Lynda Gratton - The Future of Work

Are you an Adult at Work?

Photo: Two of a Kind by Ali Elan

It’s been an exciting year – economic turmoil in Europe, extraordinary growth in many of the developing countries, the rise of some companies and demise of others. What is clear is that we are in the midst of an industrial revolution greater than the world has ever seen with all the turbulence, the challenges and the opportunities that previous revolutions have brought. Partly as a result of this, it seems to me that the relationship between companies and their employees is undergoing a fundamental shift. All over the world the old Parent to Child relationship is moving towards a potentially more balanced Adult to Adult relationship. This is generally good news - but don’t underestimate what this will mean to your working life and what you will have to do to make the most of it.

I’ve looked back over my own experiences of 2011 – multiple trips to Asia and the USA, some fascinating work with the World Economic Forum on leadership, and the research of my team on the future of work. Mulling over this it seems to me that there are 5 questions we should all be asking ourselves about our preparation for the future. All of them in some way resonate with this shift from a Parent to Child relationship at work, to a more balanced Adult to Adult. Yet whilst there are great aspects to being an Adult at work – it also shows that this brings with it responsibilities and commitments. Here are five questions to ask yourself:

1. Am I letting my context overwhelm me?  

Spending time in China last month I was struck by the upbeat enthusiasm of Chinese youth. It’s clear they have much to play for. It was a stark contrast to an earlier visit to Madrid where I heard at first hand the impact of 40% youth unemployment. Being a young graduate in a country with near zero growth is not pleasant, and we know what psychological scarring this experience can have. Context can indeed be overwhelming, and it can feel as if there are no real options against which choices can be made. But looking forward it seems to me that it crucial to see choices even in these potentially more restricted contexts. That’s why, for example, last year I supported my son Christian Seiersen to spend a year in China and India before he went to university. What is clear is that we are at the beginning of a major re-balancing of world’s growth and prosperity. You need to be very clear sighted about this and work out the choices you have – and then go for them – even if that means re-locating to the other side of the world. Children wait for Parents to make the world good for them – Adults try to make their own context.

2. Am I a Technological Child?   

One of the exciting research projects we undertook this year at the Future of Work Consortium was to look at how Gen Z’s (those under the age of around 12) think about work and technology. We have video clips of kids less than two years old working proficiently with iPads and Skype with ease and saw a real excitement in this group to engage with leading edge technologies such as holograms. But what we also found is that it’s not simply age that defines technically savvy. In the ‘technology and productivity’ survey we undertook with our consortium members this month, we also found some Baby Boomers and Traditionalist just as excited and knowledgeable. There are indeed enormous opportunities for each one of us to use technology to significantly boost our productivity and indeed create greater innovation. Many of us are choosing to do this by buying our own technological tools rather than waiting for our company to do this for us. This makes sense. It’s all part of the bigger Adult to Adult shift we are going to see. Parents buy their Children their computers: Adults make their own choices.

3. Am I in control of my competencies?  

We have just completed a 72 hour ‘Jam’ where we asked 1,500 Gen Y’s from one of the global professional firms to enter into a world-wide virtual conversation about their experience of work. I was slightly surprised by the extent to which this generation (now in their 20’s) is defining work almost exclusively in terms of how much they are learning from it. Good Work provides opportunities to do exciting, stretching work with talented peers: Bad Work may pay well, but in the long term erodes your intellectual capital. It seems to me that this is a group of people who are preparing for a world where the only game in town is to develop deep skills, preferably in more than one area. Work then moves from the old deal (which I talked about in my book The Shift) – ‘I work…to buy stuff…that makes me happy’ – to the new deal – ‘I work…to learn stuff…that makes me long term employable’. It’s a good trade – between short term gains to longer term personal resilience and capability. Sounds like an Adult to me… the Child would go for the ‘buy stuff’ anytime (although having said that the Gen Z’s we watched seemed mad about learning).

4. Do I have the courage to make the hard choices?   

Here is the emerging deal about work. Your working life will be shaped by the shifting patterns of longevity (you are likely to live considerably longer than your parents) and demography (in many regions there will be a much higher proportion of people over 50). This means that looking back to your parent’s working lives is not really going to give you much of a handle. Moreover, your current employers are unlikely to take a parenting role in really looking after you in the long term. So it’s time you faced up to some of the hard choices you face:  1. To build a career that enables you to work longer (at least into your late 60's or early 70’s), 2. Be prepared (like the Chinese who save around 40% of their income) to save a significant proportion of your income throughout your working life, 3. Consider ways to reduce your consumption and live more simply. You don’t have to make all of these hard choices – but you are going to have to take at least one. It’s about making choices as an Adult.

5. Am I making the most of the future? 

No question that Number 4 was a tough one – so let’s finish with a more uplifting question. The future of work will require us to make some tough decisions – but it will also provide some great opportunities. Here are my top four opportunities:

• To live a longer, more healthy and productive working life.
• To spend more time working from home in an increasingly flexible way.
• To hook up with people across the world via rapidly developing ‘collective intelligence’ technology.
• To get technology to do the mundane stuff – leaving you to build deeper skills and engage in more meaningful work.

How far advanced are you in making them happen? Over the next couple of years there will be many opportunities for each of us to craft exciting and meaningful working lives – let’s make sure we don’t simply wait for others to make them for us. 

 

The 10 Ways to Know Whether Your Job is Meaningful

In my book The Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here, I made the point that the formula for the traditional deal at work is as follows:

I work... to earn money... which I use... to consume stuff... which makes me happy.

I suggested that this deal is not a sufficient description of what work can and should be. Instead I put forward the following future-focused deal at work:

I work... to gain productive experiences... that are the basis... of my happiness.

But this begs the question – what exactly is a meaningful productive experience, and how do you know when your work is meaningful? So here are the 10 questions to ask yourself to establish whether your work is meaningful.

1. Do you use the majority of the knowledge you have on a daily basis?
   ...because meaningful work provides an opportunity for you to keep your knowledge fresh by using it constantly.
   
   
2. Do you feel intellectually stretched in your work?
   ...because meaningful work both uses the knowledge you have and pushes the boundaries of what you can become.
   
   
3. Are you able to learn something new at least once a week?
   ...because meaningful work creates constant opportunity for learning.
   
   
4. In your view are your colleagues at work knowledgeable and do you learn from them constantly?
   ...because meaningful work is also about the colleagues who come with it, and your learning and development comes primarily through learning from others: what I have called ‘The Posse’.
   
   
5. Are the tasks you do at work interesting and complex?
   ...because at the heart of meaningful work are the day-to-day tasks that you do.
   
   
6. Do you get lots of feedback about how you are doing?
   ...because meaningful work enables you to grow, and feedback from others is a crucial part of this.
   
   
7. Do you think that the work you do has a positive impact on the business?
   ...because meaningful work enables you to make a clear link in your mind between the tasks you perform and the broader goals of the business.
   
   
8. Do you think that the work you do has a positive impact on society?
   ...because meaningful work is made up of tasks that you believe do good and, as a consequence, make you feel good about yourself.
   
   
9. In your daily work, do you have the opportunity to reach out to develop networks with people very different from yourself?
   ...because meaningful work creates opportunities for you to develop the ‘Big Ideas Crowd’ that is so crucial to developing your innovative and creative capacity.
   
   
10. Does your work give you time to really develop deep regenerative relationships with people inside and outside of your organisation?
    ...because meaningful work creates time and space for you to develop emotionally.

So where are you on meaningful work?

Score 8-10
Through your active choices, or sheer luck, you are working in a meaningful way. Cherish the opportunities this provides and don’t compromise in the future.

Score 5-7
Some aspects of your work are meaningful. Take a closer look at those you have said no to and search for the underlying patterns. Is it possible to focus on developing these areas?

Score 1-4
Your job lacks meaning – you already know that! The question is – what are you going to do about it?

This is my take on meaning at work – are there any areas you would add?

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.

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?

 

 

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.

Urban Tribe or Corporate Tribe – take your pick

Here are two vignettes for work and life in 2020 – both of which have emerged from the discussion this week of that increasingly wise crowd in the Future of Work research consortium. So here they are:

Scenario 1 – you live in the midst of a large city in a small apartment which is also a working space – fitted it out with all the latest connectivity gadgets. Twice a week  at 9.00 in the morning you pick up the work that a project team in Singapore have been working on during their day- and at 5.00 that afternoon you shoot off your work to others across California who will pick it up. And with the latest gadgets you are able to exchange a few words through your personal hologram so you feel sort of connected.

You are feeling great. But there is one small niggle. You work with about five different companies at any one time – either you agree a flat rate or they pay by the hour. Your virtual agent avatar brings the work to you and advertises you out there –so you are never stuck for work. So here is the niggle. You’ve never actually met anyone from these five companies. Sure they have full time employees – but not many – and you are not one of them. Your virtual agent is continuously scanning opportunities for you and comparing the price per hour – so it (it is an ‘it’ by the way – not a person) rather than you does the negotiation and then hands over to you to roam the internet for other opportunities. Sure the work is well paid and some times it’s interesting as well. But you are not engaged or committed in any sense of the word with any one of these companies.

Yours is an independent, autonomous, fragmented life. You live in the city to be near your mates who are people with the same interests as you. Yours is the life of the urban tribe member – connected to tasks – but disconnected from the companies you serve.

Scenario 2 – same city, same apartment, and actually pretty much the same work. The difference is that you work full time for a large corporation. You have worked there since you finished college. At the age of 16 the company had approached you to serve as an apprentice with them and agreed to pay your college fees in exchange for the commitment that you would work for them for at least ten years when you graduated. Once you graduated they made a loan to you to make a deposit on the apartment you now live in which is owned by the corporation. Around you in the same apartment block are many other employees from the same firm and many of you spend time at the company social centre. One of the reasons you will stay in the company is because it runs its own schools and hospitals and the standards are excellent.

You are feeling great. But there is one small niggle. You’ve only ever worked for this company all your life and other companies tend not to recruit from it – the view is that your skills and knowledge are too specialised. Plus there are times when you feel overwhelmed by our work colleagues – it seems it's impossible to get away from them.

Yours is a dependent, integrated life. It’s the life of the corporate tribe member – connected 24/7 to the company – but somehow disconnected from the community of which you are a member.

What’s interesting about these scenarios is that corporate life could go either way. Some companies in the future may well decide to build whole infrastructures either independently or in clusters with other companies – to provide a total life and work experience for their most talented employees. Others will decide to buy talent from the spot market when and how they need it.

Both are possible –which would you prefer? Would you prefer a world of free agents operating autonomously or would you prefer to be cocooned in the life of the corporation?

Letter from Singapore

As I leave Singapore this weekend I thought I’d share with you some finally thoughts about what I have seen and heard about the future of work. I’ve had the real pleasure of spending the week with a group of 35 executives from companies based in Singapore and Abu Dhabi and with a number of civil servants tasked with supporting the Singapore vision. Yesterday we talked about the future of work and constructed five vignettes for the future – describing how people will be working on a daily basis in 2020. Here are eight observations from these Asian vignettes.

1. The role of governments as builders of human capital: I think one of the intriguing questions in the future of work is the extent to which governments around the word will strive to influence the working patterns and type of work of their citizens. Of course it’s easier for smaller countries than for larger, and for those with a shorter history of industrialization. Singapore is not called Singapore Inc for nothing and I’ve seen multiple ways in which the government is influencing the future of work. For example, with the development of the Human Capital Institute and the involvement of the Ministry of Manpower in this project. Our colleagues from Abu Dhabi tell us that their country is also determined to be a magnet for talent. They have a strategy by 2030 to be the one of the top 5 governments for healthcare and education. If you are sitting on as much oil wealth as Abu Dhabi is – then the possibilities are endless. It seems like the war for talent will be fought as hard by governments as it will by corporations.

2. Increased Asian mobility of talent: The group believed that the country barriers which inhibit the movement of labour across Asia will be reduced. As a consequence talent will flow with the ease that it does currently across the European Union. What will a joined up Asian talent pool mean to the future of work?

3. The rise of pandemics:  One of the themes we have not factored in yet is the way in which joined up globalisation will increase the extent of pandemics and how this will impact on work in the future. Singapore for example has drawn up very detailed plans for how work will continue during the next pandemic. Will health fears reduce mobility?

4. Differential home based work:  Like the London vignette creators – this group also saw people working virtually – often choosing to be based at home. One important difference in home working emerged. In some parts of Asia homes are small and full of family members with limited space for working – so going to an office could be a real reward. But this is not true for everyone – many will still prefer to spend time working from home.

5. Mentored by a robot? We talked about the increased need for mentoring and coaching in this virtual, home based world. People really want to know how they are getting on and have the opportunity of talking through their problems. But does this person have to be real? What about being mentored by an avatar?

6. A return to Victorian values? Everyone agreed that more and more relationships will be virtual. So what are the compensation mechanisms? In this new world of work where will communities be formed, and what role will organisations play? Will the company increasingly be the social hub for people? We heard how the founder of Unilever built communities for employees with libraries, art galleries and social clubs. Will this be the new role of companies – the place that connects people?

7. The parent-less generation?  Perhaps one of the most interesting conversations we had was around the experiences of young people. In Asia a recent survey showed that more than 20% of children spend more than 5 hours a day on the computer – much of this time unsupervised. In the majority of families both parents work and in Hong Kong and Singapore a high proportion of these children are brought up by nannies as parents work long hours. These are the workers of the future. How will these young kids evolve and what effect will their childhood experiences have on their preferred working styles?

8. Will companies always discourage good parenting? Right now many corporations have implicitly discouraged good parenting. Of course this is not explicit – but the extent of travel, the long hour’s culture, the weekend working makes it really hard for anyone to be a great parent. One of the ideas we discussed was whether in the future some companies will actively play a positive role in supporting good parenting. Here are some thoughts. Actively encouraging employees to build family ties. Creating targets (like KPI’s) for parenting –‘how long did you talk with your kids this week? what did you do this month to support their self confidence?’. Making a hot-line for parenting skills and anxieties. Sounds far fetched? Perhaps its time the pendulum to swing back? 

Tomorrow I’m back in London – on Tuesday talking with a bunch of groups like Save the Children, UNICEF and Oxfam about innovation. One intriguing question is to what extent these organisations – with an emphasis on quick fire projects, meaningful work and global reach - epitomise the work of the future. I’ll tell you what I found next week.