FUTURE SPECIAL.... JAMES WARE

FUTURE SPECIAL JAMES WARE

HISTORY RHYMES 

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR—THE FUTURE OF WORK…UNLIMITED 

THE BIG IDEA: COLLABORATION MAKES ALL OF US MORE KNOWLEDGABLE, INFLUENTIAL AND VALUABLE

There are two things I know about
the future of work: it will be more distributed and more collaborative. I will come back to those two “knowable” aspects of work in a moment. But first, some broader thoughts on the challenges of predicting anything concrete about the future of work. Even though I call myself a futurist, I feel unable (or at least unwilling) to predict in any detail what the future of work will be like over any period of time longer than about five years. It might be entertaining for me to speculate about how 3-D holographic videoconferencing, smart walls, voice-based computing, delivery drones, the ageing population, shifting social values and global climate change are going to transform our work experiences. But I believe doing so would also be irresponsible. Of course, there are many recurring patterns and experiences that we can anticipate reasonably well even ten or 20 years in advance. The American humorist Mark Twain reportedly once said “History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes.” We do know what time the sun will rise tomorrow, and every day after that. We know approximately when the world will run out of oil. We can estimate the power and processing speed of a microchip in 2040, and even predict its probable cost. But we know much less about human behavior, which will determine how (and why) the economy will grow (or shrink), where people will be choosing to live when 2040 rolls around, and most of the other elements of the future that we really care about. The most important difficulty with making accurate predictions is that most of us are not very good at anticipating truly disruptive events — natural disasters, market meltdowns (like the one in 2008), major technology breakthroughs. In spite of those caveats, I will offer a few thoughts about what the future might look like. In my work, I try to pay attention to three core factors that I believe are driving change in where, when, and how we create value at work: Technology, Demographics and Energy efficiency and sustainability. Here I will focus only on the most obvious of those three: technology; I will comment very briefly on how I believe it is affecting us — and driving us inexorably towards more distributed, more collaborative work. For me, the most salient aspect of the world we now live in is that virtually all of our communication has become two-way rather than one-way. In 2014, just about anyone can access almost any information they need, instantaneously, no matter where in the world that information is stored. But never forget that at the same time those databases are tracking your questions; after all, that’s how search engines, like Google and Bing, learn what you are most interested in, making your future inquiries even more focused and relevant. More importantly, each of us can communicate with just about every other person, no matter where in the world they may be — again almost instantaneously, and at very low cost. And anyone can publish any idea or opinion they want to, on a global basis, practically for free. Think about it: that is a very new state of affairs. We are rapidly moving into an era that my fellow futurist Don Tapscott has called “the age of networked intelligence.” We collaborate with other people in other places because we can – and because doing so makes all of us more knowledgeable, more influential, and more valuable. But I also believe we’ve only just begun to harness technology. The “next big thing” in the technology world is likely to be what some have called “the Internet of things.” There are already more thing-to-thing data flows in the world than there are people-to-people or things-to-people communication. Chief Futurist for Cisco Systems Dave Evans estimated recently that there are over 35 billion devices connected to the Internet! And there are millions of other sensors that are not “online” but nevertheless are producing meaningful data. That’s why we hear so much today about “Big Data” and “analytics.” We are swimming in data, whether it is traffic flows in and around cities, climate and weather sensors, economic transactions, oil and natural gas monitors, or airplane flight records. So, given that the future includes massive amounts of accessible data, the message is clear: learn how to ask the right questions, how to interact with the right colleagues, and how to convert data to information (and, ultimately, to wisdom). Because all the networked intelligence in the world won’t tell you what matters, why a particular idea is important, or how it can create meaningful value. Those are questions that only people can answer. So let’s resolve to use the wonderful tools at our disposal actively and wisely, and never forget that each of us, along with millions of other human beings, is at the very center of creating the future.

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