(Editorial note: the original of this blog post was written in 2004, and I have not included in it the growing influence of Web 2.0 tools, services and dynamics, though it is clearly alluded to in the notions of ubiquitous connectivity and ’smartware’)

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The workplace of the future will be surrounded by smart software, and full of people for whom interconnectedness is a given. How will the nature of work change?

Fundamental assumptions create beliefs, which shape what we do. A dominant set of beliefs creates what we call a ‘paradigm’. Many people have recognized that a paradigm shift is occurring as we move from the Industrial Age to the networked-and-hyperlinked Information Age.

While many of the factors and trends are already apparent in the work world today, using them as fundamental assumptions about the emerging future can help to address their growing impact on peoples? work lives and the ways we adapt to their presence.
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1. Interconnectedness between people and between businesses will continue to grow. Being ‘connected’ in a ubiquitous sense is rapidly becoming more familiar to more people. Access to the Web, and the applications on it, will become easier and easier to use.

It looks like a tsunami coming. Globally, three times as many people are forecasted to be on-line in the year 2003 (that forecast was essentially correct) relative to the number of people on-line at the end of the year 2000. Web applications will more and more often reflect the intersection of human and work activities, and will touch virtually every domain of activity (since the original sentence was written, the arrival of Web 2.0 has come into general awareness).

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2. ‘Smartware’ (smart software) applied to work activities will become ubiquitous for virtually all types and aspects of work. The effects of ’smartware’ applied to work will continue to change the fundamental nature of knowledge work, and increase the polarization currently occurring in the work economy.

At one pole, the ‘dematerialization’ of work (less manufacturing, more information and knowledge) will create ever-higher levels of creative, imaginative and specialized knowledge work. Highly-focused service work will be based on conversations, meetings and negotiations in which people leverage knowledge, money, power (by virtue of controlling something) or time.

At the other pole, legions of low-skilled service work such as customer service, data entry, sales service and semi-skilled trades work will be supported by smart tools. This type of work will become essentially disposable in nature, in the sense that it will matter little who does the work. This statement is not meant to be cruel - rather it is just an observation about what can be seen happening all around us.

Between these two poles, work will tend to migrate towards one or other of the poles, e.g., skilled trades or teaching school. A school teacher will be supported to significant extents through the use of ’smartware’ and smart tools, as will a technician or a machinist. However, the nature of the work will depend upon the context of the organization and the systems, tools and culture of the specific industry business or workplace.

It will become critically important to clarify the context with which to use ’smartware’ and smart tools. The tools will become important participants in this process - using them will demand clarification of the context, or the tools themselves will help to clarify and revise the context(s).
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3. The ‘line-of-sight’ between the customer, employees’ work and the company’s strategic objectives will be essential, and very complex in some types of work. An employee’s work will need to address the dynamic of mass customization (an individual’s specific skills and personality will need to mesh with highly-structured work processes and information systems).

The other type of work will be niche-based - very narrowly defined and serving a specific need, e.g., you’ll go to the dentist for dental work. And the dentist will offer you an extensive range of services, in various bundles to create packages of value (value bundling).

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4. Tomorrow’s knowledge-work employees will be smart, assertive and questioning of inappropriate or uniformed authority. This sharpens the game for senior managers / executives and makes the notion of coaching (or champion-catalyze-and-coordinate instead of command-and-control) very real.

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5. Jobs/roles will change continuously.  The focus for designing work will be blending the skills and strategic capabilities that an organization (in the present) either chooses to pursue strategically or must pursue to stay in the game.

Jobs/roles will become fluid and unbundled (into price-sensitive sets of skills). The tools to do this are currently being built, and work is increasingly being described this way (except in the Public Sector). Personal learning contracts and brief bullet-point lists of skills and competencies are on their way to becoming the job description of 2010. This dynamic will continue to grow in importance because younger workers have been told to prepare for this for at least the last fifteen years.

Restructuring and downsizing have become regular and accepted fluid dynamics of life in organizations. It is already a common feature of the corporate landscape, and it will become an accepted ?fact of life?.

6. Most of the necessary ’smartware’ to create all this already exists. New and better applications will appear continuously. The key limiting factor will be an organization’s willingness and/or courage to use them. This will depend on the awareness and openness of senior managers / executives regarding:

· Real willingness to invest in letting smart people use the tools and an interconnected social web of knowledge-building to their full potential.

· The ability of this group to share power, in a real and meaningful sense. The legacy of structural hierarchy, and the manifestations of power and control embedded in our understanding of how to lead and how to manage, have created a real rigidity with respect to the unlocking of potential implicit in the concept of Human Capital.

· The ability of the ‘top’ group to change deeply-ingrained behaviour patterns (see above) and ‘champion, catalyze and  and coordinate’ people to focus on the line-of-sight link between customers’ needs and an organization’s strategic objectives.

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All of the factors outlined above, and doubtless others which we don’t yet recognize or understand, will continue to re-shape the world of work and organizations in ways that we haven’t yet foreseen.
What is certain is that the near-DNA levels of attitudes that we have collectively held will not serve us well in the future. Flexibility, creativity, authenticity - and their opposites such as continual stress, the need to have clear structure, and protective territoriality - will all be key forces in shaping the future of work.

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Tags: workplace of future, Web 2.0, learning, interconnectivity, hierarchy, organizational design, work design, digital natives, digital immigrants

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