Trends affecting the future of work

I found an excellent blog entry that goes into some detail about the process of developing scenarios for the future. It is entitled: “A Framework to Forecast the Future of Working“. (PS, my friend, Clem Sunter is one of South Africa’s top scenario planners, having spent most of his career being paid to do this at Anglo American. His website is one of the best on the issue: Mind of a Fox, and his books are superb).

I thought you might find the analysis of future trends at the “Future of Working” website interesting:

Gutenberg Take Two

It started with Gutenberg’s printing press, the ability to mass communicate information in the form of books and newspapers, a changing of people’s view of the world. Gutenberg is credited with enabling the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the Protestant Reformation (Harry Ransom Centre, 2008). Once again the availability of information has taken on a new level fuelled by the Internet. It is providing mass communication between everyone on the plant. Today we are going through the same quantum of change as the world did starting in the 1400s with the advent of the printing press. Kevin Kelly predicted back in 1997 that this level of change will be “momentous” and explained how the underlying driver of this was communication;
“The great irony of our times is that the era of computers is over. All the major consequences of stand-alone computers have already taken place. Computers have speeded up our lives a bit, and that is it. In contrast all the most promising technologies making their debut now are chiefly due to communications between computers – that is, to connections rather than to computations. And since communications is the basis of culture, fiddling at this level is indeed momentous.” (Kelly, 1997, page 140)

So what is happening?

On the physical front we see;

• Broadband telecommunications, both wired and wireless, dramatically increasing the speed and number of data connections
• Social Networking Websites – MySpace, FaceBook
• Business Networking websites – LinkedIn, Plaxo, Xing
• Business Collaboration Tools – 37Signal’s Basecamp, WebEx Connects
• New Information Repositories – Wikis, Blogs, Podcasts, YouTube
• New transaction processing systems – eBay, PayPal
• Intelligent information retrieval – Google’s adsense, Amazon’s book suggestions

Observing changes in behaviour we see;

• The recognition of Digital Natives as an emerging group where “today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors”. (Prensky, 2001, page 1)
• People around the globe are putting their details up on social networking sites and seeking out connections with current and former friends and colleagues. Donath and boyd join Kelly in commenting on how cheaper and easier to use communication technology leads to an “increase in available information and opportunities”;
  “We hypothesise that the number of strong ties an individual can maintain may not be greatly increased by communication technology… but that the number of weak ties one can form and maintain may be able to increase substantially, because the type of communication that can be done more cheaply and easily with new technology is well suited for these ties. If this is true, it implies that the technologies that expand one’s social network will primarily result is an increase in available information and opportunities – the benefits of a large, heterogeneous network” (Donath and boyd, 2004)
• Business network sites like LinkedIn and Plaxo not only provide an online contact list but are tracking the behaviour of people as they add contacts, update their profiles and post information. Plaxo’s calls this feature “Pulse”.

At the society, economy and cultural levels we see;

• New Rules for the New Economy – Kelly wrote about the changes we are now experiencing back in 1997;
  “The advent of the new economy was first noticed as far back as 1969, when Peter Drucker perceived the arrival of knowledge workers. The new economy is often referred to as the information economy… I prefer the term the Network Economy because information isn’t enough to explain the discontinuities we see.” (Kelly, 1997, page 140)
  
  Drucker called them “knowledge workers” working in the “information economy” therefore following Kelly’s adaptation of Drucker’s terminology to create the label the “Network Economy” within this economy we may now be seeing the emergence of “Collaboration Workers”.
• Crowdsourcing – this is the phrase being used to describe open collaboration with anyone who wants to contribute. It’s best known example is Wikipedia. Tapscott and Williams in “Wikinomics” provides examples of this being applied to the commercial world, one of which is Goldcorp Inc;
  
  “In March 2000, the ‘Goldcorp Challenge’ was launched with a total of $575,000 in prize money… Within weeks, submissions from around the world came flooding in… entries came from surprising sources, including graduate students, consultants, mathematicians, and military officers… Over 80 percent of the new targets yielded substantial quantities of gold… McEwan [CEO Goldcorp Inc] estimates the collaborative process shaved two to three years off their exploration time.” (Tapscott and Williams, Page 9]
• Wikis in the Corporate World – Law firm Gilbert & Tonkin are using Wikis to share information in a new way. Bernadette Jew’s trip report on her overseas travel to China is an excellent example;
  
  “When Jew travelled to Shanghai earlier this year, notes from her meetings were typed directly into a wiki and G&T partners in Sydney read them and provided feedback directly onto the wiki. This saved them having to respond to multiple emails, or take phone calls. At the end of the trip Jew’s report on the trip was simply a link to the wiki.” (AFR, 2008)

At the personal level we see;

• Shift of Control – Rupert Murdoch spoke of a shift in control that young people want moving from the “god-like figure… above” to themselves;
  
  “What is happening is, in short, a revolution in the way young people are accessing news. They don’t want to rely on the morning paper for their up-to-date information. They don’t want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what’s important. And to carry the religion analogy a bit further, they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel. Instead, they want their news on demand, when it works for them. They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it.” (Murdoch, 2005)
  
  As an aside, Murdoch’s understanding of these changes could have been part of the reason why NewsCorp moved quickly to acquire social network website MySpace. (NewsCorp, 2005)
• Personal Satisfaction and Fulfilment – Malone in The Future of Work highlights that the “real impetus” for change will also come from our noneconomic, personal goals;
  
  “New information technologies make this revolution possible. Dispersed physically but connected by technology, workers are now able, on a scale never before even imaginable, to make their own decisions using information gathered from many other people and places. The real impetus for the transformation in business will not come from the new technologies, however.” It will come from our innate desires – for economic efficiency and flexibility, certainly, but also from noneconomic goals like freedom, personal satisfaction, and fulfilment.” (Malone, 2004, page 4).

Source: http://managementmythbusters.blogspot.com/2008/07/framework-to-forecast-future-of-working.html

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