The Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here

The force of globalisation: 24/7 and the global world

Jill lives in a world that never sleeps, with colleagues from many timezones expecting to connect to her – it’s a 24/7 world. The most obvious driver of the fragmentation of her world has been computing capability and connectivity. However, behind that is an ever-globalised and competitive world that puts immense pressure on her and her colleagues to deliver with speed and accuracy.

The joining up of the working timezones across the world began seriously from 1990 onwards, when the markets of the world become truly global. It was from this time that there was extraordinary growth in emerging markets such as China and India, Brazil and South Korea, among others. In fact, by 2009 the emerging markets accounted for half of the global economy, and by 2010 were generating the bulk of the growth in the world economy. During that year the six largest emerging economies (the ‘B6’ – Brazil, China, India, Mexico, Russia and South Korea) grew by 5.1%. In the next two decades they were joined by a second wave of economic activity in locations such as Egypt, Nigeria, Turkey, Indonesia and Malaysia.

To get the scale of globalisation – consider that in 1995 only 20 companies from the emerging markets were listed on the Global Fortune 500. By 2010 that number stood at 91.

(#litres_trial_promo) In 1990 the company that Jill often works for, Arcelor Mittal, was an unknown producer of steel in Indonesia; by 2010 Arcelor Mittal was the world’s largest steel company, and by 2025 one of the world’s largest conglomerates with diverse interests ranging from steel to telecoms to chip manufacturing.

(#litres_trial_promo) The combination of the technological forces we have described – Cloud computing, mobile communications and collaborative computing – have the potential, in concert with the momentum of emerging-market growth, to form a tipping point for globalisation and 24/7 working. Every year, millions of new consumers and small-business operators join the global economy, even from the most rural of villages. Over the coming decades we can anticipate that the economic power of the world will shift from the developed countries of the West and Japan – to be dispersed to an ever wider group of countries and regions.

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Like many people working in the West, much of Jill’s day is spent connecting to clients, suppliers and customers in Asia. This is a booming market fuelled in part by the sheer size of the population. In 2010 there were 1.2 billion people in the more developed regions (including Europe, North America, Australia and Japan) and 5.7 billion in the less developed regions (including China, India, Africa and Latin America).

(#litres_trial_promo) By 2030 it is forecast that while the developed regions of the world will have expanded by around 44 million people, the developing regions will expand by a mighty 1.3 billion – that’s more than the entire population of the developed world. Jill and her colleagues know that within five years the 7 billion living in the less developed regions will increasingly overshadow the 1.3 billion in the more developed regions.

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How can you reconnect the fragments?

What will it take for you to reconnect the fragments of working life into something with more cohesion? What will it take to craft a working life that has greater opportunity for sustained concentration, more time for deep learning, and for a life that has woven into it occasions for whimsy and play? What can you do to create a working life that does not leave you exhausted, and does not denude your capacity to sustain your energy and talent?

Of course it is impossible to wind back the clock to the slower-paced working life of 1990, when technology was basic and globalisation in its infancy. It may indeed be that technological developments such as the cognitive assistants themselves become part of the answer to reconnecting the fragments as they make it ever easier for people to prioritise and focus.

It is also impossible for you to significantly change the context in which you are living. Beyond moving to a desert island, you will always be part of the global economy, more and more people will want to connect to you and to others, and technology will create greater demands on productivity and outcome. So there is no easy answer to reconnecting the fragments. It is fundamentally about working from the inside out – being clear about the choices you are presented with, and being mature about the consequences of these choices.

I believe there are three future-proofed shifts that will play a role in ensuring that your future working life is not simply torn apart by fragmentation.

The first shift is your conscious construction of a working life that is based on mastery. By that I mean developing a career that is built from dedication and focus – remember, it takes 10,000 hours to learn something to the point of mastery. To do so will require the willpower to resist the temptation of fragmentation, and to be prepared to set aside significant time for apprenticeship, learning and practice.

The second shift is the realisation that the opposite of fragmentation is not isolation. The challenge is to construct a working life in the future that has both self focus and also strong relationships with others. It can be that, through the relationships with others, work can be simplified and shared. Perhaps one of the lessons we all have to learn for the future is that we tend to fragment our lives by trying to do too much ourselves, rather than creating sufficiently strong networks to really take some of the burden off our shoulders. Your relationships with others will also be a crucial balance to fragmentation as a strong regenerative community of people around you, who love and support you, could well help you to create boundaries for your time.

However, it’s the last shift, from voracious consumer to impassioned producer, that is most able to address the challenges of an increasingly fragmented working life. This shift is fundamentally about the way you choose to live your working life and your preparedness to make bold choices, to confront the consequences of these choices and to exercise free will. Looking back to Jill’s story, did she really have to take the call at 7.00 in the morning or 10.00 that evening? Did she really have to eat lunch at her desk on her own? Did she really have to look at hundreds of emails? These are decisions that many of the forces that will shape your working future will make ever more attractive. It will also make Jill’s way of working increasingly the norm. In a global, technologically enhanced and joined-up world, there is always something you can do – whatever the time, and wherever you are. And these issues of choices and priorities become ever more poignant when you consider that Jill, like many others in 2025, will be expected to be working into her 70s. Like you, what Jill faces is a long marathon – not a short sprint.

It is clear that crafting a working life through the choices you make will become increasingly important in the coming decades. When I think about my own working life, I did not have to make any really tough choices back in 1990; emerging technology and nascent globalisation had created a world that was a lot less frantic. If you are to address the ‘creeping normalcy’ of fragmentation, then it will require seeing it for what it is – constant pressure with no boundaries to protect you. In this third future-proofed shift – towards a deeper, more profound way of constructing a working life – we will address these issues. It is actively making wise choices, clearly understanding the consequences, and facing up to the sorts of dilemmas that Jill faces, that will be ever more crucial. Without this there will be no boundaries to protect people like Jill, and indeed to protect you from the ever-growing demands of a joined-up world.

Chapter 3

Isolation: The Genesis Of Loneliness

Rohan’s story

As we leave Jill and her increasingly fragmented life, let’s move across the world to the centre of Mumbai where, later that morning, Rohan, an Indian brain surgeon, comes online. Though skilled and masterful, Rohan experiences the dark side of the future every day of his life. Here is how.

As he wakes in the morning he moves into his home office, where he is preparing for the day’s work. You might expect a doctor like Rohan to spend much of his time at a hospital, working with colleagues and meeting patients. However, like many specialists in 2025, Rohan spends much of his time working from his home office. Within an hour of waking he has accessed the technology of the Cloud to download some of the most advanced visualisation technology that he needs for the day, and takes out a subscription for three hours of use.

By 11.00 a.m. he is ready to begin surgery. Today he is leading a team of surgeons in China who are performing a particularly tricky operation. That is why earlier in the week they had contacted Rohan to provide expertise for the operation. A young woman has internal bleeding from her brain and needs to be operated on to stop the bleeding. Rohan activates his telepresence unit, and within seconds can see clearly the other members of the team and the young woman patient who is already anaesthetised and ready for surgery. As his colleagues begin to open the skull, Rohan directs the holographic representation attached to the on-site camera to show him clearly the site of the bleeding. He then activates the robotic instruments and begins to gently manipulate the brain tissue. As Rohan leads the team, he speaks in his native Hindi language, which is automatically converted to the Cantonese of the rest of the team. This instantaneous translation technology, introduced in 2020, has made the learning of specialist languages redundant, save for those who speak languages as a hobby.

For the next half hour the team work skilfully to move to the site of the bleeding. It is a relatively shallow bleed so that stopping the blood flow can be done quickly. Within an hour the flow has been stemmed and the Chinese surgeons have begun to reconstruct the portion of the skull that was removed. The surgery seems to have been a success, so it is with a good heart that Rohan sits down for lunch in the bright dining room of his apartment.

By 2.00 Rohan is ready to join the second team he will be working with that afternoon. As the afternoon begins, he connects to the team from Chile which has come online to ask his advice about a particularly difficult case they are treating. They are due to operate on a young man with a brain tumour the following day. Over the next couple of hours Rohan again uses holographic representation – this time of the young man’s brain – to decide the best strategy for the operation. It takes over three hours of deep conversation and visualisation of the tumour to decide the strategy, but by 6.00 p.m. the team feels prepared and agrees to the timing for tomorrow’s surgery.

It is just time for Rohan to have a quick supper before he hooks up with colleagues at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London to talk about a young boy who has been brought in this week with a suspected brain tumour. Rohan specialises in the treatment of the young, so he is pleased to be able to share his advice and good wishes for the surgery. While he will not be involved with this one, he will observe the surgery in order to give feedback to one of the junior team members.

So by 11.00 p.m. Rohan is ready for bed. He has a busy day tomorrow with a follow-up to the young man from Chile and the observation of the London surgery. It has been a busy week for Rohan, and as he thinks back he realises that he has rarely left his apartment.

Amon’s Story

Amon in Cairo rarely leaves his apartment either that week. He is an independent freelancer, who works on complex IT projects. As soon as he wakes, the first action he takes is to check in with his virtual agent. He knows that every minute of the day his virtual agent is scanning the world for work that may suit Amon. It uses an exact profile of Amon’s current skills and knowledge base to find the project match. It also knows something about his working preferences – when he likes to work and the sort of client with whom he wants to work.

This morning the virtual agent has presented a range of possibilities for Amon. A drinks outfit in Brazil wants a program written for their customer care team, and needs it within three days. Another possibility has come through from a Malaysian entrepreneur with whom he has worked before. He wants a particularly complex piece of software written and is prepared to pay Amon 2000 Euros for it. He also spends the next hour taking a look at two open bids for work that his virtual agent has brought him. Amon knows that he will have to respond within the next two days if he wants to enter the competition for the work.

Over the following hour he works out how long the project will take him and comes to a decision about the lowest price for which he is prepared to work. By mid-morning he has decided to go with the drinks company in Brazil. By late morning he has begun the programming and over the next six hours he works in the virtual office of the project, dropping a note to others he is working with, and chatting to a fellow programmer. By 5.00 p.m. he is ready to attend a conference call with all the project team. By now he is at full steam and so decides that if he works into the evening he can probably get this finished. Before he finishes that evening Amon updates his personal profile, adding the recent work he completed for the Brazilian client.

Amon is a neo-nomad, picking up programming work from people he has never met, working with teams whose names he does not know, for companies far, far away.

Both Rohan and Amon have interesting working lives. Both are engaged with work tasks they enjoy and which stretch their competencies. They have found work they love and which they see as hobbies to be enjoyed, focused on and relished.

But do you notice what’s missing from their working lives? Neither Rohan nor Amon spends time during much of their working day with real people. Yes, they interact with people all day – Rohan with his fellow surgeons in China and Amon with the Brazilian team. However, what they are interacting with is cognitive assistants, avatars, holographs and video presence. Neither of them frequently encounters warm flesh and blood in their daily lives. Amon’s closest ‘friend’ is his virtual agent – and that’s a computer.

They are not alone. By 2025 we face the possibility that much of the fabric of our working lives is denuded of face-to-face relationships. It could well be, of course, that these virtual relationships become as rejuvenating as face-to-face relationships. But somehow I doubt this. When you strip away daily face-to-face relationships, then you strip away the joys of easy companionship and you strip away all the possibility that relationships have of nurturing work – and, indeed, of work nurturing life.

Rewinding to the past: a day of easy companionship in 1990

To let the extent of this sink in, let’s replay the 1990 memory experiment again – but this time look at the day, not through the degree of fragmentation, but rather through the lens of human interaction. In my case I will go back to the consulting practice I worked for – but this time view it as a series of social conversations. As I track my day, what’s interesting is that I spent most of the day in an office with my colleagues. Sure, I have my own room – but I can glance down the corridor and see others working in their offices. The place has a feeling of easy companionship. Not that we were all friends, by the way – there were certainly people I could not stand and I am sure the feeling was mutual. The place was riven with politics, power play and hierarchies – it could be infuriating, but it was also real. You may recall that in the day I described earlier I went in the afternoon to a meeting with a group of prospective clients. Again, this was a physical meeting, and we talked for an hour or two. In the early evening in the pub, the team comes together to chew over the events of the day, share more gossip and continue the marvellous power plays.

It might have been frustrating, annoying and at times downright irritating – but I never actually felt lonely during the working day. This was a world of easy companionship. Rohan and Amon have working companions whom they know well and whom they trust. However, they rarely actually physically meet these people.

What’s missing in the working lives of Rohan and Amon is the possibility of simply pushing your head through an open door and saying ‘Hi’, or wandering down the corridor to goad people into having another cup of coffee. Or even inviting a group out on the spur of the moment to a curry down the road.

The death of easy companionship

It could be that this loss of easy companionship, which was so much a part of working lives in 1990, will be one of the dark sides of the future of work. We humans, in the past, in the present and I would imagine also in the future, are intensely affected by the state of our relationships with others. For many of us, the aspect we value, above all other aspects of work, is our relationships with our co-workers.

(#litres_trial_promo) It is no surprise that when asked why people chose to stay at work, one of the top predictors is ‘I have a friend at work.’

(#litres_trial_promo) And we should also not be surprised that longitudinal studies carried out by researchers at the Harvard Medical School of the lifetime health and happiness of thousands of people reveal a similar effect. Those who are the happiest in their lives are not the richest, or indeed those who have achieved the most. The researchers found consistently that the single greatest link with lifetime happiness was the extent to which people have close friends in their lives, while loneliness was associated with ill health – and was, interestingly, contagious, rapidly spreading to others. That’s why easy, close, relaxed friendships have been described as such a key part of human mental health and happiness.

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I cannot imagine this being different in 2025. After all, across the whole history of the human race we have been intensely social, clannish people. Yet the coming forces of technology and globalisation could impact on this natural sociability in a way never experienced in the history of mankind.

So where does that leave Rohan and Amon and billions of others who in 2025 could spend much of their working day interacting with others in cyberspace rather than establishing physical contact? The simple truth is that we simply don’t know. Perhaps humanity will adjust to these cyber relationships to such an extent that they will bring the positive effect that face-to-face relationships do now. After all, the early experiments with Sony’s PET computer AIBO suggested that, with its puppy-like appearance and mischievous way of behaving, people rapidly learnt to enjoy it as a companion and as a playmate. Even in 2010 in Hong Kong and Japan, ‘virtual girlfriends’ can be downloaded to your 3-G mobile. In cyberspace and in chatroom salons a gigantic world of relationships has been flourishing. In the future we can imagine that avatars won’t simply be the mainstay of the sex trade, but will also be the logical development, from call centres to financial advisers.

(#litres_trial_promo) Perhaps one of the outcomes of advancing technology is that we humans will be able to substitute virtual, avatar relationships for real, flesh-and-blood relationships. Or perhaps technological developments will be such that, as some have predicted, by 2025 brain implants will ensure positive relational emotions – whatever the situation.

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