a compass for the future of work

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There is little doubt that automation, by machines and software, is replacing human work and putting many current jobs at risk. How this will happen is uncertain, as an MIT Technology Review analysis of various projections shows a wide discrepancy. For example Forrester expects the US to lose 13.8M jobs and gain 3M in 2018. The World Economic Forum projects that 7.1M will be lost and 2M gained by 2020, in a sampling of 15 countries. On the other hand, Gartner expects a mere 1.8M jobs to be destroyed and 2M created by 2020. We can pretty well assume that nobody knows.

Even the overhyped focus on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics may be the wrong path in the long run.

“When technology can increasingly do anything, the question becomes, what should we do and why? We humans cannot be sufficiently equipped for the future without exposure to the social sciences, humanities and the arts … While essential, STEM as work skills (as opposed to research disciplines) harbor a Trojan Horse. The STEM capabilities required to create technology will one day generate technologies that accomplish STEM far better than human beings. If we’re too focused on STEM skills, we’ll eventually STEM ourselves out of work.” —Quartz 2017-11-22

We do not know which specific skills will be necessary for valued human work in the future. Whether this work is paid or not, is a topic for another post. I have put forth that certain competencies are not easy to automate: curiosity, creativity, empathy, humour, and passion. Ross Dawson has a more comprehensive list, based on three pillars of expertise, creativity, and relationships.

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post-truth

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.” —Ursula K. Le Guin (1929 – 2018)

“Imagination, working at full strength, can shake us out of our fatal, adoring self-absorption, and make us look up and see—with terror or with relief—that the world does not in fact belong to us at all.”  —Ursula K. Le Guin (1929 – 2018)

“Society is at a transition point. Behaviors at all scales have similar challenges: Making relationships that work.” —YaneerBarYam

“Satire is meant to ridicule power. If you are laughing at people who are hurting, it’s not satire, it’s bullying.” —Terry Pratchett, via @ShaulaEvans

“Enterprise software: Built by people that won’t use it, purchased by executives who won’t either.” —@SwiftOnSecurity

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architects of our future

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Stanford Prison Experiment

It has been generally thought in the popular press that the Stanford Prison Experiment showed that normal people act like sadistic guards when placed in a ‘prison-like’ environment. In this interview with Guy Kawasaki, Dr. Philip Zimbardo discusses his 1971 prison experiment, where students played their roles as guards or prisoners and abuses started within 24 hours:

“But on the second morning, the prisoners rebelled; the guards crushed the rebellion and then instituted stern measures against these now ‘dangerous prisoners’. From then on, abuse, aggression, and eventually sadistic pleasure in degrading the prisoners became the daily norm. Within thirty-six hours the first prisoner had an emotional breakdown and had to be released, followed in kind by similar prisoner breakdowns on each of the next four days.”

Our Structures Shape Us

Authority may drive us to do immoral things. German researchers have released horrendous stories of what went on with regular soldiers during the Second World War. As der Spiegel notes: “Newly published conversations between German prisoners of war, secretly recorded by the Allies, reveal horrifying details of violence against civilians, rape and genocide”.  But the societal/organizational structure seems to have been a primary factor, as stated in the concluding paragraph of the der Spiegel article.

“The morality that shapes the actions of people is not rooted in the people themselves, but in the structures that surround them. If they change, everything is basically possible — even absolute evil.”

We may think we will do the right and proper thing, but perhaps we are deluding ourselves. In this report from Science News we learn that moral talk is cheap:

“When faced with a thorny moral dilemma, what people say they would do and what people actually do are two very different things, a new study finds. In a hypothetical scenario, most people said they would never subject another person to a painful electric shock, just to make a little bit of money. But for people given a real-world choice, the sparks flew … But when there was cold, hard money involved, the data changed. A lot. A whopping 96 percent of people in the scanner chose to administer shocks for cash.”

The statement that ‘First we shape our structures, and then our structures shape us’, has been attributed to Winston Churchill. It shows that we become the product of our shaped environment. Father John Culkin, in A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan, wrote that, “We become what we behold.
 We shape our tools 
and then our tools shape us.” This aligns with the McLuhans’ tetradic Laws of Media. How we organize as a society is just another human-created technology, or as Harold Stolovitch wrote, “Technology is the application of organized and scientific knowledge to solve practical problems.” 

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the square and the tower

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In The Square and The Tower, Niall Ferguson presents us a detailed series of examinations of the struggle between networks and hierarchies in managing society since the advent of writing. A central theme of the book is “that the tension between distributed networks and hierarchical orders is as old as humanity itself.” For example, he looks at how the wave of Chinese immigration to the USA was blocked in the late 1800’s by local racism, “Just as global networks of communication and transportation [telegraph & steamship] had made the mass migration of the late nineteenth century possible, so political networks of populism and nativism sprang into life to resist them”. Networks give and take away, as do hierarchies. Historically they appear to be in constant flux.

Another theme in the book is how the advent of the internet and the printing press have certain similarities.

“There are three major differences between our networked age and the era that followed the advent of European printing. First, and most obviously, our networking revolution is much faster and more geographically extensive than the wave of revolutions unleashed by the German printing press … Secondly, the distributional consequences of our revolution are quite different from those of the early-modern revolution … The printing press created no billionaires … Nevertheless, few people foresaw that the giant networks made possible by the Internet, despite their propaganda about the democratization of knowledge, would be so profoundly inegalitarian. A generation removed from the conflict — the baby boomers — had failed to learn the lesson that it is not unregulated networks that reduce inequality but wars, revolutions, hyperinflation and other forms of expropriation … Third, and finally, the printing press had the effect of disrupting religious life in Western Christendom before it disrupted anything else. By contrast, the Internet began by disrupting commerce; only very recently did it begin to disrupt politics and it has really only disrupted one religion, namely Islam.”

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coffee, communities, and condescension

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Last month I started a coffee club so that subscribers to this blog could purchase the equivalent of a monthly cup of coffee for each of us. This week we had our first online video conference with five participants. As a result we decided that this would be a good place to have deeper and more meaningful monthly conversations on topics that interest us. These include: self-organizing systems, platforms that enable self-organization, how to better share and filter knowledge and information. Overall it will be a place for learning and reflection. We also decided that future meetings will be recorded and that I will look into creating a secure online space for written conversations and sharing our knowledge.

I have observed over the past few years how critical it is to engage in knowledge networks to better understand my profession and the world. These networks are with people, not platforms and not companies. Relationships add the necessary context, such as what has this person written before, what is their general perspective, and what other factors may influence them. You cannot get this context from algorithms.

“The use of algorithms to give consumers ‘what they want’ leads to an unending stream of posts that confirm each user’s existing beliefs. On Facebook, it’s your news feed, while on Google it’s your individually customized search results.” —Washington Monthly Mag

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a vision for learning

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Harvard Business Review described The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge, as one of the seminal management books of the previous 75 years. The five disciplines necessary for a learning organisation are:

  1. Personal Mastery
  2. Mental Models
  3. Shared Vision
  4. Team Learning
  5. Systems Thinking (which integrates the other four)

In the January 2017 issue of Inside Learning Technologies, I discussed personal mastery and mental models. The key challenge for learning professionals today is to help their enterprises become learning organisations, as described in Senge’s book. It is also to master the new literacies of the network era and promote critical thinking, for ourselves and others. Questioning existing hierarchies is necessary to create the organisations of the future where power and authority are shared, based on mutual trust. Personal knowledge mastery (taking control of our professional development) and an attitude of working in perpetual beta (continuous experimentation) are two of the disciplines required to develop the third discipline: Shared Vision, or our worldview.

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some thoughts on thinking

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” —Ray Bradbury, via @holdengraber

@_Amanda_Killan: “Libraries literally aren’t just a place to obtain books for free. They’re one of the few public spaces left in our society where you’re allowed to exist without the expectation of spending money.”

@dougkleeman: “Before you criticize something, find three things you actually like about it first. It works when reviewing creative work, but it also makes you a more pleasant human being.”

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collaborating with the enemy

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Collaborating with the Enemy by Adam Kahane gives a framework of how to work with people you don’t agree with, like, or trust. Kahane developed it through his years of conducting collaboration workshops such as the Mont Fleur sessions to prepare for a post-apartheid South Africa. I read his first book in 2005, Solving Tough Problems, and his latest is similar in that it is short, to the point, and provides practical advice. It is based on some of the failures in his work and professional relationships from which he developed a guiding principle to always “look for disconfirming evidence”.

His framework is relatively simple to understand.

When two or more parties get together to address a problematic situation, they ask themselves a series of questions to understand their options. First they determine if they can change the situation. If so, can they effect change unilaterally, in which case they can force their solution. This happens frequently when governments ‘consult’ people who have no power to effect change.

If they cannot change the situation, then they have two unilateral decisions possible: adapt to what has been forced on them, or exit the situation if possible.

If they can change the situation but cannot effect change unilaterally, then it is possible that conventional collaboration can work, but only if the change can be controlled. This is the basis of a lot of collaboration interventions based on an assumption of control, which is often wrong. This is what Kahane learned through his failures. Even if the engaging parties agree to collaborate, other factors and external parties may subvert their actions.

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the coffee club

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coffee
Last October I suggested that subscribers to this blog could buy me a monthly cup of coffee to support my writing. Several of you have done so: thank you! We now have a private online space to continue our conversations.

To kick off 2018 I have decided to make the beta conversations available exclusively to coffee club subscribers. I will host about 10 online video conference sessions per year, in addition to a private community space for asynchronous conversations. The subjects that we will cover will include technology, media, knowledge, and society, but I am sure we will always find something to talk about. The conversations are recorded for members who cannot make it. I will ensure there is a topic or two at hand before we begin.

So if you find my writing useful, especially for your own paid work, please consider subscribing to the club and buying a monthly cup of coffee for each of us.

This will make you a member of the coffee club, caffeine-fuelled for deeper conversations, for only $10 per month.

Register here

embracing automation

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Automation

Automation, the replacement of human work with human-made technology, has been happening ever since we invented tools. Just as farmhands were replaced by machines 100 years ago, so too will knowledge workers be replaced by networked computers in the next few decades. Last century, those farmhands had the option of moving to the city and working in factories, but what are the alternatives for today’s knowledge workers? It is not likely to be a new job, as the job itself is being made obsolete, underlined by 57 million freelancers in the USA today, accounting for about 1/4 of working-age adults. This is expected to grow to 86 million by 2027 so that freelancers will be the majority of the American workforce.

Automation seems to be accelerating and has been a frequently discussed topic here. But does automation really result in job loss? It appears that where there is elastic demand, so that automation meets increased demand, employment usually increases in an industry. For example, employment at banks increased with the introduction of automatic tellers. But it is not all good news. Some work keeps going away: standardized & routine jobs.

“The evidence suggests that while computers are not causing net job losses now, low wage occupations are losing jobs, likely contributing to economic inequality. These workers need new skills in order to transition to new, well-paying jobs. Developing a workforce with the skills to use new technologies is the real challenge posed by computer automation.” —James Bessen

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