The Institute for the Future released a report on future work skills that will be needed by 2020. They are:
- Sense-making.
- Social intelligence.
- Novel and adaptive thinking.
- Cross-cultural competency.
- Computational thinking.
- New-media literacy.
- Transdisciplinarity.
- Design mind-set.
- Cognitive load management.
- Virtual collaboration.
(Gigaom gives a quick breakdown)
The graphic below from that report highlights areas of focus:
Venessa Miemis is trying to get a group of ‘change agents’ to collaborate, and is finding it hard going:
Venessa Miemis, How Will We Collaborate if We Can’t Trust Each Other?
The next few years are going to be defined by a culture of learning and interactivity that involves more trust, and so naturally, more risk. If we’re going to go beyond just sharing links with each other to actually *helping* each other, working together, experimenting, prototyping, and adapting to changing circumstances, *we* have to first change in order to make that possible.
I’m in the process of experimenting with this firsthand, bringing people together into an online collaboratory space, and I’ll admit – it’s not easy. We’ve got a group of ‘change agents’ who want to do things together, to form ad-hoc teams around short-term projects, make something cool happen and improve our world and our lives — but how to begin?
Each of us is a free agent, delicately riding the edge of chaos and uncertainty as we try to pave our own path. Each of us likes the sound of a peer-to-peer culture, a transition from scarcity to abundance, a move from a transactional economy to a relational economy (ht jerry michalski), and a redefinition of value and wealth. Each of us sees the promise of a new way of working, living, and Being.
And yet there is still fear.
Are you gonna steal my idea? Are you gonna follow through with your commitments? Are you gonna take the credit? Am I gonna get screwed — yet again?
My question to you is: How do we transcend this, surrender, and take the next leap of faith?
(ponder it)
Assuming you are curious enough about the possibility to find out how it could work, what is the critical component that’ll inspire you to jump?
For me, it all comes down to trust.
Not just blind trust in everyone else, but trust in myself and a commitment to move past fear and into action. Lead by example and see who wants to come with me. Become aware of who I’m connected to and choosing carefully with whom I want to build things. Take small risks together so we can gain momentum. Start having some Collective Epic Wins.
I think Venessa is trying to do something that’s very hard: she’s trying to get a group to form a collective, with a shared set of principles and shared goals. And she’s right. To get there you have to build deep trust: a polite way to say that the folks in the collective have to sort out the politics involved. In general that can take months, even when the participants share a great deal in common in education, background, and temperament.
But why form a collective? As she points out, it’s risky. If you want to build things, you can define a small project to test some ideas, and form a Hollywood-style project team to accomplish it. Instead of trying to collaborate on a big, wholly integrated vision of the future — where everything has to be discussed and agreed on before the first thing gets done — just cooperate on something fast, small, and low risk.
The way of the future is cooperation, not collaboration.
Among other reasons cooperation merely requires swift trust, a well-researched human universal. People are capable in some circumstances of relaxing their general desire to establish deep trust — that time-consuming, political practice —and will simply adopt a role in a project, and suspend their disbelief about other’s motives, etc. This is a way to get folks to suspend their innate concerns about trust and control. In these contexts, people start with the presumption that the others in the project are professionals and that everyone will focus on doing their jobs as best as the can. A lot of communication is needed to keep it all working, but much less than in deep trust organizations, like the conventional enterprise.
This is how freelancers generally work, and it’s the way that cities work.
But Venessa and her friends are involved in forming a collective, and there is no short cut for them. They will need to build deep trust, and establish processes and practices, and politics to manage them.
My recommendation to Venessa was and still is to take the short cut, though. Define some constrained projects, with more modest goals and defined time frames, and work on them with a few others. It might lead to deep trust, but even if it doesn’t you can still be working, making headway, and maybe some money, too.
Me, I’m trying to work on a few interesting projects with some smart people, but I am not pushing them into one group and trying to create a way that all of us can be involved in everything. I’m going to work with Teresa DiCairano of Intervista on ‘ambient innovation’, which is our term for social, bottom-up innovation. I’m going to work with Claude Théoret of Nexalogy exploring the science underlying social networks, and trying to make that more accessible to the average person. And I am going to push ahead with my analysis in work media — the use of streaming social media tools in the enterprise — and I will be pulling a few others into that project with me, too. But these will be three discrete projects, with non-overlapping groups of participants. I am not making everything, everything.
I am trying to remain liquid, loosely connected to others, heading the same general direction. I am specifically not trying to solidify relationships — build deep trust — before getting something done with others.
So, my general recommendation is that people should favor loose connectives — social networks with less tight ties — that rely only on swift trust. If and when you establish deep trust with individuals, perhaps during short-term, swift trust-based projects, then perhaps your can form a collective, where the principles shared common, long-term purpose.
But such collectives are not a higher form of human solidarity that we should aspire to, and are not what we have to build in order to get big things done. On the contrary. An increasing proportion of professional work is being performed by freelancers, who live in a short-term project based economy. Why should I have to agree on a long term strategic vision about the future of work media just to work with other researchers on the state of that industry, for example? Or to take the example of the city, all the stores on Main Street do not have to agree to not compete with each other, or to pool their profits, or even to paint their storefronts the same color.
The costs of deep trust are too high, in general, for what they return. This is one reason that work is changing so quickly. Companies are loosening their hold on employees, providing them more autonomy, relaxing the requirements for deep trust: becoming more like cities and less like traditional armies, with everyone is made to march in step, and pointed in the same direction, all the time.
New York has passed legislation to allow the formation of a new sort of corporation — a Benefit Corporation, or B Corp:
Kyle Westaway, New Legal Structures for ‘Social Entrepreneurs’
The Benefit Corporation is a new class of corporation with a corporate purpose to create public benefit, a broader fiduciary duty and is transparent about its overall social and environmental performance.
By definition, it must operate for the general public benefit – defined as a material positive impact on society and the environment. Every benefit corporation is required to publish an assessment using an independent, third-party assessment tool. To create a material positive benefit, a benefit corporation operates in a manner that not only creates value for the company’s shareholders, but also its community, environment, employees and suppliers.
The structure also calls for a high level of transparency and accountability. Within 120 days after the end of each fiscal year, a benefit corporation is required to publish a “Benefit Report,” which states how it performed that year on a social and environmental axis.
The press release, received by email:
NY Law Creates New Kind of Corporation
Spurs Investment to Create High Quality Jobs and
Use Business to Solve Social Problems
State Legislators from Wall Street Sponsored the Bill
Albany, NY: At midnight last night a law was enacted creating benefit corporations, a new class of corporations required to create benefit for society as well as shareholders. Unlike traditional corporations, benefit corporations are required to create a material positive impact on society and the environment; consider how decisions affect employees, community and the environment; and publicly report their social and environmental performance using established third-party standards.
Continuing a national trend of strong bi-partisan support for benefit corporation legislation, the New York bill (S79-A and A4692-A), sponsored by Senators Daniel Squadron (D-25) and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-64) and co-sponsored by William Larkin (R, C-39), passed both houses of the New York legislature unanimously.
“Political leaders like Speaker Silver, and Senators Squadron and Larkin understand that New York needs to attract businesses whose core purpose is to create more high quality jobs and to improve the quality of life in communities across the state,” said Andrew Kassoy, co founder of B Lab, the nonprofit organization that drafted the model legislation. “The benefit corporation bill will unlock billions of dollars in impact investment capital and enable entrepreneurs across the state to start businesses that solve some of society’s greatest challenges.”
“Benefit corporations will mean New York is open for business in an important new way. Benefit corporations will unlock billions of dollars in new investments in New York while empowering companies to do well and do good,” said Senator Squadron. “By offering this opportunity to entrepreneurs and investors, New York will bring new businesses into the state, new investors into the market and a new socially-minded approach for our entrepreneurs.”
“By bringing benefit corporations to New York, we are showing that profit and social responsibility are not mutually exclusive,” said Speaker Silver. “This law will continue our efforts to strengthen and diversify our economy while ensuring that New York remains a national leader in progressive policies that help our environment, protect consumers and bolster the rights of working men and women.”
“I am very happy to see that this bill has finally become law. It will enable businesses to grow without the infringement of state government, and will help New York become a more business friendly state,” added Senator Larkin.
The new law addresses a long time concern among entrepreneurs who need to raise growth capital but fear losing control of the social or environmental mission of their business. These entrepreneurs and other shareholders of benefit corporations now have additional rights to hold directors accountable for failure to create a material positive impact on society, to consider the impact of decisions on employees, community, and the environment, or to inform the public about the company’s overall social and environmental impact as assessed against a credible, independent third party standard.
New York is the seventh state to pass benefit corporation legislation, joining Maryland, Vermont, New Jersey, Virginia, Hawaii, and most recently, California. The legislation has enjoyed broad bi-partisan support nationally, with a vote tally of 892 ayes and 62 nays, and the signatures of both Republican and Democratic governors. The New York bill had significant support from business (partial list below), including Eileen Fisher, City Light Capital, and UncommonGoods; and from more than 2,600 New York citizens, all interested in creating better choices for the growing number of entrepreneurs and investors who seek to create businesses that create both social and shareholder value.
“The passage of benefit corporation legislation is an important and much needed step forward to grow our New York state economy and create more jobs which can also provide greater social and environmental benefit,” says David Levine, co-founder of the American Sustainable Business Council whose members’ organizations represent over 100,000 businesses. “At a time when the country is looking for solutions to build the economy, New York is helping to lead the way with an innovative and sustainable business strategy.”
I am going to be actively looking for B corps in New York, and finding out why their founders opted for that path.
(Source: underpaidgenius)
In his analysis, Mr Ford noted how technology and innovation improve productivity exponentially, while human consumption increases in a more linear fashion. In his view, Luddism was, indeed, a fallacy when productivity improvements were still on the relatively flat, or slowly rising, part of the exponential curve. But after two centuries of technological improvements, productivity has “turned the corner” and is now moving rapidly up the more vertical part of the exponential curve. One implication is that productivity gains are now outstripping consumption by a large margin.Another implication is that technology is no longer creating new jobs at a rate that replaces old ones made obsolete elsewhere in the economy. All told, Mr Ford has identified over 50m jobs in America—nearly 40% of all employment—which, to a greater or lesser extent, could be performed by a piece of software running on a computer. Within a decade, many of them are likely to vanish. “The bar which technology needs to hurdle in order to displace many of us in the workplace,” the author notes, “is much lower than we really imagine.”OK, The Economist is now trying to discuss a fact that we futurists have been talking about for many years: technology will, as it once did to farmers and later industrial workers, replace even knowledge workers and dramatically change our world (again). Unemployment will therefore be relatively high until we redefine what we mean by employment or have gone through the structural and value changes that comes from reorganizing society around a different center of gravity than the traditional factory modelled institution.
As a futurist I am of course wondering: is it now time to leave these issues to the politicians and change our focus to things more far ahead into the future…?
A drastic reorganization of society when we agree that the purpose of life is not toil, but art?
In the real future you will be working at a stint rather than a job. To work at a stint is to become part of a project team for 18 months, followed by joining three friends doing a start-up business that folds after two years, after which you sign on with a multinational which disappears in a merger…and the beat goes on. This requires a reinvention of the social contract around security and benefits.
You don’t have to be in New York to know and discuss the future of work. We will be live streaming the event and would love for you to join us. Just save this link http://www.livestream.com/podio and click it on Thursday 7pm EST to watch the session.
Stowe Boyd is joining the Podio World Tour. He is known for his writing and pioneering work around social tools and their impact on media, business, and society.
The event is part of the Podio World Tour: The Future of Work and we are happy to have Stowe Boyd joining us for the US part. Together we visit major cities and invite some of the most insightful folks for an open conversation about the future of work. In New York on Thursday Stowe will be accompanied by Valeria Maltoni, Marcia Conner, and Jennifer Magnolfi and you can take part and ask questions via chat or twitter too, it’s at 7pm EST here http://www.livestream.com/podio read more about the event here.
Just got off a Skype call with Jon Froda of Podio about the Future of Work talk tomorrow, which will be livestreamed.
If you are trying to attend in person, we are space-constrained, so sign up ASAP.
I look at some smart recommendation and observations from Tapscott, and agree that Millennials are going to change the world of work profoundly.
New research from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) finds that collecting, storing, and mining big data for insights can create significant value for the world economy, enhancing the productivity and competitiveness of companies and the public sector and creating a substantial economic surplus for consumers. The report Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity explores the state of digital data, how different domains can use large data sets to create value, and the implications for the leaders of private-sector companies and public-sector organizations, as well as for policy makers. The report’s analysis is supplemented by a detailed examination of five domains—health care, retailing, the public sector, manufacturing, and personal-location data.
MGI’s analysis shows that companies and policy makers must tackle significant hurdles to fully capture big data’s potential. The United States alone faces a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with analytical and managerial expertise and 1.5 million managers and analysts with the skills to understand and make decisions based on the study of big data (exhibit). Companies and policy makers must also tackle misaligned incentives around issues such as privacy and security, access to data, and technology deployment.
Apparently, someone from TechWeek is planning a panel on ‘the future of work’, and want some guidance.
Here’s my response:
We need liquid media to deal with an increasingly slippery, uncertain world, and to — paradoxically — help ground us by keeping our heads above the churning surface exactly where the flow is at its fastest.Let’s start by agreeing that the 2.0 meme has been played out.
I suggest we refer to these modern collaboration tools as work media: social tools designed for the enterprise but based on the patterns of interaction, influence, and communication from social networks of the open web. Work media tools share a number of characteristics, most centrally the streaming metaphor of Twitter and Facebook, with short updates from a variety of followed sources cascade into each user’s dashboard, from which each can derive a networked gestalt of the world. Work media is altering the DNA of business.
The transition to liquid media — where content is contextualized within streaming apps like Twitter, Flipboard, and News.me, instead of on web pages — is not a fad. It is the next cycle of a fundamental transition into social media, and one that is moving past the superficial, earlier adoption and into a deeply socialized experience of information flow, based on social networks, not just alternative, low-cost publishing solutions.
And yes, this is a movement away from business processes as the primary metaphor of business operations in hierarchically organized companies, over to social network-based work and social network-organized companies. This is much more than a shift in scale, and very pragmatically, it is a shift to a way of work that is very well fitted to the time we are living in.
The adoption of work media in business will be profoundly transformative, and not just because of the shiny toys — like tablets, and truly smart phones — that are arriving at exactly the same time.
There are strong cognitive reasons that people naturally are adopting a stream/networked model of work communities. There are numerous studies (Meade, and many more recently) that demonstrate that people are happier and more productive, for example, when they share their immediate tasks and receive acknowledgment of progress made. In such settings, we perceive time moving faster, and the effort involved in work seems less. (See my writing on ‘social cognition’ for more on this.)
To the extent that we are capable of getting to a flow state in our work, it seems clear that the best tools are those structured according to the patterns of human interaction present when teams ‘flow’: helping us to keep relevant information in close context, to coordinate with team members, and for all to know what needs to be accomplished by who, for example. This requires tools in which we, those doing the work, are the principal sources of information, the principal sources of meaning: not the information we are exchanging, or even the company on whose behalf we are exchanging it.
Today, companies need solutions that foster trust in an increasingly free agent world, and especially the ‘swift trust’ that is necessary for short-term teams to come together quickly, accomplish a shared task, and then move on.
We need liquid media to deal with an increasingly slippery, uncertain world, and to — paradoxically — help ground us by keeping our heads above the churning surface exactly where the flow is at its fastest.
Ten years from now, we will have a strange sensation when we think about how work was accomplished ‘in the old days.’ We will look back on the work environment of the ’00s and earlier, and wonder: how did we ever get anything done when our tools got in the way and divided us from ourselves?
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Social anthropologist, clairvoyant, postfuturist.
My work is social tools and their impact on media, business, and society.
I am made greater by the sum of my connections, and so are my connections.
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