Future of Work: Connect the Forward Dots

The "work is what you accomplish, not where you go" shift is unstoppable. 

Organization of the Future is an organization designed openly for anyone with ideas on how human organizations ought to be contrived in the face of the strategic imperatives of the 21st century. The work is not the place you go, but a live organization and an experiment lab you can connect the future dots. Here are five characteristics of future of work.

• Autonomy: The "work is what you accomplish, not where you go" shift is unstoppable. The future of work will be shaped by changes that take place in the way people relate to themselves and to their experience of their environment and others around them, which will lead to greater autonomy and "self-generated" engagement. This will impact on the way people interact in organizations and how organizations interact with internal and external stakeholders. When the "parts" (individuals and sub-units of organizations) change their thinking, emotional processes, and behavior, new patterns of activity will emerge. This will gradually replace notions of mechanisms of change achieved by hierarchical management and the emergence of more horizontal management structures. Such a shift will profoundly affect the way business will understand employee, team, organizational and leadership functions. 

• Collective Wisdom: New technologies and social media platforms are driving an unprecedented reorganization of how we produce and create value. Amplified by a new level of collective intelligence and tapping resources embedded in social connections with multitudes of others, we can now achieve the kind of scale and reach previously attainable only by very large organizations do. In other words, we can do things outside of traditional organizational boundaries. We blur nations and cultures and we adopt global common practices. Probably the future passes by sharing different tasks and different jobs in different places, at the same time working remotely eliminates transfer times with increase of productivity and work/life quality.  

• Connect the Forward-Dots: Future of work encourages the growth mindset. Fixed mindset refers to those who approach the work with fixed mindset-the assumption that their abilities were innate and not subject to change; while accelerated or growth mindset refers to those who solve problems or target the goals with growth mindset- the belief that their ability level was nothing more than a snapshot in time and eminently changeable as they continued to learn and develop.  The future of talent management is not just to connect the backward dots when recruiting for the skill set, but blueprint and connect the forward-dots based on workforce analytics, unleash talent potentials by encouraging staff to transform from ‘who you are’ into ‘who you want to become’. The work will be driven by the talent with a growth mindset, who show more agility and innovation to propel themselves and their companies forward. 

• Lean on Social Ladders: So the organization of the future starts with a transcendent purpose, which leads to a unique Natural Design, which is that allows the organization to morph as life conditions and organization capacities change to allow a better fit for the purpose. Such nature design also inspires employees to explore their own purpose. Therefore, the traditional career ladder is perhaps too ‘steep,’ biased or crowd to motivate employees ‘to compete for the same position unhealthily’ or negatively sometimes, whereas social ladders can have better open space to encourage them to become who they are authentically, as it’s open, transparent and fluid, and you are what they read, you are what you are pursuing and you are what you are creating; your unique value is in influence, your passion is in energy and your expertise is in the dots!  

• A Living Organization: The new paradigm that is emerging is one as a Living Organization, one that is organic, alive, holistic, vibrant, energetic, responsive, fluid, creative and innovative, in relationship with its environment/customers/suppliers, and above all enhances and supports the dignity of the creative human spirit. What then are the key attributes of a talent who can do this. 

- Comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity
- Confidence in their own sense of self
- Recognize their long-term needs are best achieved when the collective's needs are achieved.
- Make their teammates winners ("Making the other look good")
- Sense and respond fluidly and flexibly to the environment.
- Does not rely on authority, operates from a personal belief in their own sense of things.
- Can determine their personal alignment with the purpose of the collective and choose to be part of it or not
- Can handle complex situations without reducing them to simple black or white
- Can be moved by and learn from the experiences of others
- Trusts their own intuition
- Listens from the Heart when situation calls for that level of connection

-Unite the heart, mind, and hands.

The future of work will remain ‘imperfect’: more stress, faster deadlines, reduced budget, etc. However, as the world of work is more flexible, propelled by technology to affect where we work, how we work and at what time we chose to work. Our reach becomes global, distance disappears and connectivity increases, the future of work is indeed more fun, purposeful, intelligent and thoughtful.

More about Future:
Future of Skill Set in 2020
Three Trends of Future of Leadership
Future of Enterprise Architecture

Posted in: All about Future,Change Management,Connecting Dots,Talent Master