Stowe Boyd

Originally this essay formed the final section of An End To Predictions, A Call For Revolution, but now republished independently.

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge. | Steven Hawking

Hawking sets context for what I have been calling a ‘movement’ since 2005 or so, the movement to drive a transition from 'normal’ industrial-era organizations that are role-centered, closed, slow-and-tight, hierarchical, and backwards-focused to 'revolutionary’ post-industrial-era organizations that are human-centered, open, fast-and-loose, heterarchical, and forwards-focused. Like other movements, this work revolution is defined by the dynamics of opposing forces. On one side, we have those who explicitly or implicitly uphold the principles and cultural foundations of 'normalcy’, and who actively or passive-aggressively oppose those, on the other side, who advocate revolutionary change in work culture, practices, and values.

I’ve picked the terms 'normal’ and 'revolutionary’ with intention. Specifically, I have borrowed them from Thomas Kuhn’s central arguments in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a work that laid out the analogous dynamics in scientific revolutions.

Kuhn argued that there is a cyclic form to science, where the work of a generation of scientist in any given field establishes a paradigm around which research and discourse are centered, like Newtonian physics. It started with various incoherent notions of motion (the pre-paradigm phase), but the central premises of gravity, and Newton’s laws of motion led to the development of a second phase, where 'normal’ science began, and the dominant paradigm structured the science for a considerable period of time, establishing consensus on terminology, methods, and the sorts of experiments that might lead to increased insights1.

Over time, normal science may lead to anomalies in findings – unexpected results from experiments, questions that can’t be answered – and these can lead to questioning the old paradigm as its weaknesses are apparent. This can lead to crisis, and that can spark a paradigm shift, like quantum physics as an alternative to Newton’s.

The crisis and the shift are not necessarily smooth, and there is often active disagreement and contention between the advocates of the previous, 'normal’ paradigm, and the revolutionaries pushing for the new paradigm. This can lead to breaks in the scientific discipline, with huge controversies and great antagonism, since the reputations and livelihoods of the scientists are at stake.

At some point, the crisis ends, usually as a result of the establishment of a new paradigm, which eventually becomes 'normal’ mainstream science, with new methods, terminology, and established approaches for experimentation.

We are at a time of such a crisis, although it’s not in the traditional realm of science, per se. The crisis is in the world of business, and it is really predicated on scientific revolutions in several areas that impinge on business, namely cognitive science, behavioral economics, social psychology, and related fields. (And in the background behind the soft incursion of these revelatory social science findings, we can feel the looming hard technologies of the fourth industrial revolution.)

In the past few decades enormous advances have been made in our understanding of how people perceive the world and their relationships to others, how we reason (or don’t), how people 'make decisions’, how productive teams 'work’, and how cultural norms impact our behavior. However, very little of this science has reached the C-suite. Consider, as only one example, the persistent problems related to diversity and the foundational issues of cognitive bias. However, few in leadership are educated in these issues, and no coherent new paradigm of organizational theory and practice has yet fully emerged.

At present, we are left with the strange dichotomy of entrepreneurial capitalism – with capital growth and shareholder value as the highest aims – and the independent considerations of making the world a better place, making the workplace more equitable, just, and less precarious, and attempting to construct the world of work so that people can achieve greater autonomy, meaning, and purpose in their lives, and not just a paycheck. These cross forces define a growing area of tension in the discourse about the future of work, the transformation of the 21st century business, and how to balance the desires of the many sorts of people holding stakes in these companies.

At the same time, we see growing interest in the principle that a revolution is business operations is needed to confront and overcome a long list of 'anomalies’ in business and the economic sphere. The combination of increased economic pressures in a sped-up, global marketplace and the desire for greater stability and purpose for everyone at work leads to some broad trends that could stand as a proxy for the 'revolution’ in organizational theory and practice:

• Human-centered not role-centered. We lose a great deal when we limit people to only thinking about or acting on a limited set of activities in business. A machine press operator can have a brilliant insight that saves the copy millions, and a field sales lead can come back from a meeting with a customer suggestion for a breakthrough new product. But not if they are punished for stepping outside the painted lines on the floor. People can be larger than their job descriptions, if we let them.
• Open not closed models of thinking and operations. This means a 'yes, and’ mindset, where we consider alternatives rather than rejecting them because they are novel. This means activity rooting out systemic anti-creative and anti-curiosity patterns in business dogma. It means embracing Von Foester's Empirical Imperative: Always act to increase the set of possibilities.
• Fast-and-loose not slow-and-tight operations. Agile, flexible, and adaptive methods of organizing, cooperating, and leading are needed. A less bureaucratic management style would increase innovation, and lead to building business operations around experiments rather than only well-established processes.
• Heterarchical not hierarchical operations. The bronze age rule of kings, supposedly selected by the gods and legitimized by their personal charisma has led to terrible results, with narcissistic sociopaths all too often calling the shots. The occasional Steve Jobs or Yves Chouinard does not disprove the problems inherent to top-down-only organizations, especially in a time of great change and uncertainty. Organizational structure is another means to the ends that companies are created to effect, and serves as a powerful barrier to change when treated as sacred and inviolable.
• Forward-focused, not tradition-bound. We need to adopt a new paradigm for business, one that explicitly breaks with a great deal of what passes for conventional wisdom, organized around new science, new forms of social connection, and leveraging the possibilities in the points made above. And science is not standing still, so we must incorporate new understanding into our work and the operations of business.

This is predicated upon stating – explicitly – that a revolution is necessary, and that a long list of practices and principles will need to be identified as problematic and rooted out. This is exactly what I founded Work Futures to do, as a research and educational institute, and in 2019 I intend to push hard to advance that agenda.

This revolution has started, but the we are in the early days of what will eventually – decades from now, perhaps – be a wholesale recasting of business. But the world of work cannot be changed independently of the larger world. It is one part of a larger set of changes that envelope and animate it.

The larger societal and economic trends touched on in the post this is extracted from (see An End To Predictions, A Call For Revolution) – Polarization and Populism, Capitalism and Gigantism, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution – are imparting enormous stress on the human sphere. And, as a result, it is very hard to predict what will happen in 2019. However, I believe that by 2023 a great deal of the revolution – this transition from the 'normal’ to a 'revolutionary’ form of business – will have become more clear, as the new paradigm becomes more well-defined, and as the larger world shifts to internalize new approaches to the tectonic forces at work, at all scales.

1. Paraphrased from Wikipedia. ↩︎

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Microsoft adds more mobile, scheduling capabilities to Teams for firstline workers | ZDNet | Mary Jo Foley reports on more firstline worker support in Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft is adding customizable mobile capabilities to Teams with capabilities such as location sharing, smart camera and the ability to record and share audio messages securely.

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Computer Models to Investors: Short Everything | Stephanie Wang looks into what the algos are predicting: they’ve flipped from long to shorting.

Funds that use such strategies likely went from holding net long positions, or betting that prices would rise, in four major asset classes—stocks, bonds, currencies and commodities—in the third quarter of 2017, to being short, or wagering against, everything but bonds by 2019. And even their embrace of bonds is bearish, signaling a flight to haven assets.

These are the findings from research by quantitative investment firm AlphaSimplex Group LLC, based on models that gauge the magnitude of price moves and perform like typical trend-following algorithms. Trend-followers generally try to ride markets when they move strongly in one direction.

“This is like the chaos bet,” said Kathryn Kaminski, chief research strategist and portfolio manager at AlphaSimplex, who added that the last time trend-followers reversed positions so dramatically was in 2007 and 2008. “Pretty much any way you run the models, you end up net short a lot of asset classes.”

AlphaSimplex, which has about $7.4 billion in assets and runs one of the largest trend-following programs, is also bearish across global markets.

Uh-oh. The #chaosbet has an ominous tone. How does a person on the sideline make that bet? Short term bonds?

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James Harden Is the Outlier of the NBA | Harden’s a revolutionary: he’s taken nearly twice as many stepback 3-pointers as any NBA team this season, and 86% of his 3s are unassisted, highest in the NBA. He’s the most effective offensive player in the past 20 years. Harden has already taken more 3-pointers after seven or more dribbles than any NBA team in the last six years even though he’s only played 36 games. He has more shots after that many dribbles than the Sixers, Pelicans, Bulls, Nuggets, Clippers, Timberwolves and Knicks combined.

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Gene-edited, spicy tomatoes are the superfood scientists say we need | I want.

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Klaxoon - The Meeting Revolution - Join your Team | I should get a demo.

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WeWork rebrands to We Company, reveals details of SoftBank deal | Because of stock troubles, Softbank cut back its investment in WeWork.

Going forward, the company will no longer be called WeWork but rather The We Company. The new structure is part of Neumann’s heady ambition to push the company’s market and opportunity beyond commercial real estate. Rather than just renting desks, the company aims to encompass all aspects of people’s lives, in both physical and digital worlds, he says.

The We Company will be comprised of three main business units: WeWork, its main office business; WeLive, a fledgling residential unit; and WeGrow, a still evolving business that currently includes an elementary school and a coding academy. Although the company could not provide specifics, it says plans are in the works to build out its residential and education units this year. Also coming in 2019 are more acquisitions and new hires. The company aims to add 1,000 engineers.

Where is the hotel chain? Cohotels will be big. Oh, they mocked one up in 2009:

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How soon will climate change force you to move? | I picked Beacon NY to avoid climate change migration.

Some parts of the U.S. will be hardest hit economically, particularly the Southeast, but the whole country is beginning to see negative impacts. In the Albuquerque area, where the Mesku family moved, the risk of severe drought is increasing. In the Pacific Northwest, a region that is often cited as one of the places that will be less impacted by global warming, wildfires are incurring record costs and smoke is starting to impact local economies. In Seattle, where most people don’t have air conditioning, there was a record-breaking heat wave in 2017 and again in 2018. In Madison, Wisconsin, record rainfall, a problem that is also linked to climate change, caused widespread flooding in August 2018. In Maine, as the ocean warms and acidifies, fisheries and the lobster industry could collapse. In Canada, a heat wave in Quebec in July 2018 was linked to more than 90 deaths. San Francisco hit a record 106 degrees in September and then in November went through 13 days of dangerous air quality as smoke from the Camp Fire blew into the area. As many as 13,000 properties in the Bay Area are at risk of chronic flooding by 2045.

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Paola Antonelli on “Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival”

#readlater

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Sleep glasses | Felix Gray | Counter the blue light in your screens.

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London’s Big Event For Corporate Misfits, Troublemakers, And Rebels % | Corporate Rebels on tour!

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Big Tech’s Trump problem - Axios | Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei say

Tech is the new politics.

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Introduce Agenda to Your Note-taking - Bicycle For Your Mind | Review of Agenda note tool

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How Robots Will Transform the C-Suite

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Managing When the Future Is Unclear | Lisa Lai

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Artificial Intelligence Was Supposed to Reduce Hiring Discrimination. It’s Already Backfiring. – Mother Jones

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Expectations: The Root of your Employee Engagement Problem

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Understanding Trends in Alternative Work Arrangements in the United States | Katz and Krueger walk back the assertaion they made about the gig economy back in 2016. Now thy think it was temporary, demonstrated by a tight labor market. As Steve Levine characterizes it,

Now the pair — Princeton University’s Alan Krueger and Harvard’s Lawrence Katz — say they were fooled by economic noise and that workers are pretty much the same as they’ve always been.

• Their old paper was exceedingly influential, trickling down to how economists, human resources professionals, marketers and more viewed the workforce.

• But in their new paper, published this week, Krueger and Katz say people were doing odd jobs back then because they needed the work, not as a signal of a new trend. Now that the labor market is tight, they are back at work.

Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM, tells Axios that the pair’s new paper is par for the course. “If you’re not getting it wrong 20% of the time, you are not doing your job,” he says.

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Scoring under Pressure | what we can learn from penalty kicks in soccer (football).

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HQ 2.0: The Next-Generation Corporate Center

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Twitter will test new conversation features out in the open | I like some of these ideas, like a Twitter status:

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2019 is already full of weird and wonderful monitors | Great monitors.

Perhaps we’ll all be laughing at tiny 27-inch monitors in the future wondering how anyone ever got any work done.

Damn right.

I love the Samsung monitors that fold back against the wall:

And a portable monitor would be great for travel, if it’s light.

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Q&A: Rafat Ali, Founder & CEO @ Skift – The Idea – Medium | A profile of what Rafat Ali is doing at Skift.

I need to grab a coffee with him.

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How Being Bored Out of Your Mind Makes You More Creative | WIRED | Clive Thompson

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Changing Company Culture Requires a Movement, Not a Mandate | Bryan Walker and Sarah Soule

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Open office plans have a surprising effect on communication at work — Quartz at Work | Lila McLellan

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