With the ‘Brave New World’ theme of my last missive still reasonably fresh in mind, I chanced upon a fascinating new study from the Chartered Management Institute (CMI), which offers a vision of the world of work in the year 2018. ‘Management Futures – the World in 2018’ (www.managers.org.uk) considers the issues that affect us today – terrorism, emerging super-economies, cybernetics, demographic changes, work-life balances and the like – and suggests possible implications, and what we might do to ameliorate the worst outcomes.
The study identifies seventeen scenarios arising from political, technological and demographic changes. From a demographic standpoint, the population is ageing, a fact that employers will eventually have to address with vigour, regardless of any current legislative pressure to rid ‘ageism’ from their organisations.
The study suggests that while the average age of employees may barely show much increase at present, in ten years time this will become a major issue. Organisations that have not prepared themselves for it will be taken by surprise as they have to manage complex health issues and the daily work challenges posed by a ‘geriatric’ workforce. Common sense must prevail here. Older workers have knowledge and experience, which they not only offer to the job in hand, but which they are able to impart to future generations of young employees starting out on their careers.
With global economic development comes an inevitable shift in populations. On a small scale, we may have already seen this in the UK as our Polish friends, who came to us in their tens of thousands with the opening up of the European Union, now appear to be returning to reap the benefits of a booming economy back home.
As developing and emerging nations grow economically strong, the study suggests that people considering emigration may choose instead to stay at home, while recent emigrants decide to return to their home countries as conditions of work and pay converge. The ‘Western’ world thus loses out on significant chunks of its skilled and semi-skilled workforces – mostly young workers – and suffers consequences such as ill-maintained city and urban infrastructures.
The CMI’s futurologists believe that a possible ‘safety measure’ will be to use native resources and to train and re-skill the unemployed locally, regionally and nationally. Re-framing and re-valuing infrastructure management positively, they say, will attract the most motivated local resources. And how are these resources to be motivated? Local government will certainly have to work very hard at this if it is to provide the incentives, not to mention the additional funds required to attract workers to what has traditionally been a rather low-paid sector.
On the technology front, we could be facing a world where chip implants improve our memory and knowledge; computers become almost conversational, responding to our gestures and facial expressions, and robots possessing artificial intelligence take greater control of decision making and strategic management. The vulnerability of, and our growing dependence on, the World Wide Web are highlighted. The CMI’s worst technology scenario is a virus placed by terrorists that systematically deletes huge quantities of business and private data via online communications.
Security measures, it says, will reach a new dimension, with virtual dams rather than firewalls needed to protect such data, and multiple backups in intellectual property banks providing life-savers for business. As the CMI researchers euphemistically state, getting the balance right between openness and protection will require “some thought”.
CMI chief executive, Mary Chapman says that successful organisations are those that anticipate, identify and ultimately drive change. Preparing for change, she says, ensures that organisations and teams are “effective, capable and competitive.” She also believes that managers will require a greater degree of “emotional intelligence” in the future to understand what makes people tick and how they are likely to react to change on a scale envisaged by this study.
This is surely the nub of it. People’s expectations of life and work go far beyond what was the norm just a generation back. As one of the CMI scenarios suggests, the next generation is likely to refuse to engage in what it perceives to be ‘meaningless jobs’ on a mass scale, preferring ‘ethical’ careers and shunning the ‘rat race’ mentality of its forebears.
This year we mark the fortieth anniversary of the mass student uprising of 1968 in Paris. With the benefit of hindsight, the ideals of that student body do appear somewhat naive, but the riots nearly brought down a government and they certainly galvanised a whole generation into thinking that it did indeed have the power to bring about change. Might we be moving towards a similar uprising against the established order, this time by a generation of young people driven by a different set of ideals? Time will tell.
Les Hunt
Editor