Our Projects and Themes
The universe of the ‘Future of Work’ is enormous, but its agenda has been impoverished by being too narrow, too theoretical and disconnected from the rapidly changing social, cultural, economic, political and technological landscape.
Our rigorous ideation methodology has allowed us to identify productive and essential projects and themes that drive our work. Our agile-infused portfolio management process enables us to monitor, track, pivot, and merge projects as they evolve.
Here are some of the projects and themes we are working on. Some of them align with our products and services, but many are overarching themes in which we are interested and from which we ideate new products and services.
Generative AI and work, organisations and technology
We apply generative AI in the future skills landscape in ways that translate into practical outcomes to help Victoria and Australia gain a leading-edge understanding of the potential impacts and how they can shape the work and skills agenda.
Read more about Generative AI.
The Redesign of Work, Learning and Technology
We bring the Bildung philosophy of self-development to practical life and apply it to challenges in lifelong learning, multigenerational workforces, skills development, First Nations Peoples’ knowledge and creativity, resilience and well-being.
Read more about The Redesign of Work, Learning and Technology.
Inclusion, Diversity and Belonging
We identify, support and train the skills and practices that support diverse, equitable and inclusive work environments. We emphasise cultivating inclusive and diverse leadership as a crucial aspect of its approach. This focus is integral to creating work environments that value and actively promote inclusion, diversity, and belonging. We aim to foster a more dynamic and innovative leadership culture by nurturing representative and sensitive leadership in a diverse workforce. This approach enhances the workplace environment and contributes to developing leaders equipped to address and embrace the complexities and richness of a diverse workforce. Such leadership is vital in driving forward-thinking strategies and practices that support diverse, equitable, and inclusive work environments.
Read more about Inclusion, Diversity and Belonging.
Change Resilience
We focus on equipping leaders with the necessary skills to manage change effectively and build resilience within their teams. This is crucial for navigating the challenges and uncertainties in the modern business landscape. By developing strategies for attracting change-resilient employees, we help workforce partners create adaptive systems that support cultivating change-resilience skills.
Read more about Change Resilience.
The Freelance Economy
We have developed the Co-operative Freelancers Society, a human-centered approach to satisfying freelancers' needs. This initiative brings freelancers together within a self-governing, member-owned cooperative, fostering a community where resources and knowledge are shared.
Read more about The Freelance Economy.
Credentials and Skills
Nurturing talent within the workforce and helping them grow and adapt their skills in alignment with the industry's changing needs is now a priority. Versatility and agility are essential, along with new ways to recognise skills through flexible and modern credentials.
Read more about Credentials and Skills.
Remoderning the Organisation
Our workplaces are, on the whole, the same as they were 50 years ago. Even with the evolution of Matrix structures, organisations are process, hierarchy, and reporting line-driven structures that create vast amounts of organisational debt, lag, and distance the organisation and its people from customers. Process often outweighs the need to deliver outcomes, and structure crushes innovation. As we evolve FORWARD, we are exploring how our ecosystem can be extended and grown using platform concepts and how we can help our government stakeholders use these concepts.
Read more about Remoderning the Organisation.
Understanding the Future through Design Fiction
We are experimenting with design fiction, a strategic envisioning tool for future forecasting, to understand and shape the future of work. This approach will help our stakeholders consider the consequences of their decision-making regarding workforce strategies and help shape policy issues regarding skills and workforce transformation that may have far-reaching consequences.
Read more about Understanding the Future through Design Fiction.
Experience Design
We help organisations develop experiences that will be resilient in the face of change, help L&D functions build experience frameworks in which people learn effectively, cheaply and quickly, assist people and teams in designing core functions, and help organisations experience design where we work so that space and place that goes from a place to work to a place to be. We employ design-led strategic solutions to assist organisations in developing evolving experiences that are resilient to change.
Read more about Experience Design.
Longlife Learning
We create new conceptions and practical applications of long-life learning that emphasise flexible, on-demand, continually updated forms of learning that are deployable into the economy. In this way, organisations and entire industries can address skills gaps not by post-hoc reskilling but by continual overinvestment in people’s ‘transformational assets’.
Read more about Longlife Learning.
The New Leadership
We deliver Made, a global leadership program that provides practical, applied learning experiences for emerging and aspiring leaders that help them build a skillset to face the unique demands of leading the future workforce. Our leadership development capabilities are designed to prepare current and future leaders for the evolving needs of the modern workplace, especially in the context of rapid technological, social, and economic changes.
Read more about The New Leadership.
DAOs, Collaborative Work and Organisations
We are exploring a tokenised approach to our ecosystem and investigating the applications of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) in supporting freelance workers and assisting workforce partners in developing new forms of governance.
Read more about DAOs, Collaborative Work and Organisations.
The New Urbanism Work Lab
The New Urbanism Work Lab project involves creating an innovative space with interactive furniture, worktech, and design fiction elements. This unique environment is designed to provide first-hand insights into workers' lived experiences in a rapidly changing work landscape.
Read more about The New Urbanism Work Lab.
Indigenous Ways of Knowing, Being and Acting
We are driving an agenda that leverages the deep-rooted knowledge and practices of Australia’s First Peoples to reshape the understanding and approach to work and collaboration. This initiative focuses on integrating Indigenous ways of knowing, understanding, and working to foster a more inclusive, empathetic, and collaborative approach to problem-solving and innovation.
Read more about Indigenous Ways of Knowing, Being and Acting.
Conversational AI
We are expanding our conversational AI offerings in collaboration with the Conversation Design Institute in the Netherlands. This partnership is focused on co-designing, delivering, and credentialing courses in conversational AI, demonstrating the value of strategic partnering with global industry leaders to deliver in-demand skills solutions rapidly.
Read more about Conversational AI.
The Secret Life of Skills
We want to find what’s under the surface of the skills narrative and access the lived experience of skills, upskilling and reskilling. The Secret Life is Skills aims to do this. But it isn’t research — or at least in any conventional sense — beyond being a form of inquiry. It blends a range of approaches to finding out — and often not in the ways that methodological purists would find acceptable, comfortable or even recognisable. At its essence, it is journalism — or maybe photojournalism, participative journalism, or perhaps storytelling — crossed with some ethnographically-inspired looking-for, finding-out and sensemaking, blended with material culture studies crossed with a pinch of design fiction.
Read more about The Secret Life of Skills.
