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September 19, 2015  |  permalink

Gensler: Work in 2025

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(Gensler was kind enough to include me in a roundtable of experts on the future of Work in 2025. My interview with Eva Hagberg Fisher appears below.)

image GREG LINDSAY
is a senior fellow of the New Cities Foundation and the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Foresight Initiative. His topics include the intersection of the office, the cloud, and big data.

In 2025, will we all be working on projects?

Greg Lindsay: Like Hollywood? There’s definitely the trend. What’s missing is the kind of coordination platforms that would allow people to do this in an empowered way. The sharing economy as it exists now is based on centralized work platforms where the benefits of coordination accrue to an app’s owners, not its users. But what if the Hollywood model merged with the coworking model, for example? You’re not just renting space there–and paying quite a premium for it–but joining a potentially deep roster of talent that can be assembled into ad hoc teams depending on your availability. There have been some interesting experiments with this, but no one’s been able to make it work at scale. While I think it would work best if someone assembled these teams in person, face to face, it may be LinkedIn’s true calling to become the world’s largest talent agency, harnessing all that Big Data about people’s skills and interests. I don’t think the entire future will work this way, but with 40 percent of the US workforce already “contingent,” it’s really just a question of how big a piece it will be.

Does the Internet of Things figure here?

GL: I’m a lot less interested in an Internet of Things than an Internet of People. I’m more interested in an office that knows who I should work with and is happy to make introductions than one that dims the lights.

Most of the discussion about the Internet of Things revolves around the notion that we’re going to make work 10 percent more efficient. I think that’s a dead end. The Internet of Things is already telling people to deliver packages or restock shelves quicker, even if they burn out. Robotic efficiency should be the goal for robots, not for people. But the prevailing logic is the same as what led us from the expensive personal empowerment of Robert Propst’s Action Office II, to the deadening efficiency of the cubicle. What’s the equivalent of the cubicle in the Internet of Things? That’s the question we need to be asking.

What would I like it to do? First, I’d like it to increase our sense of agency and control over our work environment. Second, I’d like it to bring buried or invisible people and resources to our attention. And when it finds them, how will they be presented? Will our days consist of being thrown together with new coworkers by artificial intelligence fiat? Or will we have a choice?

What does this mean for organizations?

GL: That they should stop prizing hierarchy and secrecy. The greatest lie that Frederick Winslow Taylor ever told is that management always knows best. We need to encourage and empower people to “work out loud,” to share what they’re doing, what they have to offer, and what they need help with.

Tools can help with this. One that interests me is Hylo, which offers a goal-oriented social network overlay on top of real communities–whether coworking spaces, alumni networks, or neighborhoods. Hylo lets people work out loud in the cloud by posting so-called “seeds” to it–as in, “Here’s what I have to offer” and “Here’s what I’m looking for.” The software does the sorting by running in the background and looking for opportunities to match your needs and abilities with others. Hylo calls it a “serendipity engine.” Tools like these will change organizational culture as people see the benefit of making public what’s often kept hidden or secret now, so others can find it and respond to it.

Have you experienced the Internet of Things?

GL: I was part of an experiment at Fast Company, where we wore sensor-packed badges that tracked our movements and conversations. One thing we learned is that the best-connected person in the office wasn’t the editor in chief or his deputies, but a new hire whose job touched multiple departments. The next question, which we didn’t ask, is how a person like this affects everyone’s performance. What if she makes everyone 10 percent better in their jobs? How do you compensate her for it?

My personal Internet of Things nightmare is that my employer-issued Fitbit forces me to work at a standing desk after it decides I’ve been sitting for too long. I probably do too much sitting for my health, but I’ve decided that this will be my vice in life. If sitting is the new smoking, I’m going to slouch my way through whole cartons of unfiltered cigarettes.

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Greg Lindsay is a generalist, urbanist, futurist, and speaker. He is a non-resident senior fellow of the Arizona State University Threatcasting Lab, a non-resident senior fellow of MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab, and a non-resident senior fellow of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Strategy Initiative. He was the founding chief communications officer of Climate Alpha and remains a senior advisor. Previously, he was an urban tech fellow at Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Institute, where he explored the implications of AI and augmented reality at urban scale.

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