Lynda Gratton - The Future of Work

What if money was no longer the most valuable asset a company could offer an employee?

What is the most valuable asset a company can give an employee?

Historically the answer was simple – money. That’s why the HR function of most companies goes to such extreme lengths to design pay packets (bonuses, team-based rewards, stock options and so on) and to decide through antiquated performance management systems who gets paid what. Indeed, it’s why they’ve been persuaded that senior leaders really are worth up to 200% more than the pay of an average employee.

Yet we have known for sometime that although pay might indeed be a valuable asset for an employee, it’s unlikely to be the driver for their motivation. Indeed years of research have shown that this valuable asset turns out more often to be a source of dissatisfaction rather than a motivator. Most people don’t work harder, or more creatively or cooperatively because they are paid more.

So recently the search has been on for more ‘intangible assets’ that could be really valued by employees. Perhaps it’s the opportunity to work more flexibly, or the chance to work for a boss that likes you, or to work in a convivial open plan office that employees value. And indeed, perhaps it’s this combination that results in employees being engaged rather than disengaged.

I think – to use a simple metaphor – we are barking up the wrong tree. Let me explain. Over the last couple of years my colleague, the economist Andrew Scott, and I have been asking a simple question ‘What happens when most people live to 100 years’. It’s been a fascinating exploration. One undeniable truth is that if you live to 100 then you will probably need to work into your 80s. Now there is no doubt that over the course of a long working life money is indeed crucial – no one wants to look forward to an old age lived in poverty. So money is a valuable asset that a company can give to an employee.

However, across a long life this tangible asset, whilst important, has to be balanced by equally important intangible assets. It seems to me that chief amongst these crucial intangible assets is the type of work an employee is given to perform. Work that is valuable both now and as a hedge against the future has three crucial elements:

• It is interesting and allows workers to engage their mind and creativity
• It has developmental potential – particularly to in terms of capabilities that are ‘portable’ in the sense that they can be used beyond the current job
• It is non-routine so is unlikely to be substituted in the short term by robotics or Artificial Intelligence

For the sake of simplicity lets call this ‘good work’. Now lets play a mind game. Let’s assume that a leader in a corporation acknowledges that the intangible asset of ‘good work’ is as valuable to an employee as the tangible asset of money. If this were the case, what would we expect to see happening within the corporation? Here are five ideas:

• We would expect jobs to be analysed with regards to the extent that they are composed of tasks that are interesting, developmental and non-routine. We could even imagine that these job characteristics are rated against a common currency – lets call this unit a ‘tang’.
• So when an employer is advertising a job, they are able to show both the financial assets the job is valued at (salary, bonus, stock options etc) and also its ‘tang’ assets (interest, developmental potential, non-routine)
• When an employee is deciding on whether to take a job, they can balance the tangible and intangible assets it creates. They can decide, for example, that they are prepared to take a higher ‘tang’ rated job at a certain point in their career, even if the salary is lower. Or indeed take a higher paid job whilst acknowledging that the ‘tang’ value is low.
• It could be that managers who are particularly skilled at designing jobs for their team that have a high ‘tang’ value are celebrated for this sculpting skill.
• We might expect that if the ‘tang’ value of a job falls below a certain level then the whole job has to be re-designed to increase the ‘tang value’ by adding tasks that are interesting, developmental or non-routine. This re-design could be initiated by the manager, or indeed by the worker who is performing the job and who is encouraged to broaden the scope of the job to envelope more ‘tang’ rich activities.

Right now it is still money that dominates the negotiated relationship between an employee and employer. Let’s widen the conversation to include an equally important asset – good work. Perhaps by understanding the value of work with as much finesse as we currently understand the value of reward systems, we can begin to give employees a better choice about the deal they want to strike.

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What would HR policies look like if they were based on giving?

At a recent masterclass for the Future of Work Research Consortium, I raised the following question: what would HR policies and processes be like if companies based them on the assumption that their employees are programmed to be helpful to others?

My starting point was the realisation that in most organisations, HR seems to be set up to act as a buffer between the company and its employees’ worst natures.  The “worst nature” they imagine is that of someone whose priority is to take what they can while giving back as little as possible in return. This in contrast to what we see around us. For example, if you take a look at the people you know, you’ll notice that in their lives outside work, they often give their time and resources to help others. In fact, outside work, most of us are what Professor Adam Grant defines in his book Give and Take as “givers…people who contribute to others without expecting anything in return,” or “matchers [who] aim to trade evenly.” Far fewer people are “takers” who “strive to get as much as possible from others.”

If we apply Adam Grant’s concept to my question above, the question becomes: “What would happen if we turned the tables?” Here are my thoughts on what would happen if we based HR policy on the assumption that people alike to cooperate.

• It would revolutionise the selection process

If you were building an organisation with the awareness that some people are “givers”, others are “matchers” and some are “takers”, who would you want to hire? Iimagine the first change most companies would make would be to redesign their selection process to identify and favour more cooperative individuals.

• Performance management would have a positive focus

If your policies are based on the assumption that employees are trusted collaborators, you would also assume that every worker in your organisation is doing the best they can. As a result, development processes would be run on the assumption that employees have a positive outlook and are prepared to coach and mentor colleagues. People wouldn’t be ranked against each other – instead, managers would focus on building each individual’s strengths as fully as possible.

• You would provide meaningful work

In an environment where we assume everyone will be generous with their skills and time, it would be easier to design meaningful jobs that allow each employee to give of their skills and expertise to others.

• You would provide opportunities to give something back

Co-operative people tend to give across the board – they don’t restrict their giving to a single context. In an organisation based on a culture of giving, the working day would be structured to allow ample time to give to the community around them as well as the organisation. A great example of this is the John Lewis Partnership, where employees are encouraged to take time out to volunteer in the community.

• It would add value to your business

Such changes might make the workplace a nicer place to be, but how would they add value to the business? I feel that one of the advantages cooperative people bring to the workplace is their ability to build far-reaching networks of weak ties – those slight connections we all create on an everyday basis and which have proven to be more valuable than strong ties (friendships, family relationships) in the context of work. People who are generous enough to help those they don’t know well build networks as wide as they are strong – and wide networks are extremely valuable, not only to the individual, but to the organisation in which they work.

It seems clear that assuming employees are inclined to cooperate makes sense. However, actually changing HR policies and processes is a much taller order. Aligning HR policies and processes with the realities of work today isn’t happening. It’s time to start asking ourselves why.

How improving job design can secure the future of your business

If you could name a single factor as the biggest enemy of employee retention in your organisation, what would it be? My guess would be job design – specifically, the availability of career customisation.

You might think your organisation already offers career customisation and improved job design, but let me make my point clear: improving job design is not that same as bringing flexibility into work. Many – if not most – large corporations have flexible working arrangements. But when it comes to improved job design – by which I mean initiatives such as phased retirement, job share schemes and, on- and off-boarding ramps, they are lagging far behind. I estimate that such companies have a period of three years at most to introduce these elements of job design before the lack of them starts to have a serious impact.

This is becoming an urgent issue. As things stand, when people want to customise their careers they do so by leaving the company. The most valuable people are building their career elsewhere because companies are not providing what they need.

This talent drain is just one reason why companies need to ramp up their experiments and pilots in the field of job design: and it’s about to get worse. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, life stage is becoming an increasingly important factor in people’s career choices – and people reach these stages at vastly different ages. For example, some employees will choose to become parents in their 20s, while others do the same in their 40s. As people start to live longer, we will see more and more people rejecting traditional linear career paths and opting for careers that move sideways, downwards, or even pause for a while. It is the companies that are dealing with these issues already – and the ones that act now to start handling them more effectively – that will prove resilient over the coming decades.

The importance of scale

So why are so many companies, many of whom have already invested heavily in flexible working and job design, failing so miserably in this respect? One reason is that companies have for too long associated the idea of career customisation with motherhood. Often because when women in particular leave an organisation, there is an immediate assumption they are doing so to start a family. In fact, what I’ve noticed about my MBA students at LBS is that often when they leave a company, it’s to start their own business. And a key reason for this is that doing so empowers them to take charge of their own job design.

A damaging side effect of associating career customisation with motherhood is a lack of scale. You may have some great improved job design initiatives but failing to scale them beyond the concept of maternity leave means that employees will continue to achieve career customisation by moving on.

The solution to this problem is to make career customisation fluid, mainstream and transparent. Healthy, loyal employees have control over how, when, where they work and can manage their careers in tune with the rhythms of their life. To enable this, employers need to let workers know that the design of their job can change according to their circumstances and that customisation is available to everyone, not just mothers. Above all, they need to know what their options are at each stage of their life and career, so that they can make the appropriate choices.

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More women at Davos? Not at this rate

Recently in an interview with the BBC's Peter Day, I was asked about the future and replied that I expected gender parity within the next decade. Peter simply looked at me and said "But that's what you said when I interviewed you 20 years ago and it still has not happened." Of course he is right and at Davos this week I expect that, as in past years, there will be only a small proportion of women. I'm publically optimistic, but privately pessimistic about achieving a gender balance in the next couple of decades.

There are four key reasons why Davos 2024 will probably look exactly like Davos 2014. Firstly, while societal norms move fast (think about the speed with which attitudes to gay marriage or divorce have changed), corporate practices change at a glacial pace. For example, the way corporations select, promote, appraise people has hardly changed in the last 20 years. Since many of these practices were designed for people who had child care at home (ie a wife), who worked in an office (rather than at home), and who could work standard hours (rather than flexibly) they have proven to be barriers to anyone (often women) who want to work in a different way. And moreover, these are barriers that appear to be resolutely impervious to changing circumstances.

It takes a wise and courageous CEO to actively promote women into business orientated senior executive roles. Some of course do but many do not. Without this push it's almost impossible to achieve gender parity. Research has shown that more often CEOs promote one woman to the senior team and then stand back and think the job is done. Or alternatively they support a women's network, a process that we know makes little difference to promotion prospects. We need CEOs who realise these token efforts aren't enough before we will see any big change.

Like many, I believe that gender parity will only be achieved when men are willing to take as much responsibility for raising a family as women do. Of course there are families where there is already a balance, but this is not the norm. Current working practices implicitly assume that the worker is supported by someone who can stand in for them with regard to family responsibilities, this needs to be true at home.

Finally, and most depressingly, the simple truth is that there are jobs that lead to the top – jobs that require significant management of large numbers of people, jobs that have a heavy dose of finance, jobs that involve working in multiple locations. These are typically not the jobs that women apply for, or are selected into. As a consequence many women are already out of the promotion ladder within a decade of joining the workforce. I hope I am proved wrong. How marvellous it would be to see equal numbers of men and women at Davos in 2024 but I'm not holding my breath.

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 Three Paradoxes Of Generation Y

Over the last few weeks, I’ve noticed a considerable amount of attention focused on Generation Y from both the media and business world. The May 20 issue of Time Magazine led with a cover story labelling them the ‘Me, Me, Me’ generation: narcissistic, fame-obsessed, and self interested; Meanwhile PwC reported findings from a comprehensive Next Gen study of its Gen Y employees – a cohort that will make up around 80% of its workforce within the next three years.

This recent focus on Gen Y reflects a building sense of nervousness around how this generation, the biggest since the Baby Boomers, will reshape work. It’s a nervousness I’ve felt from the HR leaders in my executive programme at LBS who often despair that this generation just aren’t accepting ‘the way things are done around here,' and are instead challenging long-standing processes and practices.

But is this anxiety justified? Are Gen Y really so different from their predecessors? And, if they are, do organisations need to change to accommodate them?

Here are three paradoxes I’ve uncovered that can help us answer those questions.

Short-term focus, but equally committed – Gen Y are fast movers. We know they will change jobs, and perhaps even entire careers, many times in their long working lives. This is a stark contrast with the ‘job for life’ career pattern of their Baby Boomer parents, and the HR leaders at my executive programme. It also shows their desire for meaningful, stimulating work from day one, and their lack of interest in traditional career paths that promote slowly.

This focus on short-term success is sometimes used to depict Gen Y as less committed to work than their Gen X and Baby Boomer peers. Yet this stereotype is certainly not true of those surveyed in the Next Gen study. According to Dennis Finn, Global Human Capital Leader at PwC, ‘this generation is as engaged, committed and prepared to work as hard as previous generations’. They don’t mind working. They just think there are better ways to work.

Tech savvy, but value face-to-face - Gen Y is known for its intensive use of social media and virtual communication. In the USA, this generation send and receive around 88 texts a day according to research by Pew, and 70% check their phones every hour. With these statistics in hand it’s easy to view this generation as happy to conduct their lives, both professional and private, exclusively through their phones, iPads and laptops. But PwC’s research tells us that Gen Y’s aptitude for electronic communication augments rather than replaces face-to-face interaction. Particularly when it comes to performance and career discussions where personal interactions are still the preferred method.

Require recognition, but not necessarily more trophies - Time Magazine rather negatively dubs Gen Y the ‘trophy generation’ who, as a result of receiving too many participation trophies as children, have a sense of entitlement far beyond that of their older peers. It’s easy to see where this assumption comes from. Just look at games such as Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, which provide satisfying rewards for every action the player takes. So, it should come as no surprise that, according to a study cited by Time Magazine, 40% of Gen Y believes they should be promoted every two years, regardless of performance.

 But again, this may be misinterpreting the issue. We know Gen Y place an real emphasis on continual learning, and the drive for regular promotion should not be confused with the desire for regular feedback, which many see as a vital part of their personal and career development. Though a visual indicator of progression, promotion does not always bring with it greater learning opportunities.

So, what do organisations do about these paradoxes and how can they truly understand what drives their Gen Ys? PwC’s Next Gen report has a few recommendations, but one stands out to me as particularly important for this fast-moving, tech-savvy group: ‘Invest time, resources and energy to listen and stay connected with your people’. If there’s one thing we know for sure about this generation, it’s that they like to have their voices heard, and to feel empowered. Whether in the virtual or real world, perhaps the key to understanding this generation and knowing how to engage them is to simply listen to them.

Many of the insights from PwC’s NextGen study came out of Hot Spots Movement FoWlab jam methodology. Have a look at our website to find out more.

 

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.

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.

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.