don’t need absolute answers. But what you do need, like me, is a point of view, a basic idea of what the hard facts of the future are, and a way of thinking about the future which has some kind of internal cohesion, which resonates with who you are and what you believe. You and I, and my children, and others who are important to us, need to grasp the future of work because we have to prepare ourselves, and we have to prepare others.
To understand better these profound changes, I began my journey with the goal of discovering, with as much fine-grained detail as possible, how the future of work was likely to evolve. I was interested in day-to-day details like: What will friends, my children and I be doing in 2025? How will I be living my working life at 10.00 in the morning? Who will I be meeting for lunch? What tasks will I be performing? Which skills will be in the ascendant and most valued? Where will I be living? How will my family and friends fit with my work? Who will be paying me? When am I going to retire?
I also wanted to discover more about whether in the future our thoughts and aspirations could change. Questions like: What will be going on in my working conscious in 2025? What sort of work will I be aspiring to? What will be my hopes? What will keep me awake at night? What do I want for myself, and those who come after me?
These are the day-to-day events and fleeting moments of thoughts and aspirations that will influence the working lives of you and your colleagues, and those of your children and friends. These are important questions since it is from this fine-grained detail that our daily working lives are constructed.
I soon discovered that while, on the face of it, these are relatively simple questions, in reality the answers are not straightforward. At an early stage of this journey it began to dawn on me that you couldn’t describe your working future simply as a straight line from the past into the present, and then on to the future. Instead, I began to see the future as a set of possibilities, a number of ways forward, and the opportunity to travel on different paths. But the question remained of how best to draw these possibilities and different paths.
My mother is a great maker of patchwork quilts. As a child, I remember her assembling fragments of material over many years – material she had used earlier, or which had been donated by friends, or which she had bought. Over the years the height of the material scraps in the patchwork box increased, and every couple of months my mother would take them out and look at them closely.
What she was looking for was a pattern that she could discern from the pieces. She was looking for the pieces that would naturally fit together to create a pattern that made sense. Once she had decided which to keep and which to discard, she set about arranging those pieces she kept. She moved the pieces this way and that, until she decided how best to assemble them into the quilt. At this stage she made a rough layout on the floor of the bedroom, and then began the long task of making the first rough stitches to hold the pieces together. Once this had been done, and she had made any final changes to the location of the pieces, she set about the laborious task of hand-stitching them together.
I am reminded of my mother, and her construction of the quilt from the many pieces of material, as I craft this book about the future of work. It is a book that I hope will be uplifting without being ridiculously positive and Pollyanna-ish, and illustrative without being constraining. In the crafting of this book I have followed the same path my mother took as she fashioned the patchwork quilt. I have, over the years, kept many scraps of ideas and borrowed some from friends. More recently, I have assembled a wise crowd of people from across the globe to bring their insights and ideas. Then, having gone about the process of looking for patterns, I decided what to discard and what merited keeping. I have, like my mother before me, embarked on the long period of hand-stitching the pieces together to form a patchwork of the future of work. This book is the result of that long process.
I believe passionately that the scale of change we are going through in this decade puts into stark relief many of the assumptions we have held dear about what it takes for us to be successful. It is perilous and foolhardy to ignore these changes. It is also naive to imagine that what worked for the past will work for the future. To do so puts in jeopardy our own future and the future of those we care about. Predicting the future of work, and crafting a working life that brings happiness and value, are two of the most precious gifts you can give yourself and those you care about. Don’t leave it too late to make the decision to think and to act.
Introduction
Predicting The Future Of Work
Why now?
What we are witnessing now is a break with the past as significant as that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when parts of the world began the long process of industrialisation. What we know as work – what we do, where we do it, how we work and when we work – has already changed fundamentally in the past when the Industrial Revolution transformed work, beginning in Britain between the late eighteenth (around 1760) and early nineteenth centuries (around 1830).1 It seems likely that the period we are moving into will see as fundamental a transformation – although of course the outcome is much less clear.
To get an idea of the velocity of the changes that can sweep away so many assumptions, consider the period between 1760 and 1830. Within a period of less than 100 years – that’s only four generations – there occurred a fundamental and irreversible shift which changed the experiences of every worker in the UK, and was to be felt across the world as industrialisation spread first to Europe and then to North America. Before that time work – whether it be ploughing the fields, weaving of wool, blowing of glass or throwing of pottery – was an artisanal activity engaged with largely in the home, using long-held and meticulously developed craft skills. From the late eighteenth century onwards these craft skills began to be transformed as the manufacturing sector was developed and began to transcend the limits of artisanal production.
Looking back with hindsight and a gap of over 200 years, we can learn much from the trajectory and speed of revolutions in working lives. The Industrial Revolution began gradually and relatively slowly to change working lives. The economic growth throughout this period was little more than 0.5% per person per year, and while we now think of the ‘dark satanic mills’ as being the key motif of this time, in fact textile production often constituted less than 6% of total economic output within Britain. In reality, the growth in total productivity during this apparent revolution was in fact slow by modern standards.2 This was an evolution rather than a revolution; gradual rather than progressing through breakthrough changes; and based on continual and small changes rather than a series of massive innovations. For those living through this period it would not have been seen as a time of immense change, and it is only when the broad sweep of history is viewed that the extent of change can be put into perspective.
The core of any revolution in the way that work gets done is inevitably changes in energy. When true innovations occur in the production of goods or services, they are the result of a capacity to unearth new sources of energy or to apply existing sources in a radically more efficient way. The first Industrial Revolution, although it had an impact on working lives, was not an energy revolution. The movement that took place at this time, from farming to fabrication, was not inherently innovative; the artisan remained the primary source of productive activity. That’s reflected in the modest growth rates throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The real revolution in the working lives of people began to occur in the mid to late nineteenth century, when British scientists, unlike their European contemporaries, began to be experimental. It was this culture of innovation, with the ideas of organisational and technological restructuring rapidly picked up by entrepreneurs and industrialists, that transformed working lives. It enabled a new class of practical scientists to emerge and to excel.
This was the emergence of the engineering class and of a culture of innovation.3 The real shift in work came with a change in energy – the power of steam that was rapidly integrated into the embryonic factory system. This transformation came as the consequence of a new energy source in the shape of steam, with a new spirit of enterprise and innovation. It was only when engine science combined with