Feb. 01, 2020 I recently stumbled upon an article by Sam Lessin where he makes efforts to provide a reality check on how the future of work might evolve and what sort of implications that could have for North Americans and the rest of the globe. Certainly some stark realities of trends that are already happening in various industries. And as I dig deeper into how technology is disrupting Proptech and Contech, Sam’s theories seem quite reasonable.
Long multi-page articles always take time to read. I took the liberty to capture the highlights as I distilled what he wrote and how this might effect the industries I navigate within. I felt is observations, conclusions and projections did have a realistic basis. I wanted to capture share my notes of the article and share these.
Sam begins with drawing a parallel from the concepts of from manufacturing and applies this to the truths and ideas of knowledge work. These concepts ring some truth, and we may want to take stock of how we might approach the next decade.
(1) Dropping cost of measurement – you systematically cannot improve what you cannot measure. (ie. data capture). Now the pursuit is “inexpensive data” and using it to understand the patterns of work and optimizing people and process. There is a shift of work from abstract boxes to a measured process.
(2) Consolidating Knowledge – Document processes and techniques used to carry forth the employers business. Something I have been striving to do for some time in any occupation or venture that I touch. The customer wants consistency, not individual creativity with the base-line service offering.
(3) Improving Effectiveness through Automation – shift the work away from highly-standardized repetitive tasks toward more human-orientated tasks.
(4) Dropping Communication Latency and Technical Cost - more efficient to deal with unstructured collaboration…eliminate the need to communicate to complete a task. Reduce human time and attention.
(5) Improving Identity and Portable Reputation – clarity around people’s strengths and what others think of their track record allows an employer to better slot and focus the employee. And provides greater trust for remote working.
(6) Move toward Remote Intellectual Work – no detail required here…except software is key to this.
(7) Move Toward Asynchronous Queue-based Ranked “Piecemeal” Work – essentially self-organizing around prioritization of tasks. Unfortunately, this will futher the gap from those that can and those that cannot understand how to align themselves around prioritites.
(8) Automation of Fully Standardized Tasks – work tasks will be re-shuffled so that humans are involved where judgment and decision making will have to be re-configured. Machines can stamp out the rest.
(9) Extreme Variabilization of Labor – no “career paths”, but rather increments of work. Except for creative and entrepneurship. The confluence of tech and human judgment where humans will be contracted on-demand with time and focus will be algorithmically prioritized.
(10) Structural Shift of Knowledge -Power to Employers and Away from Employees – standardization of tasks and centralization of knowledge will benefit employers. The knowledge edge of employees will be eroded and the pool of people who can do a task will expand. Workers will have difficulty owning the knowledge they learned in school or accumulated on the job. Employers can access global workforces.
(11) Empowerment of High-skill over Low-skill – lower cost countries who do a lot of the outsourced work may actually have their source of work eradicated through automation, which creates opportunity for higher-skilled, more expensive workers. The value of culture and judgment will play a greater role in which human is getting what work. It becomes more efficient to hire higher-skilled workers at a higher cost.
(12) Employee services become self-service – ie. continuing education and skills development, the employee will have to look more to themselves to invest in themselves as lifelong careers switch to jobs of “stints” and tasks.
(13) Expansion of the Physical Landscape of Inequality – the middles of countries will be hollowed out, and extreme inequality focused in cities like San Francisco. The wealthy could possibly cluster into a handful of appealing places to live. Inequiltiy could spill over into other cities…the best and brightest stay put, which could create additional tensions.
The way we live and work today will continue to be challenged. The foundational technologists will stand-out from the implementers. The short term could be disruptive, but in the long term, the economy could expand and we have better jobs and better lifestyles. But in the meantime, there will be dramatic migration into city centers and the construction of a lot of high-rise buildings. And with that, we need to use technology within design and engineering to support a deeper level of automation and robotics to execute building projects. There is no reason to continue with the work methodologies and massive human input as we have up until now.
Steffen Waite
(1) Sam Lessin Article: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/the-key-themes-that-matter-for-the-future-of-work