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

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СКАЧАТЬ computer answering more messages and taking a couple of calls to her team members. There is a particularly tricky problem in Johannesburg and her colleagues are keen to get her advice about how to proceed with the sales. By 11.30 Jill has arrived in the hub where she takes a quick look around to find a workstation that is vacant and then logs in, saying a quick hello to the others who have also decided to work in the hub that morning. Some of the people she knows, others are new faces.

      Her boss Jerry is keen to talk with her about the daily sales figures, so by 3.00 p.m. she is patched through to his home office in Los Angeles. It’s early morning there, so he has chosen to use his avatar to present for him – no one wants to be seen working in their pyjamas. The conversation goes pretty well – one of Jill’s major clients is a telecoms company based in Rwanda in West Africa and they are negotiating a substantial order for the chips for handheld devices. Jill had caught up with the client earlier in the day, so was able to brief Jerry about how the process was going and the likely revenue stream. Jerry also wants Jill’s views on how best to build the market in Patagonia and Peru. For the last two decades, Essar in Kenya and MTN in South Africa have been leaders in the field and have been particularly adept at encouraging their customers to use their mobiles to make money transfers. It’s become big business, and Jerry is keen to know Jill’s views on how their experiences in Kenya could be transferred to the steadily growing markets of Chile and Argentina. His plan is to link with the Chinese telecom giant that is making impressive investments in these countries.

      By 4.00 the conversation with Jerry is over, so Jill takes a last look at her messages before her 4.30 team briefing. It’s an opportunity to catch up with her US team members and also to hear their views on the situation in Rwanda. A couple of them have gone to the company hub in downtown Phoenix and have booked the telepresence room for the next 30 minutes. Jill waits a moment for the telepresence to be free and then is able to link through to her group. As always the sound and visual quality is first class – and she is able to really get a real sense of how the Phoenix team are feeling about the project. By 5.00 the conference is over and Jill grabs her bags before rushing to the station to get the train home. For Jill, it is a ritual that she cooks supper at home every Wednesday when she is at home, and today is Wednesday. She is in the local supermarket by 6.00 to pick up the evening food and opens the door to her home by 6.30.

      A moment of peace – food on the table, conversation with her teenage daughter and a great cup of coffee.

      By 10.00 p.m. that evening Jill is in her study booting up her videoconference to Beijing; she wants to catch up on one of her team members before their day begins – Jerry wants to form a stronger partnership with the Chinese telecom company and she wants to know her colleague’s view on how best to do this. By 10.20 the videoconference is over and Jill has her last cup of coffee before turning on the television to catch the evening news. Her eyes are caught by the fires that are raging across Russia, and by the floods that continue to devastate Pakistan. As her eyes close her final image is of Greenpeace protesters calling for the protection of the small part of the Amazon forest that still remains …

      Welcome to the fragmented world, where it seems that no activity lasts more than three minutes, and where those in employment are continuously competing with people across the globe to strive to serve the different stakeholders they work with.

      Do you think your world is already fragmented? Right now you are already likely to be interrupted at least every three minutes.¹ If you feel that technology is already out of control, fast forward to 2025 and it’s only got worse. It’s a global world that’s so interconnected that working 24/7 is the norm, a world where 5 billion people are connected to each other through their handheld devices and as many as want to can connect to you. Imagine it – no peace, no quiet, no reflection time. Constantly plugged in, hooked up, online.

      Work began to really fragment from around 2000. This was the time when internet access reached half a billion people, when desktop computers and email brought hundreds of messages into your daily inbox, and when your mobile phone began to interrupt you as often as it could.

      Rewinding to the past: a pre-fragmented day in 1990

      Can you remember a time when work was not fragmented? Perhaps the writer Jared Diamond is right that this has become ‘creeping normalcy’.² The fragmentation of our working lives has unfolded so slowly that the build-up of pain occurs in small, almost unnoticeable steps. As a consequence of this slow unfolding, we accept the outcome without resistance, even if the same outcome, had it come about in one sudden leap, would have earned a vigorous response.

      It reminds me of the story of the frog and the boiling water. The story goes like this. If you throw a frog into a pan of boiling water it jumps out as fast as possible to escape. However, if instead you place a frog into a pan of cold water, and then heat the water very, very slowly, the frog acclimatises to the slow increase in temperature and never tries to escape – until it is eventually boiled alive.

      Have we indeed become so used to this ‘creeping normalcy’ that we fail to recognise what it means to our working lives now, and even more so in the future? To test this idea, let’s try and recreate a pre-fragmented working day by rewinding to the past rather than fast-forwarding to the future. I’m going to rewind to 1990 because it’s a time when mobile phones were very rare, and when many offices outside of the West Coast of the USA did not have internet connection, and when no homes had internet connectivity.

      To get a feel for this, you will either have to recollect from your own experience (as I am able to do), or find someone who was working 20 years ago and can describe to you in detail a typical working day. It’s important, by the way, that they describe the working day in detail – that’s where the important stuff lurks. Here is my memory of how a working day in 1990 played out for me – as far as I can remember.

      At that time I worked as a senior consultant in one of the large UK-based consulting practices. I wake in the morning, have breakfast with my husband while listening to the news on the radio, and then leave for work at 8.00. By 9.00 I am in the office and my assistant joins me to go through the letters that have arrived that morning. On average, 20 letters arrive every morning, so we go through these letters and I dictate to her my responses. By 10.00 I spend two hours working on a proposal for a client; this I write by hand and it is then taken through to the typing pool to be typed. By 12.30 it’s lunchtime and I join my colleagues in my office for a quick lunch in the local pub.

      By 1.30 I’m back at my desk and ready for two meetings with my team. It’s 3.00, and I’m in a cab to the headquarters of a multinational to present to a group of potential clients. I’m back in the office by 4.30 to sign the letters I dictated that morning to my assistant, to take two more telephone calls, and to check the proposal that’s now back from the typing pool. I make a number of changes to the proposal and send it back to the typing pool. By 5.30 the office is beginning to empty. I round up a few friends in the office and we wander across the road to the local pub for a quick drink before getting back home by 6.30 and dinner with my husband at 7.30.

      By the time I reached home, my working day was over. Perhaps I brought home a document or two to read, but not often. I certainly did not write anything at home because I did not have a typewriter at home – and of course there was no computer. So my means of production was pretty much limited to the office hours. I certainly never, ever spoke with clients after 6.00 p.m. They did not have my home number, and mobile phones were not in use.

      I don’t mean to be Pollyanna about the past. I could tell the tale again, adding in the fact that this was a deeply sexist work-place (I was the first female senior consultant and considered something of a freak), and that it was very unhealthy (we smoked constantly in the office and drank at lunchtime and every evening). This is no exercise in nostalgia. But as we look forward 10, possibly 20 years from now, СКАЧАТЬ