A Framework to Forecast the Future of Working

Abstract

The increased access and sharing of information via mediums like the Internet are continuing to have a profound impact on how we work and socialise. The question is how will these change over the next five to ten years. This paper provides obervations of these changes, analysis of what is actually happening and uses Joseph Voros’s Future Cones to illustrate a broader range of potential futures than simply more of the same only faster. The next stage of working out what to do about these potential futures is not covered in this post and any suggestions would be welcome.

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).
  

What is really happening? Analysis.

A Layered View

The observations above, across the four groupings of Physical, Behavioural, Cultural and Personal, provide examples of “events” that are taking place. To understand what is really happening we need to look at the layers below these “events” to decipher the underlying causes. These layers are;

• events (an occurrence)
• patterns (events over time),
• structures or systems and
• worldview or our “view of the world”

Our worldview influences how we think and respond to the layers above and it is by uncovering what our worldview is that allows us to get to the heart of what is really going on, how our worldview might change and therefore what range of futures could unfold.

A simple example of this analysis is found by looking at traffic in a city, as detailed in the diagram below: Traffic – Underlying Causes. Observing just the traffic, “events”, at any point of time is not enough. Observing traffic over time, “patterns” reveals that during the commuting peak times of morning and late afternoon traffic jams occur. The structure that causes this is the fact that we have similar working hours and therefore we all need to arrive and leave around the same time. Trying to managing the volume of traffic at these times creates another set of structures such as; freeways, traffic lights and restrictions on turning into side streets. The view of the world that motivates many people to battle through traffic jams on their daily commute is that city jobs are worth this effort because they offer more opportunity for pay, career or personal fulfilment; otherwise they would find work closer to home.

Today’s Work Processes – A layered View

If we apply this layered framework to how we believe today’s work processes, like meetings and appointments, operate we find the following layers in the diagram: Meetings, Appointments – A Layered View.

Today our view of the world on how we work is that people get together to share information and make decisions in real time; that is at the same time. When they get together the main form of communication is voice, talking to each other.

The Future of Working a Layered View

A common view of the future of working in the connected world is that meetings and appointments can occur in scattered locations; on the road, at home, in meeting rooms, or in different countries, using different devices; mobile video phones, web cameras, or high definition telepresence video conferencing. Voice is still the main communication method and the technology is used to try and make a distant meeting look and feel as close to being in the same room as possible. The assumption is that human interaction will still be based on “voice” and occur at the same time. These examples include being able to conquer the tyranny of distance and connect people at the same time either from their home, car, office, hospital bed, meeting room, or conference centre.

Another example of this “same time” thinking is how the use of the technology capability “presence” is discussed. “Presence” is the ability to display on your screen what a person is doing right now. It provides a status of the person based on whether they are logged onto the Internet or corporate network, on their phone or if their calendar is free at that moment. IBM even call their software for this function SameTime (IBM, 2008). From this view the use of “presence” is to be able to ascertain the status of people in order to be able to connect them now, in real time to have a discussion at the same time.

The underlying view of the world hasn’t changed therefore the forecast of the future is made based on technology enhancing the structure layer as depicted in the diagram: A “same time” Future - Layered View.

This forecast of the future is what Joseph Voros (Voros, 2003) describes as a “projected” view of the future. It takes the current patterns and extrapolates them into the future as seen in the diagram: "Same Time" Future – The “Projected” Future, where the cone depicts that there is the potential for a range of “Probable” futures around the projected future.

A Changing Worldview

In addition to the “projected” future there are a broader range of “plausible” futures. Futures that “could happen” (Voros, 2003) this is depicted by the wider cone in the diagram below;

To understand what these “plausible” futures might be we need to look at the changes occurring at the worldview layer of our analysis. In the observations above we notice that new behaviours are emerging. People are using the new information repositories of social networking sites, blogs, podcasts and wikis to share information with each other. This sharing of information is occurring on a many to many basis.

The example of Bernadette Jew (AFR, 2008) shows the use of a corporate Wiki to share information with her colleagues, who in return provided feedback which they could all see. And as was noted “This saved them having to respond to multiple emails, or take phone calls.” (AFR, 2008) There were no meetings or voice communications to discuss aspects of the trip or to gain information from her colleagues. It was all done by typing online into a new information repository structure, a wiki. In this example the new way of sharing information replaced emails and voice conversations.

What the Bernadette Jew example demonstrates is the growing pattern of online collaboration. On a broader scale this is enabling the emergence of the concept of crowdsoucing. When Goldcorp needed to work out where to find more gold in their fifty year old mine at Red Lake, Ontario the CEO, Rob McEwen, turned to the world;

“I’d like to take all of our geology, all the data we have that goes back to1948, and put it into a file and share it with the world,” he said, “Then we’ll ask the world to tell us where we’re going to find the next six million ounces of gold” (McEwen in Tapscott and Williams, 2006, page 8)
GoldCorp didn’t call a series of meetings for people to join and talk about the launch of the “GoldCorp” challenge they simply put the information online for the world to see and act upon. The result was that “an astounding eight million ounces of gold have been found” (Tapscott and Williams, 2006, Page 9).

If we were able to ask Bernadette Jew and Rob McEwen if their worldview was that;
“people had to meet at the same time and use voice as the method of communication to share information and make decisions”
we can confidently suggest that their answer would be a definite no. Their worldview has shifted to one of;

“sharing information and making decisions can be independent of people being together at the same time.”

Building on this we can see how the “events” and “patterns” that we observed above play out in our layered model in the diagram, A Changing Worldview.

Our “plausible” future is one that contains the concepts of online collaboration and crowdsourcing or “mass collaboration”. The emergence of “collaboration” workers and not just “knowledge” workers is indeed plausible.

There is yet another range of futures that may occur and Voros calls these the “Possible” futures (Voros, 2003). This is a view of a future that might happen, something we can imagine as possible. The “Possible” futures are beyond the projected, probable and plausible futures. For these to happen, future developments have to take place to provide the stepping stones to move from what is possible, to what is plausible, to what becomes probable. The range of “possible” futures is depicted in the following diagram;

A New Way of Conducting Business – Decentralised

While we have observed new forms of information repositories we are seeing new forms of transaction processing systems being built on top of this ability to share information online. A well known one is PayPal who describes themselves as;

“PayPal is the safer, easier way to pay and get paid online. The service allows anyone to pay in any way they prefer, including through credit cards, bank accounts, buyer credit or account balances, without sharing financial information” (PayPal, 2008)

PayPal facilitates a peer-to-peer exchange of money without actually being a bank or credit card provider. PayPal was acquired by eBay which is another example of a new transaction processing system based on the peer-to-peer model. According to eBay;

“eBay brings together millions of people every day on a local, national and international basis through an array of websites that focus on commerce, payments and communications.” (eBay, 2008)

Malone sees this trend occurring inside organisations like BP were they set up there own carbon trading marketplace across business units. BP set itself a target in 1998 to “reduce company’s greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent, from the 1990 levels, by the year 2010. (Malone, 2004, page 91). By using this new form of peer to peer transaction processing, as opposed to top down ordered targets, BP were able to meet their target a staggering nine years ahead of schedule. Malone goes on to describe this new way of working;

“There are many buzzwords for describing the kinds of organizations this revolution will make more common. Self Organizing, self-managed, empowered, emergent, democratic, participative, people-centred, swarming, peer-to-peer are just a few of them. The word I’ll use most… to encapsulate all these different terms is a simple and timeless one: decentralized.
…Let’s define decentralization as the participation of people in making decisions that matter to them. In this sense decentralization means roughly the same as freedom. From this point of view, decentralization offers a much wider range of possibilities.” (Malone, 2004, page 5)

Murdoch supports Malone’s view of people gaining freedom in his comment,
“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)

Adding to our previous description of a changing worldview the people in these “possible” futures may word their view of the world as;

“sharing information and making decisions can be independent of people being together at the same time and without being controlled by a hierarchy.”

Applying this to our layered approach we might see in the future the following events, patterns, structure and worldview as shown in the diagram; A “Possible” Future Worldview;

Depicting all of our future options using Voros’s cones diagrams we can summarise the potential futures in the diagram: Projected, Plausible and Possible Futures;

When viewed in this way our “same time” future is really more of the same, as the worldview doesn’t change while the structure layer is doing the same things only going faster and further due to the new technologies. Any new ways of working are more likely be found in the “Plausible” and “Possible” futures of collaboration workers and decentralised organisations.

This leaves one last set of futures for us to contemplate and that is our “preferable” future. Given the observations above and the analysis using the layered technique it is highly unlikely that the single “projected” view of the “same time” future will be the only one to happen. Therefore we need to broaden our thinking about what other futures may occur and how might we take advantage of the future ways of working for;

• “collaboration” workers,
• decentralised organisations, and
• new transactional processing systems

Which oarts of the projected, plausible or possible futures do we prefer?

For all of us the future will come, we just need to decide what role we want to play in creating it. We can either just let it happen or by understanding the above concepts start to shape our “preferable” future. Hopefully this post will help you determine what that can be.

References

Donath, J and boyd, d. 2004, Public Display of Connections, BT Technology Journal, Volume 22, number 4, October 2004 available from http://www.danah.org/papers/PublicDisplays.pdf [accessed 3rd May 2008]

eBay, 2008, eBay ‘The Company’ Section available from
http://pages.ebay.com/aboutebay/thecompany/companyoverview.html [accessed 1st June 2008]

Harry Ransom Centre, 2008, University of Texas, available from
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/permanent/gutenberg/html/5.html [accessed 1st June 2008]

IBM, 2008, IBM Lotus Sametime, available from http://www-306.ibm.com/software/lotus/sametime/ [accessed 27th July 2008]

Kelly, K. 1997, “New Rules for the New Economy”, Wired Magazine, Number 5.09, September 1997, pp. 140

Malone, T. 2004, Future of Work – How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life, Harvard Business School Press

Murdoch, R. 2005, Speech by Rupert Murdoch to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. April 2005, available from http://www.newscorp.com/news/news_247.html [accessed 3rd May 2008]

NewsCorp, 2005, Remarks by the Chairman Annual Meeting of Stockholders, October 2005, available from http://www.newscorp.com/news/news_267.html#top [accessed 25th May 2008]

PayPal, 2008, PayPal ‘About’ Section available from http://www.paypal.com.au/au [accessed 1st June 2008]

Prensky, M. 2001, Digital Natives, Digital Immigrant, from On the Horizon, NCB University Press, Volume 9, Number 5, October 2001 available from http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf [accessed 3rd May 2008]

Tapscott, D. and Williams, A, 2006, Wikinomics – How mass collaboration changes everything, Atlantic BooksVoros, J. 2003, A Generic Foresight Process Framework, Foresight 5,3 2003, pp 10-21.