more, as the demographic force shows, the generation who will be leading the world in 2025 – Gen Y – are extremely aware of the energy and environmental challenges they are faced with. Perhaps more than any other generation before, they are capable of creating the cooperative and empathic skills that will be so crucial for the emergence of the Blueprint scenario.
Crafting your own working future
You have now taken a glance at the 32 pieces that make up the five forces that will shape the coming decades of your work life. Now the task is to begin to work with these pieces to craft the story of your own future of work, and from this begin to create a deeper understanding of your options and choices.
As you look at these pieces the challenge is to make them your own and from them to craft your own story. Just as my mother worked with her fabric pieces to craft her quilts, so you need to go through a process of filtering and selection. Right from the beginning, there will be some pieces you will want to discard, others that will surprise you and you’ll want to know more about, and some you will fall in love with and want to understand more to make your own. Then, once you have initially sorted the pieces, you will want to look for patterns and begin to create a deeper structure that resonates with your own context and values. These are the actions you will want to take with the pieces:
* Discard: one of the most important aspects of creating a beautiful quilt is to know what to leave out. The same is true with crafting your own story about the future. As you look back on each of the pieces about the future, there will be some that you can immediately discard. It may be that you don’t agree with the data, or that you know it’s not going to be important to you, or that it is something that you cannot imagine resonating with your picture of the future. Feel free to discard as many of these pieces as you wish.
* Embroider: as you looked through the pieces, there will be some that intrigued you and created a sense of wanting to know more. As we take a closer look at the stories of the future, you will see that I provide more detail for each of the pieces and also have highlighted references and resources that you may find interesting.
* Discover and collect: as you begin to put these ideas together and look at them in a more holistic way, you may decide that there are bits completely missing that I have failed to find in my own quest. I’ve had this feeling with my own fabric collection. I can recall that for years I wanted to see the silks of Varanasi, which are legendary in their luminosity and beauty but which required a trip to the upper banks of the Ganges to find them. It took me years to actually make the trip – but as soon as I did my first priority was to take a closer look at the fabrics. I am sure that as you take a closer look at the pieces I have collected, there will be some that are missing and that you will want to devote energy to finding. That’s wonderful – but do come to www.theshiftbylyndagratton.com to post what you have discovered – I’d love to take a closer look at what you have found.
* Sort: I have presented the pieces to you in the simplest of categories, by the impact they have on the five forces. But as you look closer you may find that for you there are other ways of categorising these pieces. For example, you may want to sort them in terms of how much you find them personally intriguing, or the extent to which they will impact on your own future, or by the way they will impact on the region of the world in which you live.
* Look for patterns: in a sense this is the most creative aspect of making a quilt. You have discarded the fragments that don’t fit, embroidered those that you value highly, and sorted them in categories beyond the most obvious. Now is the time to stand back and see if you can find an emerging pattern. The challenge with these pieces about the future is to find a pattern that makes sense to you, and resonates with how you believe your future will emerge. It’s only at this stage that you can move into the next phase of working out the shifts you will need to take to ensure that you have future-proofed your work and career.
You may recall that this was the task I set the members of the Future of Work Consortium. I asked them specifically to take the pieces and to construct a day in the life of someone working in 2025. Many of these initial storylines were negative. They reflected the anxiety and concern people felt as they thought about the forces. As you will see, the major themes to emerge from this initial task were themes of fragmentation, isolation and exclusion. It is these themes we will next explore in more detail. After presenting these storylines, I will then describe in more detail the specific pieces that seem to play a contributing factor in the creation of the storylines.
Once the negative, default storylines had been created, we went back to the original pieces with the task of re-sorting them to create more positive storylines – what I have called the Crafted Future. These show how the pieces from the five forces can also create work for the future, a future that has co-creation, social participation, micro-entrepreneurship and creative lives at its centre.
As you begin to think through your own future of work, do download the Future of Work Workbook I have created for you – it’s available at my website, www.theshiftbylyndagratton.com, where you will also find a series of short videos in which I describe the forces and trends in a little more detail. By the way, whilst you are there do sign up for the monthly newsletter to stay in touch with developments.
PART II
The Dark Side of the Default Future
It is the subtle and unique combination of the many aspects of the five forces that will create the context in which your future working life is lived. For some it could be that technology is the crucial driver, while for others it could be demography or globalisation. However, for most of us it will not be a single force but rather the combination of these forces that creates our context. To understand the many combinations these forces can take, the members of the research consortium created storylines of people working in 2025. Of course these storylines are fictitious. However, by thinking through the intersections and relationships between the forces, these possible scenarios are revealed. We can really begin to imagine how people will live their working lives in 2025.
There is the storyline of Jill, whose frantic and fragmented life reveals how the technology and globalisation forces have created a 24/7 joined-up world that leaves her with little time to concentrate, observe and think, or even to play.
There are Rohan and Amon, on the face of it both successful professionals living in Mumbai and Cairo. But scratch beneath the surface and their minute-by-minute living reveals a life devoid of easy companionship, with little by way of family ties. They are caught in the intersections of a world that is simultaneously becoming increasingly urban, where energy costs have moved relationships to the virtual, and where family ties and ebbing trust have left them isolated and lonely.
In the USA we find Briana, with little by way of skills or ambition, joining the poor who can be found in any city around the world. Hers is a working life shaped by continuous economic bubbles and crashes, and she is the victim of the relentless replacement of semi-skilled jobs by technology. She has also seen austerity grip the West, and the rise of the underclass trapped in ageing cities.
It is through the experiences of these characters that we can truly understand how the five forces will shape our future, and how they will interact, influence and create momentum. Through the eyes of our future workers we can see the paradoxes they face, the choices they make and the troubles and anxieties they experience. Like theirs, our own future working lives will have dark and light aspects depending on our context and choices.
However, these are not uniformly dark lives – working lives rarely are. Rohan, for example, is a highly competent surgeon in Mumbai and has achieved mastery at the core of his work, and Jill has a group of friends, which I will call the ‘Posse’, that brings her enormous pleasure. What’s important about these stories from the future is that they illustrate an aspect of a working life that is missing or unbalanced. It is by considering these imbalances that we can draw a thread from the past to identify their pathway, and to the future to describe their outcomes.
As you think about each of these stories, I urge you to reflect on these questions:
* Have you noticed any of these future phenomena in your own working life