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Future Tense

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July 2, 2005

A Look Ahead

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Posted by Jim Ware

I’ve been trying understand, and help build, the future of work most of my adult life. Always trying to improve working conditions, to enhance organizational effectiveness, and to increase individual satisfaction. I do a lot of speculating about what could be, which for me is sometimes hard to separate from what will be (that is, it’s often hard for me to distinguish between what is most likely to happen, and what I hope will happen – even though that’s a pretty fundamental principle for any futurist).

Anyway, even though Yogi Berra once said that predictions are really difficult, especially when they’re about the future, I am going to stick my neck out and describe what I believe is actually going to happen over the next three to five years.

First, it’s clear to me that the very nature of work itself is changing, due in large part to technology, but also due to the increased importance of creativity and innovation in creating economic value, and to shifting population demographics (that’s a topic I promise to come back to).

In addition, recent events and experiences (like the dot-bust economy) have profoundly transformed the social contract between individuals and organizations.

So I see a number of interdependent drivers taking us into a future in which:

  • the balance of economic power is shifting away from large organizations towards smaller firms and self-employed individuals;

  • many more individuals are choosing to work as “free agents” rather than as full-time employees;

  • globalization and global competition are driving organizations to reduce their fixed cost of operations as low as possible, enabling them to scale up and down both quickly and at low cost;

  • an “emergent workforce” with new values and expectations will seek a new kind of work-life balance, leading to very different choices about where to live, what kind of work to seek, and how many hours of “work” to put in over a week, a month, or a year;

  • talented knowledge workers will not be as interested in a single career or a single “lifetime” job; they are likely to move (both geographically and organizationally) far more frequently than in the past;

  • technology enables work to flow to workers, rather than the reverse; “work” no longer refers to a place, but to a set of tasks and activities;

  • work becomes more mobile and more distributed, and workers perceive the corporate office very differently (and use it differently as well); corporate facilities will have to be radically redesigned to reflect these different requirements.

There’s much more to it than this, of course. Stay tuned: Charlie Grantham and I have actually framed 23 separate “Theses” about the reformation of work that I’ll be describing and discussing in some detail over the next few weeks (we’re looking for some bureaucratic door to nail them on, ala’ Martin Luther).

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