How the future of work leads to the future of organisations
Last week I did the keynote on The Future of Work and Organisations at a four-city roadshow for social business consulting firm KINSHIP enterprise, spanning Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne and Brisbane.
The slides to my presentation are below, together with an overview of the 7 sections of the keynote.
My keynote was framed around looking through the critically-important lens of the future of work to gain insights into the future of organisations. As you will see in the slides, I covered:
Technology drivers. Exponential growth in processing power, bandwidth and data storage are putting unprecedented capabilities in the hands of individuals, and taking machine capabilities to levels in which they can match or transcend human capacities in many domains.
Social shifts. Increasing expectations of participation, flexibility and meaning are changing the relationship between individuals and the organisations that they work for. Demographic shifts are increasing pressures on governments and social structures, changing the relationship between workers and in particularly the elderly.
Structure. In a networked world, the structure of business and how value is created is fundamentally changing. Latent availability is emerging to be matched with latent demand, creating new markets based on bringing together diverse connections.
Work. There are two critical drivers of change in work: connectivity and machine capabilities. As we are connected almost any work can be done anywhere in the world, with richer interfaces enabling greater comfort with remote work and the ability to perform physical labour. Increased capabilities of robots and computers are matching and moving beyond those of humans in many cases, destroying jobs. There is the potential for these forces to reduce employment and polarise work opportunities. However we can also envisage and create a future of work in which job creation exceeds job destruction, and we make work increasingly human, tapping our expertise, creativity, and aptitude for relationships to create a more prosperous world.
Organisations. The Möbius strip and the Klein bottle – its three-dimensional equivalent – have only one side. The inside is the outside. This metaphor is extraordinarily apt for organisations today, where the inside and the outside need to be one. The internal values and culture must be identical to those manifested outside, the social networks externally must be merged with the internal ones, it should become irrelevant where work is performed as the formal boundaries of organisations dissolve.
Performance. We need to consider what the high-performance organisations of tomorrow will look like, given the highly challenging and fast-moving business and social environment they will be working in. I will delve into these characteristics in another post.
Leadership. There are massive challenges for society and humanity in the future of work. Yet the negative outcomes some fear are not inevitable, if we take the right actions today. Leaders of all organisations must implement ‘governance for transformation’, managing risks and uncertainties while enabling necessary dramatic changes to the organisation.
For more also see a post Reflecting on the Future of Work I wrote for KINSHIP enterprise reviewing some of the conversations and ideas at the events through the week.
