As an educator working with business executives, I am passionate about what organizations can do to shape the future of employment in the face of disruptive technological change.
Looking at the past, despite broad job displacement, the industrial revolution created vast numbers of new jobs that few could have previously imagined, in retail, services, supply chains, and elsewhere. It was the result of the productivity potential of technology, in combination with a chain of complementary innovations in business models, infrastructures, public institutions, and policy.
Looking forward into the future, equivalent complementary innovations will shape a world much different to what we are familiar with today. Therefore, it is only natural that we find it difficult to imagine what new jobs might be created in a few decades. Instead, it is far clearer to us that many of today’s jobs will become either obsolete or will be taken over by automation.
The future of today’s jobs has already been largely decided, not by tech entrepreneurs who “move fast and break things [1]”, but by the structure and culture in many corporations and professions today. Too many jobs have been reduced to the lowest common denominator of repeatable tasks. Too often, ever more constraining standard operating procedures and hierarchies of control dilute trust and responsibility. Too many people are likely to feel crushed by silos, politics, fear, stifling procedures, unaccountable committees, and complacency. Such are the jobs where ownership, imagination, learning, and the joy of work, go to die. In effect, we have already stripped too many jobs of everything that is important to people and irrelevant to computers, and thus prepared them to be summarily automated, long before technology catches up.