The Work Futures Institute

One of my favorite jokes (that may only be funny to me) is a riff on Warhol’s chestnut about fifteen minutes of fame: “In the future,” I confidently predict, “we will each have think tanks with fifteen fellows.” I tried that line on Stowe Boyd last month and he took me up on it, creating the Work Futures Institute and installing me as his first senior fellow. Stowe – who in his spare time is managing director of Gigaom Research – has already published a manifesto of sorts for what we’ll investigate:

• Dissent (versus Consensus) – Active and directed dissent is a better way to counter the cognitive biases of groups and individuals, and to sidestep groupthink. This is essential to increased innovation and creativity truly driving business.

• Cooperative (versus Collaborative) – The new way of work sidesteps the politics and collectivism of consensus-based decision making, and shifts to looser, laissez-faire cooperative work patterns.

• Creativity (versus Tradition) – We are in a time when new solutions to problems need to be contrived, and traditional approaches may be not only broken but dangerous.

• Autonomy (versus Heteronomy) – Paradoxically, as we come into a time when we acknowledge that we are more connected to each other than ever before, a great degree of autonomy will become the norm. The old demands to subordinate all personal interests to those of the collective will be displaced by a personal reengagement in our own work and a commitment to a deeper work culture that transcends any one company’s corporate culture.

• (Hyper)democracy (versus Oligarchy) – Today’s management theory and organizational structure is basically a holdover from the earliest days of the industrial age, a time prior to democracy, when monarchies ruled. Businesses today are oligarchies, where the few lead the many. In recent decades, there has been a transition from coercive controls to more consensual ones, but if we are to move fast enough to compete in the new economy we will have to more to a hyper lean, agile democratic form factor for work.

• Fast-and-loose (versus Slow-and-tight) – Companies need to become much looser – higher degrees of autonomy and voluntary association into working teams – in order to run faster, increase innovation, and provide the sort of environment that top performers best operate in.

• Laissez-faire (versus Entrepreneurial) – The growing uncertainties in complex, interconnected, global economy means that predicting the future and judging risks has become extremely difficult if not impossible. Therefore, the notion of organizing any reasonably sized company around a single ‘official future’ is broken. We’ll need to adopt a laissez-faire operating system for business, where many experiments based on different hypotheses can run in parallel, instead of lining up all the troops and making them march to a single unified strategic plan.

• Hyperlean (versus Waterfall) – All business operations will transition away from top-down, long-term, waterfall-style models to a bottom-up, short-term, hyperlean approach. Those closest to the problem will work on its solution, and divvy up the pieces in a way that makes sense to them, and refactor as needed.

• Small-and-Simple (versus Large-and-Complex) – The technological advances that will disrupt markets and patterns of business in the future will increasingly be small-and-simple, but paradoxically, may force the reevaluation of everything, like file sync-and-share applications, which are destabilizing the enterprise software market.

• Open and Public (versus Closed and Private) – The number one factor today in work happiness is the transparency of management practices, and that happiness is likewise reflected in higher engagement at work.

• Emergent Strategy (versus Deliberate Strategy) – The nature of strategy changes in a time of great change, when the future is difficult to foresee. The role of leadership changes with it, as well. Instead of concocting a strategic vision and pushing it out to the organization through cultural and managerial channels – the deliberate style of strategy – leadership must shift to distributed, action-based strategic learning about what is actually happening in the market: emergent strategy. This, as Henry Mintzberg observed, does not mean chaos, but unintended order.

You can read his entire essay here. Obviously, we’re in the earliest stages of figuring this out. Please stay tuned for much more to come– especially once he appoints the other fourteen fellows.