The Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here

The Dark Side of the Default Future

It is the subtle and unique combination of the many aspects of the five forces that will create the context in which your future working life is lived. For some it could be that technology is the crucial driver, while for others it could be demography or globalisation. However, for most of us it will not be a single force but rather the combination of these forces that creates our context. To understand the many combinations these forces can take, the members of the research consortium created storylines of people working in 2025. Of course these storylines are fictitious. However, by thinking through the intersections and relationships between the forces, these possible scenarios are revealed. We can really begin to imagine how people will live their working lives in 2025.

There is the storyline of Jill, whose frantic and fragmented life reveals how the technology and globalisation forces have created a 24/7 joined-up world that leaves her with little time to concentrate, observe and think, or even to play.

There are Rohan and Amon, on the face of it both successful professionals living in Mumbai and Cairo. But scratch beneath the surface and their minute-by-minute living reveals a life devoid of easy companionship, with little by way of family ties. They are caught in the intersections of a world that is simultaneously becoming increasingly urban, where energy costs have moved relationships to the virtual, and where family ties and ebbing trust have left them isolated and lonely.

In the USA we find Briana, with little by way of skills or ambition, joining the poor who can be found in any city around the world. Hers is a working life shaped by continuous economic bubbles and crashes, and she is the victim of the relentless replacement of semi-skilled jobs by technology. She has also seen austerity grip the West, and the rise of the underclass trapped in ageing cities.

It is through the experiences of these characters that we can truly understand how the five forces will shape our future, and how they will interact, influence and create momentum. Through the eyes of our future workers we can see the paradoxes they face, the choices they make and the troubles and anxieties they experience. Like theirs, our own future working lives will have dark and light aspects depending on our context and choices.

However, these are not uniformly dark lives – working lives rarely are. Rohan, for example, is a highly competent surgeon in Mumbai and has achieved mastery at the core of his work, and Jill has a group of friends, which I will call the ‘Posse’, that brings her enormous pleasure. What’s important about these stories from the future is that they illustrate an aspect of a working life that is missing or unbalanced. It is by considering these imbalances that we can draw a thread from the past to identify their pathway, and to the future to describe their outcomes.

As you think about each of these stories, I urge you to reflect on these questions:

* Have you noticed any of these future phenomena in your own working life – are they already resonating with you?

* Do they sound plausible for others in the future, and what are the drivers behind these phenomena?

* What would these mean to your working life and the lives of others?

The final question addresses the issue of choices and consequence, of assumptions and shifting assumptions. It ties directly with the three future-proofed shifts I believe will be crucial in creating meaningful work in the future. For example, the shift from the shallow generalist to something much more masterful and skilled – which in a sense is what sits at the heart of Briana’s story. Or the shift from isolation to connectivity – which is a choice that Rohan and Amon have failed to make. Or indeed the shift from the voracious consumer that is the basis of Jill’s life to a more balanced life in which meaning and experiences play a more central role.

These are four stories that illustrate what we might think of as the Default Future. That’s the future which emerges when the tough decisions are ignored. If, as you read these stories, you find them chilling, then they simply serve to illustrate how crucial it is to think hard about how work life will emerge, and to be prepared to question some deeply held assumptions, and make some tough shifts.

Chapter 2

Fragmentation: A Three-Minute World

Jill’s story

It is 6.00 a.m. on a cold morning in London in January 2025 and Jill is awakened to the sound of the alarm. As soon as her eyes begin to focus, her attention is grabbed by the 300 messages that flash up on her wall screen. During the night, colleagues, friends, current employers and our future employers from across the world are keen to share their ideas with her, check information and ask her opinion on pressing issues. Getting out of bed, as her eyes become accustomed to the dawn light, the first hologram call comes in. Over the next ten minutes Jill works with her avatar, as it is needed for a meeting across the globe that will begin in two hours’ time and will require broad directions.

By 7.00 Jill is connected to her cognitive assistant that has created the timetable for her day and made the preparations for the teleconferencing and video-presence connections she will need. Her first conference call is to her colleagues in the Beijing office who are keen to link up with her, and so the next 30 minutes is spent in a conference call with the team. As she listens to their voices over the telephone she is able to work on another 30 messages – thank goodness for the mute button! The next 50 minutes are spent still in her bedroom taking another quick look at the nighttime messages, briefing her avatar and working on a project that is key to the group.

By 10.00, still in her pyjamas, Jill snatches a quick bite of breakfast, holds back on the demands from her colleagues for yet more feedback from them, and logs on to her worksite to see if any new work has come in overnight.

The next hour is spent on conference calls to clients, negotiating a couple of deals and agreeing delivery times. She has the final call with Mumbai before they go offline. They are using the recently developed hologram technology to project themselves, and Jill is pleased with the clarity of the representations. It is 10.30 and her team in Boston are awake and keen to ask her opinion about a particular deal they have put together: it involves linking with the Shanghai team so she agrees to brief her Chinese colleagues the following morning.

By 11.00 Jill is ready to take the train into the office hub that has been built about 10 miles away. This hub is used by any employee of the company who lives in the vicinity and provides an opportunity for people to work together in an office environment. As Jill jumps on the train she spends the next 15 minutes on her handheld 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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, it’s useful to also look back. By looking back we can get a good idea about velocity and direction, and about the rhythms and trajectories of working life.

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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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