Space Cowboy
When we think about the future, we imagine it as being like today but with some differences, largely based on new technology. I remember ‘The Jetsons’ from my childhood, a cartoon about the future where they all had flying cars - but no internet or self-service checkouts. It was basically 1950s America with some fancy doo-hickeys. (It was a comedy, which is probably why George Jetson worked one hour a day, two days a week)
We think things change incrementally, that our experience of life evolves in a linear fashion. It does, every day brings something new, but there are also great leaps, discontinuities and disruptions. Few of us have the imagination and, I suggest, courage to think about those and conceptualise how radical change might be.
This is particularly true in our daily lives and in relation to work and the workplace. We just can’t see radical change, and we often try to avoid thinking about it. The imprint of recent history is strongly upon us. The nuclear family, the corporate career, the office and the hierarchy, these patterns are hard to escape from.
You can see this with the whole remote/hybrid/office debate. The frame is always what we know, the office-centric organisation, the commute, the 9-5 and 5 days a week. We could have untethered ourselves from the office decades ago (I did in the 1990s) but it was not even considered, so only a small minority embraced it (the pioneers and early adopters). What caused it to ‘cross the chasm’ into the mainstream adoption was a crisis, the pandemic and the shutdown, when the old model simply wasn’t available.
So pretty much overnight, laptops were dished out and people were working from anywhere but the office (OK, at home, to begin with, because we weren’t allowed out!). And what did most organisations do? They recreated the office in the virtual space, replacing in-person meeting with Zoom ones. Insisting people were online 9-5, 5 days a week. Sticking to synchronous, face-to-face working even when that is probably the worst way to use the technology and fails to realise most of the potential upsides.
We’re nearly five years on from that seismic event and still many organisations are unable or unwilling to escape the gravitational pull of the old office-centric hierarchy. As we can see, through the RTO mandates that are being doubled-down on, lots of them are actively trying to return to that old status quo. Even many who are sticking with hybrid are really seeing the future ‘like the past but with some new doo-hickeys’. Work from Home as an add-on to what they had before (although some consider it more aberration than add-on).
The real opportunities in the future of work don’t lie in the where people work, although it can deliver some short-term financial benefits from reducing office space and costs. It lies in re-imagining how the work is done, and what work is done. Some organisations have embraced this and are sharing their lessons for others to learn from. However, for most organisations, they just don’t want to go there (even though their employees often do).
The winners and losers are separating before our eyes. Those who allow themselves to be pulled back to the old models are deliberately hobbling their organisations and handing competitive advantage to their more nimble and forward-thinking rivals. And yes, those losers include some very big names indeed. Still, it probably won’t be fatal. For most of them. Although it just might be…
Falling Back
Another example of this thinking is the approach to AI, which is seen almost exclusively as a way to automate away jobs and reduce headcount (or do more with the same number of people, if you’re feeling generous and not listening to what the CEOs are actually saying).
In this sense, AI isn’t new. Businesses have been automating away jobs since the invention of the Spinning Jenny at the start of the Industrial Revolution. You think this is different because it’s Tech? Well, the introduction of computers in the 1950s and 60s was almost exclusively about replacing clerical jobs and paper systems (often without redesigning those systems, i.e. ‘the work’, with the result that they failed to deliver the promised benefits and spawned the phrase GIGO - Garbage In = Garbage Out).
Another wave happened with the arrival of the PC and ‘personal productivity tools’. This proved to be less about productivity and more about sacking typists and admin assistants and all sorts of other support roles so executives could waste time doing that stuff themselves.
Then we had email, the internet, smart phones, which were all said to streamline work by making us more mobile (well, out of office hours, at least, when we wouldn’t previously have been doing work) and flexible (or exploitable, perhaps).That’s not to say that these waves of technology didn’t cause some changes to the work but they were mostly as an unintended consequence and rarely benign.
Underneath it all, the machine that was fashioned in the industrial revolution, the desk factory, has remained intact. It’s had some go-faster stripes applied and nifty new alloys, but it’s still there. Only now it’s running flat-out on nitro and it can’t go any faster.
We’ve hit diminishing returns, arguably negative ones. AI won’t improve productivity across the piece, it will quite possibly drag it down (recent research on the use of AI tools like Chat-GPT and CoPilot show that employees already consider them an extra burden and of negative impact).
I’m an AI sceptic, at least in its general application to knowledge work, but even if I bought all the hype about what it can do, it’s still missing the point. We should be considering what new vehicles we can design and delight people with, not how we can use it to turbo-charge the old jalopy.
There’s the oft-repeated quote attributed to Henry Ford (although there’s no evidence he ever said it),
‘If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses’.
Well, he gave the masses the motor car (even if he didn’t invent it) rather than faster horses. It was a discontinuity that spawned a whole new industry. However, I don’t want a faster horse, I don’t even want a flying car a la Jetsons (well, maybe a bit. It would be pretty cool!). I want to hear about something I’ve never imagined I could have. I want the future, not a rehashed version of the past. I want a discontinuity.
The Man With The Child In His Eyes
It’s not surprising that we struggle to imagine the future, to see discontinuities and things that are literally beyond our knowledge. It’s to do with the way we learn about the world and build mental models.
I did a course in Child Psychology at university, which was mostly about Piaget’s theory of child development. This says that we learn about the world by developing schemas, categories of knowledge about the world. As experiences happen, this new information is used to modify, add to, or change previously existing schemas.
‘For example, a child may have a schema about a type of animal, such as a dog. If the child's sole experience has been with small dogs, a child might believe that all dogs are small, furry, and have four legs. Suppose then that the child encounters an enormous dog. The child will take in this new information, modifying the previously existing schema to include these new observations.’ (From VeryWellMind.com)
We add to schemas through two processes, assimilation and accommodation. So when we see a new thing, we compare it with our schemas and try to fit it into one of those (assimilation). However, if it doesn’t fit with our existing schemas, we either change an existing schema or create a new one (accommodation).
You can see this process is incremental. So if a child sees a cat, it will first try to put it into its schema for dogs. However, it will see that the cat does not bark, is smaller, moves differently, so it will create a new schema that is ‘like dog but different’ (until some helpful adult tells it this is called ‘cat’).
So, faced with something new we first try to put it in a schema that we already have. If it doesn’t fit then we look for things that it is like, and create a new schema that is linked to an existing one. So if we come across something so different it is not like anything we know, it blows our mind because we don’t know where to put it. Quite often we reject it, deny its existence or ignore it.
Think about the shock you feel when in a new culture that’s very different from anything you’ve experienced before. It’s unsettling, isn't it? You experience a kind of shock.
Also think about how movies are pitched in Hollywood. They go something like “Think ‘Die Hard’ meets ‘The Muppet Christmas’ with a bit of a ‘The Sixth Sense’ twist”. If it’s not relatable to something the execs already know, it’s not going to get picked up by a studio. (Although I’d definitely go and see that film, to be fair)
The way we think about the future, about the new, is anchored in our experience of the past.
That’s why it takes real imagination and courage to go beyond that. Qualities that are profoundly lacking in business today, which is riddled with MBA groupthink and locked into mechanistic models.
(I apologise to any psychologists reading this who are deeply offended by my mangled misremembering and possible inappropriate application of their specialism. Please feel free to get in touch and put me right!)
At The Edge
So who is going to imagine the new future?
The ones who always do. The artists, the writers, the dreamers, the mavericks, the renegades, the outsiders, the non-conformists, the rebels, and, yes, the pirates (who are all of the above!).
These are the people that organisations need and yet they are exactly the people that are driven out. They are too unpredictable, they bring chaos, they don’t conform, they break rules, they ask questions and challenge, they are disruptive, they are not ‘productive’, they are difficult to manage - these are the charges levelled against them.
Some or all of these may be true, to some extent, but that is exactly why they bring value. It’s how they bring value. The disruption, the challenge, the chaos are what bring discovery and learning, innovation and creativity. They bring the discontinuity which, whilst disruptive, is essential.
The future of work will not be created in the mainstream, because it struggles to accommodate the people that will create it. No, it will come from the fringes. That’s where it always comes from.
Paranoid Android
To circle back to my scepticism on AI, I refer to the case made by Ed Zitron in his newsletter. We’re talking about Large Language Models such as Chat GPT, Claude, Anthropic and the like, which are being framed (or should that be hyped?) as general purpose productivity tools.
Ed points out there are several problems both with the products and the underlying business models, such as:
No compelling use case has emerged or been identified.
Costs currently exceed revenues. Each search costs the company money. Current pricing levels are not adequate but it’s unlikely the market would bear much of an increase in the absence of compelling use cases.
There is no obvious path to reducing costs. LLMs do not scale like Software-as-a-Service or cloud services, where marginal costs fall away dramatically. As LLM usage grows, so do costs in a roughly linear way.
New models need more training than existing models. The training costs for the next iteration of models is estimated to be $1bn each, a huge increase on the previous models.
They are running out of training data. They’ve scooped up everything on the internet (and are facing restrictions and lawsuits from the data originators).
The ‘hallucination problem’ is a feature, not a bug. It can’t be fixed, which restricts the application of these models and their usefulness.
A solution to the training data problem is to use the output of other LLMs. However, because of the hallucination problem, each iteration degrades quality. Studies show that after a few iterations, the outputs of the models become significantly worse.
Ed doesn’t see how these problems can be overcome and I agree with his analysis. Investor interest is already cooling, users are less than enamoured in the main and the losses currently being incurred are unsustainable.
This does not mean AI (which covers much more than just LLMs, including thing like pattern recognition and machine learning) won’t have an impact. It already is in fields like medicine (e.g. cancer screening), recycling (e.g. waste sorting) and production processes. It’s just not going to have the level of impact that is currently being predicted by the AI companies or BigCon.
When Tomorrow Comes
“So what does the future look like, then, Colin?”, I hear you ask.
I don’t know! But I do think we are about to hit a discontinuity. I just can’t decide if it’s going to be good or bad. It could go either way.
I’ll save the crystal ball gazing for next time, when I’ll have a go at identifying what I see as the key trends and make a few predictions for next year.
And I’ll be optimistic. It’s Christmas, no one wants a downer at this time of year.
Bits And Pieces
The latest edition of the Work Punks podcast has dropped. We’re doing a series of short (around 10 minutes) ones where we answer a question about the workplace. This month we tackle “How do you cope with incessant reporting requests from Head Office?”. Check it out whilst you’re having your morning coffee. You can watch it on YouTube here, or get the podcast from here or subscribe to Work Punks on your favourite podcast platform.
I have stopped posting on the hellsite that was Twitter (although my account is still active on there) and have moved over to Bluesky. It’s just a much more useful and pleasant experience. You can find me there as @colinnewlyn.bsky.social. Come and say hello and connect!
Or get in touch by email, LinkedIN or maybe book a chat on my Calendly page. I’d love to talk with you.
Is that a Kate Bush reference Colin?