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

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      However, before we leave this day in 1990 let me ask you to take another look at this story and consider what’s missing. Did I talk with my friends about where to meet that evening? No – I did not have a mobile phone and they did not ring me at work – so we made the arrangement well in advance with few last-minute changes. Did I have a close working relationship with my clients? Yes – we did not use the internet and so instead we met, spoke on the telephone or exchanged letters. Finally, did I link into clients all over the world? Well, yes and no. I did indeed have a client in South Africa and we exchanged letters and faxes, and talked on the phone. I went over to Pretoria three times a year and stayed for two weeks. At that time, two weeks was considered a decent length of time for what was called an ‘overseas trip’.

      What I want to draw your attention to is that, unlike Jill’s, mine was not a fragmented day. If you watched me with a stopwatch you would have found that on average I spent about half an hour on each activity. When I wrote the client proposals I was uninterrupted for two hours. Only 20 letters arrived, they were read and replied to by the next day, no one expected instant responses – and if the timing was too long we could always say, ‘The letter must have been lost in the post!’ There was no internet, in fact I did not have a typewriter in my room, typing was the job of my secretary and the women (they were all women) in the typing pool.

      I’ve chosen 1990 as the date for our memory experiment because in many ways this year marked the beginning of the extreme fragmentation of work. Over the following 10 years the forces of technology and globalisation began to snip work into ever-smaller pieces. By 2000, and the following decade, this fragmentation began to become really noticeable. In 2006, for example, the popular author Stefan Klein wrote Time: A User’s Guide – Making Sense of Life’s Scarcest Commodity.³ At the same time, the academic community began to study this fragmentation. By 2008 a group of scholars from Australia and Finland had co-authored Discretionary Time: A New Measure of Freedom, documenting the time pressure felt by people across the world.⁴ Work had begun a process of fragmentation that has accelerated over the last decade, and there is every sign that this acceleration will continue over the coming decades.

      You could say that because the increase in fragmentation has been ‘creeping’ rather than instant we have all become boiled frogs. I bet if I was to be transported from my life in 1990 to 2010, I would be amazed, probably horrified, by the fragmentation of my life. But like everyone else, it has happened so slowly that I have made very little resistance.

      As I reflect on Jill’s storyline, I think about the impact of fragmentation around me, in the programmes I teach, the executives who reach for their mobile phones the moment I stop teaching – even though we have shown how important reflection and concentration are to the learning process. Or the way my children manage to watch television, update their Facebook entry and watch a movie on their computers – all at the same time.

      Our world have become ever more fragmented over the last 20 years, and, as we can see in Jill’s story, for many people this fragmentation will only increase in the coming 20 years. Is yours a world of fragmentation? If it is, or will increasingly be so, then it is important to understand the consequences of fragmentation.

      When your working life fragments

      Does it matter that our lives are so fragmented and will increasingly be so? Does it matter that globalisation and technology will increasingly bring fragmentation to those in developed countries, and also spread it to those in developing countries? What’s the real downside of fragmentation – who really misses out? As we reflect on our current working lives, we can assume that overload and time compression will only increase over the coming decades. So what effect will this have? I believe that fragmentation, overload and compression will decrease concentration, reduce our capacity to really observe and learn, and could make the future working lives of our children more frenzied, more focused … and less whimsical and playful.

      The concentration of mastery is lost

      When our working time fragments, then one of the first victims is real concentration. Breaking up her life into such small pieces has meant for Jill that she never really has the time, the opportunity or the focus to become very good at anything. She has never concentrated enough to achieve the mastery that would put her in a different league and which, as I will argue later, is going to be so crucial for future success. There is no doubt that Jill is good at what she does, but the challenge is that she has never learnt to be really, really good. The reason for her lack of mastery is wrapped up in her three-minute life. It takes time and concentration to become masterful, and Jill has neither time nor concentration.

      The importance of time and concentration is shown clearly in psychologist Daniel Levitin’s study of people who have achieved mastery. He looked at the lives of ‘composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters … and master criminals’.⁵ He found that, despite their very different areas of skill, they all had one thing in common. What they all shared was a capacity to concentrate on developing their skill for long periods of time. In fact, he found that 10,000 hours is the common touchstone for how long it takes to achieve mastery. That would translate to Jill concentrating and practising three hours a day, for ten years. Of course, Jill does not aspire to becoming a concert pianist or a world-class novelist, so this level of concentration would be excessive. However, to gain real value in the world she inhabits, Jill does need some form of mastery – and at the moment she rarely achieves concentration of more than three minutes, let alone three hours.

      The capacity to observe and learn is reduced

      It is not just concentrated practice that suffers. When a working life is as fragmented as Jill’s – broken up into three-minute time frames – what also gets lost is the opportunity to simply sit back and watch others more skilled.⁶ This is important since it is through watching others more masterful than ourselves that we begin to absorb the subtle changes in what they do that can be transformed into our own working practice.⁷

      I notice this in the development of teaching skills. When rookie assistant professors join London Business School they are expected to teach an MBA class in their first year. The experience can be gruesome. They get their timing wrong, the class overruns and the students are up in arms. They fudge their exam rating and marking protocol, and the class loses confidence in them. They fill their slides with hundreds of words and the students cannot read them. The list of what can go wrong is endless. At first, in order to try and make the whole experience less tough we decide to write a list of ‘dos and don’ts’ to help. But, though useful, the list never covers all the challenges. For example, we might have told them to manage the timing of the class – but then found that they concentrated so much on their timing that they forgot to speak sufficiently loud for those at the back to hear.

      What we learnt was that mastering the teaching of a good MBA class is a skill that takes many hours to hone. It’s also a skill that has much ‘tacit’ knowledge embedded in it – that’s the type of knowledge that is difficult to describe in the ten points, and is often held deep within the unconscious of how tasks are performed. What we began to realise is that the best way for these rookies to learn was by simply observing others teach – not once, but many, many times, and to watch very, very carefully. That’s not to say this was observation with the planned outcome of mimicry. We certainly don’t want everyone to teach the same. However, by careful observation, these new professors began to learn deeply and to forge their own point of view about how to teach. To do this they had to concentrate, to observe for hours at a time, without recourse to checking their emails, or indeed to marking past papers!

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