Rethinking Work With A Future Detective

An Interview with Devin Fidler

Devin Fidler is Research Director at the Institute for the Future, where the leads the Workable Futures Initiative. He recently joined our CEO Robbie Allen as a speaker at FutureWork, a forum on future job creation. Devin’s topic: How can institutions adapt their organizational structures for an uncertain future?

Ahead of his talk, we interviewed Devin about where work is going — and about his own job.

A person reading your title might assume your job is to help help organizations predict the future. How do you do that?

We are careful never to imply that we “predict” the future and recognize that nobody can credibly claim to do that. However, it is possible to systematically explore the emerging issues and technologies that are shaping the future in a structured way, and that is really what we focus on. A bit like a detective putting together a dossier of evidence to make sense of something that has happened, we assemble the early innovations, clues and signals that may help give insight into where things could be headed moving forward. Most of the value of IFTF comes from maintaining an environment to have these conversations across many industries and vantage points, and from linking dozens of parallel discussions along these lines to one another.

When it comes to the future of work, what’s a perspective you’re very confident about that few others share?

One area of great interest is work we have been doing exploring the future of organizations themselves. In a sense, modern companies themselves are a technology that was largely developed to manage industrial production. If you were to create a system for organizing people to get things done from scratch today, it would probably look very different from companies as we know them. In particular, software could take much of the role that management structures have traditionally held. We have spun out a company called Rethinkery Labs that is developing these kinds of software-defined organizational processes.

What’s a common assumption about the future of work that you think is wrong?

“Jobs” may not be the right way to think about the future of work. If we were to think in terms of “workflows” the picture looks quite different.

You focus on emerging technologies and organizational design. I’m curious about how the two are linked. For example, our Wordsmith platform disrupts the writing process by allowing one analyst to write thousands or even millions of personalized reports. How do technologies like that change the way organizations themselves are designed?

It is possible to imagine that much as Wall Street has seen the rise of completely autonomous algorithmic trading systems, we may, for example, see the emergence of “self driving companies” that create value with minimal human intervention in even the next few years. It’s very easy to imagine hundreds of applications for automated text generation in this context.

Given its unpredictable nature, is the future something companies can really plan for? Or is it better to be adaptive and ready for a number of possible outcomes?

It is absolutely possible to systematically explore these shifts as they take shape, and doing so gives a much better sense of how to react. The oldest strategic principle of all is “knowledge tends to precede victory, while ignorance tends to come before defeat.”

What’s the most important thing the audience at the upcoming FutureWork Forum should know about the future of work?

It’s not just that work is being displaced by technology, it is also being fundamentally rethought.

As a software company that automates the writing process, we often get the “will robots take my jobs” question. What’s your take on that?

The answer to technological unemployment may not be less technology, but more. Even if we are entering a period of massive automation, there is still plenty that needs to be done that is outside of what even the most advanced machine learning and robotics will be able to do for a while. What if we had a way to systematically identify and consolidate these opportunities, and then to route them to people who are a good match for getting them done, even offering additional training wherever helpful. Building technologies to better unlock and coordinate awe-inspiring amounts of unapplied human potential is in our reach today and can do more than automation alone will be able to do for decades. This is the focus of Rethinkery Labs and is a very plausible counterpoint to the cliched “robots take our jobs” story we are hearing so much right now.