Dave Desforges began piloting "Work From Home" solutions over 3 years ago. His role required identifying additional candidate requirements and necessary remote work practices for both employees and managers at Sun Microsystems. His current work encompasses blending appropriate technology, organizational practices, and workplace environments to support mobile and distributed teams.
Jim McGee is currently a Director at Huron Consulting Group. He has spent much of the last 30 years working to understand, design, and apply information and technology innovations in organizations. Before Huron, Jim taught at the Kellogg School and was one of the founding partners of DiamondCluster International. With Larry Prusak, he was the co-author of Managing Information Strategically (Wiley, 1993). Jim has both an MBA and a doctorate in Information Technology, Organization, and Strategy from the Harvard Business School.
Regina Miller has more than 18 years of experience in Organization Development, Human Resources, Leadership Development and International Operations. Regina recently launched a global consultancy called The Seventh Suite which assists growing companies bolster their competitive edge via aligned strategy and progressive people practices. Her last corporate job was as the VP HR/OD for Oskar (Vodafone) which has been dubbed “one of the fastest growing mobile operators in Eastern Europe.” More info here.
Giovanni Rodriguez - Through a combination of luck and persistence, Giovanni has worked in the company of some of the most interesting and colorful leaders in several worlds: the law, theater, and technology. Today, he is a principal at Eastwick Communications, a Silicon Valley PR agency, where he advises both emerging companies and market leaders on executive leadership, public speaking, marketing strategy and media relations. He has worked for, consulted and advised numerous businesses and organizations including HP, Stanford University, Fujitsu Computer Systems, Cadence Design Systems, VMware, the American Arbitration Association, and the Unified Court System of New York. He is a graduate of Princeton University (Religion and Anthropology), and he has done graduate course work at the Columbia School of Journalism and N.Y.U.
Jim Ware is a cofounder of the Work Design Collaborative and the Future of Work program. He has over 30 years experience in research, executive education, consulting, and management, including five years on the faculty of the Harvard Business School. He was the lead author of The Search for Digital Excellence, (McGraw-Hill, 1998), and holds Ph.D., M.A., and B.Sc. degrees from Cornell University and an MBA (With Distinction) from the Harvard Business School.
"Never mistake a clear view for a short distance." Paul Saffo
Last month I had an opportunity to listen to Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future speak at the CIO Magazine CIO|06 The Year Ahead conference in Phoenix. I was there as part of CIO's Enterprise Value Award Process Review Board and as a facilitator for several of the breakout sessions. Paul was the MC for the 3-day event and his opening talk offered his rules for forecasting. They're worth having handy if you find yourself in a position to have to make some bets on what might happen next.
Before sharing his rules, Saffo made the point that he thinks of himself as a forecaster not a futurist. In his categories, a futurist is an advocate for a particular future, while a forecaster is an observer trying to understand and bound the uncertainties generated by events and trying to frame the choices that might influence the outcomes. Saffo used the following image (actually his image was much nicer - this is from my notes, but you get the idea).
Rule 1. Know when not to make a forecast. Saffo made pointed reference here to Apple's famous Knowledge Navigator concept video in contrast with Doug Engelbart's Demo Video from 1967. I think what Saffo was driving at was the distinction between setting out a vision that will drive inventors and innovators on the one hand and recognizing that a salient event has occurred that opens up uncertainties that you ought to factor in to your planning.
Rule 2. Overnight successes come out of twenty years of failure. If you're not paying attention, you're going to be surprised a lot. This is where Saffo began to offer his take on the role of S-curve kinds of phenomena and how to account for them in your planning processes. Two points that I took away here. One is that there early stages of these curves is when you typically have the most leverage, if you can find a curve that will make it to the knee. Nothing terribly new there. The second, which I hadn't thought about as much, was the difference in planning errors depending on where you were in the curve. I'm used to thinking only in terms of the tendency to overestimate how fast things will happen in the early stages of development. I've been less tuned in to the equally likely tendency to underestimate speed and demand changes past the tipping point. BTW, one of Saffo's specific observations relative to this rule was that he's paying more attention to Robotics as potentially the next big thing.
Rule 3. Look back twice as far as forward. Another quick bit of capsule advice about how to think smarter when you are dealing with exponential/logistics curve phenomena. This is a rule of thumb that captures the essential error in our tendency to think in linear terms about power laws. The change you've lived through in the last 10 years is a predictor of what you are likely to experience in the next 5. Douglas Adams captured this most memorably in his 1999 essay "How to stop worrying and love the internet."
Alan Kay has talked about this in the context of why we've had more success at dealing with smallpox than with AIDS. If you are dealing with something that is operating on exponential terms, then the rate of growth matters as much or more than the slope at any instant in time. Given our tendency to project on a linear basis our tendency to over or under predict actually depends greatly on when/where you make that projection. With smallpox, the growth rate/infection rate is so fast that by the time you make any projection you are likely to be over predicting. With a slow growing epidemic such as AIDS, early stage linear projections will under predict. The corollary, of course, is that the surprise factor in slow-growing exponential phenomena is much higher.
Rule 4. Hunt for prodromes. Learned a new word. For you non-medical types, a prodrome or prodroma is an early symptom or leading indicator. This is William Gibson's observation that the "future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed."
Rule 5. Be indifferent. Don't confuse your desire for a particular outcome with its likelihood.
Rule 6. Tell a story or, better, draw a map. Trying to package your insights into a story (or scenario if you need to justify your consulting rates) helps reveal gaps, risks, and opportunities present in the events you are trying to understand. It can also help you get a better grasp on the potential wild cards. Saffo was more keen on the value of trying to find a way to capture your insights into something more graphical/visual. The value there is that those representations can help you highlight important relationships more easily and they raise the possibility of revealing 'whitespace' where you might find important opportunities to exploit or risks to minimize.
Rule 7. Prove yourself wrong. The essential wisdom of the scientific method. Understand and resist the natural human tendencies to believe. Be careful not to rely on a single element of strong information. Look for lots of pieces of weak information that collectively reinforce your insights. Your search for strong information should be for that one piece of evidence that proves you wrong. Look for the one thing that will make you look stupid if someone else brings it up after you've gone public.
It was a well spent morning listening to Paul, as was the opportunity to interact during the breaks.
I just posted this note over at my own Future of Work weblog but wanted to share it with FutureTense devotees as well.
I am very pleased that several of the Future of Work corporate members (Forest City Covington, Agilent, Boeing, and IBM) and the Business Community Centertm concept that Charlie Grantham and I are promoting are mentioned in the December 12 issue of Business Week ("The Easiest Commute of All" - paid subscription required to access), now available online and scheduled to be in print on newsstands everywhere on Monday, December 5.
Today's San Francisco Chronicle carries an important story by technology writer Tom Abate ("Tech engineers fear U.S. is falling behind"). It reports on a recent survey by EE Times magazine showing that only 10% of American engineers are confident the U.S. will maintain its technological edge over time. The survey results are available online, at http://www.mcbru.com/news/insight2005.php. This isn't just about offshoring, however. It's also about the U.S. education system, which is falling way behind the rest of the developed world. And even if you live outside the U.S. and don't care that much about U.S. competitiveness, you have to be concerned about the state of technology innovation in the global economy.
I have been noodling quite a bit lately on the needed transition to action that online community building demands. Whether it be online communities of practice (associations, alliances, ventures), interest-based communities (dogs, Vioxx, Treos) or distributed work for one organization, I hear a lot about "listening" and "conversations" and "emergence" -- many of these discussions exhibiting a rather utopian bent. While there is still much to learn about those three topics, and many other related ones, it seems there is a lack of widespread debate about transforming all that listening and conversation into action in the real, physical world.
Now, clearly, in the case of distributed work for an organization, the people involved by definition need to produce something in the real world. But are they truly efficient in doing so? In the case of communities of practice (or the perhaps not-so-aptly-designated activist communities), how many of them have really made something happen? A change in behavior, a change in legislation, a person elected, a product designed and delivered, and so on. How many times have we seen a failure of expected result (ineffectiveness or impact failure) despite all of the buzz? Are interest-communities actually convincing people to do something? Do they need to?
I have observed and participated in online communities of practice, for example, where members spent a lot of time happily, kindly, politely debating ideas, but stumbled when it came time to step forward to take action. The activity of getting to action kept running up against strong roadblocks in the form of differing philosophies, reluctance or fear of leadership, the lack of time or commitment to take action, and so forth. Getting to action was (and is) often hideously painful.
I think one key is the design of a community. When action (and the rules that need to be put in place to facilitate this) is an afterthought, you can't hammer it onto a community that has only vaguely addressed it. When action has to happen, all of the hidden biases, struggles, vanities, egos, weaknesses etc. that have been glossed over during the listening/conversing phase jump into heavy relief. And the result can be disheartening and discouraging.
I am going to be digging into this subject over the coming months. If you have comments, examples, sources, and/or ideas please let me know. If you want to write about it in this space, please propose that to me as a guest author. I think it is a truly important subject that needs more attention as ever more of us work, collaborate and communicate online.
Several weeks ago I posted some thoughts on what Charlie Grantham and I call the “ReFormation of Work” (Parts One, Two, and Three are available here, here, and here). I was pleased to see the reactions and comments that our admittedly “far out” thoughts stimulated. Not everyone agreed with us but we clearly touched some raw nerves.
In fact, we really do believe that nothing short of a reformation in management practice is required to cope with the changes that face virtually every organization and the entire economy these days.
Specifically, our experience suggests that your future business success depends directly on your ability to understand the shifts that are occurring and to redefine your workforce, workplace, technology, and business strategies accordingly.
The Washington Post Magazine contained a very interesting article this weekend, entitled "Heaven Can Wait" that explores how retirement is disappearing for some people. Given the demographic realities of America today, delaying retirement is an increasingly necessary thing:
Having examined the demographic trends, the labor force stats, the health and longevity data, the projected costs of Social Security, Medicare and other government programs, the experts have come to a strikingly widespread consensus: Never mind that golden-years stuff. Keep working.
Of course, the government is thinking up ways to "encourage" us to keep working. And given the benefits, there may be a moral imperative to keep working as well, for the good of others.
So one prescription is obvious. Whatever else lawmakers do or don't do -- if they raise the age of Social Security or Medicare eligibility, if they establish private retirement accounts, if they index benefits for longevity -- it would be a fine thing, the wonks agree, if we'd keep working.
It's practically the public-spirited thing to do. If we remained in the workforce longer -- and labor force participation among older workers does appear to be inching upward -- we could postpone the age at which we receive Social Security checks, thus easing the drain. The higher taxes we would keep paying (including continued Social Security contributions) would help fill the federal coffers. And we could ward off a labor shortage that might threaten the whole economy.
The article offers three "serious changes" delaying retirement requires. Do you think these are the most important three? Do you have other ideas? Please share!
(a) Modifying traditional pension practices and regulations that discourage people from working longer.
(b) Persuading employers to get as excited about retaining or hiring older workers as labor analysts are.
And (c) subjecting the societal expectations and sense of entitlement built up over 70 years to a fast U-turn.
In my The Play Ethic at Work post, Rags from Un papier, commented on blogging at work and also wrote the following post. I want to respond accordingly because he brings up some important policy related topics.
Rags writes "Regarding Blogging at work Miller of The Seventh Suite wrote to me saying "yes I believe lots of people are blogging at work - all the more reason to give employees the chance to blog like Sun, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, etc...".
Rags goes on to say "I think blogging at work and employers allowing blogging is not an easy black and white decision. I think I am somewhat cynical about people blogging at work. A disclaimer, " No I am not part of the management, I am just another peon". According to Technorati's numbers the first thing people seem to be doing at work is to post a blog article. This probably is on top of the usual surfing activities like reading personal mails and news. Now one should also assume that the blog posters spend time reading other blogs as well."
I'll reserve my thoughts on play and fun at work until I read this book by Pat Kane for myself. (I am not so big on the whole fun/play thing or at least calling it that but more on that later...and maybe I'll even decide to reserve an open-mind on the topic!)
Kerabu points to a cool blog called The Play Ethic by Pat Kane who has written a book called The Play Ethic. It will be published in the UK at the end of September. "Kane expresses the hope throughout the book that the play ethic can be a bridge between results driven management and meaning driven employees in the emerging style of modern organisations."
In particular, "... Generation Xers and Yers who make up increasing percentages of today’s workforce have been brought up in a culture of play – gaming, play-stations and interactive technology – and we need to adopt different patterns of employment to accommodate their needs. New workers are looking for something more fulfilling and enriching – something that matches their experience. Perhaps, therefore, instead of looking for a work-life or work-play balance, we need to seek more ways to integrate the two."
DK sounds like a really neat guy with a very big mission. "Everyone is always wondering what kids are thinking. DK gives you a view into the complicated and sometimes contradictory world of today's teens." His organization, Phatgnat, us-them-you together "operates between the commercial and public sectors. Phatgnat creates opportunities for companies and brands to engage and communicate with young people whilst supporting local and central government’s youth-oriented initiatives through specific, high profile projects."
I have to say I am pleased at the reactions and comments that these musings on the changing nature of work have generated. It's a tribute to our readers and to the whole blogosphere that we've getting so much thoughtful feedback on my earlier postings (Theses 1-7 are here, while 8-14 are right below).
And now, for the final installment:
15. We must master Ambiguity
We no longer live in a world of certainty—if we ever did. The illusion that Homo Sapiens controlled their fate has crumbled with the evolution of the industrial, mechanical age. This, coupled with the increasing velocity of nearly all human activity, has generated an era of constant and continual change.
Work projects will begin with some goals and vision, but will continuously morph as the projects rolls on, being responsive to external influences. This new reality means that project budgets will be moving targets, deadlines somewhat arbitrary, and final design impossible to predict. Managers who thrive on certainty must evolve into leaders of ambiguity – or be left behind.
Here's the next seven (big caveat: I know these are broad generalizations, and subject to plenty of qualifiers. But that's okay, since I'm not trying to predict an actual future, but rather stimulate conversation and thinking about what the world would be like if these conditions actually become reality):
8. Work will be more collaborative, less individualistic
People will shift their work activities to their core competencies for approximately 80% of their time. Everything else will be handed off to someone with complementary competencies. Individuals themselves will become less ‘vertically integrated’ and grow loosely coupled collaborative networks to meet their needs outside their core competencies. No more "jack of all trades.’" The remaining time will be devoted to learning new skills and competencies.
9. Corporations will morph into confederations with shared liability
Modern corporations are an artificial legal structure created within the past one hundred years to minimize the risk associated with control of large asset bases. As Peter Drucker so aptly notes, they have out lived their usefulness. The assumptions that have underlain their need are not longer valid.
Primary among those assumptions is that large organizations were required to capitalize the investments required in the ownership of the means of production, such as factories. With a shift to more knowledge work this isn’t necessary for a much larger portion of the working population. Confederations of business clusters will instead move to the forefront. They will be held together by strategy, rather than by ownership of assets.
"The PC platform is going to outlive the Windows platform. In other words, because the PC platform is essentially open, it can run other operating systems, and it's open to people modifying it. So it will have a longer life span than Microsoft Windows, which is maintained, operated, and completely controlled by a single corporation. I don't think Microsoft is going to maintain its ascendancy forever. In fact, I would be surprised it it's anywhere near as dominant 10 years from now as it is now."
The whole thing is worth your time if you care at all about the future of technology.
In an attempt to return this blog to a more serious tone (just kidding Elizabeth), I want to offer up some thoughts on the future of work. I promised a couple of weeks ago to share some of the ideas that Charlie Grantham and I have been nurturing for some time.
So, what follows is a sampling of some trends that we believe are becoming more real every day (these are the first 7 of a total of 23 "Theses" that we've framed about the changing nature of work. We're trying to find a corporate door somewhere to nail them to).
1. Social bonds between worker and firm will decrease
Historically workers have been subservient to corporations because companies owned the means of production, such as factories. Individuals’ livelihoods depended on companies and they formed close connections with employers, often for life. These dependencies will decrease because large organizations are not needed to create value in a knowledge-driven economy.
I'd like to extend a warm welcome to Future Tense's first guest author, Jory Des Jardins. Jory is the author of Pause, where she chronicles her life as an independent in a series of posts entitled, "Living Without a Net," an often hilarious look at the trials and tribulations of working for oneself. Jory is also one of the organizers of the upcoming BlogHer Conference, which will take place in Santa Clara, Calif. on July 30, and will focus on the role of women in the blogosphere. She’s written for USA Today Magazine, The New York Times, and most recently for Fast Company.
This week Jory is going to share her thoughts with us on women and leadership, drawing on her own experiences, as well as research and other leaders' (both male and female) opinions. I am looking forward to the conversation!
* While the U.S. still led the world in skill certifications, India showed an increase of more than 300% in just two years.
* Eastern Europe, specifically the Russian Federation, has a significant and growing body of IT competence, while Western Europe and Southeast Asia are also on the rise.
* Canada is a powerful player in certifications, especially in customer support.
* The Southern U.S. led the nation in certifications, reflecting population shifts and the growth of “insourcing” business processes to lower-cost areas of the country.
* India led in Java programming, while the U.S. led in security-based certifications.
* While Microsoft products dominate skills tests for applications, both Linux and Unix administration outpaced Microsoft Windows Server certifications worldwide.
Study co-author Mark Healy, an independent consultant specializing in organizational assessment, hiring, and leadership, is quoted in the press release:
“In their efforts to join the global workforce, these people are shaping the very nature of work, changing the society and the world in which we live. It's important to realize that 'globalization' is not merely a corporate strategy or an economic policy: It's fundamentally a human phenomenon, a new chapter in the evolving story of the planet and its people.”
Synovate recently released their Young Asians study, done in conjuction with MSN, MTV and Yahoo! The study covers the age group of 8 to 24 in 8 Asian markets, and reports on spending habits, media consumption, favourite brands, dreams and aspirations.
Some interesting results:
The Internet and digital technology are fundamental to Young Asian lives, fuelling their desire to stay connected and central to their interaction with peers. 62% have their own mobile phone, 45% have their own desktop computer and half of 12 to 24 years olds name the Internet as the most helpful medium for product and service information over TV (32%) and newspapers (10%).
Here's a take on India's results. They are very confident about the future:
Only 7% of GenX Indians are worried about finding employment and a mere 5% get anxious about financial stability,
GenX appears to be defined differently than in the US; it is the "post reform" generation.
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:
In a couple of weeks, TransVision 2005, the 7th annual transhumanism conference will take place in Caracas, Venezuela. I am acquainted with the conference chair for the program, Jose Cordeiro, through some work I did with the Millennium Project a few years ago. I thought it would be interesting to catch up with him and have a conversation about transhumanism and what it might mean for the future of work. Along the way, he introduced me to the chair of the Venezuela committee, Santiago Ochoa , so I sent them both the same questions via email and asked them to respond.
Transhumanism is a way of thinking about the future that is based on the premise that the human species in its current form does not represent the end of our development but rather a comparatively early phase. We formally define it as follows:
(1) The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.
(2) The study of the ramifications, promises, and potential dangers of technologies that will enable us to overcome fundamental human limitations, and the related study of the ethical matters involved in developing and using such technologies.
There are a variety of ideas that go along with transhumanism, including superintelligence, singularity and extropy. Perhaps the most well-known feature of transhumanism is its seeking of immortality, most visibly represented by Ray Kurzweil.
I read through a variety of resources (listed at the end of this post) about these topics, and was struck by how there was virtually no mention of work. With superintelligent, immortal transhumans running around, what would that mean for work? Now, I ask that question in a tongue-in-cheek fashion here, but honestly, as we look into the future, the increasing melding of technology and humans seems to be inevitable. So it would seem worthwhile to discuss what these trends might mean for work. Our Q&A, accomplished through email, follows. I have edited some of the answers for length.
The Institute for the Future recently released a report called Toward a New Literacy of Cooperation in Business (pdf download). Authors are Andrea Saveri, Howard Rheingold, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, and Kathi Vian. Pulling from work on cooperation from a wide variety of disciplinary fields, including economics, sociology, biology and mathmatics, the authors seek to provide some guidance on the value of cooperation and how organizations can shift from a competitive model to cooperative strategies for business. They write:
Connective and pervasive technologies are enabling new forms of human and machine interactions and relationships; they will present business institutions with a host of new possibilities for organizing people, processes, relationships and knowledge. These forces will accelerate a shift in business strategy from solving concrete business problems to managing complex business dilemmas, which in turn will require a broader set of strategic tools and concepts than are provided by competitive models. (1)[my emphasis]
This idea of moving from a focus on "solving" to "managing" is rather interesting, because I think it moves us away from the forced oversimplification that a focus on "solving" a problem can bring.
Future Tense is about the trends and pressures that are forcing employers to change the way they think about the workplace. We'll be discussing management practices and collaborative tools, innovation and motivation, architecture, distributed work, mobility and gradual retirement. We will track how traditional hierarchies are breaking down and what is rising to replace them. Our goal is to look into the near future and provide useful information, case studies and interviews with leading thinkers. By identifying and discussing the multitude of trends that are reshaping work as we know it, we hope to provide a valuable resource to the people who are leading the way forward.
We have a great group of authors here, and I encourage you to read each of their inaugural posts, as they each define from what point of view they will be approaching this conversation:
It's likely, if you are reading this, you are already living the future of work in one way or another. I hope you continue to read, and contribute your thoughts and questions as well. This is an enormous topic to tackle, but with your help, we can create some high quality collective intelligence about current trends and how organizations around the world are changing to embrace new ways of working.
Giovanni Rodriguez
Elizabeth Albrycht
Dave Desforges
Jim McGee
Jim Ware
Rule 1. Know when not to make a forecast. Saffo made pointed reference here to Apple's famous 
Rule 3. Look back twice as far as forward. Another quick bit of capsule advice about how to think smarter when you are dealing with exponential/logistics curve phenomena. This is a rule of thumb that captures the essential error in our tendency to think in linear terms about power laws. The change you've lived through in the last 10 years is a predictor of what you are likely to experience in the next 5. Douglas Adams captured this most memorably in his 1999 essay "
