Welcome to my blog. I have questions about the way we work and I put my thoughts here. I hope you have a nice stay!
There is a lot being written of the future of work. Not a lot of it is interesting or challenging. It should be, but it’s not.
The future of work is a mystery not a puzzle. Not only don’t we have enough information about the future of work, but we may not even have the right set of tools to help us frame the problem correctly. So, we are uncertain. Forecasts of the future that generate fear (e.g. x number of jobs will be lost by x year) or forecasts that ask to invest in future-proofing the workforce (every child needs digital skills) are equally likely to be wrong. Our forecasts are either too vague or too specific. We need to think about the issues and pay attention to the boundaries where people, work, organisation and technology are already adapting.
Today’s disruption is that work we have considered for all time as exclusively the domain of humans—reasoning, judgement, learning and foresight—now appears to be within the grasp of technology. This challenges us to consider what it is we will contribute to work and organisation. The self-interested, short-term conversations about the future of work play to our many fears. There are, however, two long term questions that arise from new technologies that deserve attention.
An organisation that is culturally conditioned and practiced in flexible working is the one most likely will have the agility and resilience required to respond to disaster or crisis. It may also be one most likely to have the mindset and tools to adapt and posture for recovery.
The history of change management is replete with theories and models that have been given an existence and permanence that is divorced from reality. While originally grounded in good research these models develop into grossly over-simplified process maps that give a sense of false confidence to managers that they are in control. The models become pigs on the wing.
The solution to our sense of dislocation is not to focus on the fracturing of our experience of work but rather to focus on the philosophy and principles that have always been important to our work and organisation. To focus on people and the way they adapt in times of historical change.
If there is one area that leaders need to be thinking forward on all the time it is the interaction between people, work and organisation. There is real gravity in the way these three elements co-evolve through time. Donald Schon said it best when he coined the term ‘dynamic conservatism’, which he described as the tendency of organisations to ‘fight to stay the same’. Organisations don’t go on the ‘change journey’ willingly. So, what does it mean for an organisation transform?
Our work and organisations are also not what they once were. The structures and functions of the machine are changing. Those of us who are now deep in the machine need to understand this. Work, work relationships and how we organise are adapting to new circumstances. What do new entrants need to know in order to be successful in a machine that is in transition?
We live as if our only task was precisely to have relationships with people. To sustain a relationship, I need to exercise restraint, demonstrate empathy, and show tolerance. Camus was a strong critic of leaping to extremes—of taking extreme positions in order to justify our sense of how the world works or how we would like it to work.
Engaging with continuity and gaps, the regular and irregular, and the local and global through imagination has been most important for me in seeing how change flows. The clouds will always obscure our vision. Assuming the clouds away doesn’t work. They always reappear.
The history of work and organisation is all about cycles of success and failure. How we respond to failure in a time when disruption affects everyone may be the most enduring feature of continued organisational success.
