The Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here. Lynda Gratton

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СКАЧАТЬ The balanced man: there is growing evidence that men’s perception of their role and the choices they make are also changing. Faced with the consequences of their fathers’ choices, it seems that there will be an increasing proportion of men who will decide to make a trade-off between wealth and spending time with their family and children.

      5. Growing distrust of institutions: trust is about the relationships between the individual and their community and work. It is based on the perception of whether others can be trusted to deliver. Across the developed world it seems that levels of trust in leaders and corporations have fallen, and may well continue to fall over the coming decades.

      6. The decline of happiness: perhaps one of the most surprising aspects of working life is that, in the main, increases in standards of living – beyond a certain level – have been accompanied by decreases in happiness. If the trajectory of consumption continues, there is no evidence that this decline will be reversed.

      7. Passive leisure increases: one of the headline stories from the industrialisation of work has been the significant increase in leisure time. Up until the 2010s much of that time was spent in passive television watching. It could be that in the coming decades the growth of virtual participation will create a significant ‘cognitive surplus’ which can be focused on more productive activities.

      At first glance these piece about the societal forces look bleak: a future of dislocated families, ebbing trust, general unhappiness, ever more voracious consumption and little in the way of work/ life balance. Certainly as we construct the storylines for the Default Future these pieces play a key role in the themes of isolation and fragmentation. However, it could also be that this force is the most positive of all in the sense that it is most dependent on personal actions and choices. So as we will see as we construct the storylines for the positive, Crafted Future, within these seemingly bleak forces are rays of hope as rearranged families create a greater openness to differences, as Gen Y exercise their choice for more collaboration in the workplace, and as women are able to have their voices heard with more vigour in the boardrooms of 2025.

      The force of energy resources

      The way we will work in the future is intimately wrapped up with our access to energy and the impact this access will have on our environment. Of all the five forces we considered in the Future of Work Consortium, people felt most concerned and yet powerless about this one. For many it felt that a spectre was haunting them – the spectre of ever-increasing energy costs and of a rapidly changing climate.

      These are forces that began with the first Industrial Revolution and have been gathering pace ever since. It’s clear to many governments, to businesses and to each one of us that the actions we are taking are having a detrimental impact on the environment. The central challenge is one of short term versus longer term – an issue we will encounter at various times in thinking through these five forces. Of course we care about the environment and the future of the planet – but these are all longer-term issues. In the short term, for many people and companies and even governments, there is no immediate stimulus to drastically reorganise their policies, companies or lifestyles to avoid some of the projections we will consider in the hard data. As many of those engaged in the conversation about the Future of Work remarked, the consequences of climate change seem like a distant fiction that currently has very little influence on their everyday decisions. Yet this is likely to change considerably by 2025, and we can expect issues of energy usage and climate change to be at the centre of the working agenda by 2030. By then, many of the outcomes of fossil fuel depletion and visible climate change will begin to impact on the daily working life of people across the world.

      One of the members of the Future of Work Consortium was Shell Oil, and we found their resource scenarios for 2050 a very useful starting point from which to develop the more detailed pieces. For over 30 years the scenario team at Shell Oil have worked with experts from around the world to construct scenarios of the future use of energy, releasing these scenarios every few years. In 2008 they released the two scenarios they believe most accurately describe the paths into the next 50 years. These scenarios consider the effects of various levels of reform and progress in terms of policy, technology and commitment from governments, industry and society in order to provide a glimpse into the possible futures of energy. The interesting aspect of the Shell scenarios is that neither conclusion reached is infeasible. They display a cautious sense of optimism without forgetting the severity of the facts.

      In both energy resource scenarios we are faced with an impending and necessary restructuring. We can either run the course of the present energy framework, adapting to emerging challenges as they arise, or alternatively, begin to construct a new energy framework that integrates local, regional and global networks into a new international architecture of sustainability. Whereas the first scenario (which they term Scramble) relies on the activities of national governments to secure their future energy supply, the second (termed Blueprint) emerges as a consequence of grassroots coalitions (recall those 5 billion joined-up people) that bring together individuals, companies and other institutions to construct a new foundation for energy and resource generation and control.

      In the Scramble scenario, over the coming decades, governments around the world scramble to attempt to guarantee the maximum amount available to them of the dwindling resource pool. In asserting their autonomy rather than agreeing to cooperate, governments increasingly compete with each other to secure energy for their domestic consumers. This has the impact of preserving high-energy prices and putting increasing strain on the existing energy infrastructure. In this scenario, although prosperity persists throughout the 2010s and 2020s, this relentless scramble and competition for energy resources continues to increase the gap between the rich and the poor. Many of the resource gains that are made are due to the resurgence of the coal sector. In this scenario multilateral governmental institutions find themselves too weak to subsidise the creation of a global clean energy sector. To supplement the use of finite coal reserves, domestic investment is instead directed to the expansion of nuclear power and a modernised biofuel industry. In the short term they manage to sustain economic growth throughout the 2020s.

      However, in the longer term (2020 and beyond) the scenario is increasingly negative. In the Scramble scenario governments increasingly have to react to the emerging constraints of the traditional energy framework, imposing solutions that often have immediate benefits but long-term negative consequences. Coal is not without its environmental problems, while nuclear fuel produces nuclear waste, and the biofuel industry competes with the food industry, pushing up prices of food to unsustainable levels. As a consequence, by 2025 the uncoordinated efforts of governments to secure resources have ensured that the existing framework is stretched to its limit, eventually necessitating draconian measures on production, consumption and mobility. For the governments of China and India, still in the process of developing a modernised industrial economy, these constraints prove hard to enforce. In Europe and America the introduction of a carbon tax and the scrutiny of the carbon footprints of individuals and companies put pressure on people to work from home and live austere lives. It is only when governments, companies and individuals reach this impasse that substantial steps to create a new energy sector are taken. Having failed to cooperate sooner, instead insisting on competing to use what remained of traditional energy reserves, nations begin to realise the extent of this undertaking. Not only do they have to restructure their energy framework completely, but they also have to confront the oncoming consequences of their lack of restraint.

      The second Blueprint scenario reveals the beneficial aspect of confronting climate change and energy problems sooner (that is, before 2020) rather than later. It is also a scenario that depends both on a sense of urgency and the flow of information. It relies on the practical actions of well-coordinated coalitions who have acknowledged the implications of climate change, and are quick in their efforts to secure a safe and sustainable future. These coalitions include companies with mutual energy interests, cities and regions conscious of their future energy requirements, and a whole host of other institutions that are united in formulating low-carbon СКАЧАТЬ