Lynda Gratton - The Future of Work

Anticipating the future through weak signals

Ten years ago I took my son to East Africa to stay in a Masai village. I reasoned that time with these mighty warriors would be a good anecdote to his rather cosy suburban life.

On the second day at the village, our Masai guide walked with us into the surrounding countryside. Then something surprising happened. The silence of this picturesque place was pierced by a strangely familiar sound. From his belt pocket the warrior took his ringing mobile phone. This was not something I'd expected. 

Four years ago I had been asked by the female students at London Business School (LBS) to speak at their annual Women in Business Conference. I spoke for around 30 minutes on the way that large corporations could make a positive difference in the world - a topic I had explored in a recently published book. In the Q&A session that followed I expected to be asked about corporate social responsibility. Instead, I was quizzed about how I had managed to be a mother and also build a relatively successful career as a professor and business woman. This was again something I had not expected. 

Yet these unexpected experiences had something profound in common. They were both 'weak signals' in the sense that they both alerted me to something I had not really or deeply considered. They also heralded something that would become more important in the future. 

I had not realised the scale with which mobile phones were being rolled out across East Africa and indeed that they contained the possibility of transferring money. And I had not realised how deeply worried young women were about the life choices they face. 

Both these weak signals had a profound impact on my thinking. The first led to the creation of my Future of Work Research Consortium - dedicated to analysing the impact of trends in technology, demography and society on corporations and the people that work for them. The second helped me understand the huge impact that Anne-Marie Slaughter’s piece in the Atlantic would have when she wrote about her personal challenges in 'having it all.' 

I'm not sure it's possible to actively seek out weak signals - often times, serendipity seems to play a key role. But here are some ideas: 

- Don't turn your back on what seems hard to comprehend. Frankly I was amazed by the questions at the LBS event. What was wrong with these women that my personal life was so interesting to them? Yet as I reflected on what had happened I began to realise that I had inadvertently tapped into a deep seam of anxiety. I began to realise that young women are genuinely concerned about their future, and as a commentator about the future I needed to understand this and indeed learn more about it. I've learnt to be very sensitive to people or ideas that don't fall into my way of thinking. 

- Be prepared to get off the beaten path. I had not expected to learn about technology through a family visit to East Africa. Yet by getting out of my normal routine I was faced with new experiences that presented me with weak signals and new insights.

- Mix with different people. It's easy in a busy life to spend lots of time with people similar to ourselves. Yet often the 'weak signals' are found in unexpected conversations. So these days I try to spend time every week with people who are different from me. People who don’t necessarily walk the paths that I do, and whose experience of the world is profoundly different from mine.

Looking ahead is such a wonderful thing to do - and weak signals can be just the way to do this. 

The Five Unanswered Questions on Gender

Last month, I took the train up to the beautiful city of Cambridge to speak at their Gender Summit. Over the course of the day, and with the help of a varied panel of business and academic speakers, we explored what it takes to promote gender equality and diversity within organisations. We debated a wide range of themes, from the impact of corporate governance structures on gender policies to the practical steps for increasing the number of female applications for the best jobs. The strength of the debate revealed how much opinion is still divided on this issue, and the wealth of research still to be done. As I travelled home, I reflected on the themes we had covered and found that five questions in particular deserved further research:

1. What are organisations doing to change attitudes to fatherhood?

Throughout the day, we touched on the complexity of balancing working life with being a mum, and the emotional and physical exhaustion that can result from ‘trying to have it all.’ It seemed that the problem wasn’t trying to have it all, but trying to do it all. Women continue to be the primary care givers at home despite taking on more responsibility in the world of work. One of the reasons behind this is that the concept of fatherhood has remained quite static over the last thirty years, with short paternity leave entitlements and a continued focus on being the main breadwinner. To really achieve gender equality in the workplace, we must also work on achieving it in the home.

2. How can women operate in male dominated senior networks?

Women are still drastically under-represented at the senior level, at around 17% of all members of FTSE 100 boards and senior executive teams. The result is male-dominated senior networks that are incredibly difficult to penetrate if you are an ambitious woman. So, whom do women end up networking with if they are not easily accepted in the male-dominated elite circles? All too often, the answer is other women more junior than them who can’t help them advance their career. To get more representation of women at the top, we need to ensure they have access to influential senior networks.

3. Are quotas useful?

Norway has pioneered the quota approach to bringing women into the boardroom and now has 40% female representation at board level. However, this has resulted in some negative labelling of these new appointees as ‘golden petticoats’, promoted to tick a box rather than as a reflection of their talent. So, what is the answer? In my opinion, quotas are still essential in getting women to the top. By forcing the distribution, we can get women networking with the right people and can begin liberating men to take more responsibility in the home.

4. How can people bring their best selves to work?

An emerging theme in management thinking is how to encourage your employees to be the best they can be at work. This requires more than just generous compensation packages; it means that working life must be tailored to individuals by acknowledging their interests, concerns and commitments. In particular, women can’t be their best selves at work if they are distracted with family obligations they are neglecting while building their careers. Organisations must invest time in understanding their employees’ needs and building more tailored arrangements to cater to them.

5. How can we move beyond narrow categorisations of women?

In my blog on May 22nd I talked about how we continue to categorise women leaders by their personal circumstance rather than their goals and ideals. These women are far more heterogeneous in their backgrounds and outlook than many of their male peers, however they are often classified according to whether or not they are married, how many children they have and what kind of mother they are. These narrow categorisations fail to recognise the real difference these women are bringing to the world of work. To truly embrace diversity we must first be able to appreciate difference.

This year I launched an Inclusion and Diversity Research Consortium to bring organisations together to provide answers to these questions. We’re hearing some very interesting insights that I look forward to sharing with you in the coming months.

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?

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.

The 10 ways to Future Proof your Career

 

With the publication of my new book The Shift: the future of work is already here - there has been much debate about what it really takes to craft a career that is likely to stand the test of time. In the book I talk a great deal about the five forces that will shape work and careers: ever greater globalization of innovation and talent; the development of ever more sophisticated connective technologies; profound changes in demography and longevity which will see many live until they are 100 and others live in regions where 40% of the population are over 50; broad societal forces that will see trust in institutions decrease and families become ever more re-arranged; and finally, the impact that carbon use and Co2 will have on how we think about our own consumption patterns. Taking this rich cocktail of forces into consideration here are my 10 tips about skills, networks and choices.

1. Don't be fooled into walking into the future blindfolded - the more you know what's in store, the better able you will be to meet the challenges and really capitalize on your options. So keep abreast of the forces that are shaping work and careers in your part of the world and think about how they will impact on you and those you care for. Making wise choices will in the end come from your capacity to understand – don’t rely on governments of big business to make the choices for you.

2. Learn to be virtual - we are entering a period of hyper technological advancements - avatars, holographs and telepresence are all just around the corner. If you are a young ‘digital native’ you are already connected to this – but if you are over 30 the chances are you are already behind on your understanding. Work will become more global and that means that increasingly you will be working with people in a virtual way – its crucial that you learn to embrace these developments and don't let yourself become obsolete through lack of technical savvy.

3. Search for the valuable skills - think hard about the skill areas that are likely to be important in the future - for example sustainability, health and wellness, and design and social media are all likely to be areas where work will be created over the next decade. Also remember that jobs that involve working closely with people (chef, hairdresser, coach, physiotherapist) are unlikely to move to another country.

4. Become a Master - don't be fooled into spread your talents too thinly. Being a 'jack of all trades' will mean you are competing with millions of others around the world who are similar. Separate yourself from the crowd by really learning to master a skill or talent that you can develop with real depth. Be prepared to put your time and effort into honing these skills and talents.

5. Be prepared to strike out on your own - there will always be work with big companies - but increasingly the real fun will come from setting up your own company. We are entering the age of the 'micro-entrepreneur' when ever decreasing costs of technology will significantly reduce the barriers to getting off the ground, and when talented people across the world will be connected and keen to work with each other.

6. Find your posse- to create valuable skills and knowledge you will need to quickly reach out to others who can help and advise you. This small  'posse' of like-minded and skilled people is a network that will be central to your really building speed and agility in your career. Don’t leave it too long to find and cultivate it.

7. Build the Big Ideas Crowd - the future is about innovation, and sometime your best, most innovative ideas will come as you talk and work with people who are completely different from you - perhaps they have a different mindset, or come from a different country - or are younger. It is this wide network, the 'big ideas crowd' that will be a crucial source of inspiration. Make sure that you don’t limit yourself to working only with those who are just like you.

8. Go beyond the family  - your career success will depend in part on your emotional well being and resilience. In a world of ever shifting relationships, it's important that you invest in developing deep restorative relationships with a couple of people - this is your 'regenerative community' and they are crucial to your well being and happiness. Make the investment as soon as you can and make an effort to maintain and build these relationships over decades.

9. Have the courage to make the hard choices - 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). So you need a strategy for the long term. You have three hard choices:  1. 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. It does not matter which hard choice you make – but you are going to have to make at least one of them.

10. Become a producer rather than a simple consumer - And finally... the old deal at work:  'I work, to earn money, to buy stuff, that makes me happy' is rapidly becoming obsolete. Engaging in meaningful work where you can rapidly learn will become a priority (although fair pay will always be important). So think hard about sharing and great experiences rather than simply building your working life around consuming.

 

Take a look at my videos and download The Shift Workbook at www.theshiftbylyndagratton.com. You can also download The Shift from the App Store now.