John Hagel | Future of Work | SingularityU Spain Summit 2019

good afternoon it's a pleasure to be here to speak with you I do have to start with an apology some of you know this but unfortunately I have absolutely no PowerPoint slides to share with you today I know it will be a huge disappointment but I can tell you one thing about the future of work it will not be powerpoint slides so my topic today is the future of work and I should start by saying that in my view there are two futures of work not one there's one future of work which is actually quite dark and dystopian it's going to involve increasing polarization increasing view of a few that win very big and many that lose a lot and then that's unfortunately the future of work that we are headed towards but there is another future of work and it's much more bright and full of hope and I believe it's the future of work that we need to work towards so in order to develop that perspective let me start just by a broader context I run a research center the center for the edge in Silicon Valley and we've invested a lot of time we've been around now for 11 years we've invested a lot of time understanding the long term forces that are reshaping the global economy we call it the big shift we believe that we are in the early stages of a profound transformation of the global economy and as someone who loves paradox I will say that the big shift is full of paradox on the one side the big shift creates expanding opportunity exponentially expanding opportunity at the same time the big shift creates mounting performance pressure on all of us as individuals and as institutions competition is intensifying the pace of change accelerating product life cycles compressing and extreme events coming in out of nowhere and disrupting our best-laid plans increasing pressure on all of us so it's in that context that I think we need to understand the future of work it's quite understandable there is more and more discussion what is going to be the future of work and my experience is that as we get into it we tend to go into narrow slices so one piece of it has to do with automation you know the technology taking away jobs there's another piece of the future of work which has to do with the whole question of Reese killing as technology takes away our work how quickly can we rescale to do other work and then there's also the whole topic of the gig economy increasingly work is done by independent contractors versus full-time employees lots of different dimensions of the future of work but I will say again in my experience when the discussion gets to the future of work the conversation fills with fear and I think the fear is actually quite justified because as we look at the institutions that we have around the world those institutions are driven by something that we described as scaleable efficiency and I'm what I'm talking about institutions I'm not just talking about companies I'm talking about governments I'm talking about NGOs universities every institution is driven by a model of scalable efficiency and the core assumption of that institutional model is the way to create more value is to become more efficient at scale scalable efficiency and it has many consequences that everything we do in our institutions is driven by that basic assumption and it starts with how do we define work in a scalable efficiency world the way we define work is tightly specified tasks every task needs to be tightly specified so it's done very efficiently and it needs to be highly standardized so the tasks are done in the exact same way no matter where we are in the organization efficiently and the tasks need to be tightly integrated we remove all those inefficient buffers that separate activities in our companies in their institutions in the name of efficiency think about that work tightly specified highly standardized tightly integrated what we have just defined is a software algorithm machines can do that work so much more efficiently than we human beings can and I will say that one of the hot topics in the future of work is what percentage of jobs are going to be eliminated in what period of time I'm here to tell you it's a hundred percent of those tasks and it's gonna be much sooner than we anticipate because of exponential change so I think there's a reason for fear and by the way when we talk about Reese killing the topic is how do we give workers new sets of skills so they can go off to a different part of the organization and do other routine tasks tightly specified until the machine takes those tests and then they need to rescale again the treadmill gets faster and faster and then there's the gig economy in the scalable efficiency world one of the key objectives of every institution is to take workers off the full-time payroll and get them to be gig workers contract workers so there's variable expense no fixed expense we want to be as efficient as possible but those gig workers they're doing the routine tasks that used to be done by the in full-time employees they're just doing it now as independent contractors ok so that's the future of work in a world of scaleable efficiency I want to suggest there's a missed opportunity here and the missed opportunity is to go back to the most fundamental question of all which is what should work be before we talk about the future work what is the work what should it be that question in my experience is not generally on the table but needs to be and our belief based on the research we've done is that the what work should be is fundamentally different from routine tasks what work should be is addressing unseen problems and opportunities to create more value that's what work should be and the untapped opportunity is as the routine tasks get taken over by the machines let's focus the people on addressing unseen problems and opportunities to create more value and by the way when I talk about this I'm not just talking about innovation labs or research labs or certain parts of the organization I'm talking about every worker in the organization from the janitors to the procurement officials often frontline procurement people to factory workers every worker should have their work redefined to be this form of work now there's a lot of resistance to this view and one resistance is well wait a minute come on John you know some people are capable of creativity and identifying problems and opportunities and addressing them but most of us just want to be told what to do and have the security and safety of an income well we've actually done quite a bit of research on this topic and by the way everything I'm focusing on today we've done a lot of research on a have a limited period of time so I encourage you to seek out the research if you're interested send me an email or just go online it's freely available no charge unlike many research centers but the research we've done is to look at examples of institutions organizations today that have already started to redefine work and by the way we didn't go to tech startups or Silicon Valley companies by the way I promise you other than this never to mention or Airbnb in my talk we went to very traditional companies one of my favorites is one of the leading tomato processing companies in the United States tomato processing how much more basic can you get factory workers processing Tomatoes in an assembly line they redefined the work for everyone in their workforce and they said your mission is to address unseen problems and opportunities and they have come up with incredibly creative ideas about how to completely rethink the processing of Tomatoes new kinds of machinery new kinds of activities new approaches huge value created another example of a company again we tried to go to traditional companies not your usual suspects this was a an energy company pipeline company managing energy pipelines around the United States they redefined the work for the maintenance workers in the pipe in the field and said your job is not just to fix the problem when it emerges on the pipeline your job is to anticipate the problems and more importantly see opportunities how could we create even more value through our pipelines to our customers and these pipeline workers have come up with some incredibly imaginative ideas for how to rethink anticipate problems first of all but more importantly how to do things differently so they can create more value through the pipeline network because those are the people out in the field those are the ones who see these pipelines on a daily basis who is in a better position to see problems and opportunities than those in the front line and these are not PhDs these are not even necessarily college graduates many of them high school graduates but given the opportunity they have come up with some very important ways to create value for the company so redefining work in this in this way we believe taps into addressing the mounting performance pressure that I mentioned in this big shift in a key way we believe to do that is to move from a model of scaleable efficiency where the focus is just doing things faster and cheaper through more tightly specified activities to a model of what we describe as scaleable learning that the real need and opportunity for all of our institutions is to shift from this scaleable efficiency model to a model of scaleable learning where the goal is how can we create an institution where everyone is going to learn faster together at scale faster than they ever could on their own or as part of a smaller organization that's a profoundly different institutional model but if you think about this notion of addressing unseen problems and opportunities huge ability to drive into scaleable learning and I should say when I talk about scaleable learning unfortunately when I do this with with executives or leaders of institutions they immediately say oh you're talking about learning well we have training programs we have training rooms you know they can go off and learn all they want we take them out of the work environment and they learn all they want then they go back into the work environment do their assigned tasks faster and cheaper now the form of learning that we think is going to be increasingly valuable and necessary in the big shift world is learning in the form of creating new knowledge through action in the workplace not in a training room and if you think about it the implications of an exponential world a world that's more and more rapidly changing if we're not learning faster and again learning in the form of creating new knowledge we're gonna be marginalized so that's both the opportunity and we believe the imperative in order to create more and more value and shift from this mounting performance pressure into expanding opportunity so it's a big shift in terms of how we run our institutions how we manage our institutions but if you go back to this notion of redefining work addressing unseen problems and opportunities to create more value that is where learning occurs you learn if you see something no one else has seen and you address it in ways that create more value for the institution that's powerful learning so our focus has been on how do we actually accomplish that what are the implications of scalable learning in TOR in terms of how we run our institutions and the implications it has for work so I'm going to go through a few of the implications one implication is that it has to do with how who does the work you know in most of our organizations today most of the work is done by individuals you know they stand in the assembly line they say they go off on a maintenance call as individuals they're all not all but many most are working as individuals our belief is if the focus is on learning we need to come together into groups not just individuals no matter how smart any one of us is we'll be a lot smarter if we're working closely with a group of others who are seeing the same kinds of contexts and environments and helping us to see the problems and opportunities and helping us to find new approaches to addressing them so our belief is the future of work is increasingly around organizing into small work groups typically five to fifteen people and I should say we don't mean teams in the sense of people who come together every Friday to talk about what they did it's five to 15 people who are working together on a daily basis addressing problems and opportunities very different way of organizing and it has to do with how do we cultivate practices within those work groups so that they can learn faster together and again we've done a whole research project on this we've actually identified nine practices that we think are critical based on case studies all of our research is case studies looking for examples of companies and work groups that have started to employ these approaches but I'll just highlight one element one set of practices in this work group context that we think is particularly powerful for learning and very contrary to the scalable efficiency world in the scalable efficiency world one of the big things is friction is bad eliminate friction wherever it occurs that's the way to be more efficient our belief if a focus is unscalable learning we need to promote productive friction we need to encourage the participants in the work groups to constantly challenge each other to constantly drive to get to better and better answers to whatever the question is at the moment that's the way to learn faster is if you're willing and able and encouraged to challenge each other but to do it with respect that's the essence of productive friction in many of our environments we challenge each other to put each other down we're trying to dismiss and say no I'm better than you know in productive friction we're doing it because we all share a commitment to getting to better and better answers and we expect and need those challenges that's a very different set of practices than again in most of our scalable efficiency world tolerates so one shift is this notion of moving from individuals to workgroups cultivating a set of practices there's a second shift which is here driven by a quote that I love it's a Silicon Valley entrepreneur by and they have bill joy bill joy once made the observation he said you know no matter how many smart people you have within your organization just remember one thing there are a lot more smart people outside your organization than inside your organization surprised I know that's gonna be a shock to many but true and if you're serious about scalable learning and just focus on the people within your organization you will never scale the learning as fast as institutions that systematically reach out and seek to build relationships with expertise that resides outside the organization and relationships where both sides all sides can learn faster together very different mindset and approach in this context one of the companies that we've done a lot of research on is a Chinese company it's called Li & Fung they're in the clothing and apparel industry their customers are the brand name apparel designers that we've all heard of Calvin Klein and Taylor they work with those apparel designers and take care of everything from the sourcing of raw material through all the stages of production all the logistics to deliver anywhere in the world you specify they take care of all of that interesting observation about Lee and Fong they do none of that work themselves they operate through a global network of 15,000 business partners and it's truly a global network even though they're a Chinese company the vast majority their partners are spread out all over the world one interesting finding that we had from our research we went out and interviewed many of the partners in their network and we asked well why are you part of the Li & Fung Network without exception without prompting top of mind the answer we got back because we learn faster as part of the Li & Fung Network than we ever could on our own or as part of anyone else's network Wow you know I can tell you I've interviewed many partners of Western companies I have never once heard that answer because we learn faster are you kidding it's because we get squeezed harder and at the same time that many Western companies are shrinking the number of participants in their supply networks why scalable efficiency it's cheaper to coordinate a fewer set of partners than if you have a lot of partners lien Fung every day at 15,000 partners is adding new partners because their belief is the more partners that participate in their network the faster everyone's gonna learn more access to expertise diverse expertise the faster everyone's going to learn profoundly different mindset mentality in terms of what's required so that's the second element of scaleable learning is expanding our horizons beyond an individual institution to figuring out how do we connect more effectively with the intent of learning faster to a broader set of third parties another change and this has to do with the whole notion of skills again one of the big topics in the future of work is rescaling and yet when we talk about skills we generally are talking about very context-specific skills how to operate this particular kind of machine how to process that kind of paperwork that form in the efficient way possible those are skills we need to rescale give them a new set of skills our belief is that if we're serious about redefining work we need to shift our focus away from skills to something that we describe as capabilities which are much more fundamental they have to do with curiosity imagination creativity emotional intelligence social intelligence those are capabilities that help people to learn faster if you have those capabilities you will learn a lot faster if you're asking a lot of questions if you have imagination if you understand the context the emotional connections across people you'll create so much more value and yet no one is really focused on those capabilities it's all about rescaling let's give them those skills so they can do the routine tasks and again I get the objection that the resistance of oh come on you know some of us are capable creativity and imagination but you know most of us aren't and we should just accept that my response to that is let's go to a playground and let's watch children six or seven years old show me one child that does not have these capabilities curiosity imagination creativity are you kidding me they're practicing it every day something happened to them what happened they went to school and those capabilities were crushed the key lesson of school is listen to the teacher memorize what the teacher tells you and then demonstrate that you know it on the examination why because we're preparing you for scalable efficiency work environments where your job is to listen to the boss do the tasks as assigned as efficiently and reliably as possible our belief is if we're serious again about this notion of redefining work and cultivating these capabilities we need to rethink at a fundamental level our educational institutions and all of our institutions to cultivate these capabilities that are there the image that I like to use is the human muscle you know we all have muscles some of us exercise and those muscles are developed others of us don't and the muscles atrophy but guess what the muscles are still there they don't go away they're waiting to be exercised when are you gonna exercise me those capabilities if exercised will develop and we all have them so again our message is focus on cultivating capabilities rather than re-skilling and by the way if people have those capabilities they will acquire whatever skills they need in the particular context they're in because they have the curiosity imagination to do that and that brings me to another change I've talked about moving from skills to capabilities now I want to talk about motivation you know everybody talks about Reis killing lifelong learning that's the future of work nobody talks about what's the motivation to do that that's a lot of work why would we want to do that you know what the implicit answer is fear that's the motivation if you don't Reese kill you're gone well I want to tell you at least from my experience fear is not a good motivator for learning yeah you'll learn you'll do some learning but you won't learn as much as you need to and what we need to find is a motivation that drives people to learn that makes them excited about learning that actually makes them resist if they're not learning to move to environments where they will learn faster and this again now hopefully by now you've gotten a sense that I'm a bit of a contrarian challenging a lot of the conventional business wisdom in our business world today one of the big hot topics is worker engagement we need engaged workers that's the success I want to suggest at best that's a minimum threshold and at worst it's a distraction now we can get into semantics here in terms of what we mean by work or engagement I would say in my experience when most people talk about worker engagement they mean do the workers like the work they do did they enjoy the people they work with and do they respect the company they work for that's an engaged worker and yes there is a lot of research that shows that if you have a worker that's not engaged and move them to become an engaged worker performance increases it's a one time increase in performance but here's the problem take that engaged worker I just described loves the work they do likes the people they work with and tell them that their work is gonna have to fundamentally change whoa wait a minute I like what I'm doing don't change they actually can become quite resistant to change and learning no I'm happy let me stay happy our belief and again we've done quite a bit of research on this we went out and looked at environments where there is sustained extreme performance improvement we looked at environments that are quite diverse outside the ordinary business environments everything from extreme sports like big wave surfing and extreme skiing to online war game environments where if you make the wrong move you're gonna die at least virtually a lot of pressure and we found that there is sustained extreme performance improvement in those kinds of environments and what we found when we looked at the participants in those environments was they had a very specific form of passion and it's something and again the terms are used very loosely so we've called it the passion of the Explorer in our belief is that people who have the passion of the Explorer are driven to learn they're driven to get to higher and higher levels of impact in whatever area they have chosen for their passion and again if they're not challenged to get better and better faster they're out so rather than learning viewing learning as a burden as something else I've got to do the passionate explorers are driven to learn they're excited about the opportunity to learn completely different motivation and mindset our belief is those are the people who are going to learn faster together and by the way again bit of contrarian one of the key pieces of advice to children in the world of future of work is everybody should become going to stem academic pursuits you know science technology engineering math that's the future I have two daughters the only advice I ever gave them about their future in terms of what they should be looking at is find your passion whatever it is find that passion and don't stop until you found it and then find a way to make a living from it that's the way you will be successful in a world of increasing pressure not because somebody told you you need to go into coding or technology as the future if you're not passionate about it you're not going to learn fast enough and it is so rapidly changing so again that's another shift in terms of motivation is really focusing on what do we need to cultivate passion in our workforce so there's a lot of change that's going to be required if we're serious about redefining work in the way I described it in fact everything in our institutions will have to change in order to support that kind of redefined work and that's a whole other topic unfortunately I don't have time to go into it's the notion of how do you achieve large-scale transformation and was already mentioned briefly but it's been a key theme in our research is we've developed an enormous respect for the immune system that exists in every large organization around the world that will mobilize as quickly as possible to crush any effort to change resist change and it's the reason why transformation efforts have had such a high failure rate in our in our institutions we believe there's an alternative approach to transformation we call scaling the edge that helps to minimize the risk of that immune system coming at you but again that's a whole other topic I will resist going into that here in in terms of just to step back I would say that the I started with this notion of paradox and I started my career actually many many years ago with Boston Consulting Group BCG some of you may have heard of it very early days and the oversimplification they started there there their growth with one chart it was called the experience curve and it showed how performance improves in markets and industries over time remarkably accurate and consistent they did everything from Japanese beer to toilet paper it follows this experience curve interesting observation while it's highly accurate and predictive it is a diminishing returns curve the more experienced you get in a marketer industry the longer and harder you have to work to get to the next increment of performance improvement that is the result of scalable efficiency if your focus is on efficiency that is a diminishing returns proposition our belief is if we're serious about the big shift and this opportunity the missed opportunity to redefine work and to move to a scalable learning environment we have the opportunity for the first time to unleash increasing returns curves where the more who participate the faster everyone learns and the more value that gets created for everyone I think that's a huge opportunity for our institutions now for our individuals I would say there's another opportunity which is to for the first time do work that we human beings actually should be doing versus work the machine should be doing and in the process the ability to achieve more and more of our human potential not all of our human potential because at least my belief is our potential is limitless but to achieve more and more of it working together and learning faster and the interesting thing here is while that first view of the future of work that dystopian view was an us-versus-them kind of proposition as the efficient institution squeezed harder more and more people get in trouble if we really adopt this other view of scaleable learning it becomes a win-win proposition where the institutions win because we're creating more and more value and we as individuals win because we're achieving so much more of our potential that's a huge opportunity that's the opportunity that I believe we all should work towards and one final note is one of the key themes in our work is one of the things that's becoming feasible and actually an imperative in this big shift world is that small moves smartly made can set very big things in motion more than ever before with much more much more limited resources we can grow and scale much more rapidly than would have ever been imaginable 20 or 30 years ago so small moves smartly made in the direction of redefining work and rethinking our institutions can really unleash enormous potential thank you very much [Applause]

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Id: uAdKRvKe5PY

Length: 39min 22sec (2362 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 12 2019