Lynda Gratton - The Future of Work

The role of corporations in Future Proofing Leadership

This has been very much a leadership couple of months for me – with the World Economic Forum Council on the ‘Future of Leadership’ and indeed our own research on leadership at the Future of Work Consortium. So over the next couple of weeks I plan to talk about what we have found.

Corporations have and continue to play a key role in the journeys of many leaders. For example, a glimpse at the emerging leadership cohort in India will show how many started their careers in talent rich companies such as Tata or Hindustan Unilever. The same is true of the USA where it is said that more CEO’s are GE graduates than graduates of Harvard Business School. In Europe the ‘talent factories’ of Unilever, Shell and Nokia have had a profound impact on the lives of many leaders. When these ‘talent factories’ are missing – as has historically been the case in China, then it can take decades to provide the context for development.

In the WEF we have distinguished between the Outer and the Inner leadership journey. The ‘outer journey’ creates the skills and capabilities to do a leader’s job, and many corporations are great at this – their capacity to engage people in complex global tasks and invest in learning means that most people come to the role of a leader with the requisite skills. My view is that typically the corporate environment can create the breadth of experience that enables leaders to learn how to manage complex stakeholders, or to build purposeful work.  So where there is no question that well run corporations are great at the leader’s ‘outer journey’, what about the ‘inner journey’? 

The ‘Inner Journey’ takes a leader to deep insight that helps them to discover their authenticity and provides the resilience so crucial for judgment under pressure? Here, I think the corporation is often a poor crucible for development. Here is why:

Hyper-Homogeneity: look around any high potential group and what is really striking is often how similar they are to each other. Often they are of the same nationality, but even if they are not they will have similar mannerisms, work styles, ways of looking at the world. Often the selection process for high potential roles is so well tuned that it filters out any diversity. This hyper homogeneity rapidly leads to ‘group think’ and also a certain weakness in spotting the counter intuitive

Extreme Work Pressure: one of the defining realities of corporate life is the sheer and unrelenting pressure many potential leaders are under. Constantly barraged by endless e-mails, spending weekends travelling, answering the phone throughout the night. These are all the symptoms of a globally connected world. This pressure affects their personal life, making it more and more difficult to create deep relationship with others – be they friends, partners or children. The pressure also removes any of the opportunities for reflection and conversation that we believe is so important to the leader’s inner journey. So as the muscle of the ‘outer journey’ become ever strong, those of the ‘inner journey’ atrophy.

Focus on Power: in many corporations the currency of leadership is power. It is positional power that creates the legitimacy for behaviours and provides the cover for action. Power is also a barrier to the open and deep feedback that can be so crucial to personal learning.

So, whilst corporations can be crucial to providing the setting for the ‘outer journey’, I believe that a combination of hyper-homogeneity, extreme work pressure and a focus on power makes them often poor settings for the ‘inner journey’. Many of the executives tasked with leadership development within corporations are well aware of this challenge. They can see that too many of their current leaders do not have the authenticity and depth that will increasingly be important for the future. What is less clear is how this can be solved.

A letter from Davos

Davos may be full of leaders, but that doesn’t stop them questioning how their roles could change. The pervading theme this year is of extraordinary change and challenge: ‘ we don’t have a moment to lose’; ‘we have to do things differently’; ‘this is a unique moment in history’; ‘there is a crisis of consent’ are phrases I’ve heard from academics, CEOs and politicians. Yet while there is broad rhetorical agreement, conversations about the means of action are less clear. In this Davos blog, I’m going to concentrate on what this means for leadership. In the panels I have attended and conversations I have had, there are two emerging themes which stood out beyond the normal leadership rhetoric of purpose, values etc.

These are:

• Leading in a multi-stakeholder world. There is broad agreement that leaders will increasingly be called upon to operate effectively in a multi-stakeholder world. These stakeholders could include governments, NGOs, citizen groups, and the other businesses in their ecosystem. To do this, leaders must develop networks across these stakeholders, and understand and deeply empathize with their position. The sheer complexity of these stakeholder relationships will also require them to operate successfully in ambiguous, often chaotic circumstances. These are complex times that will require patience when gaining commitment across multiple stakeholders.

• Leading in society. Leaders must also have a point of view about their role and the role of their business in society. Being a bystander will no longer be sufficient. How leaders engage will be determined by their unique personal values, as well as the core competencies of the businesses they lead. It could be reaching out into the immediate community, working actively on global issues such as poverty, or engaging employees in community activities. Though it’s true that many are already doing this, the call is to do more, to do it quicker, and to scale with speed. It’s about ‘thinking beyond’…

Reflecting on what these two themes mean for how leaders are developed, it strikes me that neither can be ‘bolted on’ to current leadership. Instead, they have to be ‘baked in’ to the very core of what a leader does and how they spend their time. For example, ‘leading in a multi-stakeholder world’ means making a significant and early commitment to spending time with people who are different. It’s only through these committed time periods that deep understanding and empathy can emerge. We know that empathic relationships and broad networks take time to develop. Similarly, ‘leading in the society’ cannot suddenly emerge from classical leadership training. Again, it requires a deep understanding and sense of empathy with the challenges and dilemmas faced. It also requires the courage to understand that, while the short-term stock market may require a leader to simply make a return on profits, the society in which they are a member requires much more of them.

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.

When Generations Fight

I have a fascinating insight into the future of work through the 45 corporations across the world we are studying as part of the Future of Work Research Consortium. Last month we asked 2,500 executives from these companies to rate the areas they believed would  be critical for the future, together with the extent to which they believed their company was currently competent. We gave them a list of 20 areas that an earlier study had shown would be important for the future. This list included for example ecosystems, open innovation, flexible working and networked leaders.

What was extraordinary is that almost a quarter rated ‘intergenerational cohesion’ as the most significant risk their company faced, and many more rated it as one of the top three risks. This was not an isolated area of risk, but rather was seen to be a risk by executives in both West and Asia companies, and indeed across all industrial sectors. Their concern was that the potential differences and conflicts between the generations could lead to poor cooperation and knowledge sharing, but might also flare into more open sources of conflict and dissatisfaction.

Five Unique Generations at Work. 

The potential opportunities and conflicts that are arising between generations are a recent phenomena and are a factor of both demographic changes (particularly around reducing birthrates and enhanced longevity) and accelerating technological and societal trends (particularly around the use of social media and family experiences). Over the next two decades, many companies will have potentially five distinct generations in the workforce: The Traditionalists (born around 1928 to 1945); the Baby Boomers (born around 1945 to 1964); Generation X (born around 1965 to 1979); Gen Y (born around 1980 to 1995); and Gen Z (born after 1995).

Generations fight for a number of reason. They don’t understand each other, they have differential access to resources and power, their working style and use of technology is in conflict, or they are not really sharing knowledge and experience with each other.

Of course generational conflict could also be great – really create innovation, remove some old style thinking, bring creative tension. However, if companies are to move to creative rather than destructive tension, it seems to me they have to ask themselves three key questions:

1. Does technology favour one generation? The generations communicate with each other differently and one potential source of tension is that corporate communication typically favours the Baby Boomers’ preferred mode of communication rather than the younger generations. Typically, Gen Z and Y use social media such as MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Ning to access information instantly, to multi-task, and to build valuable networks and stay connected; typically Gen X use portals; whilst Baby Boomers are most comfortable with e-mail as their primary technological communication tool. Yet many companies have banned Facebook and social media, which is the lifeblood for the youngest generations and by doing so have inadvertently favoured one generation over another.  

2. Has flexibility become embedded? Each generation would value greater flexibility. Gen Y would like greater work/life balance in jobs that can be overwhelming; younger Gen X’s would like maternity and paternity leave and time off to spend with their young children, the possibilities of sabbaticals, and to temporarily step away from frontline into less demanding roles, and older Gen X’s can find themselves with ageing parents who need care; whilst Baby Boomers would like sabbatical breaks and the opportunities to work more flexibly nearer the time of their retirement through part-time and reduced hours. What is clear is that the inflexibility of work will create ever greater conflict across the generations as those that need it most (typically Gen X) are denied it. There are many reasons why the rhetoric of organizational flexibility has rarely been delivered in practice: a focus on being present rather than making results, few if any senior role models prepared to work flexibly, and under- designed and over complicated jobs. But if generations are to work together, flexibility has to be a reality.

3. Is cross-generational mentoring taking place?  There are important exchanges to be made between generations; Gen Y in particular are keen to build strong functional skills and industry knowledge and insights that those more experienced can help develop and yearn for feedback; whilst Baby Boomers want to develop their expertise in the use of social media and newly developed technology. These can be crucial issues as Baby Boomer retire taking with them valuable knowledge, insights and connections. However, too often mentoring does not take place because executives are too busy, too stressed and feel overwhelmed and under skilled. Yet the generations have so much to teach each other if only the time and resources could be focused on this.

It seems to me that the creative tensions between the generations can be a real source of innovation and excitement. Have you experienced tensions between generations – and what do you think can be done to ensure these tensions are creative rather than destructive?

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

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’. 

 

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?

 

 

Asia and the West Differences? - the four reasons why it’s a tough question

As I move back and forth from Europe and the USA, to Singapore and India – one of the questions I encounter is ‘what are the differences between Asia and the West?’ The subset of this broad question is– are employees different (more cooperative, more skillful, more educated, more determined?) – are leaders different (more authoritarian, more inward looking, more specialized?) – are companies different (more hierarchical, more global, more innovative?) This question becomes ever more crucial as we look forward to the next couple of decades.

This question of Asia and the West arose again as we launched the Pan-Asian Hub of the Future of Work Consortium in Singapore this week. With over 50 people at the launch and another 60 expected at the London launch in November, this is a great crowd to play this question through.

But the more I get to think about the future of work – the less I can really answer this question of Asia and the West without falling into old stereotypical responses. It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that one of the profound impacts of the Five Forces we are exploring in our research, is that trends such as ever increasing technology and globalization are making it almost impossible to make any broad statements about the difference. Here are four reasons why:

Multinational Champions. Across Asia we are seeing the emergence onto the world stage of the multinational champion able to fend for itself in this world stage. Whether it’s Wipro, TCS or Infosys in India; Singapore Airways and Olam in Singapore; or Lee & Fung and Nanjing Automobile Group Corporation in China, these companies have world-class leaders, world-class systems and world-class processes. They are barely indistinguishable from their Western competitors and each have their own unique ‘signature’ that goes way beyond any Asian stereotype.

Global Talent Pools. It’s clear to me that the most talented Gen Ys in India, China or Malaysia are nearer in ideals, values and mindset to their peers in California, Moscow or Munich … than to their own parents. This is the world’s first truly ‘joined up’ global generation with skills and values that span the world. So you thought that ‘work-life balance’ was a western phenomenon of Gen Y? Then talk with the youngsters in Mumbai and you will hear many of the same issues. Technology and globalization has connected this generation to such an extent that to talk of differences is to miss the enormous similarities.

Regional Differences. Demography plays a key role in our research on the Future of Work – both in terms of the creation of talent pools and consumers, and indeed with regard to aging and pensions. With regard to demography, one of the Asian stereotypes I hear is that ‘ Asian families are bigger’. Well yes, they are in rural India (though rapidly declining) – but they are not in Japan, and certainly not in China. Or a western stereotype such, as ‘western managers are less hierarchical than their Asian peers’. Well perhaps in Finland and some UK companies, but not in many German or French companies that stick resolutely to their hierarchies. Broad sweeps – such as ‘Asia’ or ‘The West’ are just too general to pick up the huge variation between countries, and even within regions.

Families, Governments and Local Companies. Finally, it’s really hard, even within a single region, to make any broad sweeping generalization about ‘ leadership capabilities’ or ‘management practices’. The reason is simply that companies in the same location come in so many different types and varieties. Take family firms for example. Japan and Europe have some of the oldest family firms in the world, where resources have been carefully handed down for centuries. These family firms, which are prevalent across Asia – just as they are in the USA (Mars or Cargill for example), and Europe (Fiat or Banco de Santander) have typically their unique governance structures, managerial practices and resource allocation measures. They are different from the ways that state owned companies are lead and governed. The implication is that even for firms within a single location, the history of the firm is likely to play an even greater part than where it is located.


It is of course attractive to fall back on broad generalizations, particularly those associated with ‘Asia’ and ‘The West’. But as we learn more about the variety within regions and countries, these broad generalizations really have very little foundation. So much so, that when people ask me ‘what are the differences between Asia and the West’ I end up looking rather blank and saying ‘well it depends’

Am I being particularly blind about this? Are there differences between these parts of the world that you think hold up to scrutiny – I’d love to hear your views.

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?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thriving in the Future: the shift from the generalist to the master specialist

As the research consortium on the future of work continues at a wonderful pace, we are beginning to move from the five themes , which will impact on the future, to what this means if we and our families and friends are to thrive in the future.

The age of mechanisation, which we are about to leave, had as its central metaphor the wheel and the cog. The wheel was the steady and unflinching manufacturing of goods and services. The cogs of the wheels are those people engaged in this process of manufacturing. As the world of work became mechanised, so too the process of manufacturing was broken down and divided into its smallest possible pieces and tasks, which could then be carried out by people with limited skills and to all intents and purposes acting as automotives. What was required in these bureaucratic hierarchies, was hours of labour – not innovation, not creativity and certainly not the ‘whole person’. Personality, aspirations, hopes were to be left at the door of the departing home.

The five future trends work together to provide a unique opportunity to shift from the age of mechanisation to the age of craft. In this new age, people can put their stamp on their work with regard to who they are and what they choose to do. This has immense benefits as it enables each one of us to become more authentically ourselves. However, it carries with it the necessity to become more aware of what it is that is unique about us and to craft credentials in a thoughtful and energetic way.

 The need to become a master of something and have some specialisation is crucial to the age we are entering. It could be a specific skill or competency; it could be a breadth of knowledge and insight; it could be particularly valuable networks and connections. The actual specialisation or mastery is not the point – the point is that to thrive in the future you have to have something.

Of course developing deep mastery and specialisation is important – but you will also have to demonstrate this to others. In other words, your credentials will have to be prominently on display. Professionals such as doctors and lawyers have historically relied on professional bodies to calibrate and label and display their credentials. A complex system of examinations, references and mentoring ensured that every medical professional had a set of credentials which they carry with them and which demonstrated their value and specialisation at any point in time.

Similarly, companies have often played the same credential role. I recall that the first job title I had, when as a novice psychologist I joined British Airways, was ‘Selection Methods Officer’ on Grade 9. This positioned me with great accuracy in the hierarchy. There was a Senior Selection Methods Officer to whom I reported, whilst my grade signalled I was not yet a manager. If the job title did not provide sufficient measure of my credential, then the size of my office (small and shared) and the power of my car (I did not have one) signalled just how far down the pecking order I stood. Hierarchies and bureaucracies are marvellous places for creating clear credentials – just as professional bodies historically have.

However, as companies become flatter and more project based and as work becomes more specialized, so too there will be a need for talented people to create their own verified credentials, which rapidly and accurately portray who they are and what they can do. This process of verification will place a premium on feedback and self authoring. Here are some ways to think about this:

    * Think about creating the new ‘craft communities’, which like the old professional bodies act as repositories of member’s credentials.

    * Work steadily and actively to build your personal credentials or brand using all the emerging social media technologies.

    * Be sure that every project or task you complete has a means of verification so that your performance can become part of the credential package. This means you will have to have transparent and shared performance ratings.

Not sure how this will work? Well, be inspired by the thousands of physicists working on the CERN project in Switzerland. They engage in a collective task and yet are able to verify their individual contribution by putting each of their names on any of the outcomes of their joint work. Or think about how the programmers who use O Desk post their performance ratings, so that potential buyers of their work can assess their competence.

 Stepping back, ask yourself these three questions about your current work:

  * If I left tomorrow what could I take with me that demonstrated to others what I have achieved?

  * How do people doing my sort of work show the skills they have learnt – particularly to others who are outside of this type of work?

  * How successfully have I been able to create an accurate measure of what I have done and how others have measured the value of my contribution?

 My guess is that this will be an interesting exercise for you – do tell me what you found out.