The Future of Work by 2020

10 thoughts on “The Future of Work by 2020”

    1. Hi Joachim! Thanks a bunch for, once again, pretty much nailing it along with that lovely conversation on G+, along with that visualisation! Along the lines of what folks mentioned on the conversation, I, too, *love* the fact you have injected the important, critical aspect of play, of having fun @ work, which I, too, think is critical in today’s current working environment to show and demonstrate how enjoying and having fun at what you do at work on a daily basis, has got a number of different perks, but one of them is just my favourite, i.e. helping address what I think is the number #1 business problem from today’s corporate world: employee engagement.

      It may not address it completely, but I am sure it would have a rather significant impact altogether!

      So thanks again for making that connection! Splendid!

  1. 2020, I will be the young age of 51 and I prefer the life where I leave work behind after I go home.
    Work, unlike religion, serves little purpose to the greater good of the individual usually. An entrepreneur sees work as their life and sometimes their religion.
    We need time to play and be young and learn new things on our own time.
    Reach out for something new and exciting and fun and not part of work.
    This of course means making money becomes harder which is unfortunate because you need money to live, at least with other people in civilization.

    1. Keith, what if you start learning new things while at work? What if work becomes more fun, because you are able to master something new, are able to find some purpose, create your own space to fulfill yourself? That’s not SF, it’s possible today. It’s the intersection of work, play, and learning that we need to declare for the sake of future generations.

  2. Luis, in exploring the future of work we must be careful not to forget one thing: it does not belong exclusively to knowledge workers like us. Plenty of research indicates that the future of work will polarise. Yes, there will be an increasingly number of jobs in knowledge work which are engaging, interactive and substantially online. Clerical jobs in the middle will decrease, reduced by technology and automation. There will be an increasingly number of less well paid, more menial jobs. People doing these jobs largely not online, largely not dealing with knowledge but vital to the functioning of the economy are also part of the future of work. And any discussion about the future deserves to include them.

  3. Great post Luis! I’ve had it on my reading list for a little while and today I found the time 🙂

    Work in the future will almost certainly be more fluid and when we are talking knowledge work, be independent of time and space. People will (still) be hired based on their competencies but also on their passion AND their Social Net Worth (value of a person’s social network). Organisations will be more loosely defined and I think that you will see a new type of organisations emerge that are more comparable to ‘think tanks’ than to an eg. consultancy.

    These “companies” consist of hypercnnected people in a networked organisation where they draw on each others competencies and experience in new ways – a sort of symbiotic organisation. Today’s consulting giants help people on changing the WHAT and the HOW that isn’t working – the new type of organisations coach companies in HOW to adapt to new changes and most importantly WHY this chage make sense. This is ultimately also why many consulting projects fail to deliver the expected results.

    To use Adler’s four categories, the company of the future consists of producers and improvers whereas the builders and thinkers become “guns for hire”.

    My two cents – one thing that’s absolutely certain though: The future will not be what we imagine, but the guessing game is always fun and ultimately what makes the future happen.

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