Tomorrow will be different, probably
The pointless yet necessary practice of predicting the future of work
This is an audio version, read by me, not some creepy AI creation.
Higher Ground
It sounds very grandiose to talk about ‘the future of work’, as if we are masterfully looking at the broad sweep of history and peering into the future, using our powers of perception and great wisdom to predict what’s going to happen.
Actually, it’s all bollocks. I should know, I do enough of it.
Because what are we referring to when we talk about ‘the future of work’? Well, we’re talking about office work, white collar work, the sort of work you do sitting at a desk in front of a screen. OK, for some, it’s escaped the office and the screen might be a phone, but it’s essentially the same sort of work. It’s what people employed in big organisations do, in WEIRD societies - Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic. Or to be even more specific, the USA, which dominates most of the discourse.
We’re not talking about the work done in factories, in shops and warehouses, in hospitals and care homes, on farms. We’re not talking about work done by the other 88% of the world’s population, in cultures that are very different to our western one, driven by different social norms and ethics.
Well, maybe we do talk about some of those a bit, in passing, as a footnote. Mostly, we just project our WEIRD worldview onto them and talk about ‘adjustments and adaptations’ because why wouldn’t they want to copy us?
The last point is reflection of the fact US business colonised the world in the post-war period, with most global organisations growing out from the USA. They bought all that, why wouldn’t they buy whatever’s coming next? Especially when all the tech companies are US-based.
Of course, we simplify and limit the scope of ‘the future of work’ so that we can get our heads around it. Otherwise it is just too massive an issue to think about. But we shouldn’t lose sight of that and must recognise the limits it puts upon our conclusions.
Besides, we are beginning to see some of this breaking down. The USA is certainly Western and Rich but Educated, Industrialised and Democratic? Well, maybe for now, but the trends aren’t looking encouraging. And new global companies are growing from other parts of the world, from the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China), from the Middle East and soon they will be from Africa. As in so many other areas, the context is fragmenting. Some of these global organisations will look very different to the norm that we’ve become used to (Haier being an obvious example).
Same Old Song
When we look forward, our tendency is to see it as an extension of the past. It’s essentially a ‘the same but more so’ view because (and this is going to sound ridiculously obvious) we can’t imagine what we can’t imagine. We build upon our past experience, our history, because it’s all we have to go on (unless we are truly a visionary or on some good quality psychotropic drugs, neither of which apply to most of us).
However, this is even more of a problem because our recollection of the past is partial, flawed, biased and just plain wrong at times. We forget stuff, individually and collectively. We make up stories and myths about events. We mistake correlation for causality, we make false connections and inferences. History is written by the victors, or at least the ones with the loudest voices, not by those with the best memories.
By way of example, Navarun Bhattacharya (who I mentioned last week) is writing an excellent series of posts about the ‘Hidden Origins of Modern Work’, in which he highlights inventions that have shaped work today. They aren’t all the ones you’d expect.
The first, ‘How a Bed Mechanic May Have Helped Build Modern Bureaucracy’, is about how the safety mechanisms invented by Otis Lifts led to much taller buildings, which in turn cemented the concept of hierarchy by making it a physical reality (the ‘top floor’ was where all the bosses’ offices were).
His other posts cover, so far, the typewriter, the Xerox photocopier, the telephone and email. The consequences of the introduction of these technologies has far outstripped the original expectations and they continue to shape the way we work today. And yet, we take them for granted and fail to join the dots between their introduction and today.
If we have an incomplete recollection of the past then we will fail learn from it and our attempts at looking forward will be greatly hampered.
There are two other effects that shape the future that we need to consider.
The first is that of unintended consequences, which these examples demonstrate nicely. The Otis Lifts’ safety brake brought us hierarchy. The typewriter brought information at scale and administration (or bureaucracy, if you prefer). The photocopier brought the CYA culture. The telephone promoted speed and verbal agility over reflection and writing. Email made every written communication automatically a document too, putting every conversation ‘on the record’.
None of these massive impacts, we which take as given today, were foreseen when these things were introduced.
The second effect is that change often comes from the edges, which means it is largely unseen and unnoticed until it hits the mainstream. That means the catalysts for change are very hard to spot and predicting their impact is almost impossible.
Yet, still, we try. Well, we have to write about something!
Supermassive Black Hole
There are two further factors that we need to consider about the future.
The first is timing. There’s a great video of Tomorrow’s World (a popular BBC science programme back in the day) in which they show how we could be working from home in the future, instead of going to an office. Sadly, I can’t find it but I do remember it was broadcast in the early 1980s and was not far off the mark from what many of us do today. Obviously, the tech was rudimentary, clunky and huge. It used a BT service called Prestel (full disclosure - I was working there at the time) where we use the internet today, and a dial up modem and telephone line instead of broadband and wifi. Mobile phones weren’t even considered back then.
Where it was wrong was that it was hopelessly optimistic about how near this was. My recollection is that they suggested it was about 10 years away. It wasn’t really something people would do at any scale until, well, 2020, when COVID forced organisations to embrace the tech. Some of that delay was to do with the development of robust, low-cost, ubiquitous networks and cheap technology. However, a lot of it was to do with adoption of the tech and the changes to work practices, these being the larger factors. If it wasn’t for COVID, it still wouldn’t have been widely adopted.
We often focus on the technology but adoption has as much, if not more, to do with human behaviour and organisational groupthink. We’re still waiting for the flying cars we were promised back in the 1960s but even if they do arrive, there’s a good chance we will decide we don’t like them for some not entirely rational reason
The other issue is discontinuities. We think of the arc of history as a smooth progression but actually that’s a story we create to quieten our minds, as we long for stability and predictability. In fact, history is really the story of us lurching from one crisis to another, with disruptions appearing seemingly from nowhere and upsetting the apple cart on a more-or-less continual basis.
I’ve already mentioned the most recent, COVID and the associated lock-downs. Before that was the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, since when productivity has flat-lined. Whilst it was a big one, crashes of this nature roll along every now and then as they are a product of the capitalist system we have. The breaking of the AI bubble may well cause another one, which may be as big or even bigger than the GFC.
We have wars going on right now in Ukraine and Gaza that are impacting us. The current geo-political upset as the global order is reconfiguring itself is likely to see more conflict, not less. In reality, there are armed conflicts happening somewhere in the world on a constant basis. We only really notice when they impact us directly.
Climate change is having ever-greater impact and this will only increase in the coming decades. We sort of know what to expect but not where or when it will impact.
And then there’s tech. Right now, all anyone can talk about is AI. Anyone who tells you they know how AI is going to impact us is a liar or a fool, or possibly both.
This collection of complex, wicked problems is often referred to as the ‘polycrisis’ (or more colloquially, the clusterfuck) and we seem to be a time of unique peril and instability. The future looks more uncertain than it has ever been.
Makes you wonder why we even bother, doesn’t it?
Say What You Want
We talk about the future of work because it is fascinating and exciting (maybe in an ‘oh shit!’ kind of way at times!) and because we know the world is going to change, possibly dramatically. Certainly for those directly affected. I might think that AI is massively over-hyped but I understand the impact on the translators whose livelihoods have already been automated away by it and I don’t underestimate that. We should not conflate the general and the specific.
The discussion is necessary though, so that we can think about possible scenarios, their impacts and how we might adapt and avoid the most destructive outcomes. However, whilst the discussion is useful, it is not definitive.
This is where the problem lies. Too much of the discourse is directed to providing certainty. This is demanded by real estate investors who want to know what to do with assets. It’s demanded by those who want to bet on the stock market and pick the winners. It’s demanded by the investors and entrepreneurs that want to get in on the next big thing. It’s demanded by the C-suites who want to plan the next 5 years.
One thing we know about today’s attention economy is that where there’s demand, there will be supply. So we get lots of experts pontificating with certainty on what’s going to be the future of work and where you should place your bets. The business media is full of confident prognostications of where the various related markets are going. CEOs are making big, bold assertions about what’s going to happen next.
The result is just a cacophony of nonsense, a trumpeting of tomfoolery. They are all bullshitting.
Meanwhile the interesting stuff gets overlooked. Stuff like how people’s attitudes to work are changing, how their priorities are shifting, how their decision-making is changing. Like how organisations are experimenting with new ways of working, new ways of organising and new ways of being. Like how people are exploring alternatives to the status quo, questioning what was previously unchallenged and collectively creating new structures of power. These things that are happening outside of the mainstream, below the radar, at the edges of attention. That’s where the future is. So let’s look there.
I’m often reminded of the Henry Gibson quote, “The future is already here, it’s just not widely distributed”. So, despite all that I’ve said above, I continue to look for the signals, the pockets of the future that are already here, the things that are going on at the edges.
It’s not just that that’s where the future is. That’s where the hope is, that we can reverse the downward trend of the past several decades and create a world where work is something that adds to our lives rather than degrades it, for the majority rather than just the minority.
Talkin’ Bout A Revolution
An example of this is the Corporate Rebels self-management summit that took place last week in Barcelona. Corporate Rebels started exploring and documenting organisations who are taking a different approach ten years ago. That’s around the same time I attended an unconference in London called “Why aren’t organisations shifting?”, where I met a whole bunch of people who thought, like me, that we need to change work and we obviously couldn’t continue the way we were (we were wrong, as we now know. It seems we could carry on the same destructive way for much longer…)
It felt like the coming together of a tribe. Then Laloux’s book ‘Reinventing Organizations’ came out and spurred a lot of interest and activity. It looked like we could become a movement. Sadly, it never reached breakout velocity and began to peter out until COVID lockdowns came along and finished it off.
Corporate Rebels were also looking to create community but were struggling too until they began to build a network of Rebel Cells. Now they’ve held their second summit. They feel that it is starting to feel like a real community, that it could become a movement. It’s starting to have major impact. It’s moving from the fringe into the mainstream.
This shows that it takes time for things to emerge. That there are paths that lead nowhere. That it is by coming together in conversation, building relationships, making sense of the world collectively, that we build something different. That a strong idea cannot be suppressed for ever, it’s time will come.
There are other organisations and events (such as the the ZeroDX Awards conference that I mentioned recently, which is organized annually by Haier, Thinkers50, and Gary Hamel & Michele Zanini’s MLab) doing complementary work, working with similar ideas, exploring the same ground. Connecting people, bringing them together and enabling the conversations that will create change. We need as many of these as possible, in all parts of the world.
This is where hope lies, because whilst I am just making shit up when I talk about the future of work, I do believe it can be better than it is today. And talking about that possibility and developing the ideas and actions is the key to getting is there.
What’s more, coming together and having real conversations is something that AI isn’t going to replace anytime soon because this is what humans do and AI is just a soulless chatbot.