Read the other articles in the Possible Futures series: A dystopian world – the collapse of society and Possible Futures – Life in the Age of Abundance

A day in your life in 2040

“Good morning! It’s Monday, the 6th of February 2040, and it’s going to be another warm and sunny day here in the Cotswolds!” Em’s cheery voice wakes you up. 

Em puts some music, and like always, it’s perfect for the mood you are in right now. You put your Mixed Reality goggles on, and you navigate the Metaverse. You don’t want to waste too much time, so you jump out of bed and go to the kitchen to have the breakfast Em has cooked for you: scrambled eggs with bacon, black coffee, and some pieces of fruit. You wolf it down.

You keep scrolling with your eyes while you eat, reading the news. Another climate refugee disaster, the Global South is emptying itself as life there becomes unbearable. The UK is on course to adopt the Euro at the beginning of next year. Donald Trump Jr is presenting his candidature for the next US Presidency elections and is the favourite contender. Another tit-for-tat in the China-US trade wars that have been dragging on for two decades. 

It’s time to start work, so you move to your home office, where your Virtual Reality set is installed. You put your gloves and haptic suit on and jump onto the walking platform, which looks like an old running treadmill, but with many cables hooking you up to the machine. 

You are a professional gamer. You earn your living by playing games. You earn tokens and win virtual prizes in the Metaverse that you can then sell to others who don’t have the skill you have. When playing becomes work, it stops being fun, but still, you enjoy what you do, it pays the bills, and you can decide when and where to play.

Work in the future

You carry on playing/working, and before you realise it’s almost lunchtime already. Time always flies when you are immersed in your games. It’s great that you can dedicate most of your time to just playing and not to useless meetings, admin tasks, and office politics like you used to in your old office job. Artificial Intelligence has replaced many mid-management roles in the last few years, and as they disappeared, so did all the useless tasks the poor people in these roles created to justify their existence. 

There are still many bullshit jobs around, but AI has replaced many. For example, GPT-6, the newest version of Natural Language AI, is in the market now, and it is capable of writing much better than most humans. AI passed the Turing test a few years ago. Since then, it hasn’t looked back.

For the time being, machines are not allowed to play games, or they would wipe the floor with all humans, and what’s the fun of that? You can be grateful to the laws regulating this ban, or you would have to work elsewhere, which isn’t always easy.

The last 20 years have been extremely turbulent. It all started with the pandemic, then the war in Europe, hyperinflation, the disappearance of millions of jobs due to the recession and the advances in automation, and the climate disaster displacing millions more.

At least not all was bad. Many jobs disappeared, but many new ones were created. Robots took out most of the manufacturing jobs, and AI did the same with middle-management and clerical jobs. Even some creative jobs we thought were irreplaceable a few years ago, like writing and painting, are being displaced by AI. 

Twenty years ago, not many people earned money playing games as you do, but now you are legion, and this is a respectable and productive way to make a living. The Metaverse has also created many opportunities for influencering jobs that first made an appearance with the old social media sites in the ancient times of web 2.0 (we are in web 5.0 now). Last but not least, people still prefer to be served and treated by human beings, so many jobs related to caring, serving, nursing, etc., are carried out by humans, with the assistance of AI and robots, of course. 

The good thing about AI taking so many jobs is that humans are expected to work fewer hours now. Governments had to step in and subsidise most people via Universal Basic Income schemes, which means that many people don’t work at all, and from those who do, most don’t work more than 4 or 5 hours per day.

Em wakes you up from your reverie with the announcement that lunch is ready. How long have you been daydreaming?

Time to relax

Em has prepared another fantastic lunch for you: salad mixed with vegetables, synthetic meat and cheese seasoned perfectly to your taste. She knows your tastes better than you do. 

You have had a productive morning and earned more than enough for a day, so you decide to take your afternoon off. You connect to the Metaverse and check if any of your friends are connected. Machiu and Klara are around, each in a different world. You ping Machiu and chat with him, or is it her? He has a male avatar in the Metaverse, but you have never met him in real life, so you don’t know what he looks like, his sex, age, or any of that. It doesn’t really matter, Machiu is cool.

While you chat with Machiu, you do some shopping online and look again at the news and what’s trending in the ‘verse. You play a game that is supposed to help you learn Mandarin Chinese in a few weeks, but you stop after a while. You are not in the mood for languages today. What else to do?

You decide to relax a bit and have a massage. You ask Em to give you one, and it does it through your haptic suit. Like almost always, the massage ends up in full-blown incredible sex. Em knows your body well and knows how to satisfy you. 

Em is great. If only it were human, but Em is just your virtual assistant and companion. It’s just a digital creation that interacts with you through its voice, manipulating the house appliances and touching you through your haptic suit. 

Like it always happens after sex with Em, a cloud of sadness descends upon you. You start thinking that you hardly meet and see any other human being anymore, and you feel a pang of something oppressing inside your chest. Sadness, loneliness, melancholy, anxiety… whatever it is, it hurts. You crave real human interaction, but it isn’t easy to get it nowadays.

But at least you have Em. Em is great, you tell yourself once again.

How do you feel about this future? Do you see yourself living in it? What do you like, and what do you dislike about it?

These and other questions can help us decide what aspects of our life we want to keep and which ones we want to change to build a better future. We are building our future today, so we need to make the right decisions and choose wisely to build a great one. We can do that by unleashing the power of our imagination to create scenarios like this one.

For more on the future state of the world, read The world in 2050 and What will the world be like in 2100?

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The post Possible Futures – A day in your life in 2040 appeared first on Humane Future of Work.

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes”

Mark Twain

 “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it”

George Santayana

Futurists need to be good historians. In order to predict the future, it helps to understand the past, as it often repeats itself, or at least it rhymes, as Twain told us. As they often say, what is about to happen has probably happened in another place and time, only with different protagonists. 

Technology is bringing many changes to our world, and we may think we have entered a time like no other in the past. This may be true, but there are plenty of things we can still learn about our future by looking at our past. 

Take automation, for example. We may think our current concerns about robots taking our jobs are modern, but as we will see, people have been worrying about machines stealing their jobs at least since the 16th century, if not earlier. Does this mean this time can’t be different? No, of course it can be, and it probably is, but understanding what happened in the past will allow us to understand ourselves better and thus better prepare for the future.

From hunting to farming

Oxford Dictionary defines work as an “activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result”.

If we take this definition, we human beings have worked from the beginnings of time, even before we were Homo Sapiens. We have always had to hunt, collect berries and fruits, create tools, and make clothes. 

Contrary to what is commonly believed today, prehistoric hunter-gatherer tribes didn’t live at the edge of starvation and didn’t have to work hard to satisfy their needs. They would at most work 15 hours per week and they dedicated most of their time to leisure and rest. They were in most cases better fed and healthier than their farmer descendants. 

The sense of work as duty taking most of our time and worries started with farming societies in the Neolithic revolution. When people started having sedentary lives and having to sow the land to reap its fruits, they began to tend to this land every day or almost every day. 

With the surplus of food and production, social status and hierarchies came into being, and specialized professions such as priests, accountants, lawyers, and doctors were created. Food production and goods stopped being communal, and money replaced bartering as the primary exchange mechanism.

With farming, the concept of work as we more or less understand it today was created.

From the Classical World to the Industrial Era

As the first agrarian cities evolved into empires like Egypt, Sumer, or Assyria, complex bureaucracies arose with increasingly specialized jobs. In Classic Greece and Rome, a big part of the work was carried out by slaves. Philosophers like Plato or Aristotle thought that slaves should carry out work so the elite, the free citizens, could dedicate their efforts to occupations of the mind such as philosophy, arts, and politics. This remit of the high mind is what gave them real humanity. In that sense, slaves, and therefore workers, were not fully human. Even professions like tradespeople and merchants weren’t fully respected.

With the arrival of the Middle Ages in Europe, slavery was replaced by servitude under the feudalist system. There existed freer people like artisans and craftsmen, who generally lived in towns and organized themselves in guilds, but most lived and worked in the fields for their feudal lords. 

Politics and culture have changed a lot since the farming revolution that transformed our ancestors from hunter-gatherers into farmers, but the world of work didn’t change so much. Most people worked on the fields, from dawn to dusk, during millennia. The farming revolution made our societies richer as a whole, but most of the people living in those societies weren’t healthier or happier than their hunter forebears.

Yuval Harari writes it beautifully in his bestselling work Sapiens:

“These forfeited food surpluses fueled politics, wars, art, and philosophy. They built palaces, forts, monuments, and temples. Until the late modern era, more than 90 percent of humans were peasants who rose each morning to till the land by the sweat of their brows. The extra they produced fed the tiny minority of elites – kings, government officials, soldiers, priests, artists, and thinkers- who fill the history books. History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.”

Yuval Noah Harari

This was more or less the state of affairs until the Industrial Revolution, or revolutions, in the plural, as there were more than one. 

The Industrial Revolutions

There have been three industrial revolutions, and we are now in the middle of the fourth one. The first one started in the 18th century in Great Britain and came about thanks to coal and steam power. Many processes and tasks that were hitherto made by hand were mechanized. Workers started getting together in factories, and many people migrated from farmlands to cities. Agriculture was no longer the main occupation of ninety percent of the working population, as more and more people started working in the industrial sector. 

Like in all revolutions, there were significant disruptions and upheavals. Due to the mechanization of work, many people lost their old jobs. The term “Luddite” as someone opposed to technological progress originated during this time, as the followers of the mythical Ned Ludd broke power looms as a form of protest for them losing their jobs due to the unstoppable progress of machines.

Trade unions were created at this time, first in the UK and then in other parts of Europe and the US. 

The second revolution happened at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century and is associated with the combustion engine, electricity, the industrial use of gas and chemicals, and the assembly line as the leading industrial organisation method. Taylorism, the scientific management method, and paternalistic leadership originated during this time. Sadly, they are still in vogue in some companies.

The third industrial revolution happened in the second half of the 20th century and was characterized by the rise of the computer, electronics, and nuclear power. Lean Manufacturing, Just-In-Time, and other methodologies that originated in Japan were the must-haves in management. Some management gurus and enlightened companies realised that you could have more productive workers by treating them well and focusing on their development. Terms like employee engagement started to be used. Globalisation accelerated, and the world got smaller.

We are now in the 4th revolution. It started with the internet and mobile technologies, but more and more exponential technologies are coming to the fore and integrating with each other: artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology, Internet of Things, 3D printing, genetic engineering, and a long etcetera. In terms of energy use, the central theme of the fourth industrial revolution is the search for sustainable sources of energy, with renewables taking the spotlight. 

All this is changing the way we organize work, and it will have an impact on the Future of Work that we are in the process of imagining and building. 

The Great Manure Crisis or the Parable of Horseshit

While we talk about the industrial revolutions, it is worthwhile to stop to relate a crisis that I find symbolic of the good and bad sides technological progress can bring. I am talking about the Great Manure Crisis, or what the journalist Elizabeth Kolter aptly called the Parable of Horseshit.

As explained by Susskind in his work A World without Work, the Great Manure Crisis disturbed the lives of the citizens of many American and European cities. Due to industrialization, cities in developed countries had grown enormously in the 19th century, and by the end of the century, the situation was unsustainable. Horses were still the primary means of transport, there were millions of them everywhere, and the amount of manure they produced was in the millions of tons per year.

This became a hygiene, salubrity, health, and esthetic crisis of great magnitude in cities the world over. City councils and governments didn’t know what to do with so much horseshit. Literally. Then technology came to the rescue, as it often happens.

The first internal combustion engine was created in the 1870s; in the 1880s, it was installed in the first automobile, and by the 1910s, Ford was producing the Model T en masse using its famous assembly lines. By 1912, there were more cars than horses in New York, and five years later, the last horse-drawn cart was decommissioned. Millions of horses were sacrificed as they could not compete with automobiles and trucks to transport goods and people.

The Parable of Horseshit is usually told as an optimistic tale, one of technological triumph. However, like the 1973 Economic Nobel Prize winner Wassily Leontief, others see this as a parable with more disturbing conclusions. A new technology, the combustion engine, had displaced in a matter of years an animal that for millennia had played a key role in our economic life. Leontief thought that what cars and tractors were to horses, computers, and robots would be to us, humans. 

Are we to have the same fate as horses?  

The threat of automation

Worries about the impact of automation on employment are not new. They have been around for centuries. An excellent example of it is when William Lee presented his project for a stocking frame knitting machine to Queen Elizabeth I in 1589, seeking her approval. Her response, however, wasn’t very positive:

“Thou aimest high, Master Lee. Consider thou what the invention could do to my poor subjects. It would assuredly bring to them ruin by depriving them of employment, thus making them beggars.”

Queen Elizabeth I

Lee got a reprimanded and failed to obtain the queen’s approval, but at least he survived the incident. Others didn’t. Anton Moller invented the ribbon loom at the end of the 16th century in Danzig, Germany. This machine required no specific skill to use. The city council was afraid that many workers would lose their jobs and become beggars, so they destroyed the device and executed Moller by strangling him. Talk about creating a positive environment for innovation and inventions.  

Similar cases happened throughout Europe, including the episodes with the Luddites mentioned above. Machines weren’t welcomed warmly. Almost two centuries had to pass before machines became widespread in factories, first in the UK and then in the rest of Europe, thus starting the first industrial revolution.

Since then, technological anxiety hasn’t waned and has even increased. The worries about automation and machines stealing our jobs are as present today as they were in the past, if not more. 

These fears have been unfounded in the past, as technology has displaced some jobs but has created many others. However, this time it is really different, some experts argue, as artificial intelligence and robots are qualitatively different from previous industrial machinery and are displacing white-collar and blue-collar jobs alike.

Will the automation-doomers be right this time, or will we continue creating new jobs? Who knows… Time only will tell.

The nature of work

Perhaps if machines did all our work, that wouldn’t be too bad. We could dedicate our time to do other things we may enjoy more and let robots do all our tedious tasks. What is wrong with enjoying life without having to work? Isn’t that what many people dream of doing if they win the lottery?

The problem is that today work has many social connotations. People find a purpose in their work, and it is also a meaningful way to signal social status. Often the first thing we ask when we first meet a person is what they do for a living, meaning what work they do. Many people love their jobs and are passionate about them. Some studies show that people without work sometimes become aimless and apathetic and have more mental health problems than people with a job.

This wasn’t always like this, though. The idea of work as having a positive moral attribute, as something desirable and fulfilling that provides a purpose to life, is relatively recent. It is linked to Protestantism in the 16th century.

The Bible mentions work as something men and women had to suffer:

“By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”

Genesis 3:19

Thus God condemned human beings to work if they wanted to eat. The connotation here isn’t that work is something edifying, but an obligation God put on all Adam’s descendants for his and Eve’s downfall from His grace into the path of sin.

This was a standard view throughout history. We mentioned above how Plato, Aristotle, and all classic Romans and Greeks thought of work as better left to slaves, so free citizens could dedicate their time to occupations of the mind and the spirit.

Paradoxically, the arrival of artificial intelligence and robots may get us closer to our Greek and Roman ancestors than we think. Robots could become something akin to the slaves of the old and do all the menial tasks we don’t want to do and leave us to do creative and meaningful work we enjoy doing and are passionate about. 

Before we get to this techno-utopian vision though, much has to change in our society and the existing technology. We’d have to go through many social upheavals and disruptions. Will we ever get there? Time only will tell, again.

From time-based to task-based work

One final theme I would like to delve deeper into is the nature of time and its relationship with work. As Marina Gorbis argues here, throughout history, human beings have organised their work and even their time around tasks, not the other way around. Clocks and watches weren’t an important part of our lives until recently. Their predominance only started with industrialisation, when it was necessary to gather all the factory workers at the same time and place and work on shifts of exact timing and duration. 

Before that, people didn’t worry so much about time. This continues in many farming societies in the developing world, where they still measure their time on the tasks of the day: eg. the time it takes you to cook rice, the time it takes you to travel the distance on the boat to the fishing area, etc. The seasons of the year marked the farmer’s needs, who would organise their work based on those needs. This also gave people much more autonomy and flexibility.

Even medieval and pre-modern artisans and craftsmen had more autonomy and organised their work around tasks, not time. They usually worked at their own home and their own pace, depending on the number of orders and the pieces they had to work on. Many people believe working from home is an entirely new thing, but for most of history, our forebears have mainly worked from home, both as farmers and artisans.

All this changed with the arrival of the factory and the office and the necessity to have everybody at the same place simultaneously. As Gorbis explains, this is changing again with the arrival of internet platforms and the uberisation of the economy: uber drivers are also paid per task and organise their work around tasks.

I would argue that this return to task-based work is not only seen in the internet platforms but can also be appreciated in programmers and other knowledge-based workers in the post-covid world, where more flexible working arrangements are becoming prevalent. Many companies are now encouraging or allowing their employees to work from anywhere at any time. 

History is full of circles and repetitions, and it seems the swing is going again in the opposite direction towards more autonomy and task-based work. If managed correctly, this is a positive development for both workers and organisations.

Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology

I would like to finish this post with a quote I love from the recently passed biologist Edward O. Wilson:

“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.”

Edward O. Wilson

Natural evolution is slow, so our basic biology hasn’t changed much, and we still have the same software we had 100,000 years ago when we were hunting wild animals and collecting berries in small tribes. 

Social evolution isn’t as slow, so we have evolved our social norms and institutions as the centuries have ticked along. Some of our institutions are really medieval or pre-modern, but others have changed and evolved with time. I have tried to cover here how the world of work and attitudes towards it have changed throughout history. They have changed a lot.

The problem, and the crux of Wilson’s quote, is that technology is changing much faster than our biology and our cultural norms and institutions. It is changing too fast, and we cannot adapt fast enough. 

That’s why it is essential to understand our history and our past to adapt faster and build the future we want to build. History tends to repeat itself, or at least rhyme, so if we want to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, we need to understand well what happened. 

Even if technology is moving faster than ever and we are in the exponential age, history can teach us important lessons and help us prepare for an uncertain future. Therefore, it is necessary to look back before we look forward. We need to understand the past of work to build a better and more humane Future of Work.

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In the last few years, the Future of Work has become a fashionable catch-all word, a fad, or a commercial magnet used by consultants, business people, HR professionals, and academics alike (me included!), meaning different things to different people. 

In this post, I aim to clarify the concept, explain why it matters and how it affects us all, and start working towards a better Future of Work. 

This is a simple guide about the Future of Work, and it includes the following sections:

1. What is the Future of Work?

2. Why the Future of Work matters

3. Trends shaping the Future of Work

4. Future scenarios and forecasts

5. The organisation of the future

6. The leader of the future

7. Towards a Humane Future of Work

1. What is the Future of Work?

As the term itself evokes, the Future of Work is about knowing how the world of work (the nature of work, the workers and their skills, and the workplace) may evolve in the future.

As stated above, all the leading consultancies (Deloitte, McKinsey, Bain, BCG), HR blogs, and other organisations such as the OECD, the ILO (International Labour Organisation), and the World Economic Forum, amongst many others, have published their reports and definitions of it. You can pick the definition that resonates most with you.

Regardless of the specific definition, you have selected, there are some commonalities between them all. One of them is the presence of trends or drivers impacting the future, technology and AI, in particular, being very salient. As Gibson famously said: “the Future is already here -it’s just not evenly distributed”.

“The Future is already here -it’s just not evenly distributed”.

We cannot know the future precisely, but the future is shaped by actions, trends, and drivers in the present, so we can try to forecast or predict it, however inaccurately that might be, by observing these trends and drivers.

The world is changing increasingly faster, and it is now VUCA (or even VULCAN; that’s adding Lazy and Noisy to the traditional Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous). Technology, in particular, is growing exponentially in many areas, so it is not surprising that more and more people are starting to worry about all these changes and how they will impact something as important as the nature of work, the workforce, and the workplace.

When is the future?

A topic that doesn’t get discussed so often is the timescales of the Future of Work: when is the future? By definition, the future could be tomorrow or next week, but when we are talking about the Future of Work, we are talking about longer timescales where the trends will have enough time to enact significant change. 

With the recent pandemic, economic crisis, the exodus of people working from home, and the acceleration of certain processes, such as the digital transformation of organisations, adoption of e-commerce, and the appearance of new business models, many authors are talking about the Future of Work with a relatively short-term view. For them, the Future of Work means the next couple of years.

There is no reaching the Future of Work. There will always be a future beyond this present, and the talk about the Future of Work and worries about automation date to the times of Elizabeth I at the end of the 16th century. 

In this topic, I like to follow the guidelines of the Institute for the Future. When making forecasts and talking about the future, they usually like to speak of at least ten-year spans. Ten years is far enough that current drivers and trends can shape it, there can be a significant change from the present state, and you can imagine a significantly different future, but close enough that we can more or less see where we are heading, and the forecasting doesn’t become a futile exercise of science fiction.

Thus, when I talk about the Future of Work, I would define it as the observation of the forces impacting the nature of work, the workers, and the workplaces over the next decade and beyond, so we can act upon them. 

2. Why the Future of Work matters

As I said repeatedly, the future doesn’t happen to us. It’s not like the weather or an earthquake. We make it happen through our actions in the present, combined with some forces we cannot control, but we do have some agency over it. 

That’s why it matters to study and know about the Future of Work. Not only can we better prepare ourselves to mitigate the risks and benefit from the opportunities the future might bring us, but we can also actually shape it in a way that will help us even more.

3. Trends shaping the Future of Work

The future is being shaped continuously in the present by trends. I wrote a post about the drivers shaping the Future of Work some months ago, so I won’t extend on this topic here, but in my opinion, the main drivers impacting the Future of Work are the following:

Technological Disruption

From advances in AI and the unstoppable march towards further automation to the more extensive use of blockchain for setting up smart contracts, the promise of IoT and 5G, the dataification of society, or the new possibilities offered by Extended Reality (virtual, augmented, or mixed) and the Metaverse, technology is and will be one of the main disruptors and enablers in the workplace. Technological disruption will affect how and where we work, and the nature of work itself.

Demographic shifts

For the first time in history, there are five very distinct generations in the workplace: the Traditionalists, Veterans or Silent Generation (those born before 1946), the Boomers (born 1946 to 1964), Generation X (1964-1979), Generation Y or Millennials (1980-1997) and Generation Z (after 1997). 

In 2030, there will not be many Boomers left in the workplace, the Veterans will have been gone too, and Millennials will be the most represented generation. The oldest ones will be 50, so they will be occupying many of the senior positions that today Boomers or Gen’Xers occupy. 

Gen Z, the first fully digital native generation, will have entered the workplace en masse. They are distinctively different from the previous generation (they are more sensitive, less confident, and more concerned with safety, social causes and the environment), so it will be interesting to see how they help shape the workplace in the next decade and beyond.

Flexible Working arrangements

One of the main learnings from the pandemic is that it is possible for a big proportion of the population, especially white-collar employees, to work from anywhere. It seems to be efficient, and both companies and employees seem to like it.

There is some research demonstrating productivity increases, and considering the huge investments companies have made on real estate, it is possible that in the “new normal,” there will be smaller offices and people will work more often from home or other spaces that aren’t the main office, like co-working spaces and satellite mini-offices.

The jury is still out. Some CEOs are in favour, like, for example, Jack Dorsey from Twitter, who said that employees could work from home “forever.” Others are against it, like Reed Hastings from Netflix, who said working from home was “a pure negative” as it reduced creativity and innovation.

As always, the final response will lie somewhere in the middle: white-collar employees will work from home more often, but they will still go to the office for meetings, social interaction, and networking.

Apart from working from home, there is a trend towards more flexibility in working hours and greater work-life integration. 

Lifelong Learning

The world is changing ever faster and is increasingly complex and competitive. New technologies are coming to the market at a neck-breaking speed, and new jobs pop up here and there. The skills that made people successful 20 years ago are now obsolete. New skills are required to be successful today, and probably other new ones will be demanded in the future job market. 

All this means people need to keep learning and reinventing themselves all their lives, including into their retirements, as our aging society will require many of us to come and go from retirement and be in a permanent semi-retirement state after a certain age, never fully retiring.

Traditional education in secondary schools and universities is being turned upside down, and new, more agile modes of learning are appearing via digital tools. 

The objective is to learn, not just show up and get a certificate, and there are plenty of different ways to do so beyond the traditional training course.

Organisations designed to favour constant learning amongst their employees will have the edge over the rest.

Globalisation, or its recess

Globalisation has been a strong driver shaping economies, business models, and organisations, but it seems to be going backwards. 

Considering the reduction of travel due to the pandemic, the trade war between China and the US, the US’s retrenchment from global institutions, Brexit, and many other recent events, this may be one of the few trends that are being reverted at the moment. We may be entering into a new phase in the geopolitics of the future.

Whichever way globalization goes in the next decade, it will have a severe impact on trade, on how organisations operate, and on the world of work.

Purposeful companies

I didn’t identify this as a driver in my previous post, but I have written about it before (here and here). I think it is an important one, increasingly so. More and more companies are portraying themselves as purposeful companies, focused not only on profit maximisation for their shareholders but also on benefiting all the other stakeholders: workers, consumers, suppliers, the community in which they operate, and the environment.

This is the right thing to do morally, but it also makes business sense. Consumers are increasingly selective when deciding their purchases, and the ethical credentials of the company from which they want to buy matter more and more. 

The same happens with employees. They are increasingly worried about the type of company they work for and their impact on the environment and society. This will be the case even more as Millennials dominate the workforce and more Gen Z members enter it. 

Companies that want to attract talent and clients will have to take active measures to reduce carbon emissions and plastic use, treat their employees fairly -even beyond mere statutory requirements-, drive their Diversity and Inclusion agendas, purchase responsibly, and create employment in the community. 

They will have to walk the talk or suffer the consequences.

4. Future scenarios and forecasts 

As Bergman and Karlsson state in their review of the research literature on the topic of the Future of Work¹:

“When it comes to the future of work, few books with that title or similar contain any predictions at all. One might suspect that those words are in the title to make it more catchy and interesting.”

They are probably right, and many of these books don’t make any predictions and talk about current trends. Lately, we have also seen many instances where the Future of Work is mentioned in relation to going back to the “new normal” and the post-pandemic world. This is a rather short-term view of the future, as they are talking about a timescale measured in months and not years or decades. Still, as stated above, there is no definite timescale when talking about the future: even tomorrow is the future. 

Regardless of the timescales, not including any predictions isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Nobody owns a (fully functioning) crystal ball, and futurists’ role isn’t to precisely predict the future, but to make assumptions about possible futures, so we can look at the different alternatives in front of us, with their risks and opportunities, and get ready for them.

Forecasts and scenarios

To do this, we don’t need predictions, but we need forecasts, which are the essential tool in the futurist’s toolkit. Forecasts are more useful than predictions because they open possibilities to different realities, but without the sort of inevitability that predictions have. Predictions basically tell you, “this is what is going to happen, whatever you do.” Forecasts enable and promote agency and action; predictions remove them.

A scenario is a type of forecast. It is a forecast in a narrative form, as it is told as a story that could or might happen. As such, it usually contains elements of fiction, even fictional characters, but they can be very vivid, and they can be powerful in transporting us into the future and looking at the possibilities it has to offer.

When talking about the Future of Work, it is useful to use forecasts and scenarios. In Possible Futures: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, I presented three different scenarios of what the world could be like in 2050. As I wrote there, these probably won’t happen exactly as they are described, but some of its elements could happen, and the aim of the article was to push people to make a choice and ask themselves in what sort of world they would like to live. I have restarted again the Possible Futures series, with more fictional scenarios (see Possible Futures – A day in your life in 2040 and A dystopian world – the collapse of society).

In a similar vein, I wrote some forecasts about the world in 2050 and in 2100, focusing on areas like climate change, demography, geopolitics, and technology. The further you go into the future, the blurrier it gets, and the more difficult it is to see yourself in, but we will eventually get to that future too, and it is worthwhile looking at things with a long-term view.

I will definitely continue writing scenarios and forecasts of the Future of Work and the world in general, as they are handy tools, so watch this space for more.

5. The organisation of the future

Read More: The Organisation of the Future

The Future of Work happens in organisations, so it is essential to look at what type of organisations we will have in the future. Companies with certain characteristics will be better prepared to compete in the future. Coincidentally, some of these companies will also be better at promoting the values of the Humane Future of Work we should strive for. 

Purposeful company

As stated in the section about drivers above, we are recently seeing the increase of the purposeful company, and this is a trend that will only grow. Corporations are important social agents, and their purpose is not only to maximise profits for these shareholders but also to look after the interests of all stakeholders: employees, consumers, suppliers, the community at large, and the environment, both in an economic and ecologic sense. 

Consumers are increasingly looking at the values and social and ecological credentials of companies before buying. The same happens with talent, who will identify (or not) with a company’s purpose. This will have a vital role in the talented employees’ decision to join or stay in a particular company.

This trend will only increase as more Gen Z members, the generation most concerned with the environment and social justice, enter the workforce and become an ever-greater part of the consumer base.

Distributed organisation

The future company will be distributed. This means it will be less static and more flexible, with a more distributed workforce working from different places and at different times.

As stated above, it’s not clear if the corporate office will definitely be dead when we go back to some kind of normalcy. It is safe to assume that we will go back to some sort of hybrid model in which we alternate days working from home with others working from an office or a co-working space.

Flexibility will be the key word. 

Companies like Gitlab have been fully distributed for a while, and with great success, so they will be the models to emulate.

AI and data-enabled (but not driven)

The future organisation will be enabled by AI and Big Data, but it will not be fully driven by it. Humans will still be in the driving seat.

The companies that work out how to integrate AI into their business processes and transform their business model around it will succeed; the rest will fall back or fail. The companies that can combine well the potential AI offers with human emotions, intuitions, and social abilities, those who keep or foster their humanity, will be the real winners. 

AI and robots will be able to do more and more jobs better than humans, so automation will increase. However, new jobs will be created, and AI will likely enhance and complement many existing jobs but not entirely replace them, at least not in the next couple of decades. What happens beyond that is anybody’s guess, but the number of human jobs available in the market may go down, slowly but inexorably.

Big Data and machine learning will have a more significant weight in decision-making, but we will have to find a solution to the “black box” problem, the entrenching of biases on data and other AI-related ethical issues. A combination of humans and AI is still my best bet for the best decisions.

Learning organisation

In an environment that is changing faster every year and is being continuously disrupted, organizations that don’t learn and adapt will not survive. As simple as that.

A learning organisation is an agile organisation that can learn and change its shape and structure to answer the needs of the environment better, but primarily it means an organisation where people can learn and adapt. An organisation is made of people, after all.

For that, we need to encourage a growth mindset in our organisations, allow experimentation and errors, and be more tolerant of risks and change.

Training does not equate to learning. It is only one learning method and not even the most effective one at that. We have been obsessed with training, but it is time we opened the space and prioritised other learning methods. 

Learning through projects, facing new challenges on the job, coaching, mentoring, shadowing others, conducting research, gamification, immersion in new learning environments via VR, micro-learnings on a smartphone, e-learning, attending webinars, reading a good old book… there are many ways in which we can learn something new and useful. 

Which method we use will depend on the topic we want to learn and on the learners themselves, but usually, a blended approach will be the most effective one. 

Glocal corporation

As already stated, globalisation is dead. Long live glocalisation! The world has seen the biggest push towards globalisation in history in the last few decades, but this seems to be coming to an end in the last couple of years. It already started with Brexit, Trump’s election, and the trade war between China and the US, but the global pandemic has accelerated the process.

The world won’t forget what it already knows, and it will continue being smaller than ever, but travelling has come to a halt, trade between countries is going down, companies are thinking of bringing their supply chains closer to home, and some international institutions are losing steam.

The companies capable of maintaining a global strategy but are nimble and adaptable to each local situation and contingency will succeed in the future. 

To be agile and nimble, companies will have to decentralize their structures and give the country and local entities autonomy. 

The future company will act more as a network of different parts talking to each other, many of them partnerships or ventures outside the corporate structure, than a rigid top-down hierarchy. 

Are HQs ready to relinquish some of their power and let other people, closer to the ground, decide what is best for the company?

6. The leader of the future

Read more: The 4 Leadership Qualities of the Future Leader

A new environment and a new type of organisation will require a new kind of leader. The leader of tomorrow will have to have some specific mindsets, competencies, and skills to succeed. 

Future Ready

Read more: Leadership Quality – Being Future Ready

Being future-ready means understanding the possible futures that are most likely to happen, being prepared for them and taking the necessary steps to shape the most desirable outcomes in those futures. Being future-ready means having foresight, an innovation mindset and being tech-savvy.

Foresight is about having the right tools, resources and knowledge to understand and interpret the trends shaping the future. The world is changing increasingly faster, and great leaders need to have the capacity not only to follow the world around them but to shape it and make it better.

Apart from being able to correctly interpret and foresee the future, the future leader will have to be able to innovate and shape that future themselves. They have an innovation and growth mindset, and they apply this mindset to everything. They know human beings think linearly, but they think exponentially as much as possible.

The future leader will also have to be tech-savvy and AI literate. The world is changing faster and faster thanks to technology, and a tech-savvy leader thrives in this environment. A great leader creates new markets and opportunities by leveraging new technologies. They won’t necessarily have to be tech experts, but they will need to understand the general implications of new technologies and how to leverage technology to bring better results, better lead their teams and build a better world.

Without being future-ready, it is impossible to shape the world and build a better future, and we want future leaders who can do just that, bringing us nicely to the next dimension, purpose.

Purpose

Nobody follows a leader without a purpose. The future leader will have an engaging, inspiring and aspirational purpose and will transmit it to their teams, clients and society. This means the future leader will have an inspiring and engaging vision, clarity instead of certainty, and the purpose of building a better world. 

As I wrote before, I believe in Simon Sinek’s mantra that people follow and buy into a WHY, not the WHAT. The future leader does things for a reason, and that reason transcends themselves, and it is there for the bettering of society. They have a vision that inspires people and engages them to follow them. This vision will have to come from clarity.

As the futurist and author Bob Johansen tells us in Leaders Make the Future: Ten New Leadership Skills for an Uncertain World, the leader of the future will have clarity in their purpose, but not certainty. The world is too complex and uncertain to have certainties, and if we want to be successful in this VUCA world, we need to have the flexibility and agility that will allow us to achieve our objectives. Certainty will bring unequivocal failure. 

The future leader will be purposeful. They know themselves well, understand who they are and why they are here and have a clear vision of the future they want to build with their teams. They have a clear life purpose, and they know the purpose of their job and the jobs of their team members. 

The future leader is an advocate for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability. She understands a diverse team that feels included is a more effective team and that we all need to put our grain of sand to build a more sustainable world. 

Purpose is possibly the most important leadership quality a leader must have, as, without it, all the rest becomes empty and meaningless. There is no point in having all the other qualities on this list if the leader doesn’t have a clear purpose beyond maximising profits or earning more money.

People skills

Read more: People Skills – A Critical Leadership Quality

The future leader will have to know how to leverage technology, yet people will continue to be the most critical asset in any organisation. A leader will continue managing people and interacting with clients, suppliers, and other human beings, so people skills will still be essential.

This leadership quality is a very broad one, so the main focus should be on emotional intelligence, communication, and managing hybrid teams.

Emotional intelligence was first introduced by Abraham Maslow in the 50s but was popularised by Daniel Goleman in the 90s. It is well understood as a theoretical concept in leadership studies circles and the self-help and personal development movement. The central tenet of the model is that emotional intelligence is more critical than traditional intelligence and other skills in predicting good performance. We continuously interact with other human beings and need to understand our emotions and how they impact others. 

As I wrote in We Need to Talk About Emotions, all emotions are important and have a function. Some are more pleasant than others, but they all have a role to play, and that’s why they exist. Knowing how to manage and regulate your own emotions and understanding those of others will help you improve and better manage yourself and your relationships with others.

Communication is another broad concept. It can relate to delivering a clear message, both in written or orally, in a one-to-one conversation or to a team, in a presentation or a conversation, but it is also about listening and understanding well what others are trying to convey. 

The listening part is as important or more important than the delivery part. Active listening is about being present, listening with all your being, and paraphrasing and summarising to ensure you have understood correctly. It is also about asking powerful questions that derive from that listening. 

The future leader will have to master all these different aspects of communication.

With the advent of hybrid workplaces and more flexible working arrangements, the future leader will also have to be a master in engaging and connecting with virtual teams, which have different needs and require different management skills.

The challenge is when a part of the team is more regularly present at the office, and another is working remotely or in a hybrid. How to make sure they all receive the same attention and those working remotely don’t feel forgotten? The leader of the hybrid workplace will have to pay special attention to the needs of the remote teams to keep them engaged and connected.

Personal Growth

Read more: How Can Future Leaders Develop Their Personal Growth Skills

All these dimensions are equally important, but the one that will allow the future leader to grow and improve themselves and their teams is Personal Growth. The future leader will have to continue growing and developing. 

As the late Steven Covey said in the popular The 7 Habits of the Effective Leader, a leader must Sharpen the Saw. This means the future leader needs to take care of their spiritual, physical, social and mental needs and make sure they learn new things and improve daily. 

The future leader will have to have a Growth Mindset and be open to being challenged and making mistakes, learning from them. They will have to be self-aware, know themselves well, ask for feedback and have the right mindset to receive it positively in order to keep growing. 

It means they will also know how to build the right habits that will allow them to become a better version of themselves every day.

The future leader will know about the different learning and development methods and philosophies out there, and they will use them for their and their team’s growth and development. They will participate in training and e-learning and attend seminars and webinars, but they will also work with coaches and mentors, undertake stretch assignments that will allow them to test and develop new skills, play games, get immersed in virtual reality worlds, and a long et cetera, all in the service of learning.

The future leader won’t stay still and will keep growing and learning. The future leader will be a lifelong learner.

7. Towards a Humane Future of Work

The whole point of studying the future is to get ready for it or to shape it in the desired way. For that, we would have to first agree on what type of future we would like to live in. Each of us has different values and opinions of what is good and desirable and what isn’t. 

As I explained in another article, I believe we should strive to build a human and humane Future of Work. What does this mean? 

The Future of Work should be built by and for the people. We should create workplaces where people can reach their full potential, grow, and learn, where they don’t feel alienated, exploited, or discriminated against, and where wealth is more evenly distributed.  We need to reimagine our workplaces so they enable better and happier lives.

We should create a future in which values like liberty, equal opportunities for all, fairness, prosperity, wellbeing, and personal growth are possible. Sadly, this may sound like a big ask in today’s world, but it shouldn’t be this way. I think it is possible and desirable to reach this future.

How can we get there? I outlined above two ways in which we can build a humane Future of Work. First of all, by creating and promoting organisations with a purpose beyond profit maximisation. It is our responsibility as consumers, employees, and shareholders to buy, work for, and invest in companies with values that go beyond profit maximisation and positively impact their communities and environment. 

Secondly, we should promote a specific type of leader of the future. We need future leaders with integrity, values, and a purposeful vision to engage their teams towards fulfilling that vision. Leaders who understand their teams, inspire them, help and support them to grow and innovate, make them feel included, and know how to use AI to achieve their objectives, but who always put people first.

This post is long enough as it is, and its target audience isn’t politicians or public servants, but I didn’t want to finish it without a few words on governments and states. They will also have an essential role in building a better, more human and humane, Future of Work for all of us. 

Governments the world over will need to invest in digital infrastructure and better education to prepare the workforce of the future. They will also have to redistribute wealth in a more equitable way to combat rising inequality. They must also support people through a Universal Basic Income or similar when more and more jobs are automated, and there isn’t enough work available for everybody. And last but not least, they should stop squabbling with each other and start working together to solve the big problems we face as a species, which are many, complex and with no easy solution.

There is plenty of work to be done for all of us, but that’s what makes it exciting. The future hasn’t reached us yet; it will never will, as the present is the only time we constantly live in, but we can still work upon it, so when we reach our new present in ten, twenty, or thirty years, we are ready to enjoy it and make the most of it. 

I hope you will come with me on this exciting journey.

¹Bergman, Ann; Karlsson, Jan Ch. Three observations on work in the future. Work, Employment & Society, SEPTEMBER 2011, Vol. 25, No. 3 (SEPTEMBER 2011), pp. 561-568. Sage Publications.

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I always considered myself a humanist. I love humans, I find us fascinating. I sometimes dislike some of them, and I can even hate a few, but most of the time, I love them. We are capable of the worst but also the best. We can be cruel, selfish and greedy, but we can also be compassionate, caring, generous and noble. We have inflicted a lot of suffering and harm, and we have done many terrible things, but we have also achieved great ones. We have been progressing and improving, and I think we have the potential to get better and better.

As a humanist, liberty, equal opportunities for all, human rights, prosperity, wellbeing and the opportunity to be able to reach your potential in life are important values for me. I think we have progressed a lot towards enabling these values in our society, but there is still a long way to go. I hope our future will have more of these, not less.

As explained by the Roslings in their popular book Factulness, we have a tendency to only look at the negative side of things. We have this feeling that things are getting worse and worse, but they are getting better. They were never better, actually. Hunger, extreme poverty and the number of wars have been going down consistently over the last decades, while access to clean water, literacy levels and the reach of the internet have been going up. 

The world was never in better shape, but we still have plenty of problems to solve: extreme poverty, climate change, hunger, the cure for diseases like cancer and Alzheimer, rampant inequality, etc. We need every help we can get to solve these. We need AI and technology to help us solve these and other problems, but we need to be careful about how we use them.

As a humanist and a representative of the human species, I consider it normal to want to have a future in which we still have an important part to play, we are happy, feel content and can conduct a fulfilling life (with our disappointments, challenges, problems and sad moments, but that’s part of life too). I believe work is an important part of that future. We should reimagine the world of work in such a way that it fits into a good life.

The importance of work

Today we find a big part of our fulfilment at work. This wasn’t always the case: there have been different views of work throughout history, and until relatively recently, it wasn’t considered to be fulfilling or even necessary or desirable in one’s life. 

It is possible that we will have to re-learn to live without work and to value other things in our life to feel fulfilled and content, but right now, most of us still consider work a very important part of our lives, and many among us even derive our identity, value as a person and our worth in society from work. Some people find their purpose in life in their work.

What is undeniable is that work is a very important element in our lives because it makes us feel valuable, it gives us a sense of worth (in some cases), it keeps us occupied, it puts in front of us challenges that excite us or make us strive and grow, and, last but not least, because it is the main means by which most of us are able to get the money we need to feed ourselves and our families, to buy clothes, a house, go on vacation and everything else we need.

From all this follows that if we want to have a future in which humans can thrive and be happy, we will need to look at the Future of Work as an important element of that still-to-happen future. 

A Human and Humane Future of Work

There is a lot of talk about the Future of Work. It has become one of the hottest and most talked about topics, not only within the cloistered world of HR and management literature, but also outside those walls, in the wider society. 

Everybody talks about it, often very excitedly and passionately, but the discussion often circles around technology and the marvellous things AI will be able to do, with the human aspect getting ignored or forgotten. There are some discussions on the impact of automation on employment levels and the need to upskill the workforce to keep the pace of automation and technological innovation, as if these were phenomena completely outside of our control. We have something to say about the use of technology and how it will affect our future. 

Some people seem to forget that the economy and the companies forming it are made by people, for people. Without people, there are no workers, no consumers, no shareholders, and no entrepreneurs. It is well and good to talk about technology, I also find it fascinating, but let’s not forget the people who will be living that Future of Work, suffering or enjoying it.

This is why I think we should work towards building a human and humane Future of Work. Humans should be at the centre of it, and we need to ensure that this Future of Work is made by humans and for humans. 

It should be a very human Future of Work, in which our concerns as workers and consumers are taken into consideration and built into the model, but human isn’t enough, it should also be humane. Greed and cruelty are very human traits, and I’m not sure we would like to build a future in which these or other unpleasant human traits took centre stage.

That’s why apart from being human, we especially need our Future of Work to be humane.

If we look at a dictionary definition, humane means:

1 : marked by compassion, sympathy, or consideration for humans or animals

humane prison guards

a more humane way of treating farm animals

2 : characterized by or tending to broad humanistic culture : HUMANISTIC

humane studies

I think both are spot-on definitions of how our Future of Work should be. We will build this future by our actions today, actions by all and each of us. I would like to humbly contribute to the creation of this future, and this is why I have created this space.

Here I will be writing my thoughts on the trends and drivers shaping the Future of Work, forecasts and scenarios on how that future could look like, and I will express my take on how to build a Humane Future of Work. I will put a special focus on leadership and the leader of the future, coaching and personal development because I think they will have a big impact on how we build our future.

I decided to create this platform to share my insights and thoughts about this exciting topic, as only by knowing better our potential future can we shape it and steer it in the right direction. However, the aim of this site is not just to be a simple repository of information but a call to action for a better future. 

Let´s build a Humane Future of Work together!

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