Four thoughts for organisations concerned about for the fourth industrial revolution
There is a growing chorus of concern around how society and organisations will be impacted by the fourth industrial revolution over the next decade and beyond. The Bank of England’s chief economist recently warned that large swathes of people could soon become “technologically unemployed” as artificial intelligence rolls into town, making many jobs and industries obsolete. This change is not near, it’s now. And if history says anything, we as a society will soon be caught out, and asking why we weren’t warned in advance, and given more help in preparing.
To fully grasp the enormity of this statement, let’s review the headlines for the first three.
- Introducing Industrial: Agrarian and rural society is steam pressured into an industrial and urban age, reshaping the fabric of society, driving economic growth and introducing new forms of poverty and social injustice.
- Technology Turbocharged: Growth intensifies to a 44 year crescendo literally and figuratively electrifying the world economy, chiefly through electricity, petroleum and steel. Workers continue to feel the impact, and their response creates the impetus for the new political and industrial philosophies, and consequent upheaval in the 20th Century.
- Digital Divides: Computers and the internet begin to shift society from the physical to the virtual, creating an interconnected information age. Individuals are equipped with the tools to enforce creative destruction, reinvention and disruption.
A part of the problem is that we, as was the case in the first industrial revolutions, just don’t know the specifics of what’s coming. When the early first-industrial power and communications technologies were first introduced, it was not with the expectation of reshaping the entire fabric of society, rewriting the global power structures, and introducing transformative new philosophies, classes, lifestyles and unprecedented conflict. The outcomes were unintended and unpredictable, and this will again be the case in the next revolution, perhaps more so.
If the third and fourth revolution follow the same pattern as the first two, the current (third) digital revolution that started in the 1980s, will rapidly move up a few gears and the real cyber-party begins. When considering the societal change that our very square eyes have seen over the last 40 years, the prospect that this period is the slow bit, and that the imminent next phase will eclipse all before it, is pretty incomprehensible.
An introduction to change.
By way of introduction I’m Liam. I run a social business that helps social organisations respond to the constant change we see around us, and to prepare for what comes next. Why? Because if history tells us anything about the future, the third sector will be on the front line fighting for and supporting the many people who become technologically unemployed and suffer the consequences. But to be ready for this massive task, the social organisation will itself need to seriously adapt to the changing world to survive. As a previous co-founder and leader of a successful social enterprise in the NHS I understand that prioritising the not yet over the now is never easy in this challenging landscape. But it is necessary and can reap many unexpected rewards.
“to be ready for this massive task, the social organisation will itself need to seriously adapt to the changing world to survive”
I was born in 1983, the year the world was introduced to the Apple Lisa and the concept of virtual reality, and therefore represent the new vanguard of ‘Millennial’ leaders. I have grown up in a whirlwind of change, where the fabric of how society learns, expresses itself, communicates and forms communities has been reinvented every 3–5 years. By the time I started my computer science degree in 2001 the world was awash with simple and accessible tools for my peers and I to paint a new world on a blank digital canvas. The content of my computer science degree was likely out of date by 2008, but the philosophy of the ‘founders’ generation (or those who destroy, disrupt and rebuild) was cemented.
In 2010 I took on the operational leadership of a high profile NHS regional programme, and was lucky to be granted freedom around the delivery model, which was digital, oriented towards scale, democratic and inclusive. The regional programme very successful and transformed into a self-funded NHS function in 2013 with the ability to self govern, which we gave back to the community. By late 2015 we had reached coverage of two thirds of the UK commissioners, outgrown NHS hosting and spun-out to form an independent social enterprise. When I stepped down as PrescQIPP CIC’s Chief Operating Officer earlier this year I left a celebrated and nationally trusted social organisation, covering 96% of the UK, and that by conservative estimate had supported the NHS commissioners in their delivering over a billion in efficiency savings.
I’m deeply proud of what we achieved as a small organisation in a complex and challenging NHS, but more personal to me was how we did it. For many of our early years, we were seen as an unwelcome disrupter and threat to the existing working structures in our field, but eventually our model of using the latest digital technology such as emerging business intelligence tools to scale and support, granting agency, governance and control to our community, and granting significant freedom to our team to innovate, learn and experiment put us consistently ahead of the curve. We operated as a virtual organisation, without an office, using modern communications tools and with a loose and flat matrix structure to support productivity and rapid response to opportunities and issues.
There were many crucial lessons to take away from this wonderful experience, which I intend to use in helping others in the future. But if there is one fundamental lesson that resonates, it’s that the our environment is now consistently uncertain, unpredictable and ever-shifting. Yet organisations who accept and actively embrace this can achieve things that they never thought possible.
Planning for the unpredictable
Since real change needs to start at the top, I have tried to delineate four complementary strategic priorities that leaders of any organisation (including social) should be considering when planning for the disruptive present and an unpredictable future. Whilst I believe that the world is now moving too quickly for 3–5 year planning cycles, I have detailed these are possible overarching ‘future business’ objectives to replace your strategic business objectives or form an extra category in your strategic plans. The operational details will clearly differ from organisation to organisation, but I believe the themes will remain pretty consistent:
Moving from IT to connected digital infrastructures — the first step of any significant change is to build the infrastructure. Within the last three revolutions, it came in the form of road and rail, electricity and phone, fibre-optic and the internet. Round four is intra-connectivity or the internet of things. In other words, organisations need to consider the things they use and do, and plan for how the tangible elements can digitally connect together.
Firstly, this involves moving towards infrastructure that is open and connectable, not closed. Pretty much all of the emerging service software on the market are built with interoperability in mind, and support scalability for new organisations. Secondly, to find and implement both high value projects (business intelligence connectivity is an obvious one) and smaller projects that help a wider number of staff to access and use and connect these tools together. This is a very necessary direction of travel for most organisations, and will be the start of a long journey, in trying to match the pace of technological change.
Transforming your staff to become people who creatively connect with tech — in the next few decades, to be successful and relevant, workers will need to prioritise creativity, learning and reinvention as specialisms become more rare. Technology and AI will become more interactive and intelligent, and those who can creatively collaborate with technology will be valuable. The future worker will create context not content as part of a super-productive human-tech partnership. This can only happen if you’re building the right infrastructure described above.
Some of your current employees will be at risk of becoming technologically unemployed. To support and protect them in the long-term, organisations must empower staff to codify routine work into workflow and help them use tech to manage these tasks. This may sound both complex and counterproductive, but ‘building your robot army’ is actually quite a fun, achievable and valuable project to do as a team. It will help deliver your digital change agenda and the prospects of your staff. Win-win.
Preparing for the transactional workforce — many leaders are struggling to hold on to younger staff, who have different expectations around employment and seek to move on once the learning curve has plateaued. Organisations should absolutely seek to find ways to keep staff happy, by granting more agency, considering work-life and introducing experimentation and creativity. However, this will only salve not solve the problem, as the workforce seeks to be more mobile and have more fluid and short-term arrangements with employers.
In response, organisations need to shift their expectations to this reality, and plan for a more transactional and term-based workforce. An idea that is growing in popularity is that of ‘tours of duty’ where employers and new hires agree objectives, mutual investment and commitment for a set period of time, and then seek to renew in the future if successful.
Becoming a responsive organisation — it’s probably not ‘over-egging’ to suggest that most organisations are struggling to keep up with an unpredictable and constantly changing world. Organisations, and how they are run, need to be redesigned to be more fluid and flexible; to harness and react to all of the above; to operate in the real-term, not the long-term. Borrowing heavily from responsive.org, which offers a manifesto that is really gaining traction, organisations should consider how they could look in a freer form.
Whilst not all of these may be suitable or possible, especially in the short term, a valuable activity would be to consider whether your organisation can be driven more by experimentation than long term plans, and in an open and transparent way that empowers and grants agency to staff, and emphasises collaborative networks over hierarchy. For most organisations this would represent a significant shift, but also offers a lot to attract and get the most out of your people.
The first and next step
Have no doubt, what I’m recommending is radical change, and raises the question of where on earth to begin. The challenge within this is immense: to prepare for life in a very different and unpredictable world, that spans the analogue and the digital. But in a current and new world of radical environmental change, the response needs to be the same. To support this I have tried to illustrate where I believe that your attentions and aims should lie, but for each organisation there will be different priorities.
What I would say, however, is that to do nothing different in the face of an industrial tsunami is not an option. To survive, and thrive, and be ready to take on the consequences, whatever they may be, a first step needs to be taken and taken now.
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