target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">5 He found that, despite their very different areas of skill, they all had one thing in common. What they all shared was a capacity to concentrate on developing their skill for long periods of time. In fact, he found that 10,000 hours is the common touchstone for how long it takes to achieve mastery. That would translate to Jill concentrating and practising three hours a day, for ten years. Of course, Jill does not aspire to becoming a concert pianist or a world-class novelist, so this level of concentration would be excessive. However, to gain real value in the world she inhabits, Jill does need some form of mastery – and at the moment she rarely achieves concentration of more than three minutes, let alone three hours.
The capacity to observe and learn is reduced
It is not just concentrated practice that suffers. When a working life is as fragmented as Jill’s – broken up into three-minute time frames – what also gets lost is the opportunity to simply sit back and watch others more skilled.6 This is important since it is through watching others more masterful than ourselves that we begin to absorb the subtle changes in what they do that can be transformed into our own working practice.7
I notice this in the development of teaching skills. When rookie assistant professors join London Business School they are expected to teach an MBA class in their first year. The experience can be gruesome. They get their timing wrong, the class overruns and the students are up in arms. They fudge their exam rating and marking protocol, and the class loses confidence in them. They fill their slides with hundreds of words and the students cannot read them. The list of what can go wrong is endless. At first, in order to try and make the whole experience less tough we decide to write a list of ‘dos and don’ts’ to help. But, though useful, the list never covers all the challenges. For example, we might have told them to manage the timing of the class – but then found that they concentrated so much on their timing that they forgot to speak sufficiently loud for those at the back to hear.
What we learnt was that mastering the teaching of a good MBA class is a skill that takes many hours to hone. It’s also a skill that has much ‘tacit’ knowledge embedded in it – that’s the type of knowledge that is difficult to describe in the ten points, and is often held deep within the unconscious of how tasks are performed. What we began to realise is that the best way for these rookies to learn was by simply observing others teach – not once, but many, many times, and to watch very, very carefully. That’s not to say this was observation with the planned outcome of mimicry. We certainly don’t want everyone to teach the same. However, by careful observation, these new professors began to learn deeply and to forge their own point of view about how to teach. To do this they had to concentrate, to observe for hours at a time, without recourse to checking their emails, or indeed to marking past papers!
The notion of mastery sits at the heart of the first shift I believe will be crucial for successful lives in the future. The challenge is that often the development of mastery is subtle and takes time. When our working lives become fragmented, as they inevitably will in the future, then we lose the opportunity to concentrate on watching others more skilled than ourselves. When Jill yields to a fragmented working life, she is sub-optimising the possibilities of honing deep and valuable skills and capabilities. Fragmentation means she never devotes sufficient time to move from the basics to mastery, and she rarely watches others with sufficient concentration to understand the often-subtle nuances that accompany mastery.
It is in the intersection between the forces of increasing globalisation and ever more sophisticated technological developments that work will fragment and observation and concentration are lost. The choices we make about how we spend our time, and how we focus our energy and resources, will prove to be crucial to our future success. It is through the shift to mastery that the trade-offs can be made. If not, then we, like the frogs in the warming water, will simply boil. But before we leave a future world of intense fragmentation, I’d like to consider one final aspect of working life that could also be lost – whimsy and play.
The creativity of whimsy and play is denuded
One of the most exciting aspects of the future is that it will provide extraordinary opportunities for creativity and impassioned productivity. That is in a sense what the third shift is about, and that is what drives the lives of many of the people we will meet when we take a brighter view of the future. However, here is the rub. When time becomes fragmented, and when every moment counts, then what is lost is the very chance to be creative, to play … to be whimsical. Instead we demand instant gratification and compressed learning. If you only have three minutes, then the rewards have to be instant and the lessons delivered clearly, fast and compressed.
When time fragments, what suffers is whimsy and play. I remember as a child being enchanted by the cookery writer Elizabeth David’s descriptions of how to make Mediterranean food.8 She introduced me to the ingredients, to their sight and smell and provenance. She took four pages to describe the making of a tomato soup, starting with a trip to the market to choose the tomatoes, then a page on how to skin and de-pip them, and only then preparing them into soup. Reading her descriptions I was transported from the cold of northern England where I was brought up to the fragrant markets of the south of France. At that time I had never stepped outside of the UK – but that did not stop me dreaming.
American readers may have had the same experience when they first read Julia Child’s whimsical cookery books.9 You may recall her description of creating French classics such as Poularde à la d’Albufera – from the moment the chicken is bought at the market, to the moment it enters the mouths of grateful guests. What Julia Child and Elizabeth David did was to illustrate, with good humour, time and sympathy, their own cookery journey, and by doing so empathised with the novice cook on her journey. This stuff takes time. Julia’s instructions for Poularde à la d’Albufera take over six pages – way more than a precise description of the recipe. What this more elaborate, human and emotional description actually does, however, is to connect with you the reader in a way that a ten-step recipe could never do.10
The challenge is that this sort of elongation of time has no place in the three-minute episodes that punctuate Jill’s world. In her world, precise and short directions will always win over the more whimsical, sympathetic illustrations – after all, who has time to fuss about Poularde à la d’Albufera?
Well, you might say, who indeed has time to make Poularde à la d’Albufera, and anyway, what’s it got to do with the future of work? In a sense this classic dish is a metaphor for mastery. It’s similar to a rookie professor sitting patiently as they watch hour after hour while others more masterful than they teach; it’s similar to the hours and hours of patient crafting that goes into learning how to write a report, prepare a presentation or lead a team.
By 2025 the attention spans of Jill and those around her have become so much shorter, so much more parcelled up, so much more prone to disruption, so much more fragmented, that it’s almost impossible for her to develop and learn to the depth of mastery which will be so crucial to her success.
It’s not just concentration, observation and whimsy that are lost in this fragmented world. It’s also play. With fragmentation comes less time to share a joke; less time to work on an idea we love but are not sure how we will develop; less time to play, to have fun times, to celebrate the joys of working. As the working world becomes more mechanised, so the boundaries between what’s work and what’s play become increasingly solid. When time becomes tighter and work fragments, what can get lost is the freedom to play. Ask Jill about playing at work and she will throw her head back and laugh out loud. With every moment accounted for, with 100 emails to be answered and another on its way – playing is way down her list of priorities.
Yet we have known for some time just how important play is to building creativity and fostering new ideas and models. The challenge for the future of work is that the compression of time pushes play out. As my colleagues Babis Mainemelis and Sarah