures. There are no boundaries, nothing that protects them from constant work. We’ve failed them because we have not protected them from the demands of a hyper connected world.

The second failure is a result of income disparity. When I was working in my mid 20’s back in 1980, the average CEO in America earned 42 times more than the average worker. For many of the current Gen Y, the figure has increased twelve-fold to 531 times. That creates big problems because it sets out a ‘carrot’ that for most is unattainable if not downright unattractive.  It’s also confusing when few Gen Y’s are swallowing the ‘deferred gratification’ creed - work hard now for riches in some indefinable time in the future. It also sways the whole work deal from working because it is interesting and potentially meaningful, to a deal that has at its centre greed and acquisition. When the whole deal is ‘work here and you could be as rich as I’ – the other parts of the work that could be fulfilling and motivating somehow seem less attractive.

We are also failing them because we have obstinately refused to dismantle the traditional vertical, hierarchical structures that some of us designed, and others inherited. Its been over a decade since we realized that uniform pay systems, constant office based work and inflexible working practices are toxic to a generation raised on more flexible ways of being. Yet despite the toxicity, we have simply changed around the margins rather than completely ‘blowing it up’ and designing companies in a more flexible and agile way.

And we have failed them because we have marginalised, discredited and been mean-minded about Gen Y’s use of technology and social media. One of the most frustrating aspects of being a Gen Y in the employment of most businesses is the inability to bring to the office all the ways of being that are common place in their private lives. The way they link up with ease, or rapidly update each other on progress, or get members of their ‘posse’ to help them out, or use the whole world as a resource when it comes to getting things done.

Of course the truly awful aspect is that we have created socialisation processes within companies that are so pervasive and deeply embedded– that within two years these bright eyed Gen Y’s are harassed, sleep deprived and depleted of energy.

My advice to my girlfriend’s son? – run away as fast as you can. What would be your advice? 

 

Keeping up with transparency

The real challenge in our Future of Work research consortium is keeping up with the extraordinary speed of transformation that is taking place on a monthly – even daily basis. In the last couple of weeks I've continued to be amazed at the velocity of change – both in the way we think about companies, and indeed in the way we think about ourselves and our lives.

What’s been a real focus in much of the media this week are concerns about technology and transparency. A combination of technology and rapid distribution has enabled the publication of thousands of confidential documents on WikiLeaks. What will become of the founder Julian Assange and the hosting of the service is not yet clear. But what is clear, is that the age of transparency is well and truly upon us and we can expect it to become ever more a part of every day work over the coming decades. One of the implications in this joined-up, transparent world is that it will become vital for every government official, every CEO and every executive to assume that everything they say, everything they write, and every action they take will be leaked, videoed and shared. This has not always been the case. In the hierarchical top-down, command and control traditional that many companies (and indeed governments) worked on, the assumption was that information was power and was vertically traded. When information no longer follows this vertical and controlled trajectory, it will have a profound impact on who will be seen to be fit to lead, and indeed, whom under these circumstances – will want to take the mantel of leadership.

But it’s not just governments and corporate leaders who are under increasing scrutiny as transparency evolves. It’s also the many billions of people who are becoming part of the joined up communities of the World Wide Web. As I have mentioned in a number of blogs over the last year – one of the questions that intrigues me is this issue of connectivity. We can estimate that by 2020, at least five billion people will be connected to each other through their mobile devises, and many will be able to download both programmes and information from the Cloud at a very low cost. What will come from this unimaginable connectivity which will have its own inherent emergent properties?

 

It’s a question I have been asking pretty much everyone with an interest in the future, and no one really seems to know the answer. However, we do know something about the future, because already half a billion of these potential five billion are currently hooked up to each other through Facebook. In David Gelles interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in Saturday’s FT, we heard Zuckerberg talk enthusiastically about ‘social graphs’. These are the intricate computer analytically enabled maps that will describe the connections between Facebook users and indeed to the websites they visit, the information they download and the service and products they purchase (and indeed to connect them to other potential suppliers of services and products). It’s what he calls integration and it will connect people (and indeed businesses) with similar revealed preferences.

 

So as we think about five billion connected to each other, so we also have to imagine that they will be able to create communities of people with common preferences with ease. It would be the sort of communities that the scenario planners at Shell have been describing as the ‘Blueprint’ in their 50-year forward projection. These are the bottom-up communities of people who join with each other to solve some of the big challenges of global warming. It could also that the communities that emerge are able to join up in order to create terror around the globe. Transparency and connectivity both have dark and light sides. But as Matt Cohler, an early employee of Facebook puts it ‘ Technology is an amplifier and enabler of human behaviors, so when you’re creating it you’d better have an optimistic view of human nature’. 

 

Why the world is becoming riskier – and the five ways to hedge

A Riskier World

An interesting couple of days in London with HR Directors from Europe and the USA. Listening to their stories plus commentators on risk and on the outlook for China, it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that whilst many of the aspects of the future of businesses is very positive (as many of my earlier blogs will attest), the future is also about both volatile and risky. Here is why:

• Because the frequency of systemic economic shocks – like those we have just experienced, will increase as the financial markets of the world become ever more connected, ensuring that local financial trauma rapidly become global trauma.

• Because in the scramble for ROE and resources, businesses will increasingly be forced to play on the risky margins – in hostile environments (witness BP and the Gulf of Mexico) and in risk business environments (witness RBS and the take-over of ABN Amro).

• Because increasing globalisation, diversity and connectivity means that ‘bad news’ can spread very, very quickly. One commentator believed that the biggest source of risk was a global pandemic – which would effectively ‘lock- down’ businesses very, very quickly (witness the impact in Asia of the bird flu).

• And finally, massive flows to the city through a continuous process of urbanization will dramatically increase the extent of both physical and technological connectivity – which could up-scale social protests and discontent (very much apparent in China right now – as the rather disorganised rural unrest has morphed more recently into something much more powerful in an urban context) 
  

 

Hedging Against a Risky World

With this as a backdrop, there are a number of ways in which companies seem to build resilience into their DNA. Here are some of these ways:  

1.     With continuity of CEOs and executive teams

Talking with Terry Leahy, CEO of Tesco, it’s interesting to note that he is only the fifth CEO since the early growth of the business. This reminds me that when Jim Collins – author of ‘Good to Great’ and ‘Built to Last’ went back recently to look at those companies in the initial sample that had failed in ‘How the Mighty Fall’, he found that the strength of the CEO succession, and their capacity to ignore the hubris and ‘spinning’ around them was one of the critical factors for resilience. In a world of rapid change and velocity, it makes good sense to have calm in the boardroom.

A question: how much continuity have you had in your own executive team, and what impact has this had on resilience?

 

2.     Through simulations and scenarios

Readers of Harvard Business Review will know that the November edition was devoted to what businesses can learn from the USA Army. High on the list was the capacity of the Army to both simulate possible situations, and indeed to engage in post-action reviews in a very deep way. The oil and natural resource executives in the group I was with this week, report that simulations are a crucial part of the way they develop managers. But I wonder how many other businesses actually increase the preparation of managers for volatilities? Listening to Nassim Nicholas Taleb (he of ‘The Black Swan’) a couple of weeks ago, I was struck by his view that we rarely imagine the ‘unimaginable’ – and that these unimaginable situations will only increase in their frequency. With such a future, surely simulations have a crucial role to play?

A question: are there any parts of your business that use simulations and scenarios, and should this practice be more wide- spread?

 

3. With dispersed, autonomous decision making and clear accountability

On the face of this, this seems counter intuitive. Surely in a crisis, a single point of decision-making is crucial?  But what many of these executives reported, was an environment so complex that pushing decisions up the hierarchy was way too slow. What was needed instead, were accountability and decision-making protocols as near the action, or what we might call the ‘defining moment’ as possible. So the question then arises – how do you know how people will behave ‘in the moment’? I find the idea that behavior will in some way flow from ‘values’ unconvincing. Values emerge out of day-to-day behavior – they are not the substance itself. More useful is the idea that people know how to behave ‘in the moment’ because – they have been trained to behave, or because they have seen others behave in that way (particularly leadership), or indeed because the context (practices and processes) do a great deal to support the ‘right’ behavior.

A question: how does decision making protocols work in your businesses, and are hierarchical routes to decision making slowing speeds of response?

4. Creating Foresight through massing triangulated data and analytics.

Although much of what will happen in the coming years may be unpredictable in its timing and intensity – never the less, the actual occurrence can be predicted. However, to do this, business executives have to build what one person referred to as ‘triangulated data’ from many sources, collected over time, through different methods – and then pulled together in a systemic way. What they referred to as ‘watching in the moment’. By doing this, some of the risks become ever more apparent, and indeed the costs of these risks easier to calculate. In our own research on the ‘future of work’ we actively follow about 40 trend areas, which range from technologies, to demographics, to resource use and so on. These allow us then to take each of these areas and triangulate them with others in order to predict more fully what the big issues and risks going forward will be.

Question: How much time and energy is your business devoting to collecting intelligence from different sources about the trends areas that will impact on your business?

 

 

 

 

Those Five Billion Connections

Last year one of the most interesting ideas that came out of the Future of Work Consortium was that by 2020, five billion people will be connected with each other through their hand held devices. Linked to the Crowd, individuals will have access to most of the digitised knowledge of the world; and using low-energy batteries, even those in the poorest places will be able to join the crowd.

What will these Five Billion Connections actually do? That’s the question I have been asking everyone whom I have come across over the last couple of months. The truth is this is an ‘emergent phenomena’, so frankly no-one really knows. But here are my top five guesses about the content of these connections.

1.    They use their Cognitive Surplus

This is the argument of New York academic Clay Shirky – you can catch his argument on his recent TED talk. Right now the average person watches 28 hours of TV a week – that’s time taken in passive viewing with no connectivity to other. Imagine if instead each person devoted, lets say 5 hours to interacting with others in a more creative way. That’s 5 hours per person per week X 52 weeks in a year X a community of 5 Billion people…now and that’s a lot of cognitive surplus to be potentially focused on big issues.

2.    They become more Empathic towards each other

So believes US policy maker Jeremy Rifkin – you can catch his ideas on his recent talk at the Royal Society of Arts. His argument is that when people connect they learn more about each other – and in doing so they become more understanding and empathic of each other. The impact is that a more empathic global community becomes more tolerant of each other, more able to communicate with ease, and ultimately more likely to cooperate on important issues.

3.    They engage in Crowd-Innovation

Already sites like InnoCentive are enabling hundreds of thousands of people around the world to connect to each other to solve the problems they really care about. Imagine if these connected millions of people together to create ‘swarms’ of people with passion and commitment?

4.    They make change happen – one person at a time

One of the interesting aspects of the Shell 2050 Scenario’s – called ‘Blueprint’ and ‘Scramble’ is the idea that in the end it will not be governments or multi-nationals that will take the lead on climate change and low carbon living – in part because these are tough decisions that institutions find hard to sell. Instead, they believe that it will be individuals that make decisions about how they are going to live on a day-by-day basis. Five billion connections enable communities of people to emerge from any location in the world to share their ideas, tips, insights, and commitments. It could be that these global communities emerge as forces that are as strong as any individual region. 

5.    They bring misery to the world

When I asked people about the five billion connections – there is also an alternative view. It’s the view that within these connections will be people who use this hyper-connectivity to build terrorist cells, or to organise crime in a more global and efficient manner – and by doing so bring ever more misery to the world.  Its also possible that these security fears will encourage governments to control the extent to which the Cloud covers their territory, or indeed the access their citizens have to digital information. As much of the world moves into recession, this closing down and erecting of walls becomes an ever-greater threat.

It seems to me that the rapid emergence of this hyper-connectivity will be one of the most interesting phenomena to watch over the coming years. What impact do you think this will have on the way people live and work?

 

 

Taming the Technology

Our Future of Work consortium is proving to be a delight. It’s really gained momentum, we have almost 170 topics (or threads in the open source jargon) under discussion with 200 people from 30 countries. So I guess we can really say this is a world-wide conversation.

We are holding a virtual conference on Monday morning so I’ve been looking closely at what we have all been talking about. More than 40% of the threads are about how technology will change the way we work. Sometimes the threads are really positive – it will be great to work more from home, or on a mountain, or at the beach. We anticipate holograms that take us around the world with no carbon footprint. Or full- scale video conferencing which allows a bunch of people to meet without leaving their breakfast tables.

So I guess collectively we are pretty chipper about technology. But behind these rather upbeat feelings there lurks a dark shadow. OK, we love technology, but we don’t like everything we imagine. Here are some aspects of the future, which seem to keep us collectively awake at night:

Isolation: We work from home and never leave the breakfast table – but is there anyone else around? With more people living on their own in urban sprawls, the spectre of isolation is never far away. And with isolation comes loneliness. Will technology leave us lonely and isolated – rarely seeing those we work with or care about?

Fragmentation: A couple of weeks ago I started to work with three pieces of technology in front of me (OK, I admit I’m writing this in bed on a tiny laptop – but it is Saturday morning). I write on an old but trusted Dell, I have a big expensive Mac open so I can look at attachments, and my i Phone because I love the way I can breeze through e-mails with it. I mentioned this to Marzia (who does our amazing graphics) and she looked at me blankly – ‘of course’. So I am not the only one with a fragmented life. About five years ago a group of psychologists followed managers around and watched how long they worked uninterrupted. What do you imagine they found – 10 minutes perhaps – or maybe 5 minutes of uninterrupted work? No – the average was 3 minutes; and the really spooky part is that even if they are not interrupted in 3 minutes they interrupt themselves (that’s where the three machines come in). Will technology fragment our world into one minute chunks?

Addiction:  I remember a few years ago one of my most glamorous friends – who also happens to be an eminent professor – telling me that every time her blackberry sounds an incoming email she gets a visceral response. Her mouth starts to water. Well, she and I know enough about psychology to trace that straight back to Pavlov’s dogs. She’d become addicted to the constant bling of the blackberry – I guess it’s not called a ‘crack berry’ for nothing. Will we become ever more addicted to being constantly connected?

I’d been mulling this over when I read a really interesting article in the newly launched UK version of Wired magazine. In it Kevin Kelly – US WIRED’s ‘senior maverick’ has concluded that technology is an unruly child ‘There’s no bad children, just bad friends. So it’s about training the technology, rearing it as if it were children’.

You can see his video on www.tedxamsterdam.nl or visit him at his web-site www.kk.org  ‘Technology’s a complex adaptive system that’s more like an organism than a gadget, and it has its own agenda’ he says ‘The technium – this system – can deliver tremendous benefits to us, but the downside is that it’s selfish. So that we have to discover what it wants to best maximise its benefits to us.- every new discovery in technology challenges our notion of what it is to be human and constantly shifts our identities –so we interact with it by evaluating it through action and then constant monitoring’

Hum – well not sure how to evaluate it – and he tells us nothing about how to train this unruly child. But being the mother of a couple of unruly children I have no problems starting the conversation about how we could treat technology as if it were a smart but unruly two year old.

Remember that you are in control; they are the child – you are the parent.

Set them clear parameters about what is expected of them – and stick with them.

Let them blossom and grow – but don’t let them destroy your own peace of mind or compromise your own preferred way of living.

Create a small set of rules about what is absolutely unacceptable, and stick with it.

Watch them carefully and monitor how it’s going.

Be prepared to create sanctions for misdemeanours.

So with this in mind I’ve put the old Dell, the smart Mac (which the kids insisted I buy) and my trusted iPhone on the naughty step. I wonder how long they will stay there?