Virtual work, real time zones: get organized

For knowledge workers, distance suddenly matters less than it used to. Covid-19 tore through years of timidity, and technology infrastructure held up remarkably well.

This is a brave new world (more on this here). Here, geography matters only if it draws time zones because the time zone might replace your office's address on your email signature and Linkedin profile (forget the paper business cards). Time zones span from the North to the South Pole and can be thousands of miles wide (think of Central European Time that stretches from Spain to Poland, GMT+9 which covers the entirety of China, or US Eastern Time, that goes from the Great Lakes to the tip of Maine.) People in adjacent ones are only marginally farther away.

This development will profoundly transform complex knowledge work, where expertise and diversity of thinking are essential. We will get used to harness that talent everywhere - from East Asia to Europe, all the way to the US West Coast...as long as they're awake.

And that’s the twist in the story.

Where the world's cognitive resources are

The next chart simplifies the point - 24 time zones, 12 broad economic areas, their GDP, and their population - their talent. The world is flat. Or is it?

Much routine activity can be digitized, or happen asynchronously, through electronic messages and workflows. But for new, nontrivial solutions, we need the right people to engage each other through real-time, synchronous communications.

Anyone who runs global organizations knows: you can't dispense of the talent (and money) from Asia, Europe, and America, but their collaboration needs orchestrating across time zones. East and West relay information to each other, and co-create it, through calls, workshops, scrums, and the like. This is not trivial to do.

In theory, orchestration work could get done anywhere. But there is one part of the world where it is easier. So much so, that management practices need to account for it.

When is the world awake? A supermind's circadian rhythm

Fly from San Francisco to Tokyo, and endless water will parade below you. Continue from Tokyo to London, and you will only see land. Each hop crosses roughly the same amount of time zones - but the former doesn’t fly over any major talent pool, or human activity, for over 5,000 miles: hardly a place for workshops.

What that means is that there is a time during a world's day when most people are offline - and that matters for processes that require synchronous communication. Let's do the math.

I took population and GDP data; approximately broke them down by time zone; and estimated when they are available (I assumed a 12-hour window when people work during their day.) Then I plotted the available “global brain’s processing power” (represented by how many people are up, and their respective GDP) against the cycle of a day. I used Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) for simplicity, but it turned out to be more than just a convenient choice.

The peak of concurrent resources being "online" (that is, awake) falls between 7 a.m. and 6 p.m. GMT if we use GDP as a proxy for highly skilled knowledge workers, and a little earlier if we use general population. The former is more realistic for today’s advanced work. The latter is where the world is heading if Asia's workforces continue to develop as they are. Africa and Latin America might also contribute hundreds of millions more if they play their demographics smartly.

In a way, this isn't surprising. London investment bankers have long benefited from being able to trade during working hours with both Asian and American exchanges - harnessing the intelligence (on a good day) of all of those financial markets. But while trading has been virtual for a long time, the rest of the knowledge work is just becoming so.

The implications for organizational design, and evolutions of ways of working, are significant.

A new world - at a crossroad

First, Europeans must get better at orchestrating between East and West. Europe is home to tens of millions of highly educated workers that can collaborate with the East in their morning and the West in their evening - and in doing so, increase the meaningful time overlap between them. It is a huge opportunity.

Second, American and Asian knowledge workers must become more adept at collaborating - and their leaders must make that possible. Today, a lot of that collaboration is at arm's length and often done through rigidly defined specifications. That's not what complex problem-solving, at scale, should be. The challenges we face, from epidemics to climate change, can’t be addressed if Asia and America do not work together. But it is difficult to build trust between peoples from different cultures who can talk to each other only for a few hours every day.

New ways of working, and possibly that European brokerage and relay, can help generate trust and results. I describe some of those methods at supermind.design.

Of course, the world might go in the opposite direction: regional ecosystems could end up mirroring fragmented spheres of political influence, where people mostly work with those in nearby time zones. Even virtual citadels. That world would lose part of the cognitive diversity and coordination necessary to solve our most complex problems. The fragmented response to Covid-19 is a testament to what an East-West rift can do. Our brain uses all its parts for its most complex jobs. Our planet's collective intelligence can do the same, as long as we relay the signal across it.