The Future of Work

In the 2020s we are, at least in the soi-disant “Developed [sic] World”, drowning in technological capability. Sometimes it feels as if all of technology we have is actually hindering not helping.

We have systems that on their own support their relevant business function extremely well,, e.g., CRM, Financial Accounting, Securities Settlement, etc., and in doing so have eliminated a great deal of “Muda” (to use a Lean term) within specific functions / silos but not necessarily End-to-End within or across processes.

In fact all the "Muda" in organisations now resides in the gaps between the systems; co-workers extract data from specific systems and pass it between each other (normally attached to emails), individuals log into umpteen systems to get the relevant information to make decisions (or if they are lucky they have one analytical system but that system is not integrated with the operational systems they use day-to-day), etc.

Even applications billed as “Collaborative” are not collaborative: I’m not going to name them for fear of libel. Many of such applications require significant amounts of “glue” (i.e., workflow enablement, basic integration, etc.) in order even to begin to implement business collaboration within or across multiple organisations. The punchline is that “it’s impossible to be collaborative when one’s collaboration tools are not …”

All of this is costing lots of money: it makes workers in the trenches quit their jobs because they are as mad as hell and won’t put up with it anymore, and it frustrates clients to the point that they take their business elsewhere.

This article suggests that the root cause is that we don’t share a clear vision of what “the Future of Work” is or might be even though the clues are all around, and suggests how that state might come into existence.

What is “the Future of Work” (& why should anyone care)?

In answering this double question, it is important to realise that: the current conception of “the Future of Work” has existed since the 1960s; the tools to implement the concept have been available progressively from the 1980s to the 2010s; and there is a perfect opportunity for organisations to realise this vision now.

A Brief History of “the Future of Work”

“The Future of Work” as a concept, dream or vision, has probably been around since long before the beginning of recorded time. For example, the ability to control fire is thought to have led to significant societal and behavioural changes which could loosely be said to have opened up new work opportunities such as warding off predators and cooking food, and life opportunities such as venturing into and thriving in more distant or harsher climes.

Focussing on information-intensive work more specifically, it could be argued that the Future of Work emerged when scribes began to record proto-business transactions in relation to the fruits of the Agricultural Revolution in the so-called Fertile Crescent, and Egypt, during the 4th and 3rd Millennia BCE.

This (first) iteration of the Future of Work with respect to information handling activities established the paradigm for all subsequent instantiations of the Future of Work and comprised:

• Information Technologies, i.e. Abaci, Clay Tablets, Cuneiform, Reed Styli, etc
• Knowledge Workers, i.e. specifically scribes but more generally administrators
• Social / Organisational Paradigm, i.e., "settled" society which required custom / rule-based collaboration between individuals and groups over extended time periods

This pattern has repeated itself over the subsequent millennia down to the current day:

• Agrarian Society, e.g., mechanical analogue computers that enabled navigation (1st / 2nd Century BCE), Blaise Pascal’s Pascaline used to facilitate tax calculations, etc
• Industrial Society, e.g., the Jacquard Loom that automated weaving, Hollerith cards facilitating US Census calculation, etc
• Post Industrial Society, e.g., IBM 7090/360 & SABRE, PDP 8s & moon shots, Apple Lisa's & WIMPs, IBM PCs & Excel, the Internet & Browsers, iPhones & mobile apps, Cloud & OpEx, etc

Now there is an entire spectrum of adoption of any given iteration of the Future of Work as illustrated by the well-known adoption curve (i.e., Innovators, Early Adopters, etc). This is not surprising because history and current circumstances show:

• The lines between each “epochs” are very blurred from an information technology standpoint, and inevitably adoption is very variable
• For example, Log tables and slide rules continued to be used until personal computers became ubiquitous
• Mainframes are associated in most people’s minds with the High Industrial Age but were really harbingers of the Information / Digital Age (“HAL, one step ahead of IBM”)
• Technological adoption within “epochs” is uneven, which provides organisations with opportunities; entire industrial sectors and firms, even significant ones, do not leverage technology sufficiently well to benefit from the latest iteration of the Future of Work.

It is well-documented that technology and change have a yin-and-yang relationship, i.e., technology makes possible different social arrangements, and different social arrangements drive the need for technology solutions. One only has to think of the most recent (on-going) global pandemic to realise this; those aspects of the economy that could continue relatively unscathed, were those for which the technology existed, and which only existed in the first place because of the technology.

No amount of technology could help an Indian day worker (e.g., an onion seller in a market) during the height of the pandemic, however on the other hand, an Indian executive (e.g., an investment banking M&A specialist or an IT executive say) could continue to function normally within their sphere of work, collaborating with colleagues and subordinates globally throughout the (business) world. So, as we already knew technology can only revolutionise societal and organisational networks to which it is relevant and available.

Despite all of the change, technological or otherwise, over millennia and more recently, the one constant in relation to information-intensive work (notwithstanding “Geeks in Garages”) is the fundamental organisational model that underpins it. This model can be summarised as the as the instantiation of ...

Collaborative Teams of Collaborative Rational Agents

It is frequently stated as a “Universal Truth” that organisational culture is the “glue” that holds organisations together. The sometimes explicitly stated, but more often implicitly understood, shared norms, values, and behavioural practices, enable individuals at the social level to work together productively towards the achievement of overall organisational goals in line with an organisation’s mission, i.e., it helps creates “Collaborative Teams of Collaborative Rational Agents”.

In information-intensive work technology instantiates organisations at the operational level regardless of whether the technology is Clay Tablet or Tablet (hardware), Natural or Computer Language (software), technology is the “glue” at the Operational Level. Further:

• Agents can be both human and non-human; in this model both “life forms” can be integrated
• Individuals’ “rationality” can be increased by the tools provided together with appropriate “acculturation” including training
• Being able to communicate and share information easily, facilitates collaboration which is fundamental to any information-intensive activity, even more so in “the Digital Age"

It has been observed scientifically that humans are tool making and using primates, i.e., that humans (and higher primates) extend their capabilities via the use of tools (including language), hence technology implementation is:

• Not about automating people away
• Is about extending their capabilities and empowering them

The Tools and Techniques that make possible the instantiation of the current Future of Work, i.e., the next turn in the wheel in terms of operational-level efficiency, have existed for years. For example:

• Commercially-robust” collaboration tools (e.g., workflow engines) have existed since the late 1990s / early 2000s and continue to develop apace
• Highly visual user interfaces have existed since the 1980s; more importantly it has been possible to build “functionally rich” commercially viable web-based interfaces since the mid 2000s onwards
• Since the mid-2000s no self-respecting product developer would release anything that didn’t have an API with which it is easy to integrate; currently the commercial framework of choice is REST

But as at 2022, what is observed in many organisations (commercial or otherwise)? Siloised solutions that do not at any level, from the most basic day-to-day activities (e.g., invoice payment) to the most strategic (e.g., competitor acquisition, governmental policy assessment), facilitate / enable:

• Information sharing between individuals and organisations (e.g., business plans, revenue trends)
• The most basic collaborative activities (e.g., end-to-end invoice management) or more ad-hoc, sophisticated collaborative activities (e.g., spinning-up projects to respond to emerging exogenous opportunities or threats – from hostile takeover bids to world events such as pandemics, war, etc)
• Individuals to see all of the relevant information needed to make sound business decisions quickly (e.g., asset acquisition / disposal evaluation, construction project bid financials, invoice due dates)
• The actioning of business decisions smoothly from inception to completion (e.g., acquisition proposal approval to “capture”, invoice approval to accepted payment, etc)
• Standardised quality of execution from the operational level (e.g., contract management) to the most strategic activities (e.g., launching new product or service lines)

None of the above takes away need for organisations to exploit the opportunities arising from specific solutions (e.g., ERP software) and technologies (e.g., Machine Learning). However, the full benefit of any of these is not realised if they cannot be used together easily in a holistic manner.

When an integrated work paradigm is required, which is true for all information-intensive activities, individual users, and thus organisations, waste valuable time instantiating integration manually, e.g.:

• Logging in and out of different applications / systems to view information and to action
• Cutting-and-pasting information between the screens of separate systems (where feasible)
• Leveraging email to implement ultimately unmanageable workflows at all activity levels, e.g., securities settlement event follow-up notification, asset disposal presentations attached for review

Now many applications provide these capabilities but only within their scope of implementation. For example, some applications allow workflows to be built. However where the relevant business process involves multiple sub-processes that span multiple business functions and not all of them are supported by one system, the situation reverts to the one described above.

The answer to this problem is not to build bigger and bigger systems in terms of capability, even if micro-services architecture-based enables this, but rather to recognise that integrating systems that are dedicated to support specific activities (even if the activities are “large”) is a more manageable approach. (This insight, at a more granular level, led to the development of Unix and the rise of Functional Programming.)

In this individual’s experience, there is plenty of empirical evidence that this approach makes sense; names withheld for commercial reasons. Once an organisation has more than about 5 applications the inefficiencies outlined above kick-in (and the inefficiencies kick in factorially). Further the problem goes beyond simply the cost associated with these inefficiencies to quality challenges:

• Client Dissatisfaction: Frequently an inability to take a holistic view and act accordingly (e.g., client delivery deadline not identified, actioned, and communicated) leads to client dissatisfaction and thus potential revenue loss.
• Reputational / Existential Risk: Siloised information and operation can lead to “the big screw-up” which dwarfs the negative impacts of client dissatisfaction, e.g., the high-value transaction that is going wrong and isn’t caught leading to catastrophic consequences. This risk has been exacerbated by the “dumb-down-and-outsource” model employed in many sectors most noticeably in Financial Services; firms have had to bring client support functions back "on-shore" because they do not have the technology. operational, or cultural resources to keep them offshore.

If this is all true why haven’t more organisations successfully embraced the (current, digitalised) Future of Work?

Why is “now" the time for the Future of Work?

Shortly after the Pandemic hit in March 2020, a senior executive at one of world’s pre-eminent advertising agencies observed that in the space of 3-4 weeks their firm had gone from considerably less than half the organisation on a well-known collaboration platform to circa 90% adoption. Pre-COVID, the roll-out to the much lower percentage figure had taken circa 18 months. So the moral is …

... existential threats are far stronger than the profit motive …

Hence the old saw that (financial) markets are driven by greed and fear, and that the latter is more powerful; as all the trend graphs show, crashes happen far more quickly than indices rise. Or as Freud didn't put it "Thanatos 1, Eros 0".

Most people, organisations, and societies only change when the pain of not changing becomes greater than the pain of changing, and existential threats are stronger motivators for change than P&L maximisation. As at Q2 2022 there are three major “existential threats”: (1) the war in Ukraine, (2) supply chain dislocation, and (3) resource constraints ((a) non-human and (b) human).

Passing over 1, 2, and 3(a) for now (topics all in themselves), one doesn’t need to look at the World Economic Forum website to realise that the Future of Work is a big deal and that threat 3b is a very significant; without well-trained, effective, and motivated personnel some organisations (and societies) will not be able to cope with their clients’ (or citizens’) basic demands.

Whilst eventually (human) resource supply-and-demand will reach equilibrium, demand will drop if the supply doesn’t exist (Say’s Law in reverse) and organisations will run the risk of, at best, shrinking or, at worst, going bust before equilibrium is reached. Since the easing of the Pandemic we’ve seen that:

• Those organisations that provide(d) goods and services closer to the “desire” end of the spectrum have experienced Say’s Law in reverse, e.g., Klarna, Netflix, Peloton, etc
• Organisations where product / service demand is high are struggling to recruit and retain personnel, and the cost of acquiring (and retaining) personnel is definitely impacting the prices they need to charge to make profits and ultimately survive (cash reserves only stretch so far)

For all the reasons outlined above, now is the time for organisations to invest in implementing “the Future of Work. The poor implementation of function-specific systems is costly, however even where individual systems have been implemented uniformly well within an organisation, the cost of collaboration (internal and external) remains significant as outlined in the previous section. Digital assets even when well implemented can only go so far if they are not used in an integrated, holistic manner.

All great but what to do?

Step One is to realise that it's all about people: people sharing information, people making decisions, people acting upon on information, people coordinating their actions, people explaining their intentions, people voicing opinions, etc. However in all cases in order to achieve anything significant, people need to act collaboratively ... and the tools that support their activities need to facilitate highly effective and efficient collaborative decision-making and execution.

Step Two is to recognise that that it's all about "human-like life forms", i.e., to expand the collaborative cohort to all rational agents and include so-called "Robots", because doing so will give rise to a Copernican Revolution in how we envisage collaborative work and whom we consider capable of collaboration. As suggested elsewhere, it is my opinion that if we were to treat "Robots" as if they were human it may lead us to not treating humans as if they are expendable machines and thus we all become more fully human. My view is that this would change the way we construct software and implement it (humanely) within organisations and society more generally.

As a PwC Partner I used to work with constantly reminded me

... Tools support Techniques support Processes support People ...

It's not too far a stretch to replace "People" with "Humanoid Life Forms"

Step Three, putting aside the prior quasi-philosophical comments and also OCM for now, and focussing on operational matters, organisations should aim to leverage existing technology assets rather than replacing them in order fully to realise there benefits.

This can be achieved by implementing and exploiting software that allows all stakeholder (employees / associates, business partners, and clients) to:

• See all the relevant information they need to make decisions and then go directly to the appropriate technological tool to perform the necessary actions
• Collaborate effectively with each other, i.e., sharing information and communicating seamlessly as opposed to extracting data from systems and attaching to emails
• Coordinate their actions in a structured manner that can be monitored by default as opposed to using email as workflow “ringing round” to find out the status of work (e.g., Toyota could not successfully operate its factories if they did so in in the way some banks execute their financial close)

The above can be achieved through implementing software that was historically labelled as "Horizontal Portals" but now are most frequently called "Digital Experience Platforms

However in doing so it is essential to select one that federates the data from underlying Operational, Business Intelligence, and / or Data Science systems as opposed to forcing data to be extracted from these systems to populate "yet another database" that underpins the Digital Experience Platform ("DXP") selected. An "un-federated" solution leads to large amounts of data being shunted around in a non-timely manner and causes the information provided by the DXP to be permanently out-of-date / stale.

Implementing a federated model has advantages over-and-above the implementation of new systems. Such a model enables so-called "legacy" systems to continue to be run in parallel (at least with respect to historical data) and thereby to defer, and potentially even eliminate, costly, time-consuming, and non-value add data migrations.

Last, but absolutely not least, the key technology enabler for the Future of Work is workflow software. It is this technology that allows individuals and teams to collaborate to the max, and allows organisations to monitor, control, and direct activity without overbearingly stepping into the process - if implemented correctly there is no need for the manic "ring round" to establish where everything is and what everyone is doing and which is inefficient and exasperating at all levels of organisations.

Importantly workflow isn't just applicable to one level of the organisation, or one type of process. Here are two examples:

• Analytical Activities: An algorithm resident within an organisation's Data Science platform identifies an anomaly that requires investigation (e.g., interest rate change has potentially adverse impact on assets held by the organisation). A message is popped on the work queue of the relevant manager with the instruction to investigate the validity of the algorithm's output and act upon the information if appropriate
• Ad-hoc Workflow: In the prior case the relevant manager identifies that the anomaly identified requires action, eg asset disposals. The manager uses the organisation's workflow tool to create an ad-hoc project to investigate and plan out the asset disposals, assembles a cohort of experts to execute the plan, and assigns tasks and responsibilities to the selected expert virtual team which can then be tracked to successful conclusion.

Are there as few as 100 seconds left to Midnight?

Back in 1947, "The Doomsday Clock" was devised, by contributors to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, to represent the likelihood of humans giving rise to a global catastrophe. The clock acts as a metaphor for threats to the human race arising from uncontrolled scientific and technological advances (e.g., "Nuclear Risk", "Climate Change") with Midnight representing hypothetical global catastrophe.

In February this year, 100 seconds was confirmed to be humankind's "distance" from Midnight. Since then yet another war has (re-)started, "the Factory of the World" has gone back into lockdown due to COVID (again), and various waves of political turbulence have swept through the world (e.g., protests in various countries due to long term economic mismanagement). So just how many seconds separate the human race from Midnight now if we were to expand the Doomsday Clock threat definition beyond "science and technology"?

So returning to "Why now?" and the "Future of Work", I would like to suggest that we need to recognise that "Turbulence is the New Normal". Economic strife and social dislocation are ever present waiting to emerge, and periods of stability are actually not the norm for the human race as the his/herstory books remind us. The only reason that "the West" has woken up to this now is that conflict, economic strife, and social dislocation are sitting at its doorstep. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse never stopped rampaging around the World, it's just that their direct impact has not been sufficiently large in the West in recent years to cause the general populace to realise that "Turbulence is the Normal".

So what is the relevance of this to the Future of Work? We need collectively to realise that "Business as Usual" is, and always was, an illusion. Getting to and remaining in the place that is the Future of Work, at least for administrative activities, is a matter of survival for organisations not choice and it is necessary for economic flourishing and more.

Now the Future of Work may appear rather bathetic when set next to the challenges we face, however if more organisations could get to the Future of Work this would overall contribute to addressing some of the difficulties economies face now. For example, highly automated business operations would help mitigate inflation by:

• Reducing the number of jobs that simply exist due to low productivity / inefficiency
• Making the day-to-day lived experience of work better, and in combination with reducing so-called "BS jobs", also reduce the need for "combat pay"

Attaining the positive state labelled "the Future of Work" is going to be challenging and take leadership. However the need and the tools exist; all that is required is the will to get there. That said there is really no alternative; the time to start the journey is now.