One of the ways that Jill works with her colleagues is through her virtual workplace, which is a graphic representation of a workplace where all her colleagues can virtually congregate. So as soon as she logs on in the morning, she can walk through her work community to see who else is around. Her virtual timetable tells her when group sessions have been planned, and so she can link up using both her avatar and virtual 3D telepresence to talk in real time with her colleagues.
For Jill, working and learning in a virtual environment has been a way of life since she attended a virtual university in 2015. She registered and met her instructors and colleagues online and then the instructors used the virtual platform to deliver to the worldwide audience at minimum cost.
The force of technology: the rise of the cognitive assistants
The first interruption Jill has on that cold morning in 2025 is her cognitive assistant – or Alfie as she calls it. Alfie has been with her for a couple of years now. It understands how she likes to work, keeps a record of who she knows, monitors her inward communication for interesting strangers and logs the amount of time she works every day – automatically billing her employers for the hours works. Over the years Alfie has learnt how she works and how her working life can be best organised, and this has become more and more accurate to the extent that Jill now relies on Alfie for much of the everyday running of her life. Alfie checks her carbon use, reminds her when her personal carbon budget is beginning to run out, and makes sure that the travel she needs to do works within her personal carbon budget. With so much information coming through every moment of the day, Alfie helps her manage her daily tasks, prioritise what’s important and manage her weekly goals. Alfie is unique – it’s a machine that uses artificial intelligence to build a logic which best fits Jill’s context and working patterns, and evolves as Jill’s preferences become clearer.15
Is Alfie like a human? Ask Jill and she will tell you she could not do without Alfie to the extent that it (he?) simplifies her already highly fragmented life. Alfie is not alone. Across the globe billions of cognitive assistants are collecting information, monitoring the behaviour of people like Jill and taking actions from their preferences. This massive crowd of computers is becoming increasingly capable of learning and creating new knowledge entirely on their own and with no human help. For decades now they have been scanning the enormous content of the internet and ‘know’ literally every single piece of public information (every scientific discovery, every book and movie, every public statement) generated by human beings.
The force of globalisation: 24/7 and the global world
Jill lives in a world that never sleeps, with colleagues from many timezones expecting to connect to her – it’s a 24/7 world. The most obvious driver of the fragmentation of her world has been computing capability and connectivity. However, behind that is an ever-globalised and competitive world that puts immense pressure on her and her colleagues to deliver with speed and accuracy.
The joining up of the working timezones across the world began seriously from 1990 onwards, when the markets of the world become truly global. It was from this time that there was extraordinary growth in emerging markets such as China and India, Brazil and South Korea, among others. In fact, by 2009 the emerging markets accounted for half of the global economy, and by 2010 were generating the bulk of the growth in the world economy. During that year the six largest emerging economies (the ‘B6’ – Brazil, China, India, Mexico, Russia and South Korea) grew by 5.1%. In the next two decades they were joined by a second wave of economic activity in locations such as Egypt, Nigeria, Turkey, Indonesia and Malaysia.
To get the scale of globalisation – consider that in 1995 only 20 companies from the emerging markets were listed on the Global Fortune 500. By 2010 that number stood at 91.16 In 1990 the company that Jill often works for, Arcelor Mittal, was an unknown producer of steel in Indonesia; by 2010 Arcelor Mittal was the world’s largest steel company, and by 2025 one of the world’s largest conglomerates with diverse interests ranging from steel to telecoms to chip manufacturing.17 The combination of the technological forces we have described – Cloud computing, mobile communications and collaborative computing – have the potential, in concert with the momentum of emerging-market growth, to form a tipping point for globalisation and 24/7 working. Every year, millions of new consumers and small-business operators join the global economy, even from the most rural of villages. Over the coming decades we can anticipate that the economic power of the world will shift from the developed countries of the West and Japan – to be dispersed to an ever wider group of countries and regions.18
Like many people working in the West, much of Jill’s day is spent connecting to clients, suppliers and customers in Asia. This is a booming market fuelled in part by the sheer size of the population. In 2010 there were 1.2 billion people in the more developed regions (including Europe, North America, Australia and Japan) and 5.7 billion in the less developed regions (including China, India, Africa and Latin America).19 By 2030 it is forecast that while the developed regions of the world will have expanded by around 44 million people, the developing regions will expand by a mighty 1.3 billion – that’s more than the entire population of the developed world. Jill and her colleagues know that within five years the 7 billion living in the less developed regions will increasingly overshadow the 1.3 billion in the more developed regions.20
How can you reconnect the fragments?
What will it take for you to reconnect the fragments of working life into something with more cohesion? What will it take to craft a working life that has greater opportunity for sustained concentration, more time for deep learning, and for a life that has woven into it occasions for whimsy and play? What can you do to create a working life that does not leave you exhausted, and does not denude your capacity to sustain your energy and talent?
Of course it is impossible to wind back the clock to the slower-paced working life of 1990, when technology was basic and globalisation in its infancy. It may indeed be that technological developments such as the cognitive assistants themselves become part of the answer to reconnecting the fragments as they make it ever easier for people to prioritise and focus.
It is also impossible for you to significantly change the context in which you are living. Beyond moving to a desert island, you will always be part of the global economy, more and more people will want to connect to you and to others, and technology will create greater demands on productivity and outcome. So there is no easy answer to reconnecting the fragments. It is fundamentally about working from the inside out – being clear about the choices you are presented with, and being mature about the consequences of these choices.
I believe there are three future-proofed shifts that will play a role in ensuring that your future working life is not simply torn apart by fragmentation.
The first shift is your conscious construction of a working life that is based on mastery. By that I mean developing a career that is built from dedication and focus – remember, it takes 10,000 hours to learn something to the point of mastery. To do so will require the willpower to resist the temptation of fragmentation, and to be prepared to set aside significant time for apprenticeship, learning and practice.
The second shift is the realisation that the opposite of fragmentation is not isolation. The challenge is to construct a working life in the future that has both self focus and also strong relationships with others. It can be that, through the relationships with others, work can be simplified and shared. Perhaps one of the lessons we all have to learn for the future is that we tend to fragment our lives by trying to do too much ourselves, rather than creating sufficiently strong networks to really take some of the burden off our shoulders. Your relationships with others will also be a crucial balance to fragmentation as a strong regenerative community of people around you, who love and support you, could well help you to create