The Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here

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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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!

The notion of mastery 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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 in every part of what has become a more and more industrialised world.

The force of technology: technological capability increases exponentially

Working lives like Jill’s in 2025 are fragmented by the sheer breadth and depth of communication and information that weighs on everyday working life.

What underlies this is the extraordinary processing power that has grown at an exponential rate over the previous decades.

(#litres_trial_promo) In fact, this annual doubling has continued every year and has been accompanied by an equally dramatic year-on-year fall in the cost of microchips. For example, in 1975 the price of a single transistor was $0.028 dollars – by 1980 it had fallen to $0.0013 and within the next decade to $0.00002. By 2010, Moore’s law was showing no sign of slowing, and we can anticipate that more transistors will be packed onto smaller microchips for less money and that processing power will continue to grow at an exponential rate.

Jill’s working life has also fragmented as a result of the advanced handheld device she carries around with her. The performance of these mobile devices has grown exponentially with a short doubling time (typically a couple of years). In 2010 a phone contained the same amount of computing power as a Mac from 2000. The device that Jill carries has the same processing power and capabilities as the high-end desktop computer I used in 2010. What this means for Jill is that in those evenings when she is not online with others she is using her computer to crunch the terabytes of data that have poured out that day from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. And when she is not doing that, she is linked into the data beaming from the Mars station to join with millions of other people who are scouring the universe for alien life.

This increasing power and the falling cost have enabled these machines to be capable of ever-increasing feats of power, from simultaneous translation, to the lifelike graphics of Jill’s personal avatar and the way that she has been able to build complex performance models for her clients. It could be that by 2025 miniature computers are baked into every brick, every piece of clothing and every item of food. What this means is that data is streamed into the office and homes at an extraordinary rate. But it’s not just computing power that has fragmented these lives – it’s also the location and speed of downloading.

The force of technology: the Cloud becomes ubiquitous

Jill is able to download highly complex data and programs anywhere, anytime. Already by 2010 most of the regions of the world had a level of connectivity that enabled fishermen in India or the weavers in Tanzania to talk with others and access some information. Over the coming decades this was augmented by an ever faster and easier connectivity to the web and access to bandwidth that enabled the telepresence and holograms which are part of Jill’s everyday working life. Behind this connectivity have been rapid developments in the Cloud. This was first conceived in the early 2000s as an expertise, control and technological infrastructure that would be all-enveloping – hence the name the ‘cloud’. By 2010 services, applications and resources were already available as a service over the internet, although corporate adoption of the Cloud was relatively low, only in the beta phase, and there were many concerns about security.

These concerns were resolved over the next two decades and by 2025 the global range of the Cloud had increased, with the services available becoming ever more complex. This had allowed hundreds of thousands of independent programming teams to develop their ideas, in much the same way that applications for the iPhone were developed in 2010. What Jill loves about the Cloud is that it is convenient, on-demand and allows her to work with her colleagues to pool their resources. Jill does not actually own the physical infrastructure she uses or the applications she downloads. Instead she rents usage as and when she needs it – paying only for the resources she uses.

The Cloud has also created endless possibilities for people across the world to access pooled resources. That’s one of the reasons why avatars and holographs are the norm. To use her avatar or work in a holographic representation of her office, Jill simply has to hook up to the immense computational power available on demand from Cloud computing.

Notice that the fragmentation of Jill’s working life is created by technology in which she has personally invested, and which she uses from her home and the hub she works in. By 2010 the gulf between personal use of technology and corporate use had already begun to narrow as more people decided to invest in home-based technology rather than rely on the technology companies provide for them. By 2010 people had already begun to see their workplace technology lagging behind their personal investment in technology.

(#litres_trial_promo) Like most of her colleagues, Jill has made a personal investment in the technology in her home and the technology she carries with her.

The force of technology: ever-present avatars and virtual worlds

In the pre-fragmented day at least you had the opportunity to relax when you where ‘offline’. By 2025 you are ‘online’ 24/7 and your presence is augmented by avatars and virtual worlds. This development had begun in 2008 when Xbox Live launched its Xbox 360 avatars, which acted as the player’s emotive representative when communicating with other players. Gamers began to customise their avatars’ physical appearance, dress them in clothes bought from an online marketplace, and use them to virtually interact with other gamers’ avatars from around the world. Though initially limited to online gaming, the use of avatars continued to expand into all aspects of life, to such an extent that for Jill her avatar is her primary interface between the virtually connected people she works with. Jill has designed her avatar to be as near a two-dimensional representation of herself as possible. In the online games she plays, she has other more fantastic avatars – but when she is working she keeps to a form that is close to her own.

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One of the ways that Jill works with her colleagues is through her virtual workplace, which is a graphic representation of a workplace where all her colleagues can virtually congregate. So as soon as she logs on in the morning, she can walk through her work community to see who else is around. Her virtual timetable tells her when group sessions have been planned, and so she can link up using both her avatar and virtual 3D telepresence to talk in real time with her colleagues.

For Jill, working and learning in a virtual environment has been a way of life since she attended a virtual university in 2015. She registered and met her instructors and colleagues online and then the instructors used the virtual platform to deliver to the worldwide audience at minimum cost.

The force of technology: the rise of the cognitive assistants

The first interruption Jill has on that cold morning in 2025 is her cognitive assistant – or Alfie as she calls it. Alfie has been with her for a couple of years now. It understands how she likes to work, keeps a record of who she knows, monitors her inward communication for interesting strangers and logs the amount of time she works every day – automatically billing her employers for the hours works. Over the years Alfie has learnt how she works and how her working life can be best organised, and this has become more and more accurate to the extent that Jill now relies on Alfie for much of the everyday running of her life. Alfie checks her carbon use, reminds her when her personal carbon budget is beginning to run out, and makes sure that the travel she needs to do works within her personal carbon budget. With so much information coming through every moment of the day, Alfie helps her manage her daily tasks, prioritise what’s important and manage her weekly goals. Alfie is unique – it’s a machine that uses artificial intelligence to build a logic which best fits Jill’s context and working patterns, and evolves as Jill’s preferences become clearer.

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Is Alfie like a human? Ask Jill and she will tell you she could not do without Alfie to the extent that it (he?) simplifies her already highly fragmented life. Alfie is not alone. Across the globe billions of cognitive assistants are collecting information, monitoring the behaviour of people like Jill and taking actions from their preferences. This massive crowd of computers is becoming increasingly capable of learning and creating new knowledge entirely on their own and with no human help. For decades now they have been scanning the enormous content of the internet and ‘know’ literally every single piece of public information (every scientific discovery, every book and movie, every public statement) generated by human beings.