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

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СКАЧАТЬ sits at the heart of the first shift I believe will be crucial for successful lives in the future. The challenge is that often the development of mastery is subtle and takes time. When our working lives become fragmented, as they inevitably will in the future, then we lose the opportunity to concentrate on watching others more skilled than ourselves. When Jill yields to a fragmented working life, she is sub-optimising the possibilities of honing deep and valuable skills and capabilities. Fragmentation means she never devotes sufficient time to move from the basics to mastery, and she rarely watches others with sufficient concentration to understand the often-subtle nuances that accompany mastery.

      It is in the intersection between the forces of increasing globalisation and ever more sophisticated technological developments that work will fragment and observation and concentration are lost. The choices we make about how we spend our time, and how we focus our energy and resources, will prove to be crucial to our future success. It is through the shift to mastery that the trade-offs can be made. If not, then we, like the frogs in the warming water, will simply boil. But before we leave a future world of intense fragmentation, I’d like to consider one final aspect of working life that could also be lost – whimsy and play.

      The creativity of whimsy and play is denuded

      One of the most exciting aspects of the future is that it will provide extraordinary opportunities for creativity and impassioned productivity. That is in a sense what the third shift is about, and that is what drives the lives of many of the people we will meet when we take a brighter view of the future. However, here is the rub. When time becomes fragmented, and when every moment counts, then what is lost is the very chance to be creative, to play … to be whimsical. Instead we demand instant gratification and compressed learning. If you only have three minutes, then the rewards have to be instant and the lessons delivered clearly, fast and compressed.

      When time fragments, what suffers is whimsy and play. I remember as a child being enchanted by the cookery writer Elizabeth David’s descriptions of how to make Mediterranean food.⁸ She introduced me to the ingredients, to their sight and smell and provenance. She took four pages to describe the making of a tomato soup, starting with a trip to the market to choose the tomatoes, then a page on how to skin and de-pip them, and only then preparing them into soup. Reading her descriptions I was transported from the cold of northern England where I was brought up to the fragrant markets of the south of France. At that time I had never stepped outside of the UK – but that did not stop me dreaming.

      American readers may have had the same experience when they first read Julia Child’s whimsical cookery books.⁹ You may recall her description of creating French classics such as Poularde à la d’Albufera – from the moment the chicken is bought at the market, to the moment it enters the mouths of grateful guests. What Julia Child and Elizabeth David did was to illustrate, with good humour, time and sympathy, their own cookery journey, and by doing so empathised with the novice cook on her journey. This stuff takes time. Julia’s instructions for Poularde à la d’Albufera take over six pages – way more than a precise description of the recipe. What this more elaborate, human and emotional description actually does, however, is to connect with you the reader in a way that a ten-step recipe could never do.¹⁰

      The challenge is that this sort of elongation of time has no place in the three-minute episodes that punctuate Jill’s world. In her world, precise and short directions will always win over the more whimsical, sympathetic illustrations – after all, who has time to fuss about Poularde à la d’Albufera?

      Well, you might say, who indeed has time to make Poularde à la d’Albufera, and anyway, what’s it got to do with the future of work? In a sense this classic dish is a metaphor for mastery. It’s similar to a rookie professor sitting patiently as they watch hour after hour while others more masterful than they teach; it’s similar to the hours and hours of patient crafting that goes into learning how to write a report, prepare a presentation or lead a team.

      By 2025 the attention spans of Jill and those around her have become so much shorter, so much more parcelled up, so much more prone to disruption, so much more fragmented, that it’s almost impossible for her to develop and learn to the depth of mastery which will be so crucial to her success.

      It’s not just concentration, observation and whimsy that are lost in this fragmented world. It’s also play. With fragmentation comes less time to share a joke; less time to work on an idea we love but are not sure how we will develop; less time to play, to have fun times, to celebrate the joys of working. As the working world becomes more mechanised, so the boundaries between what’s work and what’s play become increasingly solid. When time becomes tighter and work fragments, what can get lost is the freedom to play. Ask Jill about playing at work and she will throw her head back and laugh out loud. With every moment accounted for, with 100 emails to be answered and another on its way – playing is way down her list of priorities.

      Yet we have known for some time just how important play is to building creativity and fostering new ideas and models. The challenge for the future of work is that the compression of time pushes play out. As my colleagues Babis Mainemelis and Sarah Ronson have shown, we play when we believe we have the time and space, when we feel flexible about what we are doing and free from constraints.¹¹ This is the stuff that play is made of. Play is important because we are more likely to love our work when we see it as play. If you are in advertising or design, you know your play through fantasy and imagination is at the core of innovation; if you are a consultant or researcher like me, your play through exploration and questioning is at the heart of how you create value. If you are a mathematician or a theorist, the play of solving problems is what really excites you. Isn’t the absolutely best work to have, both now and in the future, work of which you can say, ‘I cannot believe that people pay me to do my hobby’? It’s those times you are simply ‘building castles in the sky’ – exploring new ideas, and putting old ideas together in new ways, or in other words, playing. But to play you need time and a feeling of control over constant interruptions.

      The challenge with the fragmentation of the future is that both are lost. When you are ‘on’ all the time, what gets lost is the opportunity to blur work and non-work – to get to the opera, theatre or a sports game, events that though playful can give you new insights and ways of thinking about problems. Absolutely the best way to work creatively in the future will be to blur the distinctions between work and play. The most rewarding jobs will be those in which your work is also your passion and hobby, and vice versa.

      Our world is already fragmented, but, as we shall see, the combination of technology that connects most people on the planet with globalisation that will see more work following the sun 24/7 can only make this fragmentation more profound.

      The forces that created fragmentation

      It matters that work becomes ever more fragmented. It matters because with this fragmentation comes the incapacity to create the focus, concentration and creativity that will be so important to the shift from shallow generalist to serial mastery. So we have to understand why work will become increasingly fragmented, and what can be done to reconnect the parts.

      In describing working lives in 2025, we began to glimpse the impact that technology had on Jill’s working day in 2025 compared with my own working day in 1990. The exponential growth in technological capacity and developments in Cloud technology enable Jill to download advanced programmes from the web. At the same time, her day’s work is shaped by the avatars and cognitive assistants that support her. But the fragmentation of Jill’s work is not just about technology – it is also about globalisation. We see it as she struggles to join up across timezones that range from Beijing to Los Angeles. She lives in a 24/7 joined-up global world, with colleagues and customers СКАЧАТЬ