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Mark Wehrmeister
A lot of these loose teams of people from outside the organization already exist ...
ReneCardenas
Couple of good observations on communication, organization and design trends but ...
Get ready to swarm: 10 changes to the way we work in the next decade
Tom Austin
8/5/2010 6:39 AM EDT
The world of today is dramatically different from 20 years ago and with the lines between work and non-work already badly frayed, we predict that the nature of work will witness 10 key changes through 2020.
Organizations will need to plan for increasingly chaotic environments that are out of their direct control, and adaptation must involve adjusting to all 10 of the trends.
Work will become less routine, characterized by increased volatility, hyperconnectedness, 'swarming' and more. By 2015, 40 per cent or more of enterprise work will be ‘non-routine’, up from 25 per cent in 2010.
People will swarm more often and work solo less. They’ll work with others with whom they have few links, and teams will include people outside the control of the organisation,” he added. In addition, simulation, visualisation and unification technologies, working across yottabytes of data per second, will demand an emphasis on new perceptual skills.
Organizations will need to determine which of the 10 key changes in the nature of work will affect them, and consider whether radically different technology governance models will be required.
1. De-routinization of work
The core value that people add is not in the processes that can be automated, but in non-routine processes, uniquely human, analytical or interactive contributions that result in words such as discovery, innovation, teaming, leading, selling and learning. Non-routine skills are those we cannot automate. For example, we cannot automate the process of selling a life insurance policy to a skeptical buyer, but we can use automation tools to augment the selling process.
2. Work swarms
Swarming is a work style characterised by a flurry of collective activity by anyone and everyone conceivably available and able to add value. Gartner identifies two phenomena within the collective activity; Teaming (instead of solo performances) will be valued and rewarded more and occur more frequently and a new form of teaming, which Gartner calls swarming, to distinguish it from more historical teaming models, is emerging. Teams have historically consisted of people who have worked together before and who know each other reasonably well, often working in the same organisation and for the same manager. Swarms form quickly, attacking a problem or opportunity and then quickly dissipating. Swarming is an agile response to an observed increase in ad hoc action requirements, as ad hoc activities continue to displace structured, bureaucratic situations.
3. Weak links
In swarms, if individuals know each other at all, it may be just barely, via weak links. Weak links are the cues people can pick up from people who know the people they have to work with. They are indirect indicators and rely, in part, on the confidence others have in their knowledge of people. Navigating one's own personal, professional and social networks helps people develop and exploit both strong and weak links and that, in turn, will be crucial to surviving and exploiting swarms for business benefit.
4. Working with the collective
There are informal groups of people, outside the direct control of the organisation, who can impact the success or failure of the organisation. These informal groups are bound together by a common interest, a fad or a historical accident, as described by Gartner as 'the collective'. Smart business executives discern how to live in a business ecosystem they cannot control; one they can only influence. The influence process requires understanding the collectives that potentially influence their organisation, as well as the key people in those external groups. Gathering market intelligence via the collective is crucial. Equally important is figuring out how to use the collective to define segments, markets, products and various business strategies.
5. Work sketch-ups
Most non-routine processes will also be highly informal. It is very important that organisations try to capture the criteria used in making decisions but, at least for now, Gartner does not expect most non-routine processes to follow meaningful standard patterns. Over time, we believe that work patterns for more non-routine work will emerge, justifying a light-handed approach to collecting activity information, but it will take years before a real return on investment for this effort is visible. In the meantime, the process models for most non-routine processes will remain simple 'sketch-ups', created on the fly.
6. Spontaneous work
This property is also implied in Gartner’s description of work swarms. Spontaneity implies more than reactive activity, for example, to the emergence of new patterns. It also contains proactive work such as seeking out new opportunities and creating new designs and models.
7. Simulation and experimentation
Active engagement with simulated environments (virtual environments), which are similar to technologies depicted in the film Minority Report, will come to replace drilling into cells in spreadsheets. This suggests the use of n-dimensional virtual representations of all different sorts of data. The contents of the simulated environment will be assembled by agent technologies that determine what materials go together based on watching people work with this content. People will interact with the data and actively manipulate various parameters reshaping the world they’re looking at.
8. Pattern sensitivity
Gartner has published a major line of research on pattern-based strategy. The business world is becoming more volatile, affording people working off of linear models based on past performance far less visibility into the future than ever before. Gartner expects to see a significant growth in the number of organisations that create groups specifically charged with detecting divergent emerging patterns, evaluating those patterns, developing various scenarios for how the disruption might play out and proposing to senior executives new ways of exploiting (or protecting the organisation from) the changes to which they are now more sensitive.
9. Hyperconnected
Hyperconnectedness is a property of most organisations, existing within networks of networks, unable to completely control any of them. While key supply chain elements, for example, may be "under contract," there is no guarantee it will perform properly, not even if the supply chain is in-house. Hyperconnectedness will lead to a push for more work to occur in both formal and informal relationships across enterprise boundaries, and that has implications for how people work and how IT supports or augments that work.
10. My place
The workplace is becoming more and more virtual, with meetings occurring across time zones and organizations and with participants who barely know each other, working on swarms attacking rapidly emerging problems. But the employee will still have a 'place' where they work. Many will have neither a company-provided physical office nor a desk, and their work will increasingly happen 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In this work environment, the lines between personal, professional, social and family matters, along with organisation subjects, will disappear. Individuals, of course, need to manage the complexity created by overlapping demands, whether from the new world of work or from external (non-work-related) phenomena. Those that cannot manage the underlying 'expectation and interrupt overloads' will suffer performance deficits as these overloads force individuals to operate in an over-stimulated (information-overload) state.
Tom Austin, vice president and Gartner fellow, will further discuss social software and collaboration trends at the Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit 2010, taking place on September 15-16 in London.
Additional information is available in the Gartner report Watchlist: Continuing Changes in the Nature of Work, 2010-2020.
Organizations will need to plan for increasingly chaotic environments that are out of their direct control, and adaptation must involve adjusting to all 10 of the trends.
Work will become less routine, characterized by increased volatility, hyperconnectedness, 'swarming' and more. By 2015, 40 per cent or more of enterprise work will be ‘non-routine’, up from 25 per cent in 2010.
People will swarm more often and work solo less. They’ll work with others with whom they have few links, and teams will include people outside the control of the organisation,” he added. In addition, simulation, visualisation and unification technologies, working across yottabytes of data per second, will demand an emphasis on new perceptual skills.
Organizations will need to determine which of the 10 key changes in the nature of work will affect them, and consider whether radically different technology governance models will be required.
1. De-routinization of work
The core value that people add is not in the processes that can be automated, but in non-routine processes, uniquely human, analytical or interactive contributions that result in words such as discovery, innovation, teaming, leading, selling and learning. Non-routine skills are those we cannot automate. For example, we cannot automate the process of selling a life insurance policy to a skeptical buyer, but we can use automation tools to augment the selling process.
2. Work swarms
Swarming is a work style characterised by a flurry of collective activity by anyone and everyone conceivably available and able to add value. Gartner identifies two phenomena within the collective activity; Teaming (instead of solo performances) will be valued and rewarded more and occur more frequently and a new form of teaming, which Gartner calls swarming, to distinguish it from more historical teaming models, is emerging. Teams have historically consisted of people who have worked together before and who know each other reasonably well, often working in the same organisation and for the same manager. Swarms form quickly, attacking a problem or opportunity and then quickly dissipating. Swarming is an agile response to an observed increase in ad hoc action requirements, as ad hoc activities continue to displace structured, bureaucratic situations.
3. Weak links
In swarms, if individuals know each other at all, it may be just barely, via weak links. Weak links are the cues people can pick up from people who know the people they have to work with. They are indirect indicators and rely, in part, on the confidence others have in their knowledge of people. Navigating one's own personal, professional and social networks helps people develop and exploit both strong and weak links and that, in turn, will be crucial to surviving and exploiting swarms for business benefit.
4. Working with the collective
There are informal groups of people, outside the direct control of the organisation, who can impact the success or failure of the organisation. These informal groups are bound together by a common interest, a fad or a historical accident, as described by Gartner as 'the collective'. Smart business executives discern how to live in a business ecosystem they cannot control; one they can only influence. The influence process requires understanding the collectives that potentially influence their organisation, as well as the key people in those external groups. Gathering market intelligence via the collective is crucial. Equally important is figuring out how to use the collective to define segments, markets, products and various business strategies.
5. Work sketch-ups
Most non-routine processes will also be highly informal. It is very important that organisations try to capture the criteria used in making decisions but, at least for now, Gartner does not expect most non-routine processes to follow meaningful standard patterns. Over time, we believe that work patterns for more non-routine work will emerge, justifying a light-handed approach to collecting activity information, but it will take years before a real return on investment for this effort is visible. In the meantime, the process models for most non-routine processes will remain simple 'sketch-ups', created on the fly.
6. Spontaneous work
This property is also implied in Gartner’s description of work swarms. Spontaneity implies more than reactive activity, for example, to the emergence of new patterns. It also contains proactive work such as seeking out new opportunities and creating new designs and models.
7. Simulation and experimentation
Active engagement with simulated environments (virtual environments), which are similar to technologies depicted in the film Minority Report, will come to replace drilling into cells in spreadsheets. This suggests the use of n-dimensional virtual representations of all different sorts of data. The contents of the simulated environment will be assembled by agent technologies that determine what materials go together based on watching people work with this content. People will interact with the data and actively manipulate various parameters reshaping the world they’re looking at.
8. Pattern sensitivity
Gartner has published a major line of research on pattern-based strategy. The business world is becoming more volatile, affording people working off of linear models based on past performance far less visibility into the future than ever before. Gartner expects to see a significant growth in the number of organisations that create groups specifically charged with detecting divergent emerging patterns, evaluating those patterns, developing various scenarios for how the disruption might play out and proposing to senior executives new ways of exploiting (or protecting the organisation from) the changes to which they are now more sensitive.
9. Hyperconnected
Hyperconnectedness is a property of most organisations, existing within networks of networks, unable to completely control any of them. While key supply chain elements, for example, may be "under contract," there is no guarantee it will perform properly, not even if the supply chain is in-house. Hyperconnectedness will lead to a push for more work to occur in both formal and informal relationships across enterprise boundaries, and that has implications for how people work and how IT supports or augments that work.
10. My place
The workplace is becoming more and more virtual, with meetings occurring across time zones and organizations and with participants who barely know each other, working on swarms attacking rapidly emerging problems. But the employee will still have a 'place' where they work. Many will have neither a company-provided physical office nor a desk, and their work will increasingly happen 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In this work environment, the lines between personal, professional, social and family matters, along with organisation subjects, will disappear. Individuals, of course, need to manage the complexity created by overlapping demands, whether from the new world of work or from external (non-work-related) phenomena. Those that cannot manage the underlying 'expectation and interrupt overloads' will suffer performance deficits as these overloads force individuals to operate in an over-stimulated (information-overload) state.
Tom Austin, vice president and Gartner fellow, will further discuss social software and collaboration trends at the Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit 2010, taking place on September 15-16 in London.
Additional information is available in the Gartner report Watchlist: Continuing Changes in the Nature of Work, 2010-2020.
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sranje
8/5/2010 12:53 PM EDT
A very well done article. Still also a lot of hard individual work and hard data will be required.
For example there is no other way than to really drill down on the actual (versus "perceived" by tear-downs) number of Power IC used, by type of portable electronic device, and by each of eleven power application segment:
Notebook PC 20
High Multimedia / Smart Phone 18
MID (Mobile Internet Device) 18
Digital Still Camera 18
GPS / PND Device 16
Digital Picture Frame 15
Portable Ultrasound 15
Entry / Regular Phone 13
Netbook PC 13
Portable Medical Device (Meters) 11
MP3 / MP4 Player 7
Bluetooth Headset 7
see at www.petrovgroup.com
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ryan.medlin
8/5/2010 1:17 PM EDT
Great Article.
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Himanshu_Gupta
8/5/2010 1:39 PM EDT
Very informative article Tom. If even 50% of these predictions are correct then we would need drastic modification of our existing way of working. I am wondering whether these work trends would be equally applicable in all the industries rest apart the engineering fields? I can think of the upper-mentioned trends to be more connected to the consultants and free-lancers but not much for those who work for a particular company.
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SEEngineer
8/5/2010 11:53 PM EDT
This is a reality already where I am working now.
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prabhakar_deosthali
8/6/2010 2:30 AM EDT
I understand that this future work culture only pertains to white-collar work. But the factories have to be still run by physical presence of Blue-collar workers and their supervisors. The goods have to be dispatched to consumers by real transport means. There will be a tremendous need to accelerate these physical activities as processes related to the the product design, validation, testing , market surveys, marketing, advertising, order booking, selling, payment collection all become very fast aided by the virtual on-line collaborative work assisted by the Tera-speed networks and gigantic cloud-computing Infrastructure. Serious thought is required on the BRICK part of the future work environment
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tianhangchen
8/6/2010 9:49 AM EDT
It is the work manner that I are pursuing!
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tianhangchen
8/6/2010 9:50 AM EDT
are -- am
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MLED
8/6/2010 2:32 PM EDT
Pardon me.... I may be old school, or just plain playing skeptic here; but, a lot of the problems I have seen throughout my career come from this notion of multi-tasking, let's speed things up, and what tests can we skip to save money. I submit this future is the wet dream of the mba community. As far as I'm concerned change and transition are the order of the day; however, lets not forget the rigorous and painstakingly slow process that has brought us to where we are now. It really works when you dot the I's and cross the t's. Engineers are being treated like slaves by the management class. I don't like it now and never did. I saw it destroy one great organization after another. Engineers should organize and push back on this nonsense. To put it simply folks, the old story of the tortoise and the hare is just as valid now as anytime in history. Don't forget it!
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Pubs
8/6/2010 5:57 PM EDT
I recognize every item on the list. In traditional workplaces it goes by the name of "lack of planning", "fire-fighting", "agendas", "turf battles", and to me the most indicative of choas--"we need a tiger team".
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Frank Eory
8/6/2010 7:06 PM EDT
So true Pubs. But I think "tiger team" is so '90s -- today its equivalent is called a "Kaizen event." Same idea though -- swarm a bunch of people for one week and see if they can collectively figure out why the wheels fell off the cart, and how to not let that happen next time.
It's amazing how many people make careers out of this stuff!
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ddaly
8/7/2010 8:36 AM EDT
Feory, Pubs, and especially MLED, thank you for injecting some common sense into this thread. I side with the skeptics here. This is exactly the kind of buzzword-overload nonsense that has made Scott Adams fabulously wealthy.
I've read stuff like this before, foisted upon workers (at all levels) by executives in an attmpt to veil what they really want to say: "work harder. Embrace change just because. Sixty-five percent of you are going to lose your jobs next week when we downsize."
The author also appears to be saying that all accountability and organizational structure, even small, useful amounts, having been proven completely obsolete, will go the way of the dinosaur, and that work and worker interaction is going to get increasingly undisciplined. Tell that to those working on high-rel, mil-spec, or any type of product or process on which lives depend.
Show me work happening "24 hours a day, seven days a week", and "lines between personal, professional...and family matters" disappearing, and I'll show you unduly overworked, insane workers, their incompetent, unsuccessful, desperate managers, and their broken families. Predicting an unsustainable trend without any hint as to how or why it ought to become steady-state robs this article of most of its credibility. I want my five minutes back.
I'll make my own prediction: smart successful companies, along with the smart executives and managers who lead them, will continue to explore new ideas and methods to evolve the technology that is a corporation. They may flow with the current in matters of style, but they'll stand like a rock in matters of principle. They'll know the difference. They'll recognize that there is some truth in these ten predictions, but that most of this won't last any longer than a celebrity marriage.
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MLED
8/9/2010 8:38 AM EDT
DDaly:
Spot on and well said!
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Charles.Desassure
8/8/2010 3:32 AM EDT
Thank you for your article Tom Austin. I agree with one writer that wrote: “I recognize every item on the list. In traditional workplaces it goes by the name of "lack of planning", "fire-fighting", "agendas", "turf battles", and to me the most indicative of choas--"we need a tiger team". But many of these items are recognized within large companies today. For many small engineering shops that I come in contact with, their employees have an excellent team relationship and good communication with their clients. But I understand your point. I do recommend that you revisit your predication list before the Big Ball drop in Time Square for 2011…just in case you come up with something new.
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dworkman
8/9/2010 10:58 AM EDT
Could you find some more buzzwords to describe the organizational breakdown of many modern corporations and try to portray their distress in glowing futuristic terms?
This is the kind of intellectual fluff that clueless business leaders worldwide tend to fill their heads with when running an organization correctly is beyond their grasp. "You can throw together a team of people without regard to their locations or prior working relationships and have them be effective." "You can expect your workers to be available at all hours of the day and night and give their own personal time at a moment's notice." "It's not necessary to plan ahead to have the proper talent-you can just find someone somewhere."
Here's a prediction for the future of those organizations that think ANY of this is a good idea: You'll have more employee turnover, especially among your most talented and disciplined employees.
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mtwabp
8/9/2010 6:55 PM EDT
There is generally a piece of wisdom in each side of any argument. In this case they are:
1)Automation and information technology will continue to reduce the need for the human side of "routine" processing, so those who wish to add value in the future are advised to be prepared to problem solve a larger percentage of their time.
2)A higher propotion of on-routine work is no excuse for dysfunctional collaboration. Clear problem definition, leadership, ownership and appropriate division of labor should never disappear as core competencies, and can exist amongst a group of individuals who do not work together every day.
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jena999
8/28/2010 8:39 AM EDT
Hi I am jena
The article is good but simultaneously confusing. What I found that the rapid growth of IT and other technology has provided the material need and we falsely believing that technology helping us but rather increasing our greed and we are falling self created trap and trying to use jargons for justification. My question is whether we are consume more what is our share in universe.
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ddaly
8/31/2010 4:08 PM EDT
It's too often true that what technology (especially on the order of productivity tools running on windoze) gives you with one hand, it takes away with the other. Just because the technology is developed (even adopted) more and more quickly doesn't mean its maturation is necessarily or commensurately accelerated. Does all this technology make us more productive? In some very meaningful ways, yes, and in other ways, no.
Determining the yes and no takes time. That's a large part of the process whereby most of the questionable concepts behind all the jargon are weeded out, and how the viable, workable parts, if any, become accepted and legitimate.
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Product Engr
8/31/2010 8:24 PM EDT
Corporate culture plays a major role, I believe, in "how we will work"!A company's leadership, the management team's ability to blend effective team structures, focused product and service delivery along with achieving measurable positive results will determine "how they will work", and those corporate entities who can apply the techniques for a balanced work-life will establish a workforce who's corporate culture is defined by " how they are working" in order to sustain consistent business and revenue growth.
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ReneCardenas
9/1/2010 1:28 PM EDT
Couple of good observations on communication, organization and design trends but need sanity check.
The highest percentage of business is smaller than 100 employees.
In these communities/spheres there is need for product continuity (evolution, not revolution) to remain in business, so profit is king and main driver on what work practices are really effective to help in product/service delivery.
As much as I would like to agree with most of those 10 key ideas, I give more value to MLED, feory and Pubs for the critical thinking on these mostly philosophical projections.
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Mark Wehrmeister
9/3/2010 8:31 PM EDT
A lot of these loose teams of people from outside the organization already exist today, they are just not formally recognized. In the future, virtual teams of independent workers will be commonplace and be able to be pulled together in a moment's notice through the formal social networks that already exist today like Linkedin. Piecework will again be popular and unfortunately, most of us will not have the security of a regular paycheck. But then again, who really has that today?
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