Thinkers50 is delighted to be partnering with Mercer on a ebook, The Human-Centric Enterprise. I'm Stuart Crainer, cofounder of Thinkers50. Today I'm talking to one of the contributors to the ebook, Ravin Jesuthasan. Ravin is coauthor of Work Without Jobs which Thinkers50 selected as one of the best business books of the last year.
For this ebook, Ravin looks at the heart of what it means to work in and help create human-centric enterprises. So, Ravin, let's start by asking, what does the idea of the human-centric enterprise mean to you?
Yeah, thanks, Stuart. Lovely to be here with you and good to always catch up. So when I think about what the human-centric enterprise means, I think it's a reflection of some pretty significant macro shifts that we've seen over the course of the last decade or so-- rising volatility; growing use of automation to transform work; the democratization of work as we call it; our growing ability to increasingly decouple work from its traditional confines of space, time, and structure.
And I think all of these forces are driving us towards the human-centric enterprise. But I do think that human-centric enterprise is underpinned by three things. The first being skills being the currency for work and a much more humanizing approach for connecting talent to work, recognizing the unique bundle of skills and capabilities, that Stuart versus Ravin being able to be much more thoughtful about and how we create more inclusive operating environments which enable talent to connect to work ever more seamlessly.
So I think this notion of skills as the currency for work instead of jobs is a key underpinning for it. The other is the opportunity to transcend the traditional boundaries of the organization, if you will, what we call boundaryless work. Human-centric workplace is one where work and talent flow to each other ever more seamlessly across those traditional, functional, and organizational boundaries.
So this notion of boundaryless-ness, if you will-- if there is in fact such a word-- where employees, gig workers, other third parties can engage with the organization's mission and contribute, I think that is another key variable.
And the third, Stuart, something you and I have talked about and as you know something that I've written about extensively is an enterprise where the combinations between humans and automation is increasingly more seamless, this notion of an algorithm for every person who contributes to the mission.
The human-centric enterprise is the one that leads with the work and sees those nuanced combinations of talent and technology where the highly repetitive rules based might be substituted where human creativity, ingenuity, and critical thinking might be augmented and where the presence of emerging technology might create the space for new human work or create the demand for new human skills-- so three variables that I think underpin what that human-centric enterprise looks like.
Can you go back, Ravin, and tell us more about a really nice phrase, I think, the democratization of work, can you just say what you mean by that?
Yeah, and I think the best marker for that, Stuart, is what we all went through the pandemic, right? So back in 1970, the great futurist Alvin Toffler wrote about us living in electronic cottages. And in the United States, we went from 0% work being done full-time remote in 1970 to 50 years later in March of 2020, that number got up to a whopping 6%.
And then overnight in April or May of 2020, we got up to 56%, so essentially fulfilling Alvin's sort of prophecy, if you will. But it took the pandemic. But if you think of the future of work, those are just two of the dimensions, right? It's where and when of work. And when we think about the future of work, it includes what the work is, how that work is done, different work engagements, this notion of job sharing and work sharing.
Who does the work-- whether it's an algorithm versus an employee in a full-time job versus a gig worker or perhaps someone in an agile talent pool. And then increasingly, the why of work-- how does what you as a company stand for align to the greater purpose I have on this planet.
So when we think of all of those six variables at play, what the democratization of work essentially means is as a result of all of these forces, external and internal, our ability to increasingly decouple work from those traditional confines again of space, time, and structure.
Our ability to send work anywhere in the world, our ability to connect with new work options, our ability to more seamlessly engage a disparate pool of talent with the mission of the enterprise-- so again, all six of these variables I think come into play as we think about the democratization.
You don't actually hear Alvin Toffler being quoted and cited that much, but he was so far sighted pretty incredible really over an extended period. I think he was absolutely spot on.
Yes, he was.
So there's no going back. I mean, there are voices raised saying in the UK-- I can talk in the UK some members of the government encouraging people to spend more time in the offices and not work at home. So do you expect there to be some return to the previous ways of working or do you think we're there now and we're going to move forward?
It's a good question, Stuart. I do think the genie's out of the bottle. I'm 100% sure we're not going to go back to 6% work being done full-time remote. I suspect we won't stay at 56%. And we will find some happy medium. The thing that to me is really exciting, Stuart, is it is, as you know, it's such an experiment, right?
You've got organizations all along the spectrum, some who've said, COVID's over, back in the office, that's who we're about and consequences be damned. Interestingly, very few who've actually said that walk the talk, as you've probably seen.
It's a great thing to say out there, but they rarely implement it because they understand that the potential impact on the attraction and retention of their talent. Yet others have said, we're going to be a complete hybrid structure. You will come in when you want, and we'll treat you like an adult.
My personal sense, Stuart, is that something in the middle needs to be put in place. I think our talent needs to understand why we need to be together. We need to be explicit about the purpose of us being together, whether it's in an office or some form of coworking space. I think those nuances of understanding we don't need to be together when I've got my head down working on a spreadsheet.
But we do need to be together when we're collaborating and trying to come up with new ideas when we're looking to build chemistry across a new team, when we're looking to bring the next generation of talent along particularly when you've got operating models that are based on an apprenticeship model as is my firm and many others. So I think being much more nuanced about where and when we need to be together and ensuring that people understand that and see the value of that.
You talk of skills being the currency of work which is, again, a really nice phrase. But in some ways, that's going back in history, isn't it? I mean, work was traditionally, a few hundred years ago, it was very craft based.
Absolutely.
And so there's a sense that we're taking the best of history and adding technology and making something completely new.
Yeah, you're absolutely right, Stuart. We are going back to, in that sense, to an era where your, quote unquote, "value" as a function of the skills you had and your ability to keep adding higher-value skills. And I do think that is a key part of it. But I also think, in many respects, we are moving beyond what we now know to be some of the really big challenges associated with work being bound up in jobs--
The inability to actually see how the work itself is changing because it's so obscured by all of the other tasks and activities, the inability to send better signals of changing demand and supply for work and the underlying skills, the inability to more equitably and inclusively connect a variety of different individuals who could contribute to the mission because we often relegated this thing called a job to its headlines, right?
And very often that those one-to-one relationships between a person and a position and you could back it up to a degree, which was the singular marker of one's capability to perform the work, at least that's what it was supposed to be.
And all that that meant and the frictional cost that that built up in the organization versus as we see the, again, that the many-to-many that is possible between skills and work, the unique and different ways in which your unique skills could contribute and how I might provide you with more skills, that then open up new and many more ways in which you could contribute versus how I might do that. I think we start to see that this notion of skills really becomes a critical underpinning for the agile enterprise.
Yeah, you talk about the need for more agile many-to-many relationships between skills and work. Again, Ravin, can you just unpack that a little bit? So you're talking about an ecosystem, really, an ecosystem of talent and skills.
Absolutely, that's exactly right. If you think of where we've come from, Stuart, when you got that one-to-one relationship, you've got very few permutations, either for the organization or the individual. The individual either sort of moves up or sideways or out, if you will. Not a lot of permutations in terms of how he or she could develop and grow and advance themselves for the organization.
And this worked really well, right? If you think of when this thing called a job was created, it was creating an environment of really significant stability and fairly steady price increases, which allowed you to have long planning cycles and be able to plan for often years in advance for these tightly-scripted supply chains of skills. And this thing called a job was ideal for doing that because it allowed you to, in lockstep, move people and get them ready for as your business expanded and grew.
And then you fast forward to where we are today and our inability to plan for next quarter, let alone next year, and the volatility and the growing options of automation and the democratization of work. I think all of which make this notion of skills ever more important because it creates an agility in the workforce that allows us to plan for many different scenarios over an extended period of time.
And I think perhaps most importantly that many-to-many relationships, Stuart, creates optionality that previously never existed-- optionality for organizations and optionality for talent-- to be able to pivot from as some have talked about the sunset bodies of work to the sunrise bodies of work, to be able to pivot as demand changes based on a pandemic, to be able to pivot as decisions are made about the portfolio and the operating model.
But I do think managing that many-to-many, Stuart, is-- and the reason that time is now is because we've seen these dramatic advances in AI and machine learning that allow us to manage the many-to-many much more seamlessly and in a way that's possible that never was the case 10 years ago.
And in your conversations with senior leaders of organizations, do they understand these issues? Because it strikes me when we're talking that the one job that we're not talking about is the job of the CEO and the job of the senior leadership team, but those jobs are fundamentally changed as well because the world of work is undergoing a revolution.
Absolutely right. And I might just be provocative, Stuart, and say, it's the one job that hasn't changed yet. I suspect that as we see more use of machine learning in organizations, even that role and the growing premium we're placing on the capacity of leaders to orchestrate a distributed ecosystem of work options is going to change immensely as technology becomes more of an asset and an ally to everyone from the administrative assistant all the way up to the CEO and the board.
But I have met some robotic CEOs so--
And some very effective board members too.
Yeah, but it has always been assumed that the effects, the impacts of technology would be on lower-grade jobs and they'd be replaced. But that really hasn't happened in the way that we've predicted. And indeed, what we're seeing is that managerial jobs are increasingly affected by the technology. It was a book that came out last year called My Manager is an Algorithm. And a lot of, especially in the HR world, a lot of it can be done by technology.
Absolutely right, Stuart. The thing that I've always wondered is-- and for years we've asked managers to be coaches. We've asked them to develop their talent. And yet 90% of the time that the average manager spent was around the basics of supervision and coordination. And if you think about it, that's what an algorithm is perfectly suited to do, right?
You could argue that in some organizations, it's used for nefarious purposes. And it's used to extract that last pound of effort or energy required and is quite inhumane. But I do think it has the benefit of actually helping us shine a spotlight on what we really want from managers. Where does that human empathy, that decision making, that critical thinking really have a premium? Because it's not in supervision and coordination, right?
And it doesn't really matter to me if my boss tells me to do something or if the algorithm does, provided it's done humanely. But I think the coaching from my boss, his mentoring and his support, his insights into, well, that's a really good idea. Why don't you connect up with Kate over there and I think the two of you could do something quite creative. But they'll be able to create a team is I think where the premium is shifting for managers.
Yeah, because in many ways, the job of management is still described by Henri Fayol and early in the 20th century. POSDCORB, that was the horrible acronym-- planning, organizing, supervising, and so on. But in many ways, that does describe the managerial job in the 21st century. It's amazing. It was amazing how prescient he was as well.
Yes, exactly.
So the role of the manager becomes exercising judgment.
Yes, and exercising judgment and executing aligning talent to the mission, if you will, as opposed to merely supervising and coordinating work and delegating responsibility. And as you know, Stuart, we talk about these big shifts in leadership in our ebook as well.
What organizations get this, do you think? You must encounter-- you travel the world. You deal with all sorts of organizations. And you must meet a few whose faces go blank when you talk. But you must see a lot of others where who are really doing interesting things, which companies have you encountered recently that excite you?
I see some really interesting changes in organizations. I'm very excited by the journey that Standard Chartered bank has been on. They have been incredibly thoughtful about being and mindful about reskilling and upskilling their talent from their sunset jobs to their sunrise jobs. Unilever, you and I have talked about them for a number of years, have been on this journey to create an ever more human-centric ecosystem.
I look at what Bill Anderson has done at Roche and during his time there of moving towards eliminating bureaucracy and moving to more humanocracy, to quote Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini. So I do see some amazing organizations who are challenging the status quo and frankly starting to see, starting to create some separation from the pack as they build much more agile, resilient, sustainable enterprises.
We talked about Alvin Toffler earlier. Perhaps you could become Alvin Toffler for a minute and just think where's this going? Where do you see the world of work and jobs in 10 years time?
That's a great question, Stuart. I am really, really excited to come back to where we started about this notion of human centricity because I see these advances towards the skills-based enterprise and all the skills-based organization really driving that more human-centric enterprise where instead leaders are focused on creating, aligning a disparate ecosystem to a common mission and purpose where resources, both talent, automation flow much more seamlessly to work and connect kind of on demand this notion of autonomous teaming, if you will, starting to come to the fore.
I see value propositions evolving really quickly where if you think about it, the way HR has-- the way the talent model has worked is we've got a value proposition that is based on every single person being here every single day to increasingly a proposition that is based on Stuart might be here every day. Ravin's here perhaps every other gig.
Jim's here perhaps once every three to five years-- that we've actually got a mechanism and a means for meeting talent where they are on their terms and aligning them to them, to our mission and purpose. So even if they're here for a short duration versus a long duration, we have an ongoing relationship with those individuals.
And I think of what the advent of distributed autonomous organizations might mean. And I think it further accelerates this ecosystem notion, Stuart, of where enterprises scale as needed come together, form, and redistribute themselves. So I think we're in for a really exciting time. And again, I think at the heart of it is a much more human-centric enterprise powered by skills as the currency for work.
Work Without Jobs, the book you co-authored with John Boudreau, was selected by Thinkers50 as one of our best books of the last year congratulations on that, Ravin.
Thank you.
Why do you think it struck a chord?
I think it struck a chord for a number of reasons, Stuart. I think one was we set out with the goal of challenging this legacy of work being bound up in jobs. The legacy work operating system, which we've had for 140 years.
And I think thanks to the case studies and the many folks who contributed their case studies didn't just have a theoretical book that laid out what needed to change, why it needed to change, and how it would need to change, but also illustrated in very tangible terms how those changes would happen, what was needed of different organizational systems and leaders to make those changes happen, and illustrated what the impact of those changes would be.
And I think that practical nature with which we set out to write the book I think might have resonated with many, Stuart. It also-- and Stuart, you're very familiar with my work. But it's the continuation of the fourth book or a 10-year journey around this broad notion of the deconstruction of work into tasks and activities.
The deconstruction of talent into skills and capabilities and essentially changing the currency for work so that we've got much more granular building blocks that allow us to recombine them in ever more agile ways and to be able to pivot as the conditions require. So I think that the arc of the narrative is one that I think many folks understood.
Ravin, thank you very much.
Thank you, Stuart. Always a pleasure.
