Family Business
edited by Helen Wilkinson
Thinking in the Future Tense
Major Trends and Their Implications for Family, Work and Community
Nancy Ramsey
Today is 'the time in between'. In some cultures there is a single work for this concept. Native American and African storytellers often depict transitional periods as 'dream time'. Jungian analyst Dr Jean Bolen calls it 'liminal time'. For some, 'post-modernity' is the name that fits. In geopolitical terms we speak of it as the time between the end of the Cold War and 'the next big thing'.
Some describe these times in images. An anthropologist recently observed that we are 'hospice workers to dying systems and midwives to new one'. Author Stewart Brand describes today as, 'a magic carpet ride which makes older generations feel as if the rug is being pulled out from under them and younger generations feel as if they are driving.'
Whatever its name or description, our experience is that change is the only constant. Individuals as well as systems struggle to catch up with a tumult of changes as we transition to the Knowledge and Information Age.
We feel it at work, in families, communities, recreation and spiritual centres. In governance, economics, management and the arts we work under the guise of 'managing change' while bursts of rapid, complex reordering impact our organizational process and individual lives. For most of us, the tightest pressure point in the barrage of change is between work and family, between labour and life.
We humans hold a deep need to know what we will 'get' before we 'let go' of what we have. With the degree and depth of change ongoing today, such certainty is impossible. There are few models for the challenges we are called upon to solve in the complex, evolving workplace. in each individual situation we are increasingly like jazz players, making it up as we go along, pushed into new riffs daily by the speed change.
For front line workers this pressured cycle provokes additional stress. It is not only the demand for more work completed quickly in the global 24-hour economy. It is more than the ongoing conflicts between the demands of work and the desire for life beyond the job. It is also a reaction to change itself. But change we must.
How do we learn to let go of outmoded work models and step into the breach with creative license to let enhance the skills and talents of workers struggling to meet the challenges? How do we reduce risk and enhance our ability to meet the demand for smarter, faster work? How do we anticipate and learn from uncertainty while traversing transition?
First, we can polish the tools we know. Experience demonstrates that familiarity with different possibilities and appropriate coping strategies can bring insight and opportunity to an otherwise chaotic change dynamic in everything from nuclear war gaming to sports play books, education modeling and case studies; we know that foreshadowing the future prepares us to respond appropriately in real time.
Second, we can identify key driving forces of change, probe their depth and range, and consider their relationships to each other as well as critical work challenges.
Third, we can create scenarios, stories of credible, alternative futures, which allow us to meet those forces as possible realities against which we can work through strategies and responses. By travelling these alternative pathways to the future we can consider options that provide opportunity and explore the dangers of these turbulent times.
The constant is change. The impact is stress and resistance. The challenge is learning and adaptation. The hope for the future is the cultivation of people who are able to anticipate, cope and react quickly with winning strategies. The outstanding need is for clarity on long term goals, flexibility in systems and strategies as we work our way beyond this in between time.
Seven drivers are critical to the future of work and work related issues.
Values-based groupings
Political pollsters and marketers confirm new trend in identity groups. It cuts across but does not eliminate other, familiar, standard categories such as age, race, gender and income. It is a transnational, gender neutral, ages and races alliance united by common values.
The Global Business Network proposes five values-based global groupings: Elites, Pragmatists, Believers, Marginal I and Marginal II. Taking believers as an example, we can see how this phenomenon is at the heart of 'culture wars' that are currently played out in and across communities and countries, often with clashes over religious definitions of values at their heart.
This trend is most visible around religious values. In every part of the world, religious groups are entering politics and even commanding governance in the name of deeply held values. For example, in America the Christian Coalition and Moral Majority are challenging local school boards for authority in education and establishing baseline positions on reproductive rights in the Republican Party. Conservative Jews in Israel are fighting to protect their special relationship with the state. In Islamic nations, religious conservatives battle the State for political control. In Northern Ireland, India and China, religions are uniting groups to action – which often translates into resisting change.
Demographics
The rate of world population growth has slowed and steadied and current UN predictions are that by 2020 the population will be 9 to 10 billion people. While a major increase above today's 6 billion it is well below earlier predictions of well above 12 billion. All indications are that this reduced rate of growth is related to world wide population control efforts, education of women and girls and women's increased ability to take personal responsibility for birthing fewer, healthier babies.
The geographic distribution of the population growth is critical, with 95 percent of the new births expected in less economically developed areas of the world. The more economically developed countries of the global north are barely maintaining population replacement levels and in some cases, rates are falling below those levels.
Advances in medicine, biology and improved life conditions have contributed to a major increase in longevity. Future advances in biotechnology and pharmacology provide the potential for furthering the trend. In Italy, Germany and Japan the first decade of the next century will see upwards of 20 percent population today is in the over 80 year old group. Every region of the world will be dealing with older populations beyond any numbers previously experienced.
But at the same time, huge youth populations will be a challenge to education and employment systems throughout the less developed world. In Iran, for example, 65 percent of the populations is under 28 years. With an aging global north and a significant population growth in the global south the pressure of global economic migration may be profound. One corporate vice president characterized it this way: 'Diversity tomorrow will be what technology was in the 1960s. We all said technology would change our lives but we didn't really understand what that meant. Diversity will change our lives.'
How will societies deal with their elder's needs and how will providing family eldercare effect the workplace? Who will be their caregivers and how will it all be finances? How will we meet the need for highly educated skilled technology workers and how will we provide employment for huge numbers of unskilled labour?
Globalization
Globalization has become synonymous with growth, mergers, economies of scale and profitability. It has also come to mean a search for cheaper labour, expanding markets and squeezing the bottom line. As the collapse of the 'Pacific Rim miracle' and the Russian ruble meltdown have demonstrated, huge structural and cultural challenges remain to be dealt with in the economic and legal systems that underpin globalizations.
While globalization has brought with it the growth of a new middle class in many nations, it has also perpetuated a greater economic gap between the top and bottom of the economic tier. Not all have profited equally. This inequity, together with environmental concerns, is leading non-government organizations in particular to call for more progress towards strong measures to enforce corporate responsibility and transparency as corporations challenge nations in size and influence.
The promise of expanding growth, replete with gains in equity may be before us. But in building scenarios, one must ask hard social and environmental as well as economic questions about globalization. Is it truly irreversible? Can I continue and if it does, how must it change to accommodate to ever increasing demands for public accountability. How will new international regulatory bodies and changing economic and regional systems effect this globalization? Can geopolitical instability disrupt economic globalization? Is 1990s capitalism the only economic model or are we on the edge of evolving different models?
Technology
The rate and scale of technology advancement in information and communications has breached Moore's Law, the measure for decades. The speed and nature of future change have led some to hypothesize that the past progress in information technology has been to provide the new languages necessary for the biology and physics breakthroughs for the next century.
We do know that successes in key areas like the human genome project, stem cell research, nano-technology and micro-technology, energy alternatives and fields not yet invented will continue to alter our daily lives and challenge the way we work, live and relate. Technology can also challenge values such as individual privacy and personal freedom.
>Are the public challenges to genetic engineering in seed and feed harbingers of a technology backlash, which could inhibit technology's progress? Could public pressure to stop funding of research in critical areas cut into the education and research partnerships, which have generated so much private growth? Is the economic imperative for growth so compelling that it is free of public influence?
The greatest changes in work for the future will spring from the Internet. Not only does it promote online access to information resources and people, the Internet promises to be a tool for learning for an entire work life. "E-everything' is remaking commerce form product through delivery to service.
Systems
Systems transformations in government and business organization are underway and will continue. Information processing and connectivity demand open systems. Just as military command structures are adapting to technology driven restructuring, so too the classroom and workplace are transforming into more transparent and flexible systems. Active and passive resistance to these deep social and structural changes persists, but it is increasingly clear that information driven decision making is crucial to success in commerce and government. In the new power paradigm, access to information and knowledge rules. Will structural change follow?
Combined with the generation changes discussed earlier, this systems transformations may have profound social, emotional and economic consequences and certainly will impact any future scenario.
The increasing role of non-government organizations (NGOs) on both politics and business is challenging old orders. In local, national and international arenas, environmental and human rights organizations are placing values based pressures on systems formerly invulnerable to outside pressures. Organized NGO networks pressure corporations, governments and international institutions for environmental compliance to Kyoto agreement for example.
Another example would be the campaign for broad public disclosure of human rights abuses by police; military and para-military groups throughout the work have focused attention on formerly secure, secret power bases. From Africa to south and Central America to South Central Los Angeles open communications networks tell the dark secrets of systems and demand accountability and change. What impact will this have on governance structures? Can huge public and private organizations, governments and systems adapt sufficiently to meet the changing needs of workers and technology? Will potential technology advantages be lost in systemic intransigence and perpetuation of vested interest?
Women
The greatest transformation in the social order of the twentieth century is the change in the status of women. Every woman, man, family and society feels it. First and foremost, women are clear that being equal does not mean being the same as men. Today women see the characteristics and qualities of gender difference without attached judgment of better or worse and women no longer accept the male norm as the default for what is standard or 'right'.
In some countries women are now the majority of graduates in primary, secondary and tertiary education. Education and training are the universal 'equalizers
In the advancing information and knowledge economies. The increasing demand for skilled workers and diverse teams in international markets are opening economic and social doors for women. Will the trend continue in all economic circumstances or could old models of gender preference for men push women out of the labour force in economic downturns as it has in Korea and Russia?
A World Bank study prepared for the UN's World Conference on Women confirmed what political pollsters around the work had already identified as a gender difference in values. In asking what values governments should implement as policy, women place the highest values on health care, education, safety for themselves and their children and economic equity. Men place the highest value on balanced budgets, tax relief and military spending.
Will women assert their increasing economic power for social and political change? Will the international women's networks, which have grown over past decades, become power sources to business marketers? Will women tire of the passive institutional resistance to gender equity and abandon main line institutions to develop parallel economic, political and social structures?
Equally unclear is how evolving family structures will be influenced by the increasing demands on women for employment outside the home in an expanding global economy. How will care for elderly relative effect women's ability to work outside the home? Will governments agree to pay for currently unpaid domestic contributions from women and men, which make a big impact on total social welfare?
Geopolitics
Challenges to traditional nation-state governance proliferate around the globe. We witness the establishment of powerful economic and judicial Transnational institutions, which both support and challenge the authorities of current states. In hot spots around the work, civil and ethnic wars rip at the fabric of existing nations. The economic strength of private corporations and wealthy individuals exceed the wealth of many nations. Rampant corruption and cronyism threaten the legitimacy of many states. While not on its last legs, this national governance form is undergoing major transformation, which can not be ignored.
Regional alliances I military and economic co-operation are also changing. NATO military action in Kosovo was a first this year. Does it indicate a new model for armed intervention in a sovereign state or was it a unique, single imperative? The European Union and Wold Trade Organization are increasingly active in far-reaching international economic decision making. Will their authority prevail or weaken and how will that effect governance and independent commerce? Can nations be reconstructed from the ravages of civil war and ethnic cleansing?
Scenarios
All of these issues bear down on discussions of work. How these driving forces come together will greatly influence the future form of work, its compensation, form and role in our lives. Combining them in different credible and internally consistent ways can build scenarios, story lines that provide a framework for considering the future of work.
The following three scenario outlines were developed in conjunction with the Work-Life Leadership Council of The Conference Board to examine the Future of Work-Life Initiatives in major corporations. Their purpose was to make connections between key driving forces and possible different futures for Work-Life Initiatives.
The Big Boom: 'Transformation'
In the scenario, a global high-growth economy continues to flourish and work-life balance moves to the center of business considerations as the pressure to hold on to skilled, steady workers increases. Options for new forms of work and individual opportunity abound as both business and society invest in people as the key to realizing the potential of a strong economy and expanding technology. Work-life considerations as a discrete set of issues disappear because the agenda for meeting those needs is 'mainstreamed' into business and government institutions. A stable, expanding economy has the resources to absorb the cost of providing services and the flexibility to meet changing demands. Command and control management systems give way to transitional teams and work is reconceptualized as task completion. This shift in task-oriented organizational pattern allows work across time zones, family structures and cultures. No one need to advocate flexibility because it emerges as the only way of dealing with the complexity inseparable from rapidly expanding opportunities.
The Growing Divide: 'Everyone scrambles, everyone improvises'
In this scenario a wakening economy puts strains on families and individuals as technology makes possible a fast pace, but reinforces a low paying structure with long work hours that give individuals few choices in their life style. People of all generations experience painful choices between career success and personal life. The strain this puts on families re-ignites the backlash against working women. The work-life industry thrives as companies offer multiple programs, either to attract just-in-time workers or to enrich the work environment and supports for the core elite of technology and knowledge workers. Social systems are strained by the health care and a young population whose multiple children press the systems capabilities by their sheer numbers alone. Diminished returns from full-time employment lead many Baby Boomers to retire, leaving a young, largely inexperienced workforce that is sandwiched between childcare and elder care responsibilities. The slowed economy produces low revenues for government, hampering its capacity to meet social needs as individuals an companies search for ways to survive in difficult times.
The Big Bust: 'Back to square one'
This scenario combines the impact of a slow economy with that of a crisis in the use of new technology. The combined impact of international Y2K crises, Euro integration and a sliding American stock market make it a buyers' market for labour. IT systems failures push the global economy into recession, and weaker economies enter a depression. Trade patterns are disrupted. Many work-life arguments fall back on an advocacy theme that business must meet its social responsibility because it is the 'right thing to do'. As both small and large businesses fail, a few large multinational corporations become primary employers and set the tone for wages and working conditions. To counteract the power of these companies, sentiment builds for government intervention and legislated safety nets for families, the elderly and children. Conflicts arise among organized groups as pressures to protect constituencies grow. In the unstable employment environment, women's role in the paid economy becomes critical to business and families and benefits tied to jobs are again a measure for service.
Conclusion
No one of these brief scenarios will be the future, but parts of each of them will. When drawing on these driving forces and the trends they illustrate, we see how the complexities of change can deeply impact the future of work. By examining and developing the scenarios and fleshing out their implications we can explore the future in an informed way that facilitates learning and adapting as individuals and as institutions in the private and public sectors.
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