The future of work has no future

The future of work is the most fashionable subject in management and one of the least useful. Between the people frightened of automation and the ones evangelising a world of freelancers, everybody has a view about what is coming and everybody is worried.

I want to start somewhere else, in a specific room on a specific afternoon, because that room explains why almost every prediction about work is answering the wrong question.

Nobody knows what the future of work will look like. What we can say is that most of its elements are already visible today, and that the difficulty is telling which of them will matter and which will not.

Which produces a conclusion the prediction industry cannot sell. There is no single future of work arriving for everybody. Your organisation’s future is being decided right now by the culture it has and the leadership practices it uses, and those are observable rather than forecastable.

Future of work predictions describe a general destination. What determines where your business actually ends up is whether it has made flexibility real, whether it has stopped scheduling meetings at six in the evening, and whether anybody has looked seriously at managerial innovation.

So the useful role is not futurologist. It is something closer to nowologist, which is a joke with a respectable cousin, since nowcasting is a real term in economics and meteorology for the difficult work of estimating the present.

What gets sold	Why it does not land	What decides it instead
A single arriving futureFuture of work predictions describe one destination reached by everybody: remote, automated, skills-based and increasingly freelance. The reports are competent and the destination is general, which is what makes it unusable for any particular business.	The elements are already hereAlmost every ingredient of the next decade is visible today, and the difficulty is telling the movements that will matter from the ones that will not. That is a problem of noticing rather than of forecasting, and forecasting is what the industry sells.	Your culture and your practicesTwo organisations in the same industry reading the same reports arrive somewhere different, because what decides the outcome is the leadership practices they already have and the gap between their stated values and the ones their market holds.

The room in 2008 where nobody could see it

December 2008, an event for the technology industry in a converted municipal building in Paris. In the audience, three people watching an interview and thinking about something else entirely.

Three people and a transport problem

Garrett Camp was there with a friend called Travis and with Melody, who worked in media. Camp was by then an employee of eBay, which had acquired his company StumbleUpon the previous year for a reported seventy-five million dollars, and Travis was similarly working for the business that had bought his own start-up.

Camp lived in San Francisco and so did the person he wanted to see, in a different part of it, which created a logistics problem every time they arranged to meet.

As he saw it there were three ways of getting across a city with any style. Own a car, and he had bought himself a Mercedes and disliked driving in town. Take a taxi, and the taxi arrangements of the day were what they were. Or hire somebody to drive the car for him.

The idea and the counter-proposal

The entrepreneur in him wondered whether options two and three could be combined. Buy ten of the cars, and let people reach the drivers through an application.

When he put it to Travis, the answer was that he would do better to use the limousine drivers who were already sitting idle between jobs, rather than spending a fortune on German cars.

Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick went on to co-found Uber, and origin stories of this kind get polished in the retelling, so treat the dialogue as the version that has come down to us rather than as a transcript. The founding is not in dispute.

What followed was neither uncomplicated nor uniformly admired. The company reorganised urban transport, generated a decade of regulatory conflict and disputes about the status of the people driving for it, and one of those two co-founders left under considerable pressure. Nothing in this article is a recommendation of how any of that was handled.

What the story actually proves

Here is why the room matters. Sitting in that audience, those two had not the faintest intention of shaking the world economy, creating a movement that would be named after their own company, or setting the urban transport industry alight.

And yet every element that would produce that upheaval was already present in 2008, publicly available and in the pockets of the people in the room.

• The smartphone existed.
• The application store existed.
• Digital mapping existed.
• The beginnings of on-demand work existed.

Nobody in that room, including the two of them, could connect those points. If they had been painters they had the canvas and they had the paint, and they had no idea what the finished picture would look like.

Which is precisely the situation everybody is in with the future of work today. The components are visible. What is missing is the ability to tell which ones will turn out to have mattered, and no amount of forecasting supplies that.

Five kinds of people telling you what is coming

The future is built on the present, so before getting excited about fashionable themes it is worth looking at the movements being announced and at who is announcing them. Five distinct groups dominate the conversation, and each one announces the end of something.

The liberated consultants, and the end of the middle manager

For this group the future of work marks the end of the infantilisation imposed by hierarchy. Layers disappear, teams self-organise, and the intermediate boss becomes surplus.

There is something real underneath it, since a great many middle management roles exist to move information upwards through a structure that no longer needs a human to move information. The prediction is a decade old and the layer is still there.

What the group misses is that removing a layer does not remove the work that layer was doing. Somebody still has to translate strategy into a week, and organisations that deleted the role without redistributing the work reinstated it within two years under a different title.

The management documentarians, and the end of the soft manager

This group catalogues practices from start-ups to demonstrate that the future will demand still more leadership. Their announcement is the end of the mild, administrative manager.

The cataloguing is genuinely useful and the conclusion rarely survives contact with an organisation that has different foundations from the ones being catalogued. A practice lifted from a venture-funded software company lands very differently in a family manufacturer.

Which is the whole problem with practice transplants, and the reason I built a separate diagnostic for what a specific business is made of before it copies anything.

The optimists, and the end of salaried employment

For the optimists the future belongs to free agents, and employment as we know it is finishing. It is the most repeated claim in the category and the one most easily checked against data.

Australian employment projections do not describe a collapse of employment. Jobs and Skills Australia projects total employment growing by around 961,000 people over five years and by close to two million over ten, reaching about 16.6 million employed people by 2035.

That is a picture of more employment rather than less, growing roughly in line with the population. Independent and contract work is real, it is significant in particular industries, and on these numbers it is not replacing the employment relationship at anything like the rate this group has been predicting for a decade.

The anxious technoprophets, and the end of the human being

For this group the equation is simple. Digitisation plus automation plus robotics equals a universal basic income, so that everybody has something to live on once the work has gone.

The Australian Parliament ran an inquiry into the digital transformation of workplaces and its committee tabled a report on the future of work, which is a more sober document than any of this and worth reading before adopting a position.

The pattern with this group is that the technology arrives roughly on schedule and the consequence does not. Something gets automated, the work changes shape, and the job disappears far more slowly than the capability appears.

The new-ways-of-working crowd, and the end of the workplace

The last group announces liberation from the workplace itself. Work anywhere, at any time, on any device, while remaining employed by the same organisation.

Of the five predictions this is the one that has travelled furthest, and it travelled for reasons nobody in the group anticipated rather than because the argument won.

It also produced the clearest example of a practice that changed meaning. Unlimited leave arrived as an innovative managerial practice at several well-known technology employers and has since been criticised as a manipulation, on the grounds that staff take less time off when nobody specifies an entitlement and everybody is chasing a target.

That reversal took about three years. It is the strongest available argument for reading practices against your own organisation rather than adopting them because they appeared on a list of what is coming.

What the Australian evidence actually says

Before dismissing forecasting altogether it is worth reading what the serious forecasters actually publish, because the caveats they attach are more instructive than the numbers they produce.

The projections, and the caveat attached to them

Jobs and Skills Australia produces the national employment projections, modelled to 2035, and they are the most careful numbers available on this subject in the country. They are also accompanied by an unusually honest warning.

The agency states that the projections rest on assumptions, contain inherent uncertainty, and should be treated as indicative of trends based on current knowledge rather than as a precise prediction. It adds that they are not forecasts, since they extrapolate from past trends rather than from specific future-oriented factors.

Read that twice. The national body responsible for projecting Australian employment tells its readers that what it publishes is not a forecast, which is a considerably more rigorous position than anything on a conference stage.

The lesson is not that the numbers are worthless. It is that they describe the shape of a trend rather than the arrival of a destination, and every honest projection carries that limitation whether or not the publisher admits it.

The skills that keep appearing

Where the Australian work is genuinely useful is in the skills that surface repeatedly across different methods and different agencies. Those are worth attending to precisely because several independent processes keep landing on them.

Jobs and Skills Australia groups them as care, computing, cognitive ability, communication and climate, having added the last of those to an earlier set of four.

CSIRO approaches it differently and arrives somewhere compatible, identifying long-run megatrends including adapting to climate change, the escalating health imperative, geopolitical shifts, diving into digital, increasingly autonomous systems and unlocking the human dimension.

Notice what those lists have in common. Not one of them tells a particular business what to do, because they were never built to. They describe the weather rather than what to wear.

Why a trend list is not a plan

The gap between a trend and a decision is where most organisations lose the value of all this reading. A trend tells you a direction. It says nothing about whether your business should move, when, or with what.

Worse, a trend list encourages adoption for the wrong reason. The unlimited leave story is the clearest case: a practice adopted because it was on everybody’s list, in organisations whose own conditions made it function as a reduction in leave taken.

Sorting the movements that matter to you from the ones that do not is a skill in its own right, and I have set out how I approach it in the case for discarding more trends than you follow.

What has actually changed in Australian work

Set the five predictions aside for a moment and ask a different question. Over recent years, what has genuinely changed about working life in this country, in ways that affect every employer rather than a fashionable few?

The change that arrived by law

The boundary between work and personal life stopped being a matter of culture and became a matter of statute. Under the Fair Work Act, employees can refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact outside their working hours unless that refusal is unreasonable, and the right covers contact from clients and third parties as well as from the employer.

It reached small business employers a year after everyone else, a right to disconnect term now sits in every modern award, and disputes go to the Fair Work Commission.

Read that against the five groups. The workplace was going to dissolve into work anywhere at any time on any device. What actually happened is that the law drew a line around when an employer may expect a response, which is close to the opposite movement.

The change that arrived by regulation

The second change is larger and gets discussed less. Australian work health and safety law now treats psychological health as safety rather than as wellbeing, which converts a great deal of management practice from good intention into legal duty.

Employers carry a positive duty to eliminate or minimise psychosocial risks so far as is reasonably practicable, and the hazards named in that framework include job demands, low job control, poor support and unclear roles.

Every one of those is a management practice rather than a technology. Which means the single largest recent change to what Australian managers must actually do arrived through a regulator rather than through automation, artificial intelligence or self-organisation.

Why none of the predictions included either

Look back through the five groups and try to find the one that called this. The liberated consultants were removing hierarchy, the documentarians were cataloguing start-up practice, the optimists were dissolving employment, the technoprophets were automating the human being and the new-ways crowd were dissolving the office.

Not one of them predicted that the most consequential changes to Australian working life in a decade would arrive through the Fair Work Act and a model work health and safety code.

The reason is structural rather than a lapse. Prediction in this field runs on technology and ideology, because both are visible from a stage and both make an interesting slide. Regulatory change is slow, unglamorous, jurisdiction-specific and enormously consequential, which makes it invisible to a global futurist and unavoidable for an Australian employer.

Which is the argument for the nowologist stated as evidence rather than as a joke. The people watching what was already happening in Australian workplaces, and reading draft instruments during consultation periods, saw both of these coming. The people watching the future did not.

Your future of work is decided by your culture

Here is the argument this pillar rests on. Whatever any report says, your future of work depends on your current management practices and on your company culture, which means it is being decided this quarter rather than in 2035.

Practices already in place, or not

The test is uncomfortably concrete. Has your organisation actually established flexibility in working hours and location, or has it published a policy that managers decline to apply without ever saying so?

Does anybody still schedule meetings at six in the evening? Has anyone looked seriously at managerial innovation, or at the internal processes that make a good idea take four months to reach a decision?

Organisations still at the beginning of their digital transformation, still running an annual appraisal as the main feedback mechanism, or still recruiting for a single lifelong career, have already chosen a future. It is simply not the one described in the reports they are reading.

Six checks cover most of it, and every one can be answered from records you already hold.

• What proportion of meetings in the last month started before nine or after five?
• How long did your last three significant decisions take from first proposal to approval?
• How many people used the flexibility your policy offers, as opposed to how many are entitled to it?
• When did somebody last receive feedback outside an annual or half-yearly cycle?
• What did the last three people who resigned give as their reason, in their own words rather than in a category?
• Which of your roles are still described as a career rather than as a piece of work?

None of this requires prediction. All of it is observable this week, by anybody willing to look at their own calendar rather than at a trend deck.

The sixth question is the one that catches organisations out most often, because a role written as a lifelong career reads as a promise to a generation that has stopped expecting one, and reads as a restriction to anybody evaluating the work rather than the employer.

The values gap

Underneath the practices sit the values, and this is where the real divergence between organisations happens. Values are not carved in stone, and the ones a company adopted twenty years ago were adopted for a society that has moved.

Three things need identifying, in order. The values currently held by the society your business recruits from and sells to. The values your organisation actually operates by, as distinct from the ones on the wall. And then the gap between the two.

That gap is your future of work, stated as a measurable quantity rather than as a prediction. A wide gap means difficulty attracting and holding the people you need, whatever the labour market does.

Recovering what an organisation is genuinely for, rather than what it says it is for, is a discipline in itself, and there is more on how real company values get recovered in the piece on company values worth having.

Two organisations, same industry, different futures

Take two businesses in the same sector, reading the same reports, facing the same technology and the same labour market. One has spent three years making flexibility real, shortening decision paths and asking its people what they actually want from the work. The other has published a values statement.

Their futures of work will not resemble each other, and no external forecast distinguishes between them because no external forecast can see inside either.

Five years on, one of them is competing for the same people on salary alone and the other is not. Neither outcome was caused by automation, artificial intelligence or the gig economy, and both were entirely predictable from the inside at the start.

Which is why the question what is the future of work is malformed. There is no single one. There are as many as there are cultures, and yours is already under construction whether or not anybody is supervising it.

Nowologist, not futurologist

Which brings me to the job title I would rather hold. Not futurologist, since I have no idea what is coming and neither does anybody selling you a picture of it. Something closer to nowologist, whose work is establishing what is already true.

The skill is noticing rather than forecasting

Return to the room in 2008. Nothing was missing. The phone, the store, the maps and the on-demand labour were all present and all publicly available, and two founders sitting in that audience could not assemble them into the thing they would build.

That failure was not a failure of prediction. Nobody needed to see the future, because the future was already sitting in their pockets. What was missing was the connection between four things everybody could see.

So the useful discipline is observational. Where does change originate, which signals are actually moving, and what follows from them for a specific business. I have set out the categories I watch in the framework on where disruption comes from.

The joke has a serious relative. Nowcasting is an established term in economics and meteorology for the surprisingly difficult work of establishing the state of the present, since even current conditions arrive late, incomplete and contested. Working out what is already happening is harder than predicting what might.

Where external forces still bind you

The obvious objection to all of this is that it counsels looking inward while genuine external forces rearrange whole industries. A regional manufacturer’s culture will not protect it from an automation wave, a tariff, a climate policy or a shortage of a particular skill.

That objection is correct and it does not overturn the argument. External forces set the range of outcomes available to you. Your practices and your culture decide where inside that range you end up, and the two answer different questions.

Which is why the projections and the megatrend work are worth reading, and worth reading for what they are. They tell you what could arrive. They cannot tell you what your organisation will do about it, and that second part is the half that decides the outcome.

Two businesses hit by the same external force diverge on exactly the variables this article has been describing, which is the practical form of the same point.

Where to start on your own future of work

All of which produces something considerably more useful than a trend list. Four steps, each of which can be completed with people you already employ, and none of which requires anybody to predict anything.

Four steps that need no forecast

The order matters more than the individual steps, because each one supplies the material the next one needs.

1. Accept that your values are not set in stone. They were adopted for a society that has since moved, and treating them as permanent is what produces the gap.
2. Identify the values currently held by the society you recruit from and sell to. Not the ones you assume it holds, the ones it demonstrates.
3. Identify the values your organisation actually operates by, which are visible in what gets rewarded, promoted and tolerated rather than in what is written on a wall.
4. Measure the gap between the two, and treat that gap as your future of work rather than as a communications problem.

Step three is where organisations resist, because the values that operate and the values that are published are rarely the same document. That difference is the finding rather than an embarrassment to be managed.

Which future of work predictions are worth your attention

External material is still worth reading, provided you know what each kind of source can and cannot tell you. Three categories cover almost everything that will cross your desk.

Source	What it can tell you	What it cannot	How to use it
Government projections and agency modelling	The direction and scale of labour market movement, with stated assumptions	Anything about your organisation, and they say so themselves	Set the range of what could arrive, then stop
Consultancy and conference futurism	Which ideas are currently circulating among executives	Whether any of it applies to your conditions	Read as a map of what your competitors are about to try
Your own practices and values gap	What your organisation will actually do when something arrives	What is going to arrive	Measure it, and treat the result as the plan

Read across the bottom row and the point of the whole article appears. The only source that can tell you what your organisation will do is your organisation, and it is the one nobody schedules time to read.

The middle row deserves one word of defence. Knowing what your competitors are about to try is genuinely valuable, and it is a different thing from knowing what will work, which is what that material is usually sold as.

How I can help you build your own

Nobody I work with needs another set of predictions. They need somebody to establish what their organisation is currently doing, name the gap between that and what their market values, and say it in front of the people who can change it.

Keynotes and workshops

Keynotes on this subject are deliberately not futurism, which occasionally disappoints an organiser who wanted a picture of 2040. What they do instead is take the room through its own present, which is less comfortable and considerably more useful.

Workshops run the four steps live, and most of the day goes on step three. Establishing what an organisation actually rewards, as opposed to what it says it rewards, is the work.

Diagnostics and leadership programs

The values gap diagnostic measures the distance between what your organisation holds valuable and what the people you need currently hold valuable. It is a fortnight of work and it predicts recruitment and retention better than any labour market projection can.

Longer programs work on the practices that gap exposes, which usually means decision speed, flexibility that is real rather than published, and the quality of the daily experience your people actually have. There is more on that last one in what people notice about working for you.

If you want to test any of this, a conversation beats a proposal. You can tell me what your organisation last changed about how people work and roughly when, and the answer usually describes the future you are already building.

Conclusion: there is no future of work to predict

In December 2008 every component of a company that would rearrange urban transport was sitting in one room, in the pockets of the people who would build it, and nobody could see the picture. That is the permanent condition rather than a story about two founders.

Five groups will tell you what is ending: the middle manager, the mild manager, salaried employment, the human being and the workplace. Each has noticed something real and each has drawn a conclusion no evidence supports, and the national agency that models Australian employment attaches a caveat to its own numbers saying they are not forecasts.

So treat future of work predictions as a description of the weather rather than as instructions about what to wear. They set the range. They cannot tell you where inside it your business will land, because that is decided by practices you already have and values you have not examined lately.

Which is why the future of work has no future, in the sense the phrase is normally used. There is no single destination arriving for everybody, only as many futures as there are cultures, and yours is being built this quarter by people who are not thinking about 2035 at all.

Frequently asked questions about the future of work