I initially wrote the piece below a little more than five years ago. 

At the time I had been running around trying to get people to look at the ways that information technology and the Internet would have major impact on the ways we work, and the on the structures and dynamics of the workplace of the (relatively) near future.  Most of the time it felt like being a butcher at a vegetarians’ convention … especially given that it wasn’t so long after the dot.com bust and 9/11/01.

I find it useful to look back, and check in:

The Workplace of the Future
posted Mon November 11, 2002 - 04:00 AM

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 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.

1. Interconnectedness - between people and between businesses - will continue to grow. Being ‘connected’ in a ubiquitous sense will become 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 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.

So much of  this has happened that the forecast above seems banal today.

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.

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 that specific 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, and using them will demand clarification of the context, or the tools themselves will help to clarify and revise the context(s).

This large shift seems to be underway.

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, yet the service provider will offer you an extensive range of services, bundled to create packages of value (value bundling).

This shift is also underway.

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 championing-and-channeling instead of command-and-control) very real.

Many have written often about the growing impact of tech-savvy Digital Natives as they begin to pile into the workplace.  The rapidly-growing use of wikis and blogs in organizations seems to reinforce this observation.

5. Jobs/roles will change continuously - the focus will be a blend of skills and the strategic areas an organization now (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 ‘described’ this way (except in the Public Sector). Personal learning contracts will become the job description of 2005. This dynamic will continue to grow in importance because younger workers have been told to prepare for this for at least ten years.

Restructuring and downsizing will 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.

This has been happening, and has been reinforced by the large shift to online descriptions and applying for jobs using job boards.

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/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 and channel’ people to focus on the line-of-sight link between customers’ needs and an organization’s strategic objectives.

The rise in awareness of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, code words for the application of social software and web services to critical elements of knowledge work in many organization, is a clear indication that this forecast is accurate, so far.

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 attitudes about work that we have collectively held at near-DNA levels of our psychology, will not serve us well in the future. Flexibility, creativity, authenticity - and 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.

Powered by Qumana