For a lot of my futurist career, blogging has been a major outlet. My posts are less frequent these days but occasionally I still use a blog post to organise my thoughts.

The archive of posts on this site has been somewhat condensed and edited, not always deliberately. This blog started all the way back in 2006 when working full time as a futurist was still a distant dream, and at one point numbered nearly 700 posts. There have been attempts to reduce replication, trim out some weaker posts, and tell more complete stories, but also some losses through multiple site moves - It has been hosted on Blogger, Wordpress, Medium, and now SquareSpace. The result is that dates and metadata on all the posts may not be accurate and many may be missing their original images.

You can search all of my posts through the search box, or click through some of the relevant categories. Purists can search my more complete archive here.

Future of Work Future of Work

Future working: what does the company of the future look like?

Following on from my speech at Boston’s Smashfly conference in 2016 on the future of recruitment, I’m discussing the topic once again. There is a lot to unpack when we consider the future of workforce management, and indeed, the company of the future.There are lots of articles out there about the future of recruitment. Many of the ones that I read tended to focus on how we will hire people in the future. The end of the CV/resume, for example, and AI-assisted selection. But I thought I would focus on why we will hire people, what sort of business we will be bringing them in to, and how we will see workers change as a result.

The future of workforce management

The starting point for this is understanding that the rules of success are changing. What defines a successful company in the future is not the ability to optimise, it is the ability to adapt. In short, being the best at what you do is only useful while what you do is something people want. In an age of high frequency change, what people want is subject to frequent and rapid disruption.Future-ready organisations are constructed as networks of loosely coupled smaller units, not deeply integrated monoliths. Each of these smaller units might have a unique culture and operating processes. They will need to be ethically compatible and aligned to the wider organisation’s over-all goals. But if their interfaces match up to the interfaces of other parts of the organisation, and they continue to deliver, there is little need for rigid control.

Building for remote

Some companies have already ‘built for remote’. GitLab has documented in great detail its approach to an all-remote workforce, including the challenge of onboarding people and overcoming loneliness.As well as having a continuing fear of infection, lots of people – and their employers – have now recognised these benefits of working remotely. They have found a better way of working for many of the things they need to do. Once you have found this better way, why on earth would you want to go back?

Migrating to Cyberworld

You can see the move to the cyber realm as similar to relocating to a different country, with a new language, culture and rules. Why shouldn’t it be possible? After all, we had to build up the now familiar processes of the office environment. Why shouldn’t we just create a whole new set of behaviours for the remote world?This would be true even if most organisations currently run in a slick, transparent and deliberate manner. I think most of us know that is not the case for most organisations, which tend to rely on the good will and hard work of lots of people to keep them running in spite of – rather than because of – sound processes. Should we address this? Absolutely. Can it be done fast? Absolutely not.People will need to be both retrained and re-equipped. In giving up the office, large organisations will need to start thinking much more about the home or remote working environment of their staff and spend accordingly, if they want to avoid risks of physical or mental harm. The change this will require in budgets alone is colossal for a large employer.The question for organisations who have recognised the potential for more remote or hybrid working, is when to begin the radical interventions that will begin their real transformation and allow them to reap the benefits.

High value hires

That might sound bad for recruiters but that would be to ignore the critical corollary to falling worker numbers: each worker becomes more valuable as a result. Just look at the earnings per employee of some of the world-leading companies right now. Companies like Apple make over two million dollars in revenue and hundreds of thousands in profit for every single employee. That means the value that they have to place on selecting and developing the right people is much higher.Networked organisations created in response to high frequency change are designed to be adaptable. Sometimes that adaptation will be organic within each node on the network. Small, agile teams should be able to evolve faster. But sometimes more radical excisions and acquisitions will be required. Whole units may need to be added quickly, sometimes through outsourcing to third parties, sometimes through acquisition. Sometimes, whole units will be dropped. Recruiters will be expected to fill critical positions at speed.

Constant evolution

For workers, high frequency change means constantly evolving your skill set to remain relevant. This too presents challenges to recruiters. The best candidates will be advancing their skills at an accelerated rate. The ability to learn and develop becomes one of the most critical factors in candidate selection, much more than established skills and experience. Companies are building the ability to be great tomorrow, not just seeking more of the same to expand their current output.

Embracing the ‘lazy’ mindset

I say all this as someone who has worked remotely for much of the last fifteen years. It’s good to be lazy. I am lucky enough to have a good setup at home to allow me to be productive. And my periods of working in offices and collaborating with others have shown me when it makes most sense to isolate myself, and when it is best to come together. I recognise that working remotely I can be a lot more productive in many tasks. And not only that, I don’t waste large parts of my day travelling.It’s good to be lazy because people with the right type of lazy mindset do things better. They are less likely to be busy fools. They are more likely to be the type of ‘essentialist’ described in Greg McKeown’s popular book: focused on the things that matter.We shouldn’t be calling out the ‘lazy’ people staying away from the office. We should be celebrating their better instincts. And at the same time, working out how we support those for home remote working just doesn’t work.

What will jobs look like in the company of the future?

So, we know that hiring processes will change and organisational structures will evolve. But what will future jobs look like? Let’s take a look at a future job: the Algorithm Archaeologist.

Future Job: Algorithm Archaeologist

Unless you have been living under a rock, you’ll know by now that algorithms – a sequence of steps to process some information and return a result – are responsible for a lot of things in our lives.But how do we know what those algorithms are doing? How do we know we can trust them? How do we know they are not biased against us, because of our age, sex, ethnicity or sexual orientation?Algorithms have been around for a long time. They rarely operate in isolation in such a virgin environment. They are compounded and integrated, fed skewed data sets. Their outputs get twisted from the intention.Who do you call when this happens? The Algorithm Archaeologists. Data professionals who can spelunk down through the chained processes to understand the complete sequence, and audit and identify any bias or breakdown.As we build up more and more layers of technology, one on top of the other in opaque strata of complexity, we will need more people with these skills to help us maintain our faith in the systems that support us, and ensure that they are not exacerbating existing inequalities, or creating new ones.

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How will jobs change in the future?

When something gets stretched or squashed, engineers talk about ‘elastic’ and ‘plastic’ deformations. Elastic, as you might expect, is something that can be stretched or squashed and then return to its original shape. Plastic deformations are more permanent. In a plastic deformation, something is bent beyond its elastic range and the new shape is retained.

The impact of COVID-19

When we’re talking about the changes that will stay with us after the COVID-19 pandemic, it feels to me like we frequently confuse plastic and elastic deformations. People experience an elastic change long enough for it to become a temporary ‘new normal’, and come to the mistaken belief it will be permanent. But when the pressure is removed, it is much more likely that things will snap back to their old state.So, what does the future of careers look like? We’re likely to see three key changes in the workplace:

  1. Change enforced by law: legislation will enshrine some pandemic measures in law. Let’s just hope the disenfranchisement of many voters doesn’t last…
  2. Change enforced by caution: risk managers and HR departments in organisations are likely to be extra cautious about their responsibilities and liabilities, driving more enforced behaviour change
  3. Change enforced by failure: the businesses that have failed might not be coming back, and nor might their business models

Flexible working

Much of this will be realised in flexible working. Vital as face-to-face contact is for communication and collaboration, our focus on face time, all the time, is terrible for productivity. We waste enormous amounts of time on commuting. That’s even before we consider the carbon impact.

Trusting workers

Flexible working only really works when we stop thinking like that. When we schedule time for communication, face-to-face or remote, but let people manage their own time outside of those moments. As long as people are delivering on expectations, we should be a lot less concerned about how long they are sat staring at a screen.

Combatting isolation

If more of us are going to work remotely, we need to think less about how many hours people are putting in and more about how it is affecting their wellbeing. We need to create more opportunities for interaction, perhaps taking the opportunity to reinvent some old traditions away from our alcohol-centric past.

Future of careers: tell your own story

While workplaces undergo a period of accelerated change, it is on us as individuals to think about our careers. We know that the single clear path has disappeared for most people. You can no longer walk out of school or university, join a trade or profession, and pursue that career for life.Disruption is coming, even to those niches that currently look robust. The construction trades are hungry for people right now. But over the next two decades they will go through enormous change. The skills you will require as a bricklayer, electrician, or plumber will be dramatically overhauled with the introduction of new materials, more modular construction, and co-working with robots. Law, accounting and finance still look on face value like solid professions, but they are on the verge of dramatic change.This constant disruption, across all fields, leads to a lot of uncertainty, amongst those entering the world of work and those advising them, and those already in work as well. Because the paths that we understand, and the experiences of the previous generation, are no longer a good guide.The best route to success, particularly in a “wicked world” of novel and complex problems, is diversity of experience and learning. The people concerned about their varied work history have actually been doing the best possible thing to build success.

We need to differentiate between future jobs and future work

There are many estimates of how many jobs might be susceptible to automation in the coming decade. The typical response is that many new jobs will also be created. And they will.But I don’t believe that jobs, in the traditional sense, will be created in the volume that would be required to offer meaningful employment to the many millions of cab drivers, call centre operators, retail assistants, warehouse workers, lawyers and accountants, who might be displaced by technology.This is different to saying that there won’t be work, however. But work is something very different to a ‘job’. A job means a mutual commitment with an employer. It means benefits and protections. These have already been eroded. There has been some pushback from governments around protections for those in the gig economy. But I think it’s only a matter of time before these rights are overturned — sometimes in the most dramatic way possible. After all, robot cab drivers will have no rights.

The future of freelance work

One of the core tenets of my belief about the future is that technology is reshaping our organisations — public and private — from large monoliths into networks of smaller components. The smallest component is the individual, the freelancer.This has been one of the fastest growing forms of work on both sides of the Atlantic in recent years, and I don’t see this growth slowing. The good news is that there is plenty to do. And it is work that might be better suited to people than machines. A few examples:

Infrastructure

In both the UK and the US, national infrastructure has faced decades of underinvestment. New build catches the headlines: HS2 and Crossrail for example. But there is an enormous amount of maintenance work to be done, on both public and privately held assets.Though machines can augment every aspect of this work from the design process to the delivery, sheer human flexibility of thought, and motion, will remain in demand.

Craft

The more things in our world become digitised, the more we crave rich, tactile, physical experiences. A higher proportion of our spend goes on experiences over goods, we eat out more, when we drink it is lower volume and higher quality. We start buying vinyl again.I think the demand for the human-made, the personal, the crafted, will continue to grow. Fashion will dictate that for every mass- and machine-produced item in your home or on your person, you demonstrate some personality with more crafted items. Digital consumption will continue to be balanced with experiences you just can’t get online.

Care

Care is the oft-cited example of an industry that won’t be disrupted by automation, and that faces growing demand thanks to our ageing population. Care absolutely will see a measure of automation. But the bulk of the work will still be carried out by humans for now.The problem with this is the low value we continue to place on care work, both formal and informal. We pay very little to those raising our children or caring for our parents, or anyone else who needs our support, for that matter. If redistribution of wealth is needed anywhere, it’s here.

Creativity

Since the passing of the days of ‘Cool Britannia’, we have been very poor at celebrating the power of our creative sector in this country. And yet it remains a global powerhouse, turning out a disproportionate amount of the world’s stories, art, design, architecture, music, television formats and more.The disruption of the traditional media channels threatens this industry, and our national strength, perhaps more than any other. But while we have this power we ought to recognise its value and promote it as a career path — not least because creativity is a critical and under-trained skill in other disciplines.

How will jobs change in the future?

This is far from an exhaustive list, but I hope you get the idea: jobs may be disappearing, but there will be work available. The question is how do we support those in inconsistent work, how do we enable constant learning and reskilling to allow people to keep up with a fast-moving market for skills. How do we make this new world of work a positive for more people, not a terrifying world of risk.

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Mental health and the future of work

Tomorrow’s worker will be permanently outward facing, obliged constantly to perform. I’m concerned that this doesn’t suit everyone. Even those it does suit might find their resilience challenged.Many years ago, long before I had done any telly myself, I attended the filming of a TV show. Not a drama, more of a magazine show. Because I knew someone on the production staff, I also went to the party afterwards. It was that sort of show.The party was in a bar nearby. It was a great place for people watching. There were a few interesting characters in the crowd. But I found myself rather obsessed with the behaviour of the host. Not because they were a celebrity, or because they were doing anything untoward, but because they spent most of the time seeking reassurance and the feedback of others.The swaggering, confident persona I had just seen perform in front of the cameras was now asking everyone, on the phone and face-to-face, what they thought and whether it had been any good. This wasn’t compliment-seeking, or just a humble entry-point to conversation. They were really concerned about the quality of what they had just delivered. They were unsure. There was a brittleness to the confidence they had earlier displayed.I thought then that this was unusual. It also got me thinking about my future networking skills. Now I think that there is a correlation between the need to constantly perform with an outward confidence, and a weakening of the more quiet confidence underneath.

The price of performance

This has certainly been my experience. I’m no celebrity, but every few days I’m on stage, speaking at a dinner, lecturing, or on the telly or the radio. I’m constantly exposed and so are my ideas. Half of the things I speak about have sprung from my imagination and I am opening them up for criticism. It is sometimes difficult.The need to take a break is natural but my desperation to get away from the screen has undoubtedly been amplified by the nature of my work during lockdown. I have written before about the brittleness in my confidence induced by performing. Normally, I might do two or three speaking gigs a week and a similar number of radio appearances.This has increased to the point where sometimes I feel like I have barely stopped performing. I have been going from livestream to livestream, and when I’ve not had a camera in my face, I have been constantly plugging the book or upcoming events on social media. This has left me more exposed than I might like to some of the current toxicity there, which hasn’t improved with everyone being isolated.I have always been a very confident person, happy walking into rooms of people I don’t know. I have always enjoyed performing, and there’s no doubt that this job is about performing, as well as research, thought and writing.But the more I do it, the more I recognise that there is definitely a mental cost to this exposure.I don’t write this to complain. I wouldn’t change my job for the world. But rather to illustrate a hypothesis. The neurotic actor, crippled by self-doubt off the stage is something of a cliched trope. But I think there is something in it. I believe that roles in which we have to perform constantly challenge our internal equilibrium. And I believe that more of us will be more exposed to this risk in the future because of the changing structure of our organisations, and the changing nature of employment. Tomorrow’s worker lives their life on the edge.

The future of workplace wellbeing

One key change in the structure of organisations is the use of freelancers. Our organisations are increasingly structured as networks of smaller components. This is an approach that I advocate, believing that networks of small components are much more adaptable than deeply integrated monoliths. But networks of small components naturally have many more people exposed at the edges.The most extreme example of a networked organisation is one composed entirely of freelancers. Each person in that network is not only responsible for fulfilling their own duties as part of the network, they also have to sell their value, report their successes, and communicate constantly – a form of performance – with the parts of the network with which they interact.Any freelancer will tell you this is draining. But right now a lot of freelance workers self-select for that lifestyle. They probably have, for the most part, personality types like mine that mean they can endure it, or even thrive in it. What happens when more and more people find themselves in a constant state of performance, either as freelancers or at the edge of their component of a networked organisation?

Building resilience in tomorrow’s worker

Resilience has become something of a self-help buzzword in recent years. It’s easy to be dismissive of those offering to teach or coach people for it. But I’m increasingly of the opinion that it will be a core skill for tomorrow’s worker.That alongside the Three Cs for which I have advocated over the last few years, we should be teaching people how to deal with what happens in a world where those skills – creativity, curation and particularly communication, are prized above all else. How do you cope if you are not a natural presenter, are uncomfortable doing it, and yet are forced to do so? This isn’t just about overcoming stage fright, it can be about going against core aspects of your personality, identity, and even challenge the stability of your own mental health.

Flexible working: one more challenge for the future of workplace wellbeing

In the past, I have worked with global communications company Poly to produce a report on the future of work. You can download the full report here.In summary, we are not all going to be working remotely now. The office has too many advantages, and remote work is problematic for many. But we are undoubtedly going to be working in a hybrid fashion. This requires incredibly careful thought about how you give people freedom and flexibility while not disadvantaging others and maintaining coherence and collaboration.While I may have come across as negative about remote working, this is only in response to the massively over-hyped idea that we will all be working remotely for the foreseeable future. As ever, what is needed is a balanced, considered approach to the future of work.As the size of our organisations shrinks, so more of us are exposed at the edges. We rely more on constant communication to bring in new work, keep partners close and customers happy. We are constantly in promotion mode, pitching our wares.No-one can live their lives on stage like this. If we are all to work more remotely, more individually, and in smaller, networks of organisations, we need think carefully about the effects on people’s mental health. We need to ensure that they are working safely, and getting away from work as well.

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Future Job: Algorithm Archaeologist

Algorithm archaeologists will help us dig through layers of complexity to understand the bias inherent in our systems and automated decisions

Unless you have been living under a rock, you’ll know by now that algorithms – a sequence of steps to process some information and return a result – are responsible for a lot of things in our lives. Your bank tells you that you are pre-approved for a loan? Algorithm. Website shows you different things to your friends? Algorithm. Freaky matches on your dating app? Algorithm.But how do we know what those algorithms are doing? How do we know we can trust them? How do we know they are not biased against us, because of our age, sex, ethnicity or sexual orientation? How do we know that, even if these particular data points are hidden from the algorithm, that it is not inferring them from other information?There is a responsibility on the designers of algorithms to consider all of these things. And there is a responsibility on those that employ and commission them to validate their work against such standards. But that assumes a green field site. A situation where we are building an algorithm using known and trusted data, and without reliance on existing steps and processes.

Layers of complexity

Algorithms have been around for a long time. They rarely operate in isolation in such a virgin environment. They are compounded and integrated, fed skewed data sets. Their outputs get twisted from the intention. They end up as one element in a complex chain of processes that is near incomprehensible, even to those who created them.Who do you call when this happens? The Algorithm Archaeologists. Data professionals who can spelunk down through the chained processes to understand the complete sequence, and audit and identify any bias or breakdown.These people exist today. They are consultants from places like Accenture, whose innovation centre, The Accenture Dock, I visited again on a research trip yesterday. Algorithm Archaeologists is my term for them and it feels right.As we build up more and more layers of technology, one on top of the other in opaque strata of complexity, we will need more people with these skills to help us maintain our faith in the systems that support us, and ensure that they are not exacerbating existing inequalities, or creating new ones.

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Raging against the invisible machine

The Luddites smashed machines they could see that were taking their jobs. How will the new Luddites rage against invisible, ephemeral machines?

Today we use the word Luddite to describe someone who is nonplussed by technology. Someone who just doesn’t like it, understand it, or engage with it. This is not an accurate description of the real luddites though – as a historian friend once pointed out to me. They had no abstract objection to technology, they just didn’t like it taking their jobs.The Luddites could see and touch the machines that they opposed. They could take hammers and break the frames. Not so for any true modern luddite, raging against the cognitive automation that might strip them of work. Today the greatest threats to human work are remote algorithms, spun up on a distant server, perhaps on the other side of the world, to perform a single task. They may only exist for a fraction of a second before they disappear again, back into the giant pools of data and computing power.I raised this at Barclays recent Charities Day to highlight the challenge that automation presents to all of us, but particularly to the third sector. Charities have the challenge of employing automation to maximise their own performance, when they might consider their role as employers and venues for volunteering as a very important secondary goal to their primary mission. But they also have the threat to their fundraising activities. Payroll giving has been a growing component of their income in recent years. What happens when fewer and fewer of us are on a regular payroll?Ephemeral robots aren’t likely to be so generous.

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Engineering adaptability

 

What does accelerated change mean for organisations? Accelerated adaptation. Or put another way, agility.

Agility is an over-used word in business these days. The perceived sexiness of agile development methods spilled out of the product labs and the IT function and into the rest of the business. It’s a useful word but you have to define what you mean when you use it outside of those product or project contexts.

Perhaps it first makes sense to define what it means in those contexts. Here, agile development is about formalised alternative approaches to the classic ‘waterfall’, where all possible requirements are captured at the start of a project and then development continues until those requirements are met. Agile approaches are instead iterative, testing requirements with the customer at every stage. This avoids long product builds where the end result has either diverged from the customer’s original (or real) need. Or products that become less and less fit for purpose over the life of the project.

Organisational agility

In a broader organisational context, agility is about the ability to change rapidly in response to a variety of signals. Agile methods may be part of this response but this is really about the capability of the organisation to receive those signals, process them, and act on them quickly.

For clarity, that’s three clearly different capabilities that I’ve defined before:

  • The antennae to detect change signals from inside and outside the organisation and particularly from adjacent spaces — often blind spots from which the most serious challenges may come
  • The ability to process this information and build a response plan rapidly, gaining assent from, or at the worst compelling change in, the relevant parts of the organisation
  • The flexibility to act on that response plan at speed

Change signals

Examples of signals that might trigger this chain of responses include:

  • Internal functional failure or degradation
  • Accelerated direct competition
  • Adjacent market competition
  • Customer channel shift
  • Collapse of product or service relevance

I’ll break those out in more detail

Internal functional failure or degradation

How fast could you rebuild one of your core business functions if it appeared to be failing? How much disruption would it cause? How would you know it was failing in the first place?

I haven’t worked with an organisation where one or other unit wasn’t failing the rest. But they often don’t know they’re failing and nor do their managers — at least, they can’t prove it objectively. They don’t have the benchmarks against which to measure the performance of procurement, finance, HR or IT teams.

That’s not to say they don’t have some metrics in place, but these metrics are usually operational and based on a historical idea of how that unit should perform. They don’t measure its contribution to the organisation’s wider goals.

This isn’t easy. Part of the problem is often a disconnect between what these functions think their role is and what it should be for the long term health of the organisation. Only with a proper alignment of expectations and measurement built around those shared expectations will you ever get a signal that something is wrong.

Accelerated direct competition

The most obvious form of signal is direct competitors applying the accelerating effects of technology to overtake. But this is perhaps the rarest example I see and the one for which most organisations are reasonably well prepared. They are focused on the rear view mirror, so see these organisations approaching in the outside lane.

Adjacent market competition

This is the blind spot. The one that people don’t see coming until it’s too late. Or that they are too arrogant or ignorant to acknowledge. This is the Netflix vs Blockbuster battle. Kodak vs digital (and now the rest of the camera industry vs the smartphone). It’s HMV vs iTunes or Yellow Pages vs Google.

Customer channel shift

The way customers communicate with their suppliers, and buy from them, is changing.

Case in point: a couple of years ago a friend asked me to speak with the MD of a small-ish (a few tens of millions) manufacturer. He was about to push the button on a new website costing a few tens of thousands — perceived as a big investment for him. He had cold feet and wanted to check his strategy before paying out.

I looked at his business — selling to service providers, retailers and manufacturers — and asked him a few questions. One of the first was “Do you sell on Amazon?” He got quite annoyed at this point. “You’ve got the wrong end of the stick. We only sell to other businesses.” I convinced him to bear with me and go onto Amazon’s website, and type in some keywords related to his products. “Oh shit,” was his response, or words to that effect.

To his surprise (though obviously not to mine), his competitors were already selling their wares there. More to the point, his distributors were selling his products there. And he had no idea.

Collapse of product or service relevance

The lifespan of products is getting shorter and shorter. Take the ‘hoverboard’ for example. In the space of six months it went from appearing under the feet of celebrities and costing the thousands, to being a huge phenomenon (and costing hundreds), to being effectively banned from the streets, killing the market.

Monitoring such rapid rise and fall in relevance is a challenge.

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Automation: will robots take our jobs?

The most common questions I am asked today are about automation in one form or another. Closely followed by questions about whether I have a crystal ball, or if I can share next week’s lottery numbers.As with jokes about my name, everyone thinks they’re the first to make them.What’s clear is that there is huge confusion about areas of business that can be automated — robots directly replacing people — and those where augmentation can play a huge role.

Bionic business

Augmentation is about expanding the capabilities of individuals. Sometimes this will mean these individuals can do the work of many. Here the lines between automation and augmentation blur: you can argue that all automation is, in fact, augmentation, since there are usually people remaining in the business and those that remain benefit from operating at an improved profit margin since — at least in theory — productivity rises and costs fall.But other times, augmentation can make individuals better at their jobs, taking their capabilities beyond the human to the superhuman. All without affecting the employment of their colleagues.Where things get really confusing is where the augmentation saves time: surely that’s the same as replacing people?

Will robots take our jobs?

Our understanding of the potential impact of automation is undermined by a lack of differentiation between jobs and work. Robots can do work but no robot is a direct replacement for a human employee.There is one characteristic that is more important than any other in humanising the robots we see in science fiction films. It is not the oversized eyes of Wall-e, or the cute little beeps of R2-D2, or the conversational humour of Johnny 5. It is their ability to adapt to different challenges and situations.If you augment the capabilities of your AI tools, they will achieve more than one ‘pure’ human normally could. But you are not really replacing other people because their work cannot easily be shared across multiple individuals unless those individuals are operating at the same level in the same market with the same influencers.

Will automation replace jobs?

Automation will not replace jobs entirely. In the real world, we tend to build robots for single tasks. We design them to perform those tasks with incredible efficiency. Inside the bounds of these narrowly defined tasks, they can outperform humans by many orders of magnitude in speed, strength, and dexterity. Beyond these narrowly defined tasks though, they are useless. Unless and until they can be reconfigured for the next challenge.Building flexibility into robots is expensive, both mechanically and computationally. This is why the robots of science fiction are so different and so appealing. R2 can deliver cocktails, hack space stations, fix your space fighter, and even hold down a conversation, if you speak robot whistle. Meanwhile his real-world counterpart can just move steel pressings from one place to another, over and over again.

How robots will affect future generations?

When we employ a human in a job, we count on a degree of flexibility and an array of complementary skills. This differentiation is critical in understanding the impact of robots on the future workforce. Because there is no robot today that is a straight swap for a human being.They must be able to:

  • Understand variations in the brief and respond to them
  • Access the task location.
  • Communicate with the other human beings around that task: customers, colleagues, partners.

So, when robots enter the workforce, while they absolutely displace people it is never a one-to-one ratio. Rather, the workload of specific tasks is aggregated from multiple people and allocated to one robot. One machine might do 80% of the work of ten different people. That still leaves work for two full time people, but it is now a pair of roles that look very different to before.

Roles where automation could replace jobs

Sometimes those new roles will be very high value. For example, in a professional services environment, the robot might do a lot of the document processing that has traditionally been the domain of junior members of staff.What is left is the strategic thinking, problem solving and client engagement.Sometimes what is left might be less engaging. Picture the delivery driver in a self-driving van who just has to get out at the relevant locations and run the parcel to the door (or as is so often the case, throw it over a fence or put it in the paper recycling bin).Of course, you don’t have to use a human to round-out the robot’s capabilities. You can always change the operating model. In the delivery example, the robot truck is more likely to park up outside and phone the recipient to tell them to come out collect their parcel. It won’t need to put things in odd places because it is in permanent communication with the recipient’s smart device and knows their location and availability.

New jobs

Though the statistic about ‘65% of future jobs not being invented yet’ seems to be itself, completely invented, there will undoubtedly be new jobs created in the future. But it is hard to see what jobs might be created that offer large numbers of people long term security.So, will robots take our jobs? Alongside the rising perceived value of human work, it is hard to see anything but a decline in the total number of traditional full-time jobs. Jobs that are a mutual contract between employer and employee, trading commitment for security and personal development.And how will robots affect future generations? The net result is likely to be that the perceived value of humans in the full-time workforce increases. Because humans do the low volume, high value tasks that machines find difficult. This won’t, sadly, overcome our historical underpayment of those in roles like care and teaching. Though the same automation effects may free more of their time to focus on the aspects of their job where they add the most value and relieve some of the time pressure.

Widening the divide

The jobs that remain will be of higher value and – on average – higher pay. The people who don’t get those jobs? There will be the same spread there is now amongst the self-employed and gig economy workers. Many with high value skills will be absolutely fine. But the size of the ‘precariat’ in less secure, freelance and part-time work could grow considerably.Robots don’t take jobs, but they do take work. And in doing so, they may widen the economic divisions in society.

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Future of Work Future of Work

What is the future of creativity?

At various points in history people seem to have decided that there’s nothing left to be invented. That we have exhausted the possibilities for music, art, and science. Inevitably they are proved wrong. Today we’re more aware of what we don’t know than ever before. It’s clear that we are only beginning our journey of discovery as a species.Creativity is often misunderstood. It is overly associated with the arts, and art in particular. Those who didn’t take to art or creative writing at school may not consider themselves creative. But creativity is problem solving. It is often not about originality but transposition and iteration, bringing ideas from one place and applying them in a different context then refining them over a period until they fulfil a need. The arts are a great place to learn these skills, but they are not their only outlet.

Creativity and future of work

Creativity is one of those words that gets bandied about meaninglessly like ‘innovation’ and ‘disruption’. But what about creativity and the future of work? If you can’t choose a career, maybe you need to invent your future job?“What do you want to be when you grow up?” It’s such a singular question in an age when our careers so rarely include just one line of work, sometimes including many in parallel. And when it’s not entirely clear at what point in our lives we count as having ‘grown up’.Now seems a good time to share the tools I use for mentorship sessions.

Future Job: Opportunity Matrix

The first of these is about capturing the different avenues available to someone. This may sound like an unusual position, but we are in a world of growing self-employment and rising diversity in types and styles of work. Dell and the Institute for the Future suggested back in 2017 that 85% of jobs that will exist in 2030, don’t yet exist today. This says nothing of the jobs that exist today that might not exist, or might employ many fewer people in 2030, but that’s a different story.We are making up jobs all the time, so why shouldn’t people make up their own future job? Perhaps people come to me because I did just that. I have now been an Applied Futurist for longer than I have been anything else.The first tool I put together for my mentees is designed to simply map the different avenues available to them and get them to put some values against each.

  • The first value is enthusiasm, or passion. Does this type of work, or working in this particular line, bring you joy? Very Marie Kondo.
  • The second value is opportunity. Can you realise a good income from pursuing this line of work? Can you win work against the competition?
  • The third value is credibility. Do you have a track record in this line or some other validation of it being your specialism?

I ask my mentees to give a score out of ten for each of these criteria to the various avenues in front of them. No single avenue of opportunity has to score highly in all three criteria: if there’s a big opportunity, it’s worth working towards credibility. But you really want it to be something you enjoy.The results don’t give you a hard and fast answer about which direction to pursue. But I’m hoping they provide a platform for our next conversation. If you’re facing similar choices, feel free to download this template and use it to find your ideal future job.

Is technology making us less creative?

So, what is the future of creativity in the workplace? The drive for operational excellence has brought an end to the age of creativity in too many businesses. Lots of companies are focused on doing what they do better. This is a noble goal, you might think. And that’s true, as long as this pursuit doesn’t exclude an even more critical challenge: asking the question, “should we even be doing it?”There is a new class of small but impactful and highly accelerated waves of change that will ultimately present an existential threat to every organisation. In this age, it is critical that every leader who wants to build sustainable success – who prizes stewardship over short-term wins – focuses on adaptation not optimisation. That they recognise that while wastefulness is never good, long-term success will require rapid change to fit the market, rather than endless refinements to today’s model.In an age of high frequency change we need open minded, wide ranging, creativity applied across our organisations. A constant challenge to our processes, propositions and behaviours, and new ideas instituted, revised, and applied.This type of creativity is a skill, one that can be learned and that must be honed. This process is an unalloyed good for individuals and has enormous benefits for our organisations. It is something that deserves our investment. We need to return to an age of creativity.

Rewarding future creativity

Creativity is often seen as being its own reward, but even artists need to eat. Too often creative talent is devalued. Jobs offered for ‘exposure’. Music and arts squeezed out of the curriculum. Yes, you can be extremely creative in science, maths and English. But that creativity is always enhanced by cross-pollination with other, explicitly creative disciplines where the creative muscles can be developed.Google may have part of the answer. Its Content ID system may be unloved by the music industry, who claim it isn’t effective enough at identifying unlicensed use of their properties. But if Google is to be believed it identifies 99.7% of copies of tunes in its database. Content ID automatically notifies copyright owners, allowing them to monetise user-generated content that infringes their rights.Imagine a system like this that allows individuals to protect their rights to creative works of all types around the world. The complexities of global copyright may make it hard to enforce legally. But much more shaming of the type that Inditex is experiencing now may convince large retail brands to sign up. And it would provide a simple source of discovery and a single source of evidence for those who have been infringed. Even if the person doing the infringing is another small business or sole practitioner — as has happened to a well-known illustrator friend — this would be a way to monitor that and at least socially enforce some sort of control.Would this be a good thing? It would undoubtedly be abused. By large corporates (as happened in this case) and spiteful individuals.Either way, I think we’ll see something like this before too long.

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