In the 21st century, incremental change is no longer an option. The world faces many challenges that could impact society’s well-being and happiness.
Organizations that want to succeed must reinvent work, direct their workforce towards new growth models and develop new skills training programs so that their employees can do more valuable work. This will drive efficiency and create new forms of growth and innovation.
By redefining the labor frontier, the widespread adoption of revolutionary innovations will help to address the main challenges of society and all stakeholders will rethink a variety of possible futures that will have a serious impact, socially, economically and environmentally.
Scenario planning helps analyze how today’s megatrends could lead to different versions of a future world. Each scenario is a single point in the broad spectrum of the probabilities of alternative futures and therefore will never be fully realized in the way it is imagined.
It is important to keep in mind that scenarios are not predictions for the future. Rather, they demonstrate a broad spectrum of possible futures.
In any case, their function is to help decision-makers understand the different ways in which current trends can manifest themselves in the future, use them as a basis for creating strategies to prepare for the coming company and evaluate their long-term choices.
However, through scenarios, possible evolving realities are identified on the basis of which we can take initiatives or devise strategic options in order to obtain the greatest benefits.
In the “Work 2040 Scenarios for the future of work” report by Demos Helsinki & Demos Effect, the backcasting method is applied to design future scenarios whose implementation is based on factors relating to the current state and prevailing trends.
These scenarios open up some possible developments of future paths and highlight some phenomena of change, in order to make resources available to actors who can and must intervene on changes in order to achieve better solutions.
Backcasting is about defining the desired and possible perspectives. The paths go backwards, from the future to the present, to identify scenarios that could be desirable, probable or possible, but all reasonably credible, since otherwise they would not encourage action.
Their task is to highlight some of the main factors of change that are already partially evident to date. The final result are three different kinds of future describing the working society in 20 years from now.
These three future scenarios help us to understand how work is a fundamental activity for man, much more than just the time spent in the workplace, limited to an employment relationship.
The quality of the society of the future will depend precisely on how much we manage to understand and redefine the role of work and how we will be able to manage the consequences of the disappearance of some professional identities.
The Honourable Toilers scenario, the current employment relationship remains part of the culture of work, but for many workers the actual job performance changes into varied ad hoc gig work. This shift occurs by transforming the practice with which employees are hired.
Employees have guaranteed wages and employment relationships, and companies easily find the right person for each task. In this new context, people’s professional identity is increasingly replaced by their job identity.
Recruitment companies become the centerpiece of this new economy, distributing work and ensuring livelihoods for workers. They are companies in which transactions, lifestyles, political programs and the construction of meaning are shared.
In this scenario, each worker can change the recruiting company according to his or her life situation.
The disappearance of job descriptions and the fragmentation of job functions in the scenario do not necessarily mean that working long careers in employment relationships has to be abandoned.
In the scenario, so called recruitment companies take as their core business the effective supplying of skilled workers into various duties.
For example, where companies who take good care of their skilled workers sell them to other organizations to carry out problem-solving duties, even for extended periods of time.
When these recruitment companies employ more and more workers, they have increasingly good opportunities to support people’s individual development by offering them interesting duties. The key competitive advantage of recruitment companies is their data on labour demand and people’s competencies, passions and desires.
In this scenario, in 2040, 45% of the working age population have an average income and higher-level educations.
There are not large differences in working hours within the middle class. In addition to a large middle class, there are also some who make € 1.000-2.400 euros a month in 2017 currency and some peak earners.
Organizational culture changes notably, which also changes management training and coaching for managing your own work.
The teaching of self-management begins already in nursery school. Interaction coaches graduate from management training.
There are half as many superiors as in 2017. It is primarily adaptive and quick to react to changes in working life.
The scenario expects wage labour to retain its position: therefore jobs will remain.
Although work is done in an employment relationship, the shape of job functions has not remained unchanged. Indeed, the central problem of the scenario is how fragmenting job functions can be carried out meaningfully when job descriptions disappear.
There will be work upheaval in many dimensions. This scenario, highlights the role of general competence at the expense of expertise, specialization and gig work. So in practice, the following components driving the transformation of work will be highlighted: market convergence, digitalization’s ability to bring new jobs into the marketplace, gig work becoming more employment relationship-based and the strengthening effect of technology on the capabilities of doing work.
As a result of market convergence, meaning the merging of previously entirely separate markets, recruitment companies will gain significant competitive advantage from their extensive group of workers.
The problem of subsistence is solved largely with gainful employment and a high employment rate. The meaning of work is attached to the job, not work performance. A person also adopts a certain lifestyle through the job, which is strongly attached to their identity.
Work is still a central part of life in 2040 but working hours have decreased slightly nonetheless. One’s livelihood will diverge from the workplace and working hours. In the future, part of one’s livelihood will be generated from property.
Car sharing, shared workspaces and many forms of social economy will spread more than ever. At the same time, the price of commodities approaches zero, and work and the compensation from work decrease. On the other hand, inventiveness enables the individual tailoring of services, whereupon people pay for different things than before.
For example, a salesperson in a clothing store gets access to information on the customer’s purchase history and preferences, and the customer pays more for the creative combination and use of these than for the products themselves
The Flexible Producers scenario is a world where work has broken up from organizations into networks and from employment relationships into productions.
Productions mean that independent entrepreneurs and work collectives get together for a limited period of time to work on a specific production. The work is based on shared problem solving. When the problem is solved, the producers disband to other groups and productions.
In this scenario, working life is production-based work where individual people and small companies sell their expertise to each other in loose networks. Above all, work is related to solving the great problems of humanity, such as climate change.
Careers are winding instead of linear. The continuous learning of new things and training have been made easy and worthwhile in the scenario’s world, so individuals move from expert work that demands higher education to more routine gig work, and vice versa, flexibly.
Work and livelihoods come to people from many different sources, unevenly. There is hard competition in networks over the available work productions, but on the other hand, cooperation is also necessary in the fragmented world of work.
People build informal support networks in their own fields in order to receive support in an irregular working life. Continuing uncertainty over how to ensure sufficient income for different people is managed with versatile basic social security.
Basic income has been introduced to even out income uncertainty. The Flexible Producers’ world is truly global also in terms of labour mobility. Work is divided into hyperconnected value chains around the world in which individuals work together.
Over the years, this has raised even more world citizens who feel that they are each other’s peers regardless of nominal differences in nationality. Solving the global problems of humanity has become an important meaning and source of work around the world.
If large amounts of in-depth information or technically demanding skills are not needed for doing work, the boundaries between job descriptions fade, and so work “de-professionalizes.”
That does not mean the same thing as the disappearance of job functions. It is about a change where more and more people with general level competencies can do work that has previously demanded specialization.
For example, Artificial iIntelligence can help a nurse make diagnoses that would have previously required medical education.
The acceleration of the disappearance of job descriptions would lead to the breaking down of traditional professional identities, and on the other hand to new ones being born.
Solving global problems is central in this scenario and will provide enough work.
Work will form around productions. People have specialties but will also lend themselves to other duties if the execution of the production demands it. People often have specialties in many fields, for they train themselves continuously. Specialization and gig work are highlighted in the scenario, not general competence or automation. The platform economy’s services makes finding work productions easier.
In this scenario, the challenges of livelihoods and production-based work are solved with basic income. Meaningfulness is produced by work that focuses on important problems. It may therefore be that in this scenario, the longing for meaningfulness is a central motivator for people to join work productions whenever possible.
Work is divided unevenly between different producers in the scenario. For some, the significance of work as one of life’s central elements diminishes, for others it might even increase.
This scenario is based on comparatively widely accepted inequality: in 2040, a small percentage of people are substantially more productive than others (hyperproductivity).
Income predistribution comprehensively ensures the opportunities for success and socioeconomic status is rarely inherited. Monetary income inequality will grow, but it is possible to get something other than monetary compensation from work and exchange, due to which subjective standards of living are not really disturbed.
They are employed by competitive global business clusters and produce the majority of economic value. However, this elite is meritocratically selected and their work widely funds society’s services as well as a large part of other people’s work.
The largest problem that is formed from the differentiation of competitive and non-competitive work is increasing regional inequality.
Previously, the consequences of the transformation of work have mainly been reflected in the career choices and careers of the next generation to enter working life: a farmer family’s children left to work in factories.
Now, the structural change is faster and more significant. Then again, computers are constantly catching up with us in the things that we are traditionally good at. That is why we have to begin to consciously build up our people skills.
Empathy, creativity, intuition and curiosity are abilities that computers and robots do not quite have. The abilities are not only important in themselves, but also indispensable tools for building innovations, economic development, new markets and a better society.
The conclusion is that while not everyone will become an artist, supporting people skills will help in every profession of the future.
In the future hyperproductivity will be possible thanks to technological advancement, for example by the improvement of artificial intelligence to better support human labour.
In this scenario a hyperproductive section of the population looks after the well-being of everyone else. But it is important to find out to what extent it will be possible to provide everyone with the opportunity to be hyperproductive.
In the future meritocracy will be based on productivity differences in working life and being able to most accurately demonstrate them. Hyperproductive workers will be elevated to serve globally competing companies and the added value they produce will be many times higher compared to the average worker.
The time of merited individuals will be used extremely efficiently for solving difficult problems. But if on the one hand, the elites are committed to the development of society and are accountable to society for their actions, on the other hand, putting hyperproductive individuals in the spotlight can also lead to individualization of success, as well as growth income inequality.
Job functions in the scenario can be roughly divided in two. There are the global, extremely complicated problems whose solution only a small part of the population is focused on. Then there is work that requires lots of working hours and people skills, of which a large part is care work
The scenario does not take a strong stance on the disappearance or preservation of job descriptions. The globally active expert elite has a clear area of expertise and many others will likely have a reasonably permanent employment profile. Expertise is highlighted in the scenario at the expense of specialization and gig work. Technologized work will demand new kinds of specialties.
In this scenario, livelihoods are for remuneration or at least strongly directed towards job functions. Working provides life with meaning and people are directed towards work that is empathetic and feeds internal motivation.
Work is a central aspect of life in this scenario. Alternative ways to experience fellowship and communality are not presented.
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