The Changing Nature of Work
My usual answer to the question “What has happened to make Crowdsourcing the ‘it’ trend?” is not at all surprising: the Internet, Globalization, and Broad Acceptance of Social Networking Principles. But I increasingly believe that there is another that is perhaps equally important and more profound in its impact on our lives. With credit due someone else for the term I’m sure, I call it “The Changing Nature of Work”.
Now before you dismiss my premise, saying “What work? Unemployment is out of control!”, hear me out.
I am not talking about the current difficult economy. Nor am I going to fixate on the positive macroeconomic ramifications of increasing innovation efficiencies through crowdsourcing for organizations. Those topics get plenty of coverage.
I am talking about the positive and empowering impact on real people and their work made possible by the increasing trend toward project based work on a global scale. Today, too few have the opportunity to do the work for which they are exceptionally capable and passionate, but that is changing.
Why is this so important? Because the current system of matching people to work is weathered and insufficient. As in all things human, there are a multitude of reasons why, but the reality is that billions of people are not doing what they could or should be doing. They are punching the clocks and doing good work to be sure, but are they doing the kind of work that comes from applying their talents and energy toward the work products for which they have a passion? In fact some would argue that MOST people are in the WRONG jobs. The opportunity costs are incalculable.
Let me illustrate the point with story. I grew up on the southern tip of Lake Michigan (Remember John Cougar Mellencamp’s Small Town?) in a very likable town called Michigan City, IN – people are terrific and quality of life is good. Half of my college bound friends went to Indiana University, half went to Purdue, few left the state. Not surprisingly, most returned home from college and live there today. Even in a tough economy, moving away to find their dream job is the last thing that most would consider. Why should they? With family, friends, and firmly established roots, home is home. This story repeats itself everywhere. Let’s add to this the realities of those with the desire but not the means by which to relocate to where their dream jobs may reside, or the tradeoffs we make to accommodate child care or parent care, or the multitude of other reasons. Our occupations are almost always the result of tradeoffs and limited options. Practical realities and local economies shape our options. No less true in India or other places around the world than in the USA.
Now this is important: when people are both passionate and good at what they do, productivity is extraordinary – not just a little better, a LOT.
There are millions of people now that work when they want, where they want, and on projects for which they are passionate and energized. We know them as self employed, freelancers, independent contractors. But it is only the start. The increasingly outdated model of job postings, internal transfers, and employment agreements is disintegrating and is being replaced by a new work model of the future that has enormous implications for both the individual and the economy. Many soon-to-be clichés are vying for popular acceptance to name the phenomenon – but my favorite is Free Agent Nation (see Fast Company article at http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/12/freeagent.html).
Society is increasingly evolving in favor of enabling the individual, and that movement is accelerating. Some call the current crop of youth the Millennial Generation. These are children who are ‘growing up digital’. Most will have 8 or more jobs in their lifetimes. They value more what they are doing and why than for whom they work. Employer Loyalty and Lifetime Employment are dated concepts to them. They are more connected and informed than ever (See Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation by Don Tapscott) and have their own visions of work. They are empowered.
But it’s not just the younger generations. Gen X and Gen Y people I know are increasingly opting for a life of consulting: project based work in areas they love. They work their own hours, on their own terms. Most love the lifestyle (although this economy does have its challenges) and tell me the work life balance and the fact that they are doing what they love easily trumps the old model.
So what does this mean? It means that Crowdsourcing is both enabling AND being enabled by a powerful trend in the workplace. People all over the world, plugging into work they love to do, on terms they decide, and in ways that allow them to have it all. What if that someone in Hometown USA or Anytown China could apply their skills, whether it was customer service or civil engineering, on projects anywhere at any time? As an example, in InnoCentive’s world, creative minds everywhere apply their talents to problems that matter. Geography, time of day, work habits – none of those matter. They still need to be great at what they do, but the tools and engagement models are all developing at a rapid pace.
And real world economics still need to work. If a million people’s dream job is to be a Sports Agent, then we’ll have a lot of unemployed Arlisses out there, new model or not. One brilliant aspect of the new model is for supply and demand to ebb and flow in efficient ways. Maybe I can not be the Sports Agent, but I could try my hand at Sports writing as a free agent. And maybe I do that from my home on the Southern tip of Lake Michigan.
The profound implication is this: I believe an enormous increase in national and global productivity comes from getting this model right in the next 10 to 20 years. People work on projects for which they are passionate and capable (driving up productivity many fold) and maintain a work/life balance never before possible and organizations achieve their goals better, faster, and more cost effectively than ever before possible.
I have to confess that I also find certain poetry in the idea that what is good for us individually may also be what is good for us all. I believe this is the proverbial “win-win”. But make no mistake, the individual has more leverage and flexibility in the equation than ever before. This is the Working Man’s MegaTrend.
Let me leave you with an excerpt from a blog post from one of our 2007 Top Solvers, Ed Melcarek:
” … I posted and subsequently won my first award, back in ‘03. That award saved me from the welfare office, and re-affirmed my confidence in myself. My batteries were re-charged … I’ve given up trying to fit round pegs into a square holes and jumping through corporate status quo hoops. InnoCentive does all that work with their Seeker companies, and lets me just do the science; a dream job, considering that I get to choose the Challenges I want to work on.”
What are your thoughts?
Tags: changing nature of work, Dwayne Spradlin, Free Agent Nation, freelancing
July 11th, 2009 at 12:24 am
Nice, inciteful piece that expresses many of the things that I’ve felt and experienced in the course of my own 30+ years in what I now call “corporate publishing’. Kicked to the curb last December I’m taking what I know and reinventing myself and creating a new work ethic, modeled closely along the lines outlined above. The quote below, from one of my favorite authors, expresses many of these notions which have been around for over 150 years.
“In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it. They must not do too much of it. And they must have a sense of success in it. ”
John Ruskin, Pre-Raphaelitism, 1850
The internet challenges all of us to get the life balance part right but it. more than anything I know, has been the catalyst for changing the nature of work more than anything I can think of. Not sure we can wait two decades to sort all of this out though.
July 13th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
Great article. You timing is impecable. Having grown up in an area that has seen a mass exodus of youth and brainpower, I stayed to help solve fundamental problems. While I was close enough to work in NYC too my main focus has been on helping my hometown succeed. The problems at home gave been enormously complex because they cut across so many disciplines. So, those challenges have propelled me to hone my creative skills and pushed me to gain a broad knowledge in many different areas. Therefore, I feel that I may be of service to practically any company in need of a creative problem solver. As of late, I’ve teamed up with a brilliant PHd to form a think tank/consultancy. As an innovative ideast, inventor and entrepreneur, when given a problem – I can’t stop until a solution is found. With the help of scientists on our team, I hope to be of service to most any company in need of solutions. With Innocentive (I almost started a similar company u til I found yours BTW), and the Internet, I know I can continue to work on problems in my hometown of Wilkes-Barre, PA and still make positive difference Worldwide. Thank you for all that you do! P.S. Glad to see Innocentive at Ocean Tomo IP Auction in Chicago last year!
July 13th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
80 million Net Generation people are going to create and change what the 78 million Baby Boomers leave behind determining whether Dwayne’s ideas become a reality. When you consider that the average job tenure for the Net Gen is about 18 months – it seems that they would be the group to evolve our workforce economy into a Free Agent Nation.
Coming from a Talent Management background, there is a reason that most people are in the wrong job -it has to do with the main tool we use as a society for job determination – the RESUME. Until this outdated and ill used sytem is thrown to the curb there will continue to be companies that will direct people consistently to the wrong job. A resume in most cases tells what experience a person has- not what they are capable of DOING or what they like to do. Once the resume is laid to rest we can begin getting people into the jobs best suited for them – I bet on the Net Gen to make it happen!
July 13th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Bravo!
At last, something worth reading! Well written. Well done!
July 13th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
[...] The Changing Nature of Work (Perspectives on Innovation) [...]
July 13th, 2009 at 6:10 pm
A great, great article. And also some great comments preceding mine, specially those from R.Wallace and K.C.Donovan.
What is needed to make the potential effectively happen?
We need:
1. A way to make the work reach (or, better, be offered to) the potential workers. That is what a site like Innocentive does for thinkers and also all those sites that offer coding jobs to sw coders.
1a. We all must communicate well; so adhering to a common language (English?) is a pre-requisite.
1b. If we are to really achieve productivity, we need a way for a team to be formed and too-large-for-just-one-to-do work to be jointly developed (split into pieces, then assembled). This is still a missing component.
2. A way to make the end product reach the contractor.
2a. If the work is digital, like an idea, a text, a picture or a sw, then the Internet is the way.
2b. But how to make this happen for material stuff?
3. A way for the payment and the recognition to flow back to the workers. As for money, we have the bank system. And recognition can be digitally-signed acknowlegdments.
So I feel that questions 1b and 2b are the only questions still open, on the way of this “work anywhere” scenario.
Maybe I am willing to advance too fast. Maybe we should just practice more with the opportunities already open. Anyway, it is a bright new world!
July 13th, 2009 at 6:27 pm
Great article, and very timely! I too live in a small town in rural South Australia. I choose to ‘live local’ because of the lifestyle. However, I’ve been frustrated at the lack of local employment that suits my skills and I frequently have to travel as part of my job. That all changes come Sept – when I’m going to freelance. I can write from here, I can research from here. I’m a networker and my network is huge. But it is the convincing of others in our highly urbanised country that is my greatest challenge to working the lifestyle I want. How do we challenge the ‘you must live in a city’ to be worth anything?
In a changing world where climate change impacts and rising fossil fuel costs are going to curb our consumerism, I like the idea of living local but working globally. We’re socially connected and I can telecommute. We changed from a manufacturing economy to a service economy – what is the next change going to bring? There will be one and I want to be part of that!
July 13th, 2009 at 6:58 pm
Threadless and Linux demonstrate that using the customer to design, produce, viral market, sell, etc what fits today’s consumer’s wants and needs is a viable business model. This model is one of inclusion of customers into the production cycle – Alvin Toffler called them ‘prosumers’ (producers and consumers). This is a networked model of business and thus is inclusive of all who want to contribute to a product or a service. The system it replaces is an exclusion business model wherein you – the consumer – pay for your right to consume the end product or service (a no pay, no play system).
Inclusion or crowdsourcing is not a new concept or practice but a return to how things were done in Guilds and in the Barter economy. Then along came the auto industry and in particular Alfred Sloan at GM who gave the world the notion of “value adding”. Each person within an enterprise is “value adding” just by being at their workplace or workstation. Whereas with an inclusion business model the holly grail is “use value” – when you design workplaces around the notion of use value rather than value adding you will recruit and use people and their skills in very different ways.
Recently I have been trying to convince Recruitment Companies thatt digital technologies are about to seriously disrupt their industry. Digital technologies are a disruptive force to the current ways we design jobs, recruit people for those jobs, and remunerate people who provide use value or innovation for their enterprise. People can and will be afforded the opportunity to design their own jobs – they will do it with a gaggle of others who have an interest in a common purpose or outcome.
When I was at NASA working the Head of the Shuttle Program I noted how each Shuttle Mission had a dedicated crew and a back up crew ready to go do only what was useful. We can learn more from NASA about how to organise work and workplaces as mission oriented teams than we can from most contemporary workplaces. NASA has a matrix organisational structure which has been both its downfall and its saviour at various times. Thus it is not the ideal model for all workplaces but there are important lessons to be learned from the way they do things around that workplace.
We will not change current workplaces unless or until we change the ways we design jobs, recruit people, and reward effort in the modern workplace/workspace.
July 13th, 2009 at 8:19 pm
I work in employment advisory, and I’m a freelancer. I work in four different time zones. I’ve worked in Shanghai, Vancouver, New York, and Brussels, and that was just last year, and I’m an Aussie, based in Sydney. No trouble relating to this piece.
You’ll be pleased to hear that the HR industry is finally waking up out of the blue sky era and is now emphasizing the need to fit jobs to people, not people to jobs. The Preferred Working Style, looking for that fit, is now a standard interview question. The productivity thing is now finally accepted for dedicated and passionate people.
That was 4000 years well spent, but it’s paying off. I sense Mr. Donovan would agree with this: We emphasize personal talent as a primary job- finding and career creating asset, because of the performance potentials, specifically to enhance the career prospects and to put people in a position where they can actually achieve their aspirations, not just talk about them. They can also have a lot more confidence in roles where they know they can perform well, which tremendously improves their job and career moves.
The big problem is training, both for career paths and for basic employment. We see people from all over the world who don’t have a clue how to get their jobs or their lives moving. Even professionals seem to be stuck with the old career and job idioms. The employment industry, sadly, functions from the top down, and today’s innovations will be hot news down the food chain in about 10-20 years. Even the idea of portable skills and transferring skills still seems to be brand new in the mass economy.
The old methods just don’t work properly any more. Contractors and outsourcing now apply across the spectrum. Ironically, pre- crash, the freelancing, contracting and outsourcing seems to have been generating more employment than anyone’s credited. The relatively low unemployment rates only started spiking when the traditional work force was hit. For those not on the cattle train, it was pretty much business as usual.
I think the New Economy approach, advanced training, high skills, high pay, multiple income streams and multiple jobs, is the way things have to go. The fact of being totally dependent on one job for a life isn’t looking like such a great idea these days, with the big rise in shorter hours and part time jobs globally. It’s far more efficient, and much less stressful, to have employment options, not threats of redundancies, etc., as the working model.
I’m pleased to see this topic come up on Innocentive, because employment and training is where ideation and innovation are required to make the new economy work, and give people back their lives. These are huge challenges, and when they come looking for answers, solvers will know they’ve made a real contribution to the quality of life.
Mr. Lipscombe: If your recruiters don’t get the message, they’ll be working for the Smithsonian themselves in a couple of years. Job design is a critical factor in the worst employment messes around. I wish you well with your endeavors, but time is running out for anyone who’s not up to speed on these things.
July 13th, 2009 at 11:35 pm
In complete agreement.
If we look back at history or even at the animal kingdom, we find similar instances.
There’s not much dissent, no energy / carbon issues, hardly a heartbreak or a financial crisis there!
Simply as they mostly do what they are good at, when they need to & while around their loved ones.
Time and again we find pathbreaking animation films dropping serious hints about this phenomenon, but we tend to forget them as soon as we turn off the screen.
We humans have ventured too far away from all things & traits “natural” and “habitat” is one very very serious issue there.
It’ll not be long before we return to Innocence. Possibly these disasters, financial or otherwise, are good stimuli to make us think on these lines, very seriously.
Thanks for such a great insight.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:25 am
Nice article.
Although, I think predictors of the future tend to neglect the social aspect of group work. While working alone at home is suitable for some. Others want to be around other humans for various reasons. How often have you heard retired people who say “I went back to work to keep busy”. The underlying reason is that they probably want the human contact.
To much emphasis is put on the internet and computers in general. Staying home and working on the computer is the equivalent of playing a game of cards with computer “friends” versus playing cards in the basement with real friends. Works for some, but not all.
j.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:44 am
Couldn’t agree with you more. However, the latest economic slowdown has driven companies back to the “let’s cling to the old way of doing things at least until the dust settles” mode. It is only the bold ones who are willng to experiment with the new model worker as markets shift and remake themselves. So finding those dream assignments is becoming challenging in this environment – I hope it’s merely a short term blip.
I think the key to being this new kind of worker is to also build one’s profile and self-market oneself to the hilt in the public domain to prospective clients. This was not demanded so much by the old model jobs, where one was required only to sell oneself internally in order to get ahead.
July 16th, 2009 at 9:39 am
Wonderful, awesome, amazing, very good news.
May everyone everywhere have work that engages and excites us and allows us to live a lifestyle that thrills us.
July 16th, 2009 at 10:54 am
Self-employment is the only way to go.
You just get to enjoy your life so much more.
When you are free to spend your time as you want, you can figure out many different income streams to go with.
Great post!
July 16th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
I hope that as freelancing opportunities become more attractive, companies increase job security and benefits to try to retain valuable workers. There’s a place in the economy for steady wages, too.
July 20th, 2009 at 2:58 am
The Next Step… Niche Building. As I see it, to make what you envision a reality may be something that you or Innocentive can start.
The problem for many people is that they have a unique niche that they would either like to fill, or a niche they would like to create. But they have nowhere to start.
That is, one person says ‘I would like a job that lets me use my special skills and interests in these… areas’. Another says ‘If I could only find these special skills people who are willing to help me, we could build a small empire together’. The problem is, these people can’t find each other. If one of them is dynamic and dedicated enough (to promote either their skill or the project), they may eventually meet. More likely each will settle for second best, the first finding a so-so job, and the second finding a so-so partner/employee. Most will never get that chance to excell.
To make the problem more difficult, there are usually three of four (or more) elements involved. A group of participants is required each with a set of unique talents. AND then they must find a financial resource with similar interests.
Getting the IDEA-TALENTS-CAPITAL together is the nearly impossible challenge. As an entrepreneur and a SCORE Counselor, I have seen many more lost business opportunities, businesses with REAL Value than I have fulfilled businesses. So many could succed with just a small boost from in the right direction. I try to help some of these, but most can never ‘find the dots’ much less ‘connect the dots’.
Innocentive is filling one role of helping connect such dots. However the Innoventive service is still relatively one sided. A business that is adequately funded, and can afford to offer large awards (aka Seekers) can ‘hire’ Innocentive to help them find answers to isolated and unique problems.
What about the other direction? Where can an entrepreneur or inventor or highly skilled individual go to find that presently non-existent “niche”? And how do they initiate their search or development with little or no capital? Can a search and build (rather than search and destroy) system be built?
Such a multi-directional search system must be both aggressive and delicate: new ideas may be very proprietary, individuals wishing to move on may want to do so privately, and even small investors must be very selective and not attract everyone who has a hair-brained scheme.
To solve the problem, I envision a sort of on-line “game”, a multi-level search-and-build game. Each player would be anonymous at first, using only each other’s first names or “Nicher” names. Each could probe through layers of the game looking for people with similar interests and complementary skills. The inventor types would try to find resource talents to develop, engineer, test, promote their ideas. They would form into tenuous teams, set up mini-blogs to discuss their ideas.
Out of these team efforts might come ghost business structures (following a preset BP format), with product/management/technology/promotion/etc. loosely defined. These ghost businesses would then be available for browsing and perhaps participation by the potential investors…… Then there would be a a’game won” exit strategy wher a real business would be formed and go on to succeed or fail as is their lot.
How does one support such a complex game? The same way most on-line games are supported: through subscriptions. From successful ‘game’ players new businesses would arise that would become Innocentive Seekers, so now we have come full circle.
While this is a complex and challenging task, I am personally aware of a technology that I believe can be developed to help it work…. if anyone wants to discuss it.