Hindsight 2020 Redux

In 1997, a friend and colleague of mine, Jim Oher, asked me to write a chapter about the future of workplaces for his text The Employee Assistance Handbook. The research consumed me in a very pleasurable way; thank goodness for the Bobst Library at NYU, which was one of the greatest benefits of being an adjunct there. One quote that I used in that chapter has stayed with me in the more than two decades since that work: “Thinking about the future is only useful and interesting if it affects what we do and how we live today.” The British futurist, James Robertson, coined this aphorism and I found it at that time in a book by Hancock and Bezold who suggested that Robertson’s wisdom lay in part through his suggestion that “futurists don’t actually study the future, since it does not yet exist. Rather, they study ideas about the future, most often in the belief that the future is ‘plastic’ and can be shaped.”[i] But what about ‘misthinking’ about the future? Isn’t that harmful as it affects what we do and how we live today?

Three events brought these quotes and that concern about misthinking to my mind:

1.      cleaning out my office had already yielded an article from 15 years ago that spurred the reflections contained in my previous post regarding futuristic claims and an opportunity “to declare some hits, misses, and egregious blunders” in HBR predictions about Breakthrough Ideas of 2005,

2.      further digging in the piles euphemistically called ‘my files’ revealed that I have held onto a copy of the book Workplace 2000, which was one of the books I consulted when writing my own chapter back in the late 90s,

3.      and, lastly, reading an article by Carol Stubbings in the current issue of Strategy + Business entitled ‘The case for change: New world. New skills’ brought the subject of forecasts of the future again to my immediate attention.

That article is well-crafted but not unique: the clamor about change in the workforce is inescapable in both the business press and social media. Many of these articles pull from the same pile of statistics; e.g “one of three jobs is likely to be severely disrupted or to disappear in the next decade”, “Employers also seek workers who can keep pace with rapidly changing technologies”  My own colleagues at ETS have presented substantial research on this subject. I agree with these analyses; in fact, I wonder why we treat them as new. Experts have opined on these same issues of workforce inadequacy and its attendant dangers for at least 30 years. In reviewing these artifacts of the past, I am struck repeatedly our idea of the future called for solutions that never happened. That may or may not be the case with this current fascination with upskilling, reskilling, etc., but considering the phenomenon may help us in better sensemaking and decision-making. I have yet to find in any article about the present situation a reference to the fact that previous warnings about these shortfalls in workforce skills went unresolved.

That missing acknowledgment shouldn’t surprise us. Predictions about the short-term future rarely reference our more than spotty record as a species in foretelling what the world will look like. Perhaps any article about what the future will be like and what will be needed should come with the sort of disclaimers that are on prescription medicines or health food packages: taking this may not work exactly as we hope. Phillip Tetlock’s work explicates how bad we are at predicting social phenomena. Other authors from Dan Gardner in the well-framed Future Babble of 2011 to Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky in the highly entertaining (but perhaps a little sloppy itself) 1998 compilation The Experts Speak have documented the egregious forecasts of some very smart people; the usual suspects appear in both books (the spectacular miscalculations of Paul Ehrlich on the population explosion, Paul Krugman being admittedly wrong on the 1998 Asian meltdown, Lord Kelvin declaring that ''heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible”, that poor guy from Digital who maybe said we were never going to need personal computers )

But the predictions about reskilling from very competent people like Carol Stubbings are different because they assess a deficit that currently exists and then reckon its damaging effects. My limited knowledge of the subject leads to an intuition that the experts are right in their analysis of the situation. But what I don’t understand from reading articles across those 30 years is why if this is now and has been the situation we have not been more successful in taking decisions that led to successful actions that remedied deficits that we all acknowledged. And since the failure in that realm over 30 years cannot escape everyone’s notice, why don’t we change whatever it is we are doing?

Others may locate references on upskilling/reskilling that are earlier then Boyett and Conn in 1991, but their treatment of “The Skills Required for Workplace 2000" was specific, evidence-based, and action oriented. Yet similar ‘clarion calls’ emerge even today as if this was new. Workplace 2000 used as reference a late 1980s US Department of Labor and American Society for Training and Development joint research project that found “what employers wanted and said they needed most desperately workers with a solid basic education plus relationship skills and skills in self-management.” In that same section of their book, mention is made of ‘learning to learn’ as “the most basic of all skills" and the “fact (of) the need for continuous learning (that) already exists in the workplace of today.” Korn Ferry in an attachment from an email that I received today states “Reskilling is now (emphasis added) for everyone. It’s not only tech workers who need to meet the demands of the digital revolution. Companies are helping everyone develop skillsets for the future—from sales to HR.” Carol Stubbing cited above advises that “People will also need to understand technology to be able to make better choices.” In an earlier edition of that same PWC publication, Strategy + Business, Julia Hobsbawm argued that “personal networking is a skill that people can learn and benefit from, and it’s particularly important for those who choose to freelance.” Sure sounds like relationship skills to me.

I am in a position having been a Chief Learning Officer for 15 years to know that work organizations spent billions of dollars since the publication of Workplace 2000 the Revolution Reshaping American Business on improving relationship skills, communication, teamwork, etc. Initiatives abounded. There is a whole industry focused on closing this gap, but evaluation of the current state suggests that it is as large as ever and warns that the associated problems will be dire. And this seems to be true of many of the issues raised by Boyett and Conn in that book: motivating workers, recognizing good and bad leaders, changes in employee communication and performance appraisals. CEOs and their teams approved and applied oodles of money and attention to these problems, but does anyone believe that they shrank let alone disappeared since 1991?

One prediction of Boyett and Conn turned out to be true, that workplaces would be doing more with less. That future is already here only it’s still not evenly distributed (to paraphrase William Gibson); those who have less are generally the employees occupying the lower strata of organizations that are still far more hierarchical and pyramidal then many experts including Boyett and Conn predicted. What precludes progress on these issues? What forces stymie change? If someone in 2020 does have hindsight that is 20/20, I’d value enormously those insights. Perhaps we can stop the cautionary articles about how the workplace is changing and instead provide some insight as to why it hasn’t changed. At the risk of appearing jaded toward the end of my work career, I hope never to read another article that promises “a revolution reshaping American business" as Boyett and Conn and many others after them have styled their current circumstances. Instead, I prefer the insight of those often neglected management theorists Lennon and McCartney:

“You say you want a revolution

Well, you know

We all want to change the world

You tell me that it's evolution

Well, you know

We all want to change the world”

I get the wanting part, I’m waiting for why it doesn’t happen. As someone once wrote, ““Thinking about the future is only useful and interesting if it affects what we do and how we live today.”

[i] Hancock & Bezold p. 23, 1997