The Shift

The Future of Work is Already Here

Lynda Gratton

• Publisher: HarperCollins Business
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780007427949
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Workplace Culture
• Index: Business

PART I

The Forces That Will Shape
Your Future

Chapter 1
The Five Forces

If you want to understand the future, you need to start with the five forces that will shape your world over the coming decades. What’s more, you need to understand these five forces in some detail, since it is often in the details that the really interesting stuff can be found. For me it has been an incredibly exciting journey to collect from around the world the 32 pieces about the forces. I cannot remember being so excited about getting up in the morning and researching and writing. I have been fascinated, surprised and intrigued by what I have found. I had no idea that in 2010 China was building 45 airports; or that the centre of innovation of handheld money devices is Kenya; or that by 2025 more than 5 billion people will be connected with each other through handheld devices. These are the hard facts that I will share with you in order to create a deeper and more accurate view of the way your working life will change. They are also the hard facts that will aid you as you begin to decide how you will construct your future working life, and indeed the advice you will give to others. In finding and putting these 32 pieces together, I have been influenced by the need to be global rather than local; historical rather than simply of the moment; and broad rather than narrow.

Taking a global focus

One of the challenges about understanding the future is that much of the contemporary research and books about technology, oil or globalisation tends to take a single-region focus – typically either the USA or Europe. This makes sense as the boundaries are well understood and so the context is agreed up front.

However, this local focus does not suit my purpose for this book. In the past, I have been delighted that people across the world have read my books, and my hope is that this book will resonate with people across the world. So it’s really important to me that wherever you are reading this book you have some sense of inclusion. But it is not just you as a reader that creates the need for a global viewpoint. Perhaps more than at any time in the history of mankind, the story of the future is a ‘joined-up’ story that can only be told from a global perspective. For example, it is impossible to imagine future carbon usage and the impact it could have on work patterns without knowing something about China’s likely industrial development. It is impossible to understand potential future consumption patterns without knowing something about the savings preferences of the average US worker.

So, for both these reasons, my mission is to create a global perspective. However, I am acutely aware that as I have developed the 32 pieces that follow there are many missing regions. The challenge is that if I wrote a sentence or two for every region, then what follows would become more like an encyclopaedia and lose the flow I believe to be crucial to a story that’s worth reading. So, generally I have assumed a global vantage point, and focused on specific regions when I believe something particularly interesting is happening there.

Looking back to a historical focus

It is slightly odd in a book about the future to be often casting a glimpse back to the past. Of course there are books that are resolutely future focused. However, I believe that if we want to increase our ability to understand the future of work we also have to glimpse back to the past. Taking a historical perspective can be useful in both creating a sense of momentum and velocity, and also providing a view of historical precedence. This is important for, as we have seen, there are clues to the future of work in both the first Industrial Revolution of the 1870s and indeed in the changes in production that occurred around the 1930s. It also seems to me that knowing a little about the past can serve to bring deeper insight into the future. This is particularly the case when we come to think about societal trends, including family structures and consumerism.

Understanding the broad context

Over the following 32 pieces you will see that I range far from the confined space of work itself. We will take a look at how we have lived and might live in the future, our family structures, our modes of consumption, oil prices and institutional trust. I have chosen to take this broad brush because it is clear to me that work cannot be seen without acknowledging the broader context. Work takes place in the context of families, expectations and hopes; it takes place within the context of the community and in the context of economic and political structures.

As I put these pieces together I am reminded again of my mother’s quilt-making. Over the years she collected scraps of material from many sources and then one day would sit down and work out a pattern from the pieces. I have to admit that one of the reasons the earlier metaphor of my mother’s fabrics and the quilts appeals to me so much is that, although I am not a maker of quilts, I am a collector of fabrics. Almost any trip I go on, I come back with tiny snippets of embroidery from Seoul or swathes of silk from Mumbai, or woven grasses from Tanzania. I even have a small woven Aboriginal basket made from pine needles. I’ve always patched together information in the same way. I like to travel and talk to people, and every year I make a point of visiting Asia, Africa and America.

Being a business professor is a huge advantage in this endeavour since I’m not trying to sell my ideas as I might in consulting, and I am not hiding my views as I might if I was an executive in a multinational company. I find that people tend to talk with me openly, sharing their hopes and confiding their fears. And, of course, perhaps the biggest advantage in being a professor is that I have the luxury that few have of extended periods of time to think and write. This has been crucial because, as you will discover, while this is an incredibly exciting journey, it is also very complex and it is only with time and reflection that I have been able to take a perspective and view of these pieces.

To help you find you own way through this maze of information, I have assembled the pieces of hard facts about the future under five broad headings: Technology; Globalisation; Demography and Longevity; Society; and Energy Resources. The truth is that these are rather superficial ways of categorising and the reality is that they can be re-sorted in many other ways. But it strikes me that this is a good place to start.

I have then created for each of these broad areas about five to eight smaller pieces. Each of these pieces has some kind of internal consistency and tells a story on its own: a story, for example, about how the West is ageing, or how the developing countries are becoming powerhouses of innovation, or how the population of the world is moving from the countryside to the city. I’ve chosen each of these pieces because I believe they could be important to your future, your children’s future or the future of your community. It is up to you to decide what to do with the 32 pieces as you craft your personal point of view about the future.

So, let’s take a closer look at the five broad forces that will shape the future of work, and the more detailed pieces that create a deeper understanding.

The force of technology

Technology has always played a key role in framing work and what happens in working lives. When we fast-forward to our working lives in 2025 and even out to 2050, we can only do so by knowing something about how technologies will develop in the near term – and by taking a guess at the possibilities for the long term.

Technology has been one of the main drivers of the long-term economic growth of countries; it has influenced the size of the world population, the life expectancy of the population and the education possibilities. Technological changes will continue to transform the everyday nature of our work and the way we communicate. Technology will also influence working lives in other deeper and more indirect ways – the way people engage with each other, their expectations of their colleagues, and even their views on morality and human nature. You don’t have to be an out-and-out supporter of technological determinism to recognise that technological capability – through its complex interactions with people, institutions, cultures and environment – is a key determinant of the ground rules within which the games of human civilisation get played out.¹

That’s not to say, of course, that the experiences of technology of those living in 2025 will be similar across the world. There have been, and no doubt will continue to be, large variations and fluctuations in the deployment of technology. That’s because technological developments do not happen in isolation but instead are dependent on context – be that cultural, economic or the values of people. What’s more, the deployment of any particular aspect of technology is not inevitable and will not necessarily follow a particular growth pattern. It could be that some technological developments will create revolutions in work while others will be a slower and steadier trickle of invention. It may be that in the future, as there has been in the past, there will be important inflexion points at which technologies divide and history will take either path with quite different results.

The Cloud, the technology net that creates the means by which people across the world can access resources, is a case in point. Technologically it will be feasible within the next decade for anyone with access to the Cloud around the world to access the World Wide Web and all the enormous information held in it. However, it could be that in certain countries and regions and at certain times, issues about security and access will severely limit the deployment of the Cloud. However, in spite of these likely variations in deployment, the impact of different growth patterns across the world, and contextual variations, what is clear is that technological developments will continue on a broad front.

For those of us on a journey to understand the future, the question is what might we expect this broad front to be – and how will it impact on day-to-day working lives in 2025 and beyond? Here are the ten pieces about technology that we will see played out in the storylines that follow.

1. Technological capability increases exponentially: one of the key drivers of technological development has been the rapid and continuous fall in the cost of computing. We can expect this to continue and it will make increasingly complex technology available in relatively inexpensive handheld devices.

2. Five billion become connected: this capability will be combined with billions of people across the world becoming connected. This will take place in both the megacities of the world and rural areas. The extent of this connectivity will create the possibility of a ‘global consciousness’ that has never before been seen.

3. The Cloud becomes ubiquitous: rapidly developing technology will create a global infrastructure upon which are available services, applications and resources. This will allow anyone with a computer or handheld device to ‘rent’ these on a minute-by-minute basis. This has enormous potential to bring sophisticated technology to every corner of the world.

4. Continuous productivity gains: technology has boosted productivity from the mid-1990s onwards, and we can expect these productivity gains to continue with the possibility of advanced communications at near-zero cost. Interestingly, in this second wave of productivity the emphasis will be less on technology and more on organisational assets such as culture, cooperation and teamwork.

5. Social participation increases: a crucial question for understanding the future of work is predicting what people will actually do with this unprecedented level of connectivity, content and productive possibilities. Over the next two decades we can expect the knowledge of the world to be digitalised, with an exponential rise in user-generated content, ‘wise crowd’ applications and open innovation applications.

6. The world’s knowledge becomes digitalised: there is a huge push from educational institutions, public companies and governments to make available the knowledge of the world in digital form. We can expect that this will have a profound impact, particularly on those who do not have access to formal educational institutions.

7. Mega-companies and micro-entrepreneurs emerge: these technological advances will lead to an increasingly complex working and business environment – with the emergence of mega-companies that span the globe. At the same time, millions of smaller groups of micro-entrepreneurs and partnerships will together create value in the many industrial ecosystems that will emerge.

8. Ever-present avatars and virtual worlds: increasingly work will be performed virtually as workers hook up with each other across the world. Their virtual representatives – avatars – will become central to the way virtual working occurs.

9. The rise of cognitive assistants: at the same time, bundling and priority mechanisms, such as cognitive assistants, will act as a buffer between ever-increasing content and the needs of workers to arrange their knowledge and tasks. 10. Technology replaces jobs: much of the productivity in the coming decades will come as robots play a crucial part in the world of work, from manufacturing to caring for an increasingly ageing population.

These are the ten pieces of the technology force that will shape the world you will live and work in. As we shall see in the stories that follow, technological developments will not only be at the heart of the Default Future’s dark side of fragmentation and isolation but will also be a part of a Crafted Future where co-creation and social participation are the norm. Before we move on, take a moment to ask yourself which are the most important pieces for you, which you can discard, and also to consider those technological aspects that have not been considered, but which you believe you need to know more about.

The force of globalisation

The workplace that dominated most of the twentieth century allowed producers and sellers a fairly relaxed existence. Thinking back to my first real job – as a psychologist for British Airways – much of the world was broken into relatively stable markets. BA had a near monopoly on the UK travelling passenger, and if the company did not make its predicted revenue the UK Government, as the owner of the airline, was there to bail it out. I recall getting into the office at 9.00, taking a one-hour break in the staff canteen on the other side of the airport, and then leaving my desk at 5.30 for a leisurely trip home. No work was expected at the weekend, the holidays were good, and of course I had the pleasure of deeply discounted travel perks – oh, and did I tell you about the BA pension scheme?

Economies of scale and stable markets (often supported by monopolies, oligopolies and regulations) protected large companies like BA from competition. If you worked for a smaller company, then you only competed with other local services and industries. The focus of these companies was on the production of goods and services at a reasonable price and in a form that consumers would not reject out of hand. Research and development departments did exist, but they tended to change around the margin, and costs could be planned for, thanks to unions negotiating wage rates for entire industries.²

That’s not to say, of course, that national economic activity took place in complete isolation. There has always been economic integration and trade within and between nations. We may have assumed that globalisation is a recent phenomenon because we tend to take a local view of history. In fact, for thousands of years there have been complex networks of trade across regions.³ Putting a precise date on the origin of these global linkages is difficult, since it depends on factors such as human migration, improved transport links and ever more substantial trade. Whatever the answer, the important point is that the forces that transcend the local have been operating for a very long time.

However, globalisation, as distinct from global history, emerged in the wake of the Second World War, following the agreements reached in the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 that led to the establishment of truly international trade institutions.⁴ Before 1944, trade was constrained by the sheer cost of moving goods around the world, the difficulty of sharing information across countries, and defensive governmental protectionism. After 1944, moving goods around the world became increasingly cost effective; developing technologies enabled information to be rapidly shared across much of the world, and government barriers to trade began to dissolve. As the goods and services available began to globalise, so consumers transformed the way they thought about meeting their needs. Rather than simply buying from the local supplier, people in many countries began to have a real choice. The result of this era of trade liberalisation was that the world volume of trade in the manufacturing sector rose 60-fold between 1950 and 2010.⁵

As we take a closer look at how the forces of globalisation will impact on work in the coming decades, I have selected eight pieces about globalisation that I believe to be crucial and which will become part of the future storylines.

1. 24/7 and the global world: since the 1940s, the combination of political will and motivation and technological innovation has created the means to join up the world and, in so doing, has pushed ever greater globalisation.

2. The emerging economies: probably the biggest globalisation story since 1990 has been the emergence onto the world’s manufacturing and trading stage of emerging markets from China and India in Asia, to Brazil in South America. With large domestic markets and increasing determination to export goods and services, these emerging markets have rewritten the rules of global trade.

3. China and India’s decades of growth: since the Cultural Revolution in Chi...