The most important asset for the Future of Work is intangible.
This text is the last one of a series of four articles that I’ve written for Cognizant’s Center for The Future of Work. You can check here the #1 “From Ice to Steam: The Transition of Work in the Digital Era”; and here the #2 “The Elephant in The Room: Climate Change” and here the #3 "How to be less like a Feudal Lord and more like a Data Artisan"
This video from the beginning of the 80s got me awed the first time I have seen it. It shows a group of women from a certain region of Scotland singing what they call “waulking songs”, which are Scottish folk songs used to drive rhythmically the act of “beating newly woven tweed against a table or similar surface to soften it”, according to Wikipedia. Having a musical rhythm to mark the tempo of a mechanical task isn't exclusive from the Highlanders, but kind of a norm in the story of humankind when we talk about the ritualistic aspects of work. They are from the era of the pre-industrial machines, humans instead were who did the repetitive work; a phenomenon that we can observe in different parts of the globe. In Brazil, the washerwomen from the Jequitinhonha valley are an example of this sort of ritualistic aspect of work, on which women gather together to wash their clothes and sing a myriad of centennial songs, lasting through generations, bringing the other aspect of work songs: Besides making pleasant and giving regularity to the movements done by workers, singing also gives unity to the work performed by a group of people, externalizes group consciousness, and establishes an invisible thread that unites them.
One of my favorite writers of the present time, Yuval Noah Harari, argues that what drives human beings to cooperate flexibly in large numbers is the ability to create, spread and believe in fictional stories, whether it is a nation or a corporation. Fictional stories are the core component of culture, enabling social cohesion, connection and cooperativeness, revivified through rituals such as the mentioned above. In the context presented, culture is the premise for work to existing, engaging people in those tasks through a shared language that touches them deeply in their ancient identities. Nowadays we can check our vows of commitment to work through a variety of updated versions of working rituals. Whether it’s the Kanban, the Design Sprint, or the Scrum, or any other agile methodology, it is up to you to choose how your “tribe” will commit to your organization. The widely known figure in the IT industry, for example, the Scrum Master, is analog to the beat that keeps everyone in the rhythm doing the waulking ritual. This figure is the facilitator of Scrum methodology in an agile development team, allowing them to self-organize around those rituals of working production. My point is that work has changed, but humans are still the same on the basics of why they do it.
Nonetheless, according to my colleague Robert Brown, in his most recent report from Cognizant Jobs of The Future Index, Work Culture is the fastest growing job family for the second consecutive quarter. He argues
(…) this surge in postings reflects the growing need for work culture specialists within businesses to help their employees adapt to digital change and acquire the skills needed to succeed in the future.
Culture still eats strategy for breakfast, as Euan Davis has already pointed out. Working in the internal culture of an organization is a premise to thrive in an (almost) post-digital era. It requires a change in mindset, from analog to digital. In an article written by Stefaan Van Hooydonk, our Chief Learning Officer, he describes his experience working with Phillips, to make dozens of hundreds of employees worldwide to understand that the shift from making incandescent and fluorescent to LED lights required a different business model and a different set of technologies. To change the mindset of an entire organization, a qualitative change should come to enable this process of digital transformation, having a digital work culture being set firstly to be successful. This means having clear the aspects of what thirty years of the internet did to the global culture and how it transformed the workforce over time.
For us is clear now that the internet has been built around the premise of the free traffic of information enabling the existence of collective intelligence. This mental model was the basis for most of the digital services we have now, whether this is a social network or a search engine. Now, this cybernetic mental model is being applied to organizations and management methods. In conclusion, to put it very simply, it’s the shift from the One-to-All management model, similar to how a machine works; to the Many-to-Many, more similar to a living organism. Organizations now are being seen as knowledge communities, taking into account the internal stream of information, the thread connecting workers such as the blood in our veins that keeps us alive.
The future workplace tends to be much more like the campfire our ancestors used to make gathering the tribe to tell about the Saber-toothed cat they've met during the hunt, sharing the knowledge on what went well and what went wrong. There’s a huge shift of paradigm in this transition, and the goal of gathering those communities internally is what we would call for the re-skilling process of the workforce, which is a subject for the next post. So please don’t be afraid when someone yells out that “the robots are coming!”, jobs probably will still exist, but in a different way and mainly with different rituals.
