Posts Tagged ‘future jobs’
Emergence
I am tidying up and I glanced through a notebook from 2 years ago. I was utterly fascinated by ‘emergence’, the phenomenon where a flock of birds, for example, emerges from simple behaviour of birds. With three very simple rules – join the flock, keep up and keep a respectable “stopping distance” – birds individually, and probably without thought, create a flock that looks as if someone did think it up.
Emergence, business & management
We are fascinated with “emergence” in a business context because a naturally-forming flock undermines the idea of the all knowing and ominiscent leader. The planning, leading, organizing & controlling management theory of Fayol goes ‘for a loop’.
At first, I was puzzled that university departments hadn’t taken up this idea more vigorouosly, and more practically.
Including emergence in the theory of management
Two years on, I’ve found my thinking has drifted. Yes, it is certainly true that the role of managers is probably exaggerated (with their pay). But the project of changing management is unnecessary. Overmanaged firms will self-destruct, possibly at great cost to themselves and others, simply because managers have to be paid for and management that is not necessary simply makes a firm unweildy, inefficient and unprofitable.
The real issue is where our better understanding of organization is emerging in business. The best example that is written up is the motorcycle industry of China. The best example where an industry is trying to use similar processes is the aerospace industry in UK and the production of the Boeing 787.
Moving along to understanding emergence in business
The challenge now is to understand the variations of self-organizing networks.
I think, perhaps, the basic principle is that emergence, by definition, is not willed.
- We can prevent it happening.
- We can illustrate the principle.
But in real life, the probably the best we can do is create conditions for it to happen. What are those conditions?
Related articles by Zemanta
- 4 tips for finding work that will still be here in 10 years’ time (flowingmotion.wordpress.com)
- Leadership in a self-organising world (thecustomercollective.com)
And after Toyota we have ?
The time has come when management is making one its momentus periodic shifts in thought. The textbooks might take a little time to catch up. Most university textbooks don’t do Toyota yet. And after all, as we all know, Toyota is passed its zenith. But as ever, the world moves on, and we learn from engine-makers and manufacturers.
This time it is Chinese motorcycles. How do they make them quite so cheap?
Chinese process networks & local modularization
I have been looking for good references to understand the phenonmenon of “local modularization”. At last, I have found a good paper the motor cycle industry in Chongqing where this practice emerged. It is a pdf document presented at Davos 2006 by Hagel & Brown who are now part of Deloittes.
Working tips for finding work that will still be here in 10 years’ time
As ever, I’ve made a working checklist for my own good. I imagine it might have been superceded by know, though. 3 years is a long time in today’s management practice.
Think supply chain not assembly line
The key to this thinking is ‘supply chain’ not the assembly line. Now there are specialized master’s degrees in supply chain & logistics. It is a serious business. I have a very amateur take of what we can learn generally about where business is going but this is what I make of it.
#1 Pull vs push
Look for networks where people are asking you to do things. Avoid networks and people are trying to ‘push’ services and products (spam you in other words). You are looking for networks that are based on people putting up their hands and calling “I need . .” You can go back to them saying “I can do X at this price.” Then neither you nor them have to say “Please buy . . .” and waste time and money on marketing. I haven’t seen any writing, other than a reference that I’ve listed below, on how networks make the change from push to pull. Please tell me if you have!
#2 Change the game to give you and your partner permanent competitive advantage
Outsource strategically rather than tactically. That is, form an alliance that changes the game. Don’t just buy in finished goods. A strategic alliance
- Shares the goal setting with the outsourcing partner.
- Expands the pie.
- Deepens capability (and know how)
- Is a long term relationship.
When you are calling for assistance, begin with the long term relationship. Have a discussion about your long term goal. The British aerospace industry have a cracking questionnaire on the questions to ask. It’s worth a look.
#3 Talk long term but go with whomever delivers
At the same time, be loosely coupled. Don’t try to specify the entire process or lock people in. It’s a scary thought at first but every person and every supplier is redundant. That is the natue of pull systems. Utterly redundant.
This feature may seem sem to contradict the second point and this is how the contradiction is resolved. A long term relationship comes from discussing the long term goal. In the past, one person specified the goal and others had to fall in in lockstep. Now long term goals are jointly agreed but if a partner doesn’t deliver, the network simply closes over, just like the internet, and moves on. The ‘self-healing’ of networks, ruthless as it is, is the biggest guarantee of quality (and also a worry for people who study exploitation).
#4 Go for good company rather than total dominance
Choose networks where you are one specialist link in a network rather than a dominant player. You don’t need to dominate the network; you need a good network. And good networks are full of people at the top of their game where the network, not just the members, gets better every day.
The British aerospace industy even have a programme to switch the whole industry over to strategically thought out relationships which though not quite pull, go in that direction. I can imagine this point worrying people. Certainly I would like to see work on how we protect ourselves from people who do try to dominate the network.
Moving from old styles of business to new
Hagel and Brown also gave me this checklist for managing our futures strategically. It might be sufficient to answer my two unanswered questions. How do we make the shift and how do we protect ourselves from ‘powerful pirates’?
- Where can we see the future? Where shall we post lookouts?
- Where can we do things differently with other people? Where can we work on innovative solutions?
- Where can we push the limits of organizational practice?
- Where is the “edge” or “boundary” that meets the outside world and informs the core?
- What sustains relationships?
- Where are we getting better and getting better faster?
- Which industries are unbundling and what is the patten? In 2006, Hagel & Brown forsaw businesses unbundling into infrastructure management, product innovation & commercialization, and customer relations.
I need to explore Hagel and Brown’s work more, on their own site and Deloitte’s. These lists are pretty rough but hopefully you’ll find these two lists useful in some way. Comments?
Career decisions for young and old
I do a lot of career coaching. I talk to youngsters of all ability ranges. I talk to MBA student making career changes after a flying start in management. I talk to people who’ve been unlucky enough to lose their jobs and who looking for an echo career.
Are easy when we know what we want
What all these people have in common ~ those who are happy to get work at the minimum wage and those negotiating banker-size bonuses ~ is that they will not get what they want until they decide what they want.
And tracks are laid out for us by someone else
Many of us ~ particularly the talented, able and lucky ~ go through life on a set of rails. We go from one school to another, on tracks laid down by other people, and decision making has amounted to no more than “this” or “that”. Both are good and we chose on the basis of the frills ~ which perks were more to our taste.
When the tracks are gone, we have to lay them for selves
Then one day, shock and horror, the tracks are gone. We will have to lay them down ourselves. Suddenly, we realize that we are “institutionalized”. We haven’t being make decisions for ourselves. We are capable of rolling down pre-laid tracks without thought, but we are totally incapable of laying the tracks.
Smashing Magazine has a very comprehensive list for finding work
It’s a steep learning curve. Today Smashing Magazine has a list of “do’s” for free lancers. These “do’s” are the basis for job searches as well. Print them and rate your progress at getting them right.
The trouble is that step one is deciding what you want!
I can tell you right now which steps you will find hard ~ deciding which sector you want to work in and finding out about the companies. That’s the equivalent of laying the tracks. That is the part that you’ve never done before because you always took for granted that the tracks were there.
How to lay your own tracks
- Print out the article from Smashing Magazine
- Get a shoebox or box of similar size
- Keep your envelopes from junk mail
- Take envelopes of one color or size and every day find a website relevant to the industry that enchants you. Read and take notes.
- Take envelopes of another color or size and every day find a firm in your industry that sparks your curiosity. Read and take notes.
- Every month sort through. Keep the ten best firms and make notes on questions you want to answer about the industry.
- Also sort through and look at the people you would love to meet and learn a little about them
I can be sure that in 1-2 months of doing a little work every night, the industry will come alive. Smashing Magazine’s list will begin to be easy. Indeed, I strongly recommend that you start a blog. Get a Posterous account, which is easy to manage, and start “Expeditions into the Publishing Industry”, or whatever. In time you will be an acclaimed expert ~ and you will have got there by the first step that you took today.
Stop daydreaming about step 53 ~ take the 1st step
Indeed, if you don’t take the first step, if you keep telling me about step 7 or step 10 or step 53, then I know you are not serious. Step 1: print out Smashing Magazine’s article. Step Two get a shoebox. Step Three get a junk mail envelope and make your first notes.
And sigh with relief that you live in days of the internet!
And stop whinging! This is easy in the days of the internet. Just 10 years ago, this was almost impossible to do!
I want a British TED
The world is divided it seems – in to those who watch TED and those who don’t.
I watch TED because I like positivity – I like my daily fix. And I admire technological advancement. I wish we had a British TED too – the best of science and technology that is coming out of the UK.
But is my wonder of TED shared?
It seems strange to me, but so many people don’t share my wonder. They aren’t interested. They even proclaim themselves proudly as Luddites.
What bothers the Luddites?
Of course, the original Luddites weren’t just disapproving of new technology. They smashed the new weaving presses too.
The people around us who claim they are Luddites, simply don’t understand the technology they decry. But they don’t stop anyone else using it.
They share with the original Luddites, though, a sense of disapproval. Most of all, the new technology threatens their status.
Should we bother with Luddites?
I am impatient with people who are ‘tight’. But all fear is genuine – sincerely and acutely felt. And I am willing to spend time to help people find a positive place in the world.
What I am not willing to do is hold up improvements for others while they have a sulk. That’s not on the agenda at all.
The general class of bereavement counseling
When we are counseling people who are fretting about change, we are working with a ‘general class’ of issue – bereavement at the highest level, and adjournment at the level of group formation.
Because disdain of new technology belongs to broader, general class of situations, we have the know-how and experience to help people. We work through three broad steps.
1. Acknowledge the contribution they made to our welfare and celebrate the skills they used. We do this fully, sincerely and elaborately.
2. Focus attention on the opportunities that are opening ahead of us, and new patterns of relationships with new people who are coming into view. We are concrete & specific and we introduce them, in person, to people who work in the new technologies.
3. Help individuals, one-by-one, to formulate a personal plan. We get down & dirty, one person at a time.
I think we should be bothered with Luddites. If they cannot see how technological change will benefit them, then we haven’t worked hard enough to show them around the new world that it is coming.
Better Reality TV? TED and the parallel program for Luddites?
I want a British TED, because I like to watch science, and I want to know the best of British science, up and down the land.
I’d also like to see a parallel program that offers respect for the work of people in ‘old technologies’ and welcomes them into a world that we find dear.
Shall we put reality TV and our license fees to good work?
If you plan ahead, you will be interested in this list . . . and add to it
Posted on: October 3, 2009
- In: opportunity
- 1 Comment
As a relative “noobe” in the UK, I’ve been frustrated in my search for data about the economy. It is incredibly difficult to get information from the National Statistics Office that in the US and NZ can be slurped online in seconds.
There also seems to be little vision about where we are going.
Repeating complaints and doomsday scenarios doesn’t help, I know. But asking the right questions does.
Yesterday, IT writer, Philip Virgo posted a summary of his lobbying at each of the Party congresses. I’ve reorganised his post below as a set of questions – using his words when they graphically describe the issue.
Questions about the future of work in the UK
- Which are the industries of the future? [Which are they are, and how are developments in these industries consistently highlighted in the media?]
- Which industries will have “integrated career paths”?
- What would be consequences of not having industries with integrated career paths? What is the alternative?
- Will “home made” careers do? Or, will our children be condemned to a “professional backwater . . . no longer part of the mainstream route to the top – unless they emigrate and don’t come back”?
- Will our children and grandchildren be “condemned to surf the cybercrud on the fringes of the global information society – as the UK becomes the electronic equivalent of Cannery Row – a post-industrial poor relation to the economic powerhouses of Asia”?
What will attract industries of the future – particularly in IT and information-management?
- A competitive communications infra-structure and access to world-class broadband
- Regulatory simplicity, clarity and predictability
- Fiscal certainty [presumably for companies and employees]
- Removing planning controls designed for the 50’s and replacing them with controls we need for the information age.
- “Workforce skills programmes” that develop a critical mass of skilled people in the industries that interest us
Virgo describes the migration of IT businesses out of the UK – Maxwell’s newspapers, Google and Yahoo. Isle of Man, Switzerland and Singapore seem to be attractive destinations largely because they undertake to defend data privacy from interference from the US. If that is so, then a foreign policy component of future planning is also clear.
These questions seem to be a good way to start thinking about life and prospects in the UK in the future
What do you think of them?
Being a ‘noobe’ here, I’d be interested in your thoughts on the right questions to ask . . . and the likely answers.
Spring and new projects
Today is the first working day of British Summer Time 2009. The daffodils are out along the paths and the highways of England. It is light by 6am and it is time to spring clean my apartment.
I am also going to revamp my blog.
This is the third revamp or fourth incarnation. I will still write about work and opportunity and I will still write about positive psychology – that is, the psychology of what goes well rather than the psychology of what goes badly.
Happiness engineering
What I will focus on for the foreseeable future is “happiness engineering” or “fungineering” or “happiness hacks”. These are all terms used by preeminent games designer, Jane McDonigal who has pointed out that games designers use basic work psychology to make engaging games far more effectively than managers, HRM and psychologists use the very same body of knowledge to make engaging work.
Learning games design from the beginning
I have no experience in game design. Zip. I don’t even play games – much. So this is the blog of a rank amateur exploring what games designers have to teach us about making work and play engaging in the 21st century, in our built up urban areas, with the threat of climate change and financial ruin hanging over our heads!
A community of amateur games designers
I suspect there are a heap of people out there who want to do this too. Please drop me the name of your blog if you also blog. Or join in the comments and suggest puzzles and conundrum for us to solve. And we will do our best.
Here’s to a winning 2009!
Jo
- Image via Wikipedia
Yours sincerely
Jack Maddock
P.I.G
Printed Information Gatekeeper or what we latterly knew as Editor.
Does your job title fit the work you do?
Or does your job title sound as if HR picked it from the Bullshit Job Generator. Human Data Orchestrator, perhaps? Lol!
And what title might you suggest for my colleague who is a network engineer (computers) and makes a healthy living connecting shopkeepers and restaurants with London markets, the old fashioned way? Well, to me he is a supply chain something or other. I can see it all fits together.
It obviously all fits together but we just don’t have the right vocabulary for jobs like his which are interesting and integrated but I suppose not “functional”, using that word in the theoretical sense.
I’ve been looking around for good job titles. Here are common ones.
- Chief something office – often Chief Inspiration or Happiness Officer
- Metaverse Evangelist
- Knowledge Concierge
- Knowlege Valet (being a concierge in training)
- Instigator
- Brand Champion
Inpired by the resurgence of Concierge, I looked around for lists of jobs from days gone by.
- Scottish jobs
- Old English job titles (so Fletcher means arrow-maker)
- Old American job titles
- Job Titles in England and Wales (where I learn that Caterer comes from Acater or Achateur or Buyer . . . oh!)
They are an interesting read if only to find out the origins of British names. It is quite extraordianary, thought how specific these jobs were. Jobs today are much broader.
What job title fits what I do?
I’m a work psychologist, sometimes known as an industrial psychologist, or occupational psychologist or organizational psychologist. Which of these old titles fits my work?
I liked “chapper” on the Scottish list. This poor fellow’s job was to wake up the baker before sunrise!
I hate alarm clocks but putting that quirk aside, hmm, this is what I do for a living!
I alert people to opportunity and get them moving even when they feel like staying put!
I could also be a piecer – the child that fixed broken threads on a loom. I do a lot of that but not so much for the sake of weaving but as way of alerting people to opportunity. Fix this thread, then . . .
How would you describe the work you do?
Does your job title do it for you? Or do you need a new way of describing your work?
- Image via Wikipedia
Don’t ask who will be employed now
Today I commented on Jon Ingram‘s post about the way HR managers are responding to the recession and remarked that we should not be like the proverbial ostrich – head in the HR sand, butt in the breeze, where it is likely to be shot off!
Ostriches can run really fast (I’ve ridden one). A kick from them will also de-gut you as effectively as a kick from a giraffe.
So why don’t they run or attack, which they sometimes do?
Well, partly, they are none to bright (easily dazzled and then captured by reflecting the sun off your watch into their eyes).
But they are hoping that if they are quiet, that they will be safe.
So I am not going to be quiet. It does not make me safe.
But I’ll also be kind, and tell you why I am blathering on about the wild animals of southern Africa.
Is the knowledge I acquired in southern Africa of use here? Well, some is and some isn’t.
The point is that the competencies of yesterday are not necessarily valuable tomorrow.
We must distinguish what of yesterday we can take forward to the future.
We can respect the rest. We can reminisce about it. But some belongs to the past and will not contribute to the business models of tomorrow.
Don’t bury your head in employment sand!
The questions we have to ask, and should ask each year in our strategy review are:
- What competencies is this business or my career based?
- How are these going to change? Incrementally, or suddenly and discontinuously requiring radical back-to-school training?
And in a bad downturn, we should also ask:
- Can I use the slow time of the downturn to re-train and get some early experience in these new technologies?
Strategies for employers and employees
Employers should be actively building their team around the technologies of tomorrow.
Employees who have switched-off employers should be networking hard to find and build the team that is coalescing around the markets and technologies of the future.
Ask who will be employed in the future?
Here is a simple procedure
1 Grab an old shoe box
- For one month, on an A5 envelope, every day write down one url to the future of your field with some notes about why you think it is important. Date it!
- For one month, on an A6 envelope, write down the contact details of a person who seems to be heading towards the right future and the nature of your contact with them. Date it!
- On the back of some other suitable scrap, jot down a daily diary of “what were the main events of today and WHY DID IT GO SO WELL”. Keep your rough-and-ready diary in the box.
- Print out a calendar. Mark off each day and “don’t break the chain”. Get the creative thinking charged up and humming.
2 At the end of the month, review and repeat
- But this time discard one of the A5 and A6 envelopes as you add a new pair each day.
- Keep the rough-and-ready diary going and remember to end by asking the question “WHY DID THE DAY GO SO WELL?”
- And remember “don’t break the chain”. Do this exercise daily however roughly.
You’ll be in the future before me!
Now, you’ll be in the future before me, so let me know how it goes. I’m particularly interested in how many months it takes you. My guess is three at the outside.
And when you’ve done this, we’ll “make a plan” to come back to rescue the ostriches! We’ll have a figured out a role for them by then.
Right now, lets go out, scout the future and be there when it happens!
flowing motion 
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