Six Futures of Work

Most routine low skilled jobs are predicted to be significantly disrupted and many eliminated over the next decade, largely driven by advances in information technology (IT) and associated technologies such as robotics, big data, and artificial intelligence. Even high skilled, professional jobs appear at risk as smart machines increasingly undertake the work of smart people (Susskind and Susskind, 2015).

What are the implications for those already in work or studying to improve their career prospects? Fortunately, we can stand on the shoulders of giants: experts whose research offer us multiple lenses through which to view the potential impacts of technology on work, where and how it is organized and its creation and destruction. Using these multiple lenses, we can see many futures. This article provides snapshots of six such futures, presented as three sets of what may appear to be radical alternatives but which, as will be shown, often complement each other.

Automate - Informate

Back in 1985 Shoshana Zuboff wrote a prescient article on the potential use of information technology in which she noted that computerised methods could be used to automate, i.e. simplify and standardise work processes so that they could be performed with little or no human intervention or informate (a word she invented) i.e. inform and thus enhance human workers’ ability to perform more sophisticated and complex tasks. Zuboff explained that both approaches depend on using IT to convert tacit human knowledge into explicit, machine-readable code. Once put in a bit stream such information can be used either to inform and leverage or simplify, standardise and automate human activities. Automating and informating are not necessarily mutually exclusive, some parts of jobs may be automated and others informated. Automating may complement informating by reducing human time spent on routine tasks, allowing more time for creative thinking, planning and other non- routine cognitive activities that people tend to do better than machines.

Applying Zuboff’s insight to the future of work suggests that rather than focus simply on jobs or technologies it will be more productive to decompose jobs into their constituent processes and tasks and then investigate how they may be automated or informated to best effect using different technological approaches. Management consultants McKinsey for example have recently produced a series of decomposition models that provide a basis for identifying how work processes can be optimally reconfigured using human and/or machine intelligence.

Integrate - Relocate

Another key question affecting the future of work is the extent to which it will be concentrated and integrated in the firm or relocated to the market. We have become accustomed to linking work and jobs with the firm but prior to the industrial revolution in the mid-18th century most economic transactions were conducted in the market between individual buyers and sellers. The process of industrialisation led to the need to collocate the factors of production: labour, money and materials, leading to the development of the industrial firm. The need to assure the availability of labour for the industrial mills and production lines led to the development of the employment contract and long job tenures, sometimes for decades; in Japan lifetime employment was common

The shift to a globalised, knowledge and service-based economy during the late 20th century led to the emergence of a new post-industrial model of the firm as knowledge integrator, a secure environment where intelligent agents, human and machine, could share, integrate and apply their specialist knowledge to create goods and services. Firms became leaner and flatter, retaining only high value human capital and automating or externalising lower level jobs and non-core activities. Job tenures became shorter, employment became increasingly part time or temporary, and freelancing and gig work boomed. Subsequently digital platform technologies have been used to develop new organizational forms with features of both the market and the traditional firm, whose primary function is to value creating transactions between third parties: think of Uber, Airbnb, Etsy, Amazon and Facebook. Some platforms such as Apples iPhone platform for app. developers are product-based while others such as Upwork and Mechanical Turk link job seekers with job opportunities.

Looking ahead current trends suggest that members of the future workforce will need to acquire the skills and knowledge needed to operate effectively not only in the firm but also in the market. This will mean becoming adept at networking, marketing, self-managing their own finances and looking after their own training. Professional and technical expertise will need to be complemented by all round business knowledge, plus the social and emotional skills needed to work both autonomously and with others.

Obliterate - Innovate

In 1990, process reengineering advocate Armand Hammer wrote a paper entitled “Reengineering Work: Don't Automate, Obliterate" in which he encouraged firms to stand back and consider whether, rather than automating their current business processes, they might be better off simply replacing them. In similar vein Kurt Lewin in his 1950s research on change management had highlighted the importance of organisations being willing to ‘unlearn’ old practices before replacing them with new ones – something not all organisations have been able to do, witness Kodak’s inability to unlearn its non-digital photographic process.

The creation- destruction theme also emerged in the work of Russian economist Kondratiev who, writing in the 1920s, noted that there had been a series of long economic cycles or waves of growth, maturity and decay since the industrial revolution in the mid 18th century, each lasting around half a century. Other researchers subsequently linked these long waves to major technological innovations, noting the tendency of each new paradigm to destroy existing industries and jobs: sail giving way to steam, horse drawn transport to the internal combustion engine, mechanical office machines to computers. Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter famously referred to them as “waves of creative destruction”.

Applying these learnings, we can predict that nations, organisations and individuals that are prepared to unlearn and adopt new technologies, are more likely to survive and succeed. At a national level this will mean making the difficult choice to abandon currently profitable industries such as coal mining and investing in new, clean, high-tech industries. For organisations it will mean being prepared to change business methods, as IBM for example has done so successfully, moving from mechanical office machines to computers, then mainframes to PCs and recently from hardware to services. For individuals it implies keeping their careers under review, avoiding over-specialisation and being willing to acquire new knowledge and skills in different fields over time - in effect lifetime learning.

Conclusion

Through the multiple lenses of expert researchers, we can discern many futures of work. From a process perspective we see that technology can be applied to automate work activities, thus replacing human effort or informating/leveraging people or both. In this context decomposing the job into its constituent processes should be the starting point for considering how best to redesign or reconfigure it. From an organisational perspective the continuing shift of work from the firm to the market suggests that the workforce of the future will need the networking, marketing and business skills needed to operate as self- employed freelancers not only firm employees. From an innovation perspective we see that being willing to unlearn and adopt new concepts and practices will be critically important in avoiding destruction/obliteration and successfully riding future waves of change.

References

Susskind, R. and Susskind, D. (2015), The Future of the Professions; How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Zuboff, S. (1985) “Automate/Informate: The Two Faces of Intelligent Technology.” Organizational Dynamics, 14:2 pp. 5-18

Hammer, M. (1990). “Reengineering work: Don’t automate, obliterate.” Harvard Business Review, July-August, pp.2-8