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All the job experience we have gained is collapsing. Our future colleagues do not necessarily work at our place of work – they can be scattered around the world in global competence clusters.
We do not necessarily have a fixed place of work to go to, but use different locations to get in touch with our colleagues in the global competence clusters.
In the future, employers will design workplaces based on functions rather than positions. The innovation worker and the knowledge worker can manage themselves, and do not need intermediaries; however, there will still be deadlines.
Workplaces built in the industrial era, with their bureaucracies and hierarchies, will be subjected to transformation and if they don’t change, they will be crushed by new technology.
The new organisation and new jobs will most probably be functionally, not hierarchically, organised. The new jobs will be organised in relation to people with talent, with ideas about what makes them feel passionate. The future workplace will crystallise into an emphasis on the organisation’s meeting with the customer, the user, the patient, the student, and so on.
This Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) design, based on experiences gained from meeting customers and users, will promote a front-line focus and will downplay the past functions of bureaucracy and hierarchy.
Written by Jon-Arild Johannessen, a Norwegian academic who specialises in knowledge management and innovation
