Линда Граттон – The Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here (страница 2)
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 an emerging engineering culture that a new source of energy – steam – integrated into the productive process.
In the fifty years that followed the closing decades of the nineteenth century, a true revolution in work had occurred. The emergence of an engineering class signalled the professionalisation of practical science and the institutional pursuit of innovation. This also saw the transformation of the working lives of people across Britain and later the developed world. Work became more regimented, more specialised. The workplace and the work schedule became more compartmentalised and hierarchical.
This was the embryonic stage of Fordism – the rise of the engineer as the organiser of economic activity, and the decline of the artisan. The layout of a factory was as important as the technology within it, embodying as it did the power structure of the organisation. In this second Industrial Revolution, engineers redesigned factories to make employees fit into the production line. By doing so workers lost their autonomy, becoming simply as interchangeable as the parts they created.
As we look to the world of work we now inhabit, and the decades to come, what we are seeing is the potential reverse of this trend, from hierarchy and interchangeable, general skills to the reinstatement of horizontal collaboration and more specialised mastery.
What is clear is that the current scale of transformation is as great as any witnessed in the past. Again it is powered by an energy transformation (in this case computing power); again going through periods of slower and then more rapid change; and again depending on a new set of skills and an emerging class of skilled people.4
However, as we shall see, this time the impact of the Industrial Revolution is global rather than local, the speed ever more accelerated and the disconnect with the past likely to be as great. It is clear that our world is at the apex of an enormously creative and innovative shift that will result in profound changes to the everyday lives of people across the world.
Patching together the future
Faced with the magnitude of these changes, how do we both make sense of them, and indeed ensure that we and those we care about are able to do the very best they can over the coming decades? I’ve used the story of my mother’s quilt-making as a metaphor for the task that we are all faced with as we prepare for the future. As I attempt to make sense of the future for myself – in a sense to stitch together the pieces that are important to me – I cannot help but be occasionally overwhelmed with the sheer complexity of this endeavour, very much as I suspect my mother must have felt at the beginning of her craft. I wonder if indeed it is worthwhile to try and make any predictions about our working life in 2020, 2025 or beyond, as far out as 2050? However, what has spurred me on is that, the more I have learnt, the more I have come to believe that while this endeavour is indeed complex it is also incredibly worthwhile. It is worthwhile because you and I, and those whom we care about, need some sort of realistic picture of what the future might bring in order to make choices and sound decisions.