The War on Consciousness- Graham Hancock at TEDxWhitechapel from Ben S on Vimeo.

“What are the changing patterns of work? What are the shifts in perspective and attitude? What do the organization and worker of the future look like?

I’ve been mulling on these questions recently, and wanted to invite a dialogue about it. Below is a synthesis of ideas from a number of reports and articles (references at bottom of post) to get a sense of where we’re at in this narrative and where we might be headed.

From Job Security to Employability

The 20th century pattern of employment featured a steady, permanent job with predictably rising pay. In order to achieve maximum efficiency in that predominantly industrial paradigm, fully anticipated behavior was desirable — Meaning, people were viewed as cogs in a system: not necessarily paid to think, but paid to follow rules. They were designed to be interchangeable, and paid more for clock time than specific outcomes.

That model includes characteristics like:

• full-time exclusive employment relationship
• paid for amount of time spent at work
• common location
• stable hierarchies
• evaluation primarily through the judgment of superiors
• what and how the job is done is prescribed

A sense of security and safety came from the organization, knowing that hard work, loyalty and dedication were a good formula to get you into a lifetime job with regular pay raises, promotions and a good pension at retirement.

In the 21st century pattern, it’s accepted that we’ll have many careers over our lifetime, that movement may be lateral or transitional instead of just linear, and that “job security” will have to come through the individual. We’ll have to take more responsibility for our careers and the direction of our lives through self-awareness and assessment of our strengths and weaknesses, continuous learning, self-improvement, and the ability to be flexible and adaptive to change.

Some characteristics include:

• part-time, flextime, crowdsourced, project-based swarm teams, free agents
• paid to harvest new ideas and tap into community knowledge
• working from home & participating in virtual enterprises
• flattening hierarchies
• peer evaluation, external evaluation, new metrics like reputation, degree of connectedness, and influence in a network
• employees participate in informal communities of practice, work and learning

From Work/Life “Balance” to Work/Life Integration

Work, life, and play used to be more clearly demarcated, and we’d try to “balance” these various identities. Now the edges are blurring and overlapping. We’re trying to close the gap so that “who we are” and “what we do” aren’t different things. We’re rediscovering the need to feel that what we do matters, provides meaning and purpose, and makes us feel that we’re a part of something bigger than ourselves.

Instead of balance, we’re looking for an integration where work can become a reflection of a certain way of life, and also a vehicle for satisfying our personal and social motivations.

The Courtship Between Worker & Organization

The interplay between 21st century workers and organizations is a matchmaking dance, where both parties seek to find an alignment of vision and values.

Firms want a talented workforce whose members passionately buy into the vision. Workers want to be inspired to contribute their best to an organization with clarity of mission and purpose.

Firms want to empower and create value for the employee, so the employee will be motivated to interact with customers. Workers want to feel a sense of ownership and control in how they structure their work, and an environment where knowledge and decision-making is decentralized.

Firms want leaders with an entrepreneurial mindset that can leverage new business models. Workers of tomorrow want to be able to cultivate certain dispositions and skill sets are not necessarily prized in conventional work environments, and the support of a management team that can play the role of coach and facilitator.

Both sides of this equation seem to value personal accountability, growth, learning, and continuous improvement. Both seem to be looking for a people-centric approach.

So How Do We Create this Holistic Human Workforce?

I wonder what the dialogue might sound like to kick off this future-shaping.

The organization might say:

“Ok, look. Things are moving fast these days and constantly changing, and our challenges are complex. We need totally rethink our approach to business and transform the marketplace. We need to figure out how to add value for customers that’s totally differentiable, compelling and urgent. We need to question the very nature of the organization and how it’s managed. And we need a stellar team of people who can make this happen — people with courage and imagination.

Please drop your sense of entitlement — we can’t guarantee you lifelong employment. In fact, we don’t even know if we’ll be here tomorrow. We’re moving forward into a shape and location that we’ve never been, so we need people with vision who can take responsibility for the future. The territory we’re entering doesn’t have regimented work processes and things will not be clear-cut, so hopefully you’re comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity.

Accept total responsibility for your outcomes. That includes managing your own learning, skills development and career management. Be creative, be resourceful, take initiative, throw obsolete beliefs out the door, and be completely receptive to new ideas. Let’s go.”

The worker response might be something like:

“Alright. I’m willing to adopt a self-employed attitude, and assume I’m working with (not for) you. I’ll embrace the fact that we’re living in a networked world, that digital technologies allow for rapid information sharing and communication, and that innovation happens when many of us can interact efficiently across these mediums. I’ll work on my emotional intelligence and ability to communicate and manage conflict. I’ll invest in myself and make a commitment to continuous learning, and seek new knowledge by participating in a community of practice. I’ll face my fears and start the process of changing myself, and value enhancement as well as advancement.  I’ll bring my full Self to the table, and I’ll keep upgrading – my attitude, my craftsmanship, my performance. Support me in that.”

So if we pretend that these are the types of forward-focused mindsets that are defining the future of work, what might the next round of questions be?

I wonder:

What if we treated business itself as a platform to support personal and social learning?

How can we create nurturing, immersive environments for workers to satisfy their dispositions and talents?

What dispositions do we want to cultivate?

How can we develop a structure for lifelong learning, mentorship and development?

How can we create motivational feedback loops to improve personal performance and modify behavior?

How can we create working environments that increase human freedom and agency to make decisions and be self-directed?

What else should we be asking as we move forward?”

Vanessa Meimis via Emergent By Design

“Thus, there is no “proper order” to the process leading to Supermind. Nor is there a “proper tradition.” One may approach from any tradition, but one must have a will to the integral, as that which is plural, cosmically inclusive and transcendental all at once, without the erasure by any of any of these states. Such an aporetic and unthinkable experience can be an evolutionary telos, approachable from any tradition as starting point. As part of the Enlightenment’s academic drive to discover an integral anthropology, we can consider the building of this transhuman/posthuman trajectory through an archive of practices and a phenomenology of experiences, that respect these three dimensions of mystical space as the precursor to arriving at integrality. It is when our language culture changes to a point where we can express these dimensions of experience synthetically and can envisage the aporetic horizon in the currency of communication that we can tell ourselves that we are approaching the gates of an integral psychology or an integral philosophy. Before that, not to see it as an incalculable process aimed at the unthinkable, is nothing if not dangerous.”

Debashish Banerji via Posthuman Destinies

“As I try to argue in the book, but too briefly, the “enclosure” of the world, mirroring the enclosures six or seven hundred years ago in the English countryside (Karl Marx, among others, wrote brilliantly on this subject), spread human misery and vast environmental change, as they spread the market society outward. It is not an untouched “nature” that is overwhelmed in the process, but open spaces together with spaces cultivated by small-scale rural economies for centuries, at risk of eradication.

Robin Hood, the mythic figure, appears in the generational aftermath of a Europe’s first (if failed) mass uprising, the Wat Tyler Rebellion of 1381. Mythic Robin protects an old village society and its rules against the new oppression of the Normans, who did indeed make familiar practices (such as the killing of deer for food) into capital crimes, and pressing villages for higher taxes—en route to the enclosures to come.

Today there are all sorts of nonprofits, international human rights groups, etc., but the enclosures and exclusions (terrorizing and driving rural folk away from vast corporate mining projects in Colombia, for instance) are barely slowed, let alone halted.

We need Robin Hood because he protects the “outside” and the “outsiders.” A precursive champion of Occupy, he occupies the Greenwood, has comrades in the centers of oppression (Maid Marian is the most effective) and the support of the common village folk. He is larger than life but also part of life. Within English language lore, there has been no one in almost a thousand years who is so popular, not even King Arthur or Sir Galahad. Robin defeats the criminalization of poverty by resisting the criminality of the upper classes.

We need Robin also because from an early time, perhaps the 15th century, the Robin Hood saga was re-enacted annually in English villages as a Mayday drama, recalling the pre-Christian celebration of Spring and of fertility for humans, animals and plants alike. Robin Hood and Maid Marian are spiritual beings, Liberation Theology prototypes but not celibate! Marian, the proto feminist, is his equal and his lover.”

- Paul Buhle

“Yet too often, the stance of the designer is oriented almost solely towards problem-solving. Too often, that’s what they’re trained for. The issue here is something rarely considered at school: what do you do when you realise you are addressing the wrong problem, your bounded remit having been the outcome of the wrong question in the first place? This happens frequently in design work in practice, and yet stuck at the wrong end of the value-chain, simply problem-solving, it is difficult to interrogate or alter the original question. You simply have to solve within the brief you’ve been set; you can’t challenge its premise.”

- Dark Matter and Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary 

“A monk asked, “Does a dog have a Buddha-nature or not?”

The master said, “Not (無)!”

The monk said, “Above to all the Buddhas, below to the crawling bugs, all have Buddha-nature. Why is it that the dog has not?”

The master said, “Because he has the nature of karmic delusions”.”

- The Recorded Sayings of Zen Master Joshu