The Future Of Work: the Era of Individual Sovereignty, Infinite Leverage and Going Remote
Let’s take a look at a few memes.
Pretty depressing, right?
These visuals tell a story we have all known for a while, either at an intuitive or rational level.
We now have plenty of stats to prove it, too. Knowledge workers are often miserable or disengaged (over 80% of them). They love Fridays and hate Mondays, and refuse to go back to the office. Employees' expectations misalign with what’s being offered by employers. And the Great Resignation is driven, mainly, by being fed up with toxic work cultures.
So what we have right now, or better said, what we had until just about yesterday - traditional offices, work models, hierarchies, etc - is based on the realities of the industrial era. And it no longer works.
But how will the world look as we move into the next era? How does this change the way we work in teams, organizations, and society as a whole?
Let’s look at a few shifts currently underway, as well as some concepts that I believe will shape the future of work.
Workmode not workplace
The concept of work as a physical place was slowly coming apart at the seams before the pandemic with the (then) fringe digital nomad movement and trailblazing remote-first startups like Automattic or Basecamp. It has completely disintegrated since.
For the knowledge worker, work is no longer a place you go to. It’s something you do. An activity, a state of mind.
So there’s less and less of the workplace, workspace and simply the ‘workmode’.
Location independent entrepreneurs and digital nomads have known and practiced this for years, but the pandemic ushered in the generalized “work-from-home”; and the realization that one can be as productive (if not more so) working from home or even, wait for it, anywhere with a good internet connection.
I’ve worked remotely in various capacities for roughly a decade now. I remember that 7, 5, or even 3 years ago, it was virtually impossible to convince people that you are actually, truly, really working from a cafe, home, etc. People would ask your opinion on the latest sports shoes trend, sit next to you for a “quick chat”, request you to watch the bread baking in the oven, etc. Now there’s significantly more appreciation and understanding of the 'workmode', the focus it requires and reality that, although you are there in person, you are mentally not there right now.
But if we’re working from anywhere, who’s ‘managing’ us?
This is the million-dollar question giving tens of thousands of middle managers nightmares as we speak.
Well, perhaps, no one?
Smaller is better
Naval, one of my favorite contemporary thinkers, says:
“The information revolution makes it easy to connect, cooperate, collaborate, which means it’s easier to go back to working for ourselves.
Even a 10, 20 people company is way better than a 10,000 people company.
This idea that we’re all cogs in a machine, who specialize in memorization and small roles, will go away.
We will go back to working in small groups, bands of creatives setting out to do missions. And when those missions are done, we get rated, paid, reassess and rest before the next mission.”
Through the lens of potential shifts like this, other transitions (like simply doing more remote work, which seems to many now, huge) look minor.
Managers of one
Who’s that one team member?
You, yourself.
As work becomes more about creative, individual contributions as well as more permanently remote or remote-first setups, the ability to manage yourself, organize your work, self-drive and self-motivate becomes nothing less than essential.
A handful of companies have been promoting this for quite a few years. Here are two examples.
Fourteen years ago, the Basecamp founders wrote on their blog Signal vs. Noise:
“A manager of one is someone who comes up with their own goals and executes them. They don’t need heavy direction. They don’t need daily check-ins. They do what a manager would do — set the tone, assign items, determine what needs to get done, etc. — but they do it by themselves and for themselves.”
Several years later, inspired by the concept described by Basecamp, Gitlab (that has over 1500 team members) expanded on it in their handbook:
In an all-remote organization, we want each team member to be a manager of one. A manager of one is an attribute associated with our Efficiency value. To be successful at GitLab, team members need to develop their daily priorities to achieve goals. Managers of one set the tone for their work, assign items and determine what needs to get done. No matter what role you serve, self-leadership is an essential skill needed to be successful as a manager of one.
At GitLab, leadership is requested from everyone, whether an individual contributor or member of the leadership team.
Act as a CEO of yourself and your role by taking responsibility to set goals and appropriate timelines.
It doesn’t matter if you run an e-commerce business, make toys, run a clinic, or an accounting firm. If you can manage yourself, and all your team members can manage themselves (rather than expect detailed direction from “above”), you’re faster, less fragile, more resilient and more competitive in today’s and tomorrow’s world.
A leadership crisis. Or a leadership shift?
The realities of work are shifting and morphing into their next iterations as we speak; many people are now working for themselves or in smaller companies; managers of one are thriving, and large corporations have less and less appeal; leadership is the next frontier of change.
As I previously wrote here, VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) environments are now the norm, and leaders can’t hold all the right answers anymore. So, many of us are moving away from traditional management practices and adopting a new model, where leaders aren’t doing everything, aren’t assigning tasks and managing all projects. Our job is to create an environment in which the best people can thrive and nurture teams that can unlock innovation and the “next big idea”. Successful modern managers accept their limitations and are ready to learn, unlearn, and re-learn (Alvin Toffler).
The leadership skills we need in the future of work are vastly different from how “managing” was done in the past.
Flat hierarchies and self-organized teams
We are also experimenting with new structures of organizational management.
For example, Agile, where small cross-functional groups of 5-11 individuals define, build, test, and deliver an increment of value in a short time box.
Or Holacracy, a method of decentralized management and organizational governance, which distributes authority and decision-making through self-organizing teams rather than a management hierarchy.
In many cases, these models have failed. Here are some: Medium, Zappos .
But these companies were also operating in yesterday’s world. The pace of change is now so quick that we often feel like things happened years ago, instead of just months.
For example, in 2013, Marissa Mayer famously banned Yahoo! employees from working remotely, after trying it for a while. In 2017, IBM did the same.
It’s now abundantly clear that Yahoo! was doing it all wrong, had not built the structures to support remote collaboration and productivity, and was trying to simply replicate the traditional office online. Heaps of other companies are succeeding and thriving working remotely.
Equally, companies like Red Hat Software have posted 13 consecutive years of growth riding a relatively flat organization led by CEO Jim Whitehurst. Or eClinicalWorks, an electronic-health-records company in Westborough, Mass., Denver-based social-entrepreneuring outfit CauseLabs and W.L. Gore, maker of Gore-Tex fabric, which has been practicing a form of holacracy for decades at the $3-billion company.
Great freedom/power/autonomy = great responsibility
In order to thrive in the future of work, our mindset needs to shift. From reactive to proactive. From following to being self-led and self-driven. From focusing on the left side of the brain kind of skills, where we move in a sequential order and process information in a linear manner, to right-brain creativity and big picture, holistic thinking, problem-solving and clarity.
Long-term WFA (work from anywhere), which seems to be most people’s aspiration, only truly works for those who are self-driven and have discipline.
Freedom is your worst enemy if you don't have the right habits, infrastructure, systems to support your productivity and healthy boundaries.
A clear mind is essential for decision-making and excellent outcomes in the information age. Essential for not easily being replaced by an algorithm or an AI. And if we want to operate at that level of peak performance, the only way is to learn how to discipline our minds and bodies.
Infinite leverage
I’ll circle back to Naval Ravikant for some insight on this last point:
“We live in an age of infinite leverage: your actions can be multiplied a thousand fold, either by broadcasting a podcast or by investing capital, writing code, investing, having people work for you.
Because of that, the impact of good decisions is higher than it used to be, because now you can influence thousands or millions of people through your ideas."
The future of work is, in many ways, simply more of what makes us distinctively human. More individual sovereignty. More autonomy but also more responsibility. More ‘adulting’. More ‘taming’ our minds and bodies. More empowerment and creativity. More purpose and impact.
I don’t know about you, but I’m personally really excited about it.
