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

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СКАЧАТЬ not just our day-to-day working conditions and habits that will change so dramatically. What will also change is our working consciousness, just as the industrial age changed the working consciousness of our predecessors. The Industrial Revolution brought a mass market for goods, and with it a rewiring of the human brain towards an increasing desire for consumption, and the acquisition of wealth and property. The question we face now is how the working consciousness of current and future workers will be further transformed in the age of technology and globalisation we are entering.

      What is inevitable is that, for younger people, their work will change perhaps unrecognisably – and those of us already in the workforce will be employed in ways we can hardly imagine. This new wave of change will, like those that have gone before them, build on what has been accomplished in the past, made up of a gradual process with some possibly unpredictable major waves. It is about increasing globalisation, industry and technology. But, as in the past, these changes will also bring something that is qualitatively different – new industries based around renewable energy sources, new developments of the internet, and indeed new ways to think about work.¹⁰

      The reality is that predicting the future is a matter of degree, and different aspects of the future of work can be predicted with varying degrees of reliability and precision. For example, I can predict with some accuracy that computers will become faster, materials will become stronger and medicine will cure more diseases so that we will live longer. Other aspects of the future, such as migration flows, global temperatures and government policy, are much less predictable. It’s more difficult to predict, for example, how the way we will relate to each other will change, or how our aspirations will evolve.

      If I think about my own future and that of my children, and factor in the uncertainty we face, then of course it’s a good idea to develop plans that are flexible, and to pursue ideas that are robust under a wide range of contingencies. In other words, it is wise to develop coping strategies in the face of uncertainty. However, what is also important is to strive to improve the accuracy of our beliefs about the future. This is crucial because, as I will show, there might well be traps that we are walking towards that could by avoided with foresight, or opportunities we could reach much sooner if we could see them further in advance.

      Knowing something about the future helps us to prepare for our future, it influences the advice we give others, and could have a fundamental impact on the choices that we, our family and friends, our community and our company decide to make; about the competencies we decide to develop, the communities and networks on which we focus our attention, or the companies and organisations with which we choose to be associated.

      The Future of Work Research Consortium

      The challenge is that even with my own three decades of knowledge about work I find the future of work still fiendishly difficult to predict. That’s why, by way of preparation, I created a research consortium designed to tap into ideas and knowledge from across the world. The research takes place every year – beginning in 2009 and progressing to more global and diverse groups every subsequent year.

      Each year, my research team and I begin by identifying the five forces that will most impact on the future of work (these are technology; globalisation; demography and longevity; society; and natural resources); we then go about amassing the hard facts for each of these five forces. These hard facts for each of the five forces are then presented to members of the research consortium. This consortium is perhaps one of the most fascinating experiments ever conducted between management, academics and executives. In a sense it creates a ‘wise crowd’ of people. In 2009, for example, more than 200 people participated. They were members of more than 21 companies from around the world including Absa (the South African bank), Nokia, Nomura, Tata Consulting Group (in India), Thomson Reuters and the Singapore Government’s Ministry of Manpower, together with two not-for-profit organisations, Save the Children and World Vision. In 2010 the number of participating companies had risen to 45, with over 15 from Asia including SingTel in Singapore and Wipro, Infosys and Mahindra & Mahindra from India, and Cisco and Manpower from the USA.

      The research began in earnest in November 2009, at the London Business School. At this point we presented the hard facts of the five forces and asked executives to construct storylines of a day-in-the-life of people working in 2025 on the basis of what they had heard. We then went on to repeat this exercise with many more people in Singapore and India. The storylines that began to emerge became the blueprints for the stories I will tell later in the book. These are important because, while they are works of fiction, it is through these descriptions of possible everyday life that we are able to imagine the interplay between different ideas and knowledge. These storylines of a day-in-the-life in 2025 are not, of course, forecasts. What they portray are ways of seeing the future, and of assembling different versions of the future. They are crucial because in them we can begin to see just how much the future is full of possibilities.

      Once the research team and consortium members had developed the storylines, they took the initial conversations about the hard facts and storylines back to their own companies. Over the following months they brought back the thoughts from their wider community, and from more than 30 countries. At this point we were able to work together virtually in an elaborate shared portal, and also to discuss the emerging ideas in monthly virtual web-based seminars. We followed this up later with a series of workshops in Europe and Asia. At the same time I tested out some of my initial thoughts through a weekly blog, http:// www.lyndagrattonfutureofwork. It is these ideas, insights and anxieties that became stitched into the storyline narratives and brought depth to the conversation. They are also the basis of the personal reflections that you will come across in the debate that follows.

      The paths to the future

      As we looked more closely at the future, what became increasingly clear was that in fact there is not one but many possible paths to the future. It is certainly possible for each one of us to construct a path into the future that simply accentuates the negatives of the five forces. This becomes a future of isolation, fragmentation, exclusion and narcissism. This is the Default Future in which the five forces have outpaced the possibilities of taking any action. In these storylines we see people who may have been very successful in one aspect of their life, but who have failed to take positive action around an important issue or have only taken actions that are straightforward and seemed easy to take. In the Default Future no one is prepared to work together to take cohesive action or to change the status quo. In this future, dealing with the current problems takes place without consistency or cohesion, and events outpace actions.

      There is also a future where the positive aspects of the five forces are harnessed to create a more crafted outcome. These are career and life stories in which collaboration plays a key role, where choice and wisdom are exercised, and actions create a more balanced way of working. In these stories of a Crafted Future people are experimenting with ways of working, learning fast from each other, and rapidly adopting good ideas. These are storylines where the forces that transform work could result in the possibility – the promise, even – of a better future. It is the future that can emerge when people actively make decisions and wise choices, and are able to face up to the consequences of these choices. It is a future in which people can work more harmoniously with others, where they can become more valued and masterful, and where the different parts of a working life can be integrated in a more authentic way.

      The storylines within the two paths capture possibilities; they are a way for us to explore the future, and indeed construct our own future. A word of warning: these stories are not in any sense mechanical forecasts of what will be. Instead they are based on the recognition that each one of us holds beliefs and makes choices that can lead down different paths; they reveal different possible futures that are both plausible and challenging.

      Taking the right path: the shifts

      Each one of us would want to choose the Crafted Future rather than СКАЧАТЬ