At our Future of Talent Retreat this past weekend, I laid out the five trends I see as dominating the next decade or more. In an age of mechanization, such as the 20th century, we glorified all things mechanical and we developed hierarchal and mechanistic systems to govern the creation of those mechanical things. This was necessary to enable us to develop the technology and tools that make possible a new level for mankind to scale.
To help us achieve this new level, there are lessons to be learned from the pre-urban era when mankind lived in villages. Villages were collaborative – everyone contributed or people did not eat or have shelter. The village was a collective and few if any were “in power.” Many had no leaders or only leaders when needed. Many had rotational leadership. The village was also the source of learning through the mentorship of older members, the sharing of stories and legends, and through apprenticeships. Oral traditions, dance and song passed along history and illustrated correct behavior. The village was a place where privacy mostly disappeared and everyone knew your name. . . and more.
As we build a new ecosystem based on relationships and on integrating diverse ideas into services and products, I see the modern re-creation of something very village-like. We will see smaller and flatter organizations emerge much more focused on integrating people and their ideas into collective systems that deliver unique services or products. Brand management will morph into developing and nurturing relationships. Learning will be our responsibility at many levels and all the time. The urban neighborhood will re-emerge as the equivalent of the village, augmented by the virtual world (and maybe someday absorbed into it).
These are the five leading edge trends that are driving this and that will continue to grow and challenge the mechanistic world view.
1. Social Business. The core concept is that business is about relationships between sellers, buyers, suppliers and others at a deeper and more personal level than today. Rather than contracts and intellectual property, success requires trust, transparency and evolving such mundane things as new payment schemes (micro-payments, shared revenue, trading) as well as systems to capture ideas and forums for collaborative discussion and idea generation. The Internet makes it possible to expand relationships into virtual space and we are going to be inventing how to make this more effective for some time.
Social leadership. The CEO should be one of many leaders. I agree with Joe Raelin at Northeastern University who has developed the concept of the leaderful organization where leadership is concurrent, collaborative, compassionate, and collective. The idea of “the buck stops here” and other such notions will become less common and there will be more sharing of responsibility and decision making because of the complexity of problems and the impossibility of one person understanding all the variables.
Transparency, analytics, and privacy. There are no secrets. The internet collects, aggregates, maintains and opens up the present and the past. Analytical tools are growing powerful and can penetrate where laws and social traditions don’t. Our old notions relied on keeping secrets because we could. We had woefully inadequate methods of communication and could rely on distance as a further buffer. We will develop social structures and shared methods to redefine privacy and it will be based on authenticity and access.
Redefining the concept of the employee in the era of co-creation. Open relationships and social business requires us to redefine as well the notion of employee. The concept of employee is a social construct rising to majority status only in the last century. Prior to that, most people were independent worker, owners of their own farms or small businesses, and not dependent on a corporation. Today contingent workers are rapidly approaching the majority of all workers and most of us will be a part-time employee, consultant, contractor, or occasional employee at some stage in our life. If we maintain the notion of a regular employee, who should they be? What would motivate them to be one? How do we pay for co-creation or co-ideation when it is more and more unacceptable for a corporation to own our inputs. Why shouldn’t we be our own masters?
Working smarter: weaving together knowledge from data, people, and life. Accumulating experience, making mistakes, getting information, experimenting are collectively what we call learning. We learn constantly and tools such as smart phones and tablets means we have devices at our fingertips to facilitate this all the time. Over the next decades schools will change, morph, and become places where we learn in collective activities, share experiences and try our new ideas. Rather than act as “filling stations” for our brains, they will be the hubs of discourse and sharing.
We will be fleshing out these concepts, adding white papers and videos about them, interviewing people, and testing the concepts over the next year. Come visit us at www.futureoftalent.org. You might enjoy one of our webinars, Retreats or regional events. For more details see our website.
