The force of society
It would be a mistake to imagine that we humans remain the same as the forces of technology, globalisation and demography swirl around us – leaving us perhaps battered, but fundamentally unchanged. Mankind has changed in the past, and will continue to change in the future. The question is how these changes will manifest themselves. If we look back to the first Industrial Revolution, huge swathes of people moved from the countryside to the towns to work in factories. These experiences transformed the way that people saw their lives and their communities. They changed the way people thought about themselves, they changed the way they thought about others, and they changed their hopes and aspirations for work.16
But this process is not straightforward. The future will be elusive when it comes to predicting human behaviour and aspirations. Yes, we want to be ourselves and autonomous … but wait, we also want to be part of a regenerative community. Yes, we are excited about technology and connectivity … but we also yearn to be comforted and crave time on our own. These are important paradoxes, which those at work will be increasingly faced with in the coming decades.
However, the fascinating aspect of the past, the present and the future is that, while the trappings may have changed, the basic human plot remains essentially the same. As Maslow described all those years back, we want safety for ourselves and those we love; we like to be cherished and find a sense of belonging in the communities we live in; we need a sense of achievement and of a job well done; and for some, we also want a sense of what he called ‘self-actualisation’ – the feeling that we have done the best we could and have fulfilled our potential.17 This is the basic plot that has defined the lives of people, their families and their communities from the very beginning. What has changed are the trappings, the trappings of technology and connectivity, and the trappings of the material goods that surround us.
I remember taking my young son Dominic to Tanzania to spend time with the Masai in the Masai Mara. Dominic and I were standing on top of a hill looking over the empty plains below, talking with a young Masai warrior about his life. As we talked we were interrupted by a sound very familiar to Dominic and me – the sound of a mobile phone ringing. From his pouch the warrior extracted his phone and talked in the excited way people across the world talk on their mobile phones. When he finished the conversation I asked him who he was talking to.
‘My brother,’ was his reply. ‘He had taken the goats out to find pasture this morning, and he has just rung me to tell me that after three hours walking into the scrub they had found fresh grass for the goats to eat.’
The trappings may have changed – but essentially the warriors are still as concerned about feeding their goats as they were many centuries ago.
Here are the seven pieces about society that will play a central role in shaping the future of work.
1. Families become rearranged: across the world family groups will become smaller and increasingly ‘rearranged’ as stepparents, stepbrothers and sisters displace the traditional family structures of the past.
2. The rise of reflexivity: as families become rearranged, and work groups become increasingly diverse, so people begin to think more deeply about themselves, what is important to them and the lives they want to construct. This reflexivity becomes crucial to understanding choices and creating energy and courage to make the tough decisions and trade-offs that will be necessary.
3. The role of powerful women: over the coming decades we can expect women to play a more prominent role in the management and leadership of companies and entrepreneurial businesses as they join the top echelons of corporate life. This will have implications for women’s expectations, the norms of work, and indeed the relationships between men and women in the home.
4. The balanced man: there is growing evidence that men’s perception of their role and the choices they make are also changing. Faced with the consequences of their fathers’ choices, it seems that there will be an increasing proportion of men who will decide to make a trade-off between wealth and spending time with their family and children.
5. Growing distrust of institutions: trust is about the relationships between the individual and their community and work. It is based on the perception of whether others can be trusted to deliver. Across the developed world it seems that levels of trust in leaders and corporations have fallen, and may well continue to fall over the coming decades.
6. The decline of happiness: perhaps one of the most surprising aspects of working life is that, in the main, increases in standards of living – beyond a certain level – have been accompanied by decreases in happiness. If the trajectory of consumption continues, there is no evidence that this decline will be reversed.
7. Passive leisure increases: one of the headline stories from the industrialisation of work has been the significant increase in leisure time. Up until the 2010s much of that time was spent in passive television watching. It could be that in the coming decades the growth of virtual participation will create a significant ‘cognitive surplus’ which can be focused on more productive activities.
At first glance these piece about the societal forces look bleak: a future of dislocated families, ebbing trust, general unhappiness, ever more voracious consumption and little in the way of work/ life balance. Certainly as we construct the storylines for the Default Future these pieces play a key role in the themes of isolation and fragmentation. However, it could also be that this force is the most positive of all in the sense that it is most dependent on personal actions and choices. So as we will see as we construct the storylines for the positive, Crafted Future, within these seemingly bleak forces are rays of hope as rearranged families create a greater openness to differences, as Gen Y exercise their choice for more collaboration in the workplace, and as women are able to have their voices heard with more vigour in the boardrooms of 2025.
The force of energy resources
The way we will work in the future is intimately wrapped up with our access to energy and the impact this access will have on our environment. Of all the five forces we considered in the Future of Work Consortium, people felt most concerned and yet powerless about this one. For many it felt that a spectre was haunting them – the spectre of ever-increasing energy costs and of a rapidly changing climate.
These are forces that began with the first Industrial Revolution and have been gathering pace ever since. It’s clear to many governments, to businesses and to each one of us that the actions we are taking are having a detrimental impact on the environment. The central challenge is one of short term versus longer term – an issue we will encounter at various times in thinking through these five forces. Of course we care about the environment and the future of the planet – but these are all longer-term issues. In the short term, for many people and companies and even governments, there is no immediate stimulus to drastically reorganise their policies, companies or lifestyles to avoid some of the projections we will consider in the hard data. As many of those engaged in the conversation about the Future of Work remarked, the consequences of climate change seem like a distant fiction that currently has very little influence on their everyday decisions. Yet this is likely to change considerably by 2025, and we can expect issues of energy usage and climate change to be at the centre of the working agenda by 2030. By then, many of the outcomes of fossil fuel depletion and visible climate change will begin to impact on the daily working life of people across the world.
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