New Research Initiative – A Future of More Human Work

Everyone seems to be talking about the changing nature of work. The primary change dominating many people’s attention? Automation, especially the more sophisticated automation enabled by AI and machine learning. Unfortunately, the future of work conversation today is often framed as “win-lose,” a zero-sum game – worker-less factories, driverless vehicles, the end of “robot-proof” white collar jobs – with companies and workers pitted against each other. Companies win by implementing technology to cut costs and reduce headcount, and workers lose when robots and machine learning take on their jobs.

We believe this win-lose framing is headed nowhere; it’s also misleading. As companies continue to face mounting performance pressures, the efficiency gains from automation and other technologies won’t likely provide adequate ongoing performance improvement. Continuing to focus primarily on doing things faster and cheaper not only can lead to diminishing returns but also may squander the opportunity to redeploy human capabilities—the workforce—to focus on activities that can create new value. Yet, in a future likely of intense competition and rapidly changing conditions, finding ways to create new value can be an imperative. And typically workers--with their potential for curiosity, creativity, imagination, empathy, and resourcefulness--are uniquely capable of continuously developing new ways to create new value. Far from a workerless future, we see human workers as key for success.  Our hypothesis: a sustainable future of work will likely be a win-win, both good for the company and good for the worker, because it has the potential to create far more value in the marketplace and for the worker.

To be clear, though, we’re not talking about narrowly “re-skilling” workers so they can do remaining routine tasks efficiently and reliably. Nor are we talking about “augmenting” worker capability by training them how to use the data and analytics generated by artificial intelligence to do their remaining routine tasks more efficiently.

We’re talking about stepping back at a fundamental level to redefine work so that it shifts workers away from routine tasks to focus their time and effort on sustained creative problem-solving and opportunity identification in ways that can deliver more and more value to their stakeholders (whether they’re customers, suppliers or internal “clients” served by support functions like IT or Human Resources). As this work gets redefined, there will likely be a need to draw out the broader capabilities that humans have like curiosity, imagination and empathy, rather than focusing on narrowly defined skills.

We need your help

Unleashing this human potential to create value is likely going to require redefining the work that humans are doing. So, technology aside, as a first step we’re looking for a few good examples of where a company (or business unit or function) has re-defined, or is trying to re-define, the work of its organization. Specifically, we’re interested in cases where the routine, structured work of a group was deliberately reconsidered and transformed into work that taps into the creativity, curiosity, imagination and empathy of the workforce to create new value for internal or external customers. Again, we aren’t particularly concerned with whether this transformation was precipitated by new technology or not.

We’re simply looking for stories of where highly structured work was made more fluid and creative for a workforce of some scale, and ideally for operational workers rather than those typically considered “knowledge workers.”  We’re also particularly looking for examples within large, traditional companies rather than start-ups or technology unicorns. Just to make it even more challenging, we would especially like to find examples where this redefinition of work has led to tangible performance improvement in terms of value generated or impact achieved (not just doing something faster or cheaper).

Do you have any ideas for organizations we should look into? We’d love to hear them. Please reach out and let us know – we’re anxious to start doing some deep dives to explore this emerging edge and we need your help.