cities and the future of work

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Note: This post is based on several earlier ones. These have been edited and synthesized to a single composition in advance of my sessions in Helsinki on 3 November 2017 with The National Foresight Network and the Prime Minister’s Office where we will discuss the transformation of work and its consequences. This post looks at the roles of cities, and city regions, in a network society.

Tribes & Networks

“According to my review of history and theory, four forms of organization — and evidently only four — lie behind the governance and evolution of all societies across the ages:

  • The tribal form was the first to emerge and mature, beginning thousands of years ago. Its main dynamic is kinship, which gives people a distinct sense of identity and belonging — the basic elements of culture, as manifested still today in matters ranging from nationalism to fan clubs.
  • The institutional form was the second to emerge. Emphasizing hierarchy, it led to the development of the state and the military, as epitomized initially by the Roman Empire, not to mention the Catholic papacy and other corporate enterprises.
  • The market form, the third form of organization to take hold, enables people to excel at openly competitive, free, and fair economic exchanges. Although present in ancient times, it did not gain sway until the 19th century, at first mainly in England.
  • The network form, the fourth to mature, serves to connect dispersed groups and individuals so that they may coordinate and act conjointly. Enabled by the digital information-technology revolution, this form is only now coming into its own, so far strengthening civil society more than other realms.”
    —Overview of social evolution (past, present, and future) in TIMN terms, David Ronfeldt

There are strong indicators that society is heading toward a quadriform structuring (T+I+M+N) with network culture dominating in many fields: open source insurgencies, Blockchain financial transactions,  political manipulation through networks, crowdfunding, etc. This is also bringing tensions between the old Tribal, Institutional, and Market forms against the emerging Network form.

“The more entrenched an older form, the more difficult it will be for a newer form to emerge on its own merits: This mostly occurs where tribal or hierarchical actors rule in rigid, grasping, domineering ways; but it may also apply where pro-market ideologues hold sway … Examples may include governments rife with a clannish tribalism, militaries wallowing in lucrative business enterprises, and ostensibly capitalist market systems fraught with collusive, protectionist cronyism. The stronger are tribal/clan tendencies in a society, the more likely are corrupt hybrid designs. A society of myriad monstrous hybrids is likely to be a distorted society, even a mean-spirited one.”
—Explaining social evolution: standard cause-and-effect vs. TIMN’s system dynamics, David Ronfeldt

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distributing power for the network era

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A certain amount of command and control, exercised through a hierarchy is often necessary to get work done. I suggest temporary, negotiated hierarchies so that teams can form and re-form depending on what needs to be done. Reorganization can be inherent in the enterprise structure and not a cataclysmic event that happens only when management systems fail.

We are in the early stages of an emerging era where network modes of organization dominate over institutions and markets. Networks naturally route around hierarchy. Networks also enable work to be done cooperatively, as opposed to collaboratively in institutions or competitive markets.

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the future of work is perpetual beta

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Automation is a force that is continuously changing the nature of human work. First it replaced brute force with powerful machines, changing the nature of agriculture, mining, construction, and other fields of human activity. Then automated programs replaced simple work like withdrawing money from a bank account. Now automation is replacing complicated work, like coordinating drivers and passengers within a community, in real time. Any process that can be mapped, analyzed, and understood will be automated. As networked computers and the algorithms behind them become more powerful, even more complicated work will get automated. One banking industry analyst expects 30% of banking jobs disappearing in the next few years due to automation.

“Everything that happens with artificial intelligence, robotics and natural language — all of that is going to make processes easier,” said Pandit, who was Citigroup’s chief executive officer from 2007 to 2012. “It’s going to change the back office.” —Bloomberg, 2017-09-13

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radical ideas

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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.

@holden: “So a radical idea — maybe instead of teaching learners to code we should teach coders to learn: sociology, history, policy.”

“No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them.” —Assata Shakur, via @IamMzilikazi

@existentialcoms: “Philosophy is important because otherwise we would just be doing stuff without thinking about doing stuff. Come on, you can’t just do stuff.”

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creating resilient knowledge networks

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The personal knowledge mastery framework is a combination of seeking knowledge, making sense of it, and sharing it with others. It can become a long-term discipline of individually constructed enabling processes to help each of us make sense of our world, work more effectively, and contribute to society. Two key variables are how we make sense of knowledge and how we share it, in order to:  seek > sense > share.

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adapting to life in perpetual beta

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Twenty years ago I was finishing my Master’s thesis on learning in the information technology workplace. A significant part of my research relied on the work of Marshall McLuhan, especially his laws of media. My job at the time was the development of all training related to a fleet of helicopters employed in tactical aviation: from pilots, to technicians, and including flight simulation and computer based training. The web was a new thing in 1997. But I was convinced, based on my readings of McLuhan and many others, that it would create an epochal shift in how we work and learn. I decided that understanding this shift would become my professional focus.

I retired from the military in 1998 and took a position as project manager at The Centre for Learning Technologies, a now closed external department of Mount Allison University, here in Sackville. This is why we live in such a remote place. Later I was in charge of professional services for an e-learning company. In 2003 I started my consulting practice and soon after, this blog.

Over the past +14 years I have always had a challenge describing what I do for a living. Today I came across an article on the future of work, by Deloitte. The image included with the article pretty well describes my professional focus for the past twenty years.

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thinking about facebook

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This is a follow up on my post about the convenience of platforms like Facebook, which dominates online social networking. That one company has such global influence should be of concern to all of us. Our social networks define us, as Christakis & Fowler clearly showed in their 2011 book, Connected.

“Most of us are already aware of the direct effect we have on our friends and family; our actions can make them happy or sad, healthy or sick, even rich or poor. But we rarely consider that everything we think, feel, do, or say can spread far beyond the people we know. Conversely, our friends and family serve as conduits for us to be influenced by hundreds or even thousands of other people. In a kind of social chain reaction, we can be deeply affected by events we do not witness that happen to people we do not know. It is as if we can feel the pulse of the social world around us and respond to its persistent rhythms. As part of a social network, we transcend ourselves, for good or ill, and become a part of something much larger. We are connected.” —Connected

This is not the same situation as when companies once dominated TV advertising, as today even ad-driven Google has less influence on us than Facebook does.

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intellectual craftsmanship

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I was recently referred to a most interesting article, Intellectual Craftsmanship, via Nicole Martin who had recently completed my PKM Workshop. It is a part of C. Wright Mills’ larger work, The Sociological Imagination (1959).

“Hailed upon publication as a cogent and hard-hitting critique, The Sociological Imagination took issue with the ascendant schools of sociology in the United States, calling for a humanist sociology connecting the social, personal, and historical dimensions of our lives. The sociological imagination Mills calls for is a sociological vision, a way of looking at the world that can see links between the apparently private problems of the individual and important social issues.” —Google Books

The above description aligns with the personal knowledge mastery framework: PKM is a unified framework of individually-constructed enabling processes to help each of us make sense of our world, work more effectively, and contribute to society.

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friday inventions

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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.

“There are two different types of people in the world: Those who want to know, and those who want to believe.” —Friedrich Nietzsche, via @othertwice

@njbowden: “Imagine if cities put as much thought, effort, and incentives behind home-growing 1000 new companies with 50 employees as they have with the Amazon Request for Proposals”

@tomothycsimons: “Same origin story for every tech startup; I went into a store, saw someone with a job and thought ‘what if that person didn’t have a job?'”

A guide to the things silicon valley invented that already existed, via @edwsonoma

  • Juiceroo (juicers)
  • Bodega (vending machines)
  • Lyft Shuttle (public busses)
  • Soylent (SlimFast)

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The Copenhagen Letter

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I signed The Copenhagen Letter. Perhaps you should too, if you think that all people should control the technology that runs the world, not just the surveillance capitalists. Well, at least read it, please.

To everyone who shapes technology today.

We live in a world where technology is consuming society, ethics, and our core existence.

It is time to take responsibility for the world we are creating. Time to put humans before business. Time to replace the empty rhetoric of “building a better world” with a commitment to real action. It is time to organize, and to hold each other accountable … We who have signed this letter will hold ourselves and each other accountable for putting these ideas into practice. That is our commitment.

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