The Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here. Lynda Gratton
when we feel flexible about what we are doing and free from constraints.11 This is the stuff that play is made of. Play is important because we are more likely to love our work when we see it as play. If you are in advertising or design, you know your play through fantasy and imagination is at the core of innovation; if you are a consultant or researcher like me, your play through exploration and questioning is at the heart of how you create value. If you are a mathematician or a theorist, the play of solving problems is what really excites you. Isn’t the absolutely best work to have, both now and in the future, work of which you can say, ‘I cannot believe that people pay me to do my hobby’? It’s those times you are simply ‘building castles in the sky’ – exploring new ideas, and putting old ideas together in new ways, or in other words, playing. But to play you need time and a feeling of control over constant interruptions.
The challenge with the fragmentation of the future is that both are lost. When you are ‘on’ all the time, what gets lost is the opportunity to blur work and non-work – to get to the opera, theatre or a sports game, events that though playful can give you new insights and ways of thinking about problems. Absolutely the best way to work creatively in the future will be to blur the distinctions between work and play. The most rewarding jobs will be those in which your work is also your passion and hobby, and vice versa.
Our world is already fragmented, but, as we shall see, the combination of technology that connects most people on the planet with globalisation that will see more work following the sun 24/7 can only make this fragmentation more profound.
The forces that created fragmentation
It matters that work becomes ever more fragmented. It matters because with this fragmentation comes the incapacity to create the focus, concentration and creativity that will be so important to the shift from shallow generalist to serial mastery. So we have to understand why work will become increasingly fragmented, and what can be done to reconnect the parts.
In describing working lives in 2025, we began to glimpse the impact that technology had on Jill’s working day in 2025 compared with my own working day in 1990. The exponential growth in technological capacity and developments in Cloud technology enable Jill to download advanced programmes from the web. At the same time, her day’s work is shaped by the avatars and cognitive assistants that support her. But the fragmentation of Jill’s work is not just about technology – it is also about globalisation. We see it as she struggles to join up across timezones that range from Beijing to Los Angeles. She lives in a 24/7 joined-up global world, with colleagues and customers in every part of what has become a more and more industrialised world.
The force of technology: technological capability increases exponentially
Working lives like Jill’s in 2025 are fragmented by the sheer breadth and depth of communication and information that weighs on everyday working life.
What underlies this is the extraordinary processing power that has grown at an exponential rate over the previous decades.12 In fact, this annual doubling has continued every year and has been accompanied by an equally dramatic year-on-year fall in the cost of microchips. For example, in 1975 the price of a single transistor was $0.028 dollars – by 1980 it had fallen to $0.0013 and within the next decade to $0.00002. By 2010, Moore’s law was showing no sign of slowing, and we can anticipate that more transistors will be packed onto smaller microchips for less money and that processing power will continue to grow at an exponential rate.
Jill’s working life has also fragmented as a result of the advanced handheld device she carries around with her. The performance of these mobile devices has grown exponentially with a short doubling time (typically a couple of years). In 2010 a phone contained the same amount of computing power as a Mac from 2000. The device that Jill carries has the same processing power and capabilities as the high-end desktop computer I used in 2010. What this means for Jill is that in those evenings when she is not online with others she is using her computer to crunch the terabytes of data that have poured out that day from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. And when she is not doing that, she is linked into the data beaming from the Mars station to join with millions of other people who are scouring the universe for alien life.
This increasing power and the falling cost have enabled these machines to be capable of ever-increasing feats of power, from simultaneous translation, to the lifelike graphics of Jill’s personal avatar and the way that she has been able to build complex performance models for her clients. It could be that by 2025 miniature computers are baked into every brick, every piece of clothing and every item of food. What this means is that data is streamed into the office and homes at an extraordinary rate. But it’s not just computing power that has fragmented these lives – it’s also the location and speed of downloading.
The force of technology: the Cloud becomes ubiquitous
Jill is able to download highly complex data and programs anywhere, anytime. Already by 2010 most of the regions of the world had a level of connectivity that enabled fishermen in India or the weavers in Tanzania to talk with others and access some information. Over the coming decades this was augmented by an ever faster and easier connectivity to the web and access to bandwidth that enabled the telepresence and holograms which are part of Jill’s everyday working life. Behind this connectivity have been rapid developments in the Cloud. This was first conceived in the early 2000s as an expertise, control and technological infrastructure that would be all-enveloping – hence the name the ‘cloud’. By 2010 services, applications and resources were already available as a service over the internet, although corporate adoption of the Cloud was relatively low, only in the beta phase, and there were many concerns about security.
These concerns were resolved over the next two decades and by 2025 the global range of the Cloud had increased, with the services available becoming ever more complex. This had allowed hundreds of thousands of independent programming teams to develop their ideas, in much the same way that applications for the iPhone were developed in 2010. What Jill loves about the Cloud is that it is convenient, on-demand and allows her to work with her colleagues to pool their resources. Jill does not actually own the physical infrastructure she uses or the applications she downloads. Instead she rents usage as and when she needs it – paying only for the resources she uses.
The Cloud has also created endless possibilities for people across the world to access pooled resources. That’s one of the reasons why avatars and holographs are the norm. To use her avatar or work in a holographic representation of her office, Jill simply has to hook up to the immense computational power available on demand from Cloud computing.
Notice that the fragmentation of Jill’s working life is created by technology in which she has personally invested, and which she uses from her home and the hub she works in. By 2010 the gulf between personal use of technology and corporate use had already begun to narrow as more people decided to invest in home-based technology rather than rely on the technology companies provide for them. By 2010 people had already begun to see their workplace technology lagging behind their personal investment in technology.13 Like most of her colleagues, Jill has made a personal investment in the technology in her home and the technology she carries with her.
The force of technology: ever-present avatars and virtual worlds
In the pre-fragmented day at least you had the opportunity to relax when you where ‘offline’. By 2025 you are ‘online’ 24/7 and your presence is augmented by avatars and virtual worlds. This development had begun in 2008 when Xbox Live launched its Xbox 360 avatars, which acted as the player’s emotive representative when communicating with other players. Gamers began to customise their avatars’ physical appearance, dress them in clothes bought from an online marketplace, and use them to virtually interact with other gamers’ avatars from around the world. Though initially limited to online gaming, the use of avatars continued to expand into all aspects of life, to such an extent that for Jill her avatar is her primary interface between the virtually connected people she works with. Jill has designed her avatar to be as near a two-dimensional representation of herself as possible. In the online games she plays, she has other