The Great Opportunity of 2021

“Crafting a future that offers broad based security and prosperity may prove to be the greatest challenge of our time”  (Martin Ford, The Rise of the Robots, 2015)

This quote form Martin Ford has stuck with me since he wrote Rise of the Robots in 2015. Highlighting the exponential and converging surge of enabling technology and the rapidly shifting patterns in the world of work, he was simply pointing out the evidence and risks emerging regarding how we were doing as societies in managing the changing world of work, jobs and employment.

Every economic cycle or industrial revolution in history has had its own story and paradoxical mix of positive progress, disruption, winners and losers, and the so called 4th Industrial Revolution we are in is no exception. But the warning signs of income inequality, jobs and skills displacement, economic migration and our insatiable appetite for growth and financial efficiency have been there for all to see - and this has being visibly playing out in our workplaces, societies, in our environment and in our politics.

And then came Covid……

As a health crisis as opposed to a financial one, we have seen different responses around the world but for the most part there has been a widespread focus on more human and basic priorities. 

The pandemic is now giving us all a once in a generation opportunity to pause and to reflect on where we go from here when it comes to creating a positive future world of work and broader based security and prosperity.

In a year when so many previous assumptions and norms about who, where and how we work have been disrupted, we have been given a great opportunity to reset those assumptions and to shape a very different and better world of work, not just in our organizations and our own individual lives, but on a broader level as well. 

Isn't it ironic for example that the ‘essential workers’ that we have depended on to keep us safe, fed, connected and moving over the last year are also those who generally have the most precarious and lowest paid employment conditions ? Those conditions may or may not change dramatically in the short term, and further disruption to jobs and employment in the future is inevitable. But how we generally think about jobs and work, how we manage this transition into the future and how we make policy choices about employment and broad based security and prosperity – these certainly can change and change for the better so that we don't leave anyone behind.  2021 could be the year where we accelerate that opportunity.