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!
All tagged Workforce
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.
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?
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.
