The Future of Work and Leadership

Our changing world: Four trends set to impact how we lead in the future.

Adam Jorlen, Futurist, The Holos GroupMMgmt Strategic Foresight, Swinburne University of TechnologyTwitter: @adamjorlen

Real Leadership Real Results Program19 Jul 2012

It is often said that with each new era, new forms of leadership appropriate to the time are needed.

Certainly, our era is one of significant possibility, defined by accelerating complexity, extreme diversity, and the opportunity to leverage our global interdependence to co-create ‘thrivable’ futures.

What are the key threads informing our present and future realities?

#1 Accelerating Free Agency

TREND #1: Accelerating Free Agency

• “The project economy is coming online with more than 50% of the workforce to be classified as Free Agent by 2020.”

• “Within 8 years our employers might employ us for only a week or a month.”

• Micro-mavens: Solo (micro) entrepreneurs who leverage their personal brand (and networks) to build businesses.

• A shift from an egosystem to an ecosystem?

• Explosion of co-working spaces such as the Hub

Fractal People

• Multiple Capacities

• Multiple Roles

• Multiple Spaces of Practice

In 2020 we will have:

#2 Radical Openness & Transparency

• As traditional workplace structures collapse and organisational boundaries dissolve, the demand for cross-organisational collaboration and Radical Transparency will accelerate.

• Wikipedia and other peer-produced initiatives

• Trust & relationships. Nowhere to hide...

• Open innovation or ‘crowd sourcing’ gives customers greater input in design and other operations.

• What is the role of the leader?

TREND #2: Radical Openness & Transparency

Social MediaDo you have to be open and transparent?

Radical Transparency Remorse

“Somehow, even with documented cases and over exaggerated urban legends, some people still divulge entirely too much information without thought.”

#3 Purpose-Driven Careers

• The global marketplace is accelerating in complexity with coherence of purpose becoming an attractive with individuals, organisations and communities seeking leaders who are clear and affirming in navigating uncertainty.

• The fragmented work/life balance is becoming only balance. People are looking for a more seamless integration of all elements of life.

• A tenth of the workforce (one million Australians) ask themselves why they do the work they do.

• People want to work in meaningful occupations and to feel a sense of satisfaction in what they do.

TREND #3: Purpose-Driven Careers

Our values are....

My values are... My values

are...

My values are...

My values are...

My values are...

Shifting to the total sum of the individuals...

The World Value Survey Cultural Map

1999-2004 2005-2008

Where is this going?

#4 Re-calibrating business priorities

TREND #4: Re-Calibrating Business Priorities

• With the gap between the haves and have-nots widening, markets are becoming more socially conscious and demanding that organisations large and small embrace emerging business models grounded in For-More-Than-Profit philosophies.

• Impact investing: Assessing not only the financial return on investment, but also the social and environmental impacts of the investment.

• Social Entrepreneurship: “It’s a stupid model” (having to choose to be either for profit or not-for-profit)

• Innovative CSR initiatives in large corporations: BASF, Adidas, Danone, IBM.

For IBM, diversity means valuing and including people from every culture and religion, and delighting in their difference.

IBM is placing employees with diverse skills and backgrounds into emerging markets to tackle urgent issues in collaboration with NGO experts from around the world.

Common theme in all these trends?

Individual vs Collective

Emerging Issues AnalysisWhat seems to be happening?

Text

Emerging Issues AnalysisWhat seems to be happening?

What starts to happen now?

It may not be based just on Moore's Law. We are going to change architectures. We are going to change algorithms we are going to change a lot of things. This exponential curve may be slowing down slightly but it is still exponential; it is still marching on and it characterizes the technological architecture around which we will continue to build. Of course it is more than just technology. It is a socio-technical system and consequently you new institutional mechanisms get created in order to help transform this collection of technologies into a seamless, productive socio-technical system.

Consider cloud computing. It happened in the last two years. At the moment these are standalone clouds. I guarantee you that by this time next year they're going to be issues emerging of how do you federate the clouds? And how do you actually harmonize policies that interconnect federated clouds. To make the technology seamlessly work, you will wind up with a new interlocking infra-structure of technology, institutional arrangements, as well as work and social practices that almost all corporations will eventually figure out how to leverage.

Technology Changes the Way the Corporation Uses Knowledge

Therefore, if this exponential curve is correct, the game is changing to a rapid punctuated evolution – bang; bang; bang; bang – with no sign of stopping. It really suggests that the half-life of any given assets, any given set of skills isn't that long. It may actually be shrinking to something like five years. We have no quantitative proof of this. But basically it is shrinking. And the predict-ability of future needs is increasingly uncertain. This really undermines the foundation of corpora-tions that were built for the purpose of protecting stocks of assets -- assets that, by the way in-clude intellectual property, about which we, in the 20th century, have become obsessive.

THE COOK REPORT ON INTERNET PROTOCOL JUNE 2010

© 2010 COOK NETWORK CONSULTANTS 431 GREENWAY AVE. EWING, NJ 08618-2711 USA PAGE 12

Cross-Impact AnalysisWhat seems to be happening?

?

Layered ModelsWhat’s really happening?

ProspectionWhat might happen?

For ex. Scenario building

Low

High

High

Low

“Most people think the future is a destination or a goal - somewhere we are headed in time. It is not. It is something we

help to create every time we make a decision about what we will do next and then act out that decision”

Richard Hames - Futurist

What does this mean for Leadership?

As leaders, how do we keep a finger on the pulse of the future?

Questions