10 things I learnt about the future of work in 2019
2019 was an incredible year, and with each one that ticks by, we become more globalised and yet paradoxically more disconnected and polarised at the same time. It’s really been a year, if not a decade, of polarity management for us all.
Over the last year, I’ve been involved in several experiments into the future of work, agile transformation and new ways of working. Here are 9 anti-patterns I’ve observed over the last year that constantly disempower and disable most organisations’ journey towards the so-called future of work …
Resistant executive teams – I am going to harp on about this one a little because I think it’s the place where the most value gets left on the table, continually. Over the last 10 years, I’ve come to have an appreciation for the very unique mindsets that exist on executive teams, the politics, and the plain and simple ineffectiveness of so many of them combined with their absolute resistance to new ways of working and learning. So many executive teams, their members and the way they work are still fixed firmly in 1984, as if they are caught in some weird Orwellian time loop. Someone needs to run in and pitch a hammer at the screen and tell them it’s not 1984 anymore (thanks Steve Jobs & Apple). As a senior leader, you should be doing more personal, professional and team development than ever before, not coasting based on ways of working that we’re born at the turn the century. (I’ve put this as number one, because I think it’s possibly the core or apex problem that most organisations have; if it’s the past of work at the top, it’s the past of work in the rest of the organisation, except for the rebels – more on these people later.) You can capture the essence what i am talking about in this recent article by McKinsey and Company.
The future of work is now – It’s a strange term because most of the things that get heaved into this bucket or under this term are really the now of work, not the future. So many organisations are still talking about the future of work like it’s 10 years away from materialising and we have another decade to prepare. Most of the practices and processes that everyone is talking about in regard to the future of work have been up and running in lots of organisations for years now; we just conveniently paid little attention to them, for various reasons, especially anti-pattern 1 above. So we could do with a bit more experimentation with new ways of working at the top to enable the rest of the organisation, and that means now, not five years into their future. The positive thing is that due to the age of technology, there are currently SO many resources freely available on how to make the shift (without playing a Big 4, don’t even get me started on this one), that it’s almost ridiculous that you’re not exploring, experimenting and evolving the future of work every day.
Leadership development, or should I say entertainment – A friend of mine, Aiden Thornton, coined the term ‘leadership entertainment’ to describe the current state of global leadership development. I like this term as it falls in line with my personal experience of current approaches to leadership development, everywhere. Here’s the problem, as I see it: most leadership professionals, senior leaders and HR professionals don’t understand the emerging context or environment very well. This means that leadership approaches and methodologies in a majority of organisations are outdated by about 20 years. This goes for leadership capacity as well. We insist on leadership development that’s easy and short and takes place as events and not as development embedded directly into workplace roles and executed work. Executive teams are famous for this accompanied by the following statement ... ‘just keep it simple; what you’re proposing is too complex’, to which I reply ‘Nooooooo, absolutely not’, this is exactly what we and you should be doing. The world is getting more complex, so should the leadership development you engage in; making it easy just falls in line with point 1 above – lazy executive teams. We need to be focused less on traditional behavioural dimensions and more on vertical development, sense-making and agile learning practices.
Culture is more important than ever – In a world where the pace of exchange is increasing every day, the glue – or culture – is more critical than ever. In a world that’s getting more complex and disrupted, we need to be more vulnerable, more real, have more fun and create more psychological safety than ever before – that’s the only way we are going to create stronger more lasting bonds between teams and their members. Psychological safety and the ability to explore alternative realities and narratives will be critical to the future of work. And that means not just reading about it, but experiencing it, playing with, and exploring it in the real world. Too many people are reading about these concepts and doing just that – reading and reading is not doing. To actually develop psychological safety, you need to practice it and then practice some more. If you can’t be vulnerable, you cant vertically develop, and if you can’t vertically develop you won’t be able to successfully navigate levels of global complexity.
There will be job losses; don’t believe what you hear – So many workplace experts are currently speaking about the shift to an automated workforce and the fact that a robot will not take your job. I can understand the position of not wanting to scare people and be alarmist; but I do wish people would be honest. Simply put, computers and robots will take certain jobs. The more repetitive and the lower level the complexity of the job, the higher the risk of automation and redundancy. The shining light is that for every job automated, I foresee between two or three being created. But those new jobs will need new skills. Do you need to check out which parts of your workforce will be replaced by digital and at what pace? Check out Faethm and their automation prediction software for the future. #Amazing
Agile is becoming the new normal – Unless you’ve been living on an island like Tom Hanks in Castaway, you’ll have heard of ‘agile - either with a big A or a little a’ – it has literally become a new suffix in the business world: Agile leadership, Agile HR, Agile teams, Agile, agile, agile, the list goes on and on. Despite this, agile has some important offerings to teach us that will enable us to work with the increasing levels of complexity and change we all face now on a daily basis. In time (the next 10 years), I firmly believe it will become the standard way of working as traditional ways of working become less and less practical and productive. The best thing you can do to ensure your future career success is to learn the fundamentals of agile, today, and I mean right now, especially of you’re an executive - don’t fall into point one of this blog!
We have to get better with uncertainty, a lot better – As mentioned above, increased levels of uncertainty mean traditional ways of working are becoming less effective. Many leaders though in my opinion, are still trying to lead teams and organisations in ways that reflect a pre-digital world, in a search for some level of security and certainty. Put simply, leaders need to get better at dealing with uncertainty and building the skills to deal with an emergent highly complex world. Looking over the leadership data in regards to senior leaders and complexity, most of the data points to a 20-year gap between where they are and where they need to be to successfully lead in today’s world (yes, that’s 20 years; it’s not a typo).
Vertical Development – Vertical Development, robust learning, complexity theory and agile need to be the standard OS (operating system) in ALL leadership development programs in order to create the leaders of the future. The leadership data is pretty clear (see point 7), what we are doing is currently not working in a majority of cases. We need to focus not just on skills development (horizontal development) but (vertical development) the capacities to network across all aspects of our business while working with emergent complexity and leveraging other people’s perspectives, expertise and knowledge, all in new and agile ways of working. Check out Nick Petrie’s white papers on vertical development and Dr Theo Dawson’s work on leadership decision-making, the goldilocks zone and robust learning.
Don’t buy anything from a university, except research – This sounds a bit harsh, but I firmly believe it. Universities are no longer the gatekeepers of knowledge they once were. A majority of their value has been democratised by the common smartphone (yet most universities still fail to understand this key fact, #unbelievable). I still believe they have a place, but not in the way they once did. Today knowledge can be absorbed in so many accelerated ways, traditional approaches no longer offer you the best bang for your buck. In the near future, we will solve the bandwidth problem that currently limits technologies like VR (virtual reality) from deploying their full value. When this happens, Rome will fall overnight, and entire institutions will vanish as their assets become financial anchors that quickly accelerate their fall into irrelevance; as many businesses can instantly reconstitute their offering in a digital world anywhere and anytime.
Build the Rebellion - Despite the challenges around the future of work, there is an unground of emerging leaders that are challenging the status quo at all levels of business. They are the ones putting their careers on the line to support the shift across then great divide into the new world of work. You know them and you need them. Despite this fact, many organisations are either holding them back or actively ejecting them from their organisations for asking more of the leadership group. I know what they stand for is scary and involves admitting that we don’t have all the answers. But we genuinely need them if we are to make the future of work a reality and not fall back into the abyss of the past. So go on, be brave, support a rebel in your organisation today.
So in closing, while the future holds so many new ways of working, my experience of the last 12 months tells me that we first need to let go of many of our old habits first. If the cup is full of previous knowledge and ways of working, it simply leaves no room for the new. Ask yourself, what are you holding on today that you need to let go of to embrace a better future?