and our communities and societies will be a major challenge in the coming years.
Opportunity and Workplace. Expect to work anywhere, anytime, with anyone … or thing. We are learning from the Covid-19 pandemic how our work and personal lives could intersect. We witnessed the virtualization and shift to remote work and education. In the future many organizations may have as many people working offsite (at home, in coffee shops, and everywhere else) as in the office. As collaborative technologies along with digital reality, both virtual and augmented, become more pervasive and powerful, how we work may become more important than where we work.
Part II: Resilience (Chapters 5, 6, 7)
Resilience and Careers. Plan for longer lives with multiple phases. Resilience involves ongoing reinvention—being able to adapt, reskill, and upskill throughout our lifetimes. Enduring human capabilities that will be important in the future will include curiosity, creativity, problem-solving, empathy, communication, and leadership. We will need to develop and nurture our critical capabilities, including the ability to acquire new context-specific knowledge and routines, and to be comfortable with technology and data as our companions, along with our human colleagues and team members.53
Resilience and Organizations. Prepare for the shift to teams and ecosystems as organizations transition from twentiethcentury approaches to twenty-first-century models. We are moving from hierarchies to networks of teams, from work being done in common locations to multiple locations—physical and digital. Work will increasingly evolve beyond a focus on process to a focus on projects, assignments, and initiatives. Teams and networks will strengthen organizational resilience and become the critical units of organizational performance and professional development.
Resilience and Leadership. Embrace new capabilities to lead teams and manage new forms of work; move from controlling to coaching; shift from an almost singular focus on costs and efficiency to an expanded view of growth, innovation, value, and meaning; accept dynamic ongoing change; and gain a new level of comfort with technology and data, ambiguity and risk, and people and machines. Leadership resilience will be empowered as leaders continue to experience the shift from managing through control and direct supervision to managing with increased coaching, design, influence, and inspiration.
Part III: Growth (Chapters 8, 9, 10)
Growth and Individuals. Embrace adaptation and a growth mindset. Develop and curate a portfolio of experiences and the range of human skills and capabilities that will be essential in 100-year, multistage lives.54 Build the skills to thrive in teams; drive your own development; and integrate combinations of education, work, and personal pursuits throughout your life.
Growth and Business. Focus on creating new value and augmentation—not on replacement and automation. Redesign jobs and redefine work for cost, value, and meaning for customers, the workforce, and the enterprise. Partner with the workforce to build career marketplaces and opportunity pathways for growth and development; and design ways of working and workplaces integrating our personal and professional lives and accessing talent and capabilities from anywhere.
Growth and Society. Rethink and reset education, labor regulations, job transitions, and ethics to empower the future of work in communities and regions. Question whether our social and public institutions and programs reflect our values as citizens, communities, and societies, especially as we face technological, social, and political changes, including recent movements in the United States concerning racial equity and inclusion. Recognize the impact of work, workforce, and workplace design and regulation on our lives and on the future of local communities and our shared global environment.
What Lies Ahead To help make sense of the rapidly changing world of work around us, this book is organized in these three parts: opportunity, resilience, and growth.
Part I is dedicated to discovering opportunity in the midst of turbulent change. The chapters explore the shifting dynamics in how machines and people work together; who will do the work; and where will work be done.
Part II explores how to build long-term resilience as we plan for many careers, organizations promote teams and networks, and leaders extend their roles as coaches and designers.
Part III offers playbooks—integrating the insights we have explored—to guide individuals, businesses, and societies preparing for the changes ahead.
By exploring new mental models—such as people and machines working in tandem, 100-year lives with multichapter careers, the need to redesign jobs and redefine work, and the importance of resetting our institutions to help accelerate the path forward—we can gain a deeper understanding of how our complex landscape of work is evolving. Individuals can decide how to protect their livelihood while businesses and public institutions can consider how they can lead and support workforces to thrive in twenty-first-century careers and work.
Notes
1 1 Coelho, Paulo. “A Quote from The Devil and Miss Prym.” Goodreads, n.d. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/62867-when-we-least-expect-it-life-sets-us-a-challenge.
2 2 Slaughter, Anne-Marie. “Forget the Trump Administration. America Will Save America.” The New York Times, March 21, 2020.
3 3 Wall, Mike. “NASA Chief Orders Agency Employees to Work from Home amid Coronavirus Pandemic.” Space.com, March 18, 2020. https://www.space.com/nasa-employees-work-home-coronavirus-pandemic.html.
4 4 Albergotti, Reed, and Faiz Siddiqui. “Ford and GM Are Undertaking a Warlike Effort to Produce Ventilators. It May Fall Short and Come Too Late.” The Washington Post, April 4, 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/04/ventilators-coronavirus-ford-gm/.
5 5 Slaughter, “Forget the Trump Administration.”
6 6 “Forces of Change: The Future of Work.” Deloitte Insights, n.d. https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/insights/us/articles/4322_Forces-of-change_FoW/DI_Forces-of-change_FoW.pdf.
7 7 Slaughter, “Forget the Trump Administration.”
8 8
