Fjord Trends look back: 2021
Fifteen years of making business and design predictions, but how do our thoughts through the years seem to us now?
Fjord Trends 2022 will be our fifteenth report into what’s coming up for the business and design industries. To celebrate this milestone, we’ve asked some of our leadership team to pick out one trend from each of the past 15 years, to share their own thoughts and to ponder how things have panned out since. This is part fourteen.
This episode our Fjord Trends 2022 countdown is all about 2021 and it’s written by Joseph Fan, Experience Strategy and Design Lead, Accenture Interactive, China.
As with everything, context is king, so let’s set the scene for the year leading up to launch, with some cultural references that might take you right back. Let’s be honest: it wasn’t a great year. It included Australian bush fires, a stock market crash, and, of course, the extraordinary spread of Covid-19 around the world. We welcomed distractions in the form of Billie Eilish cleaning up at the Grammys, “Parasite” making history at the Oscars, Netflix sensation “Tiger King” dominating lockdown viewing, and John Krasinski launching “Some Good News” to keep our spirits up.
Over to Joseph…
My favorite trend: Sweet teams are made of this
By Joseph Fan
What we said back then…
A reframing of our relationship with work, working hours and workspace has been underway for some time, driven by technology. This shift accelerated in 2020, creating a need for organizations to rethink not just the employee experience but the reciprocal employer/employee contract.
“Sweet dreams (teams) are made of this…who am I to disagree”
As the song lyric suggests, a shift in team dynamics is happening now — one which no-one can dispute is taking place. As technology and the pandemic combine to reframe how each of us see the nature of our work, our working hours, and even our working space, organizations are also forced to rethink what does a “team” mean in this age, and what is it really made of?
I must confess, as a secret introvert whose ideal vacation involves sitting on a Hawaiian beach all alone, with a thriller novel in hand while jazz from the 1920s play in the background, I wasn’t too bothered by the shift from working in teams in the office to working in solitude at home. Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy going to offices and have live discussions and see my colleagues’ facial expressions in the flesh (rather than via my laptop screen). I do enjoy those casual encounters at the elevator bank or pantry during lunch hours or coffee breaks. It’s just that when the pandemic forced all of us to change how we work as individuals and as a team, I was able to adjust rather quickly, without experiencing much stress or difficulty. I was handling it fairly well. Or so I thought.
I started my career in a world where physical written slides, fax machines, and carefully crafted voice messages were still a thing when conducting business among teams. Those were the days when there was indeed a “cost” of communication — meaning most pieces of communication took time to craft, and people did take more time to write a shorter letter, with respect for recipients’ time. As I reflect on those early days, I had the fortune to be trained in determining which communication methods would work best for different objectives, situations, or types of team. That is why I thought I was able to handle the shift well — I was already trained in this. What I failed to realize is that while the effectiveness of our communication is important, the emotional bond of the teams is even more critical. In the past, we relied on happy hours or outings to connect in a casual and enjoyable manner. Now, we have the same need to connect, but we don’t really know how. Because we were not trained on this. At least I wasn’t.
In a way, I was forced to learn something new — kind of like learning a new sport. A sport where I had to use muscles I never knew existed. And I also had to learn how to learn a new sport. With a lot of trial and error, I was finally able to find a balance, and I was at least good enough at this sport to get on the court. But imagine: if it was this difficult for one individual, how difficult would it be for an organization? More importantly, how much of a differentiation and competitive advantage could this be for an organization to attract, keep, and motivate top talent?
Referring to the song, I don’t believe we need to “travel the world and the seven seas” to know that “everybody’s looking for something”. We know what humans have always needed — a sense of belonging in tribes they are proud of. To do this in a world that has forever been changed by technology and a pandemic is a new sport. The game is on to see who can excel in it.
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