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Lastly, ''there was no competitive advantage''. Everyone was in the same boat. How it would have played out, had [[Goldman]] been allowed back to the office, but Morgan Stanley forced to stay remote. Who would have done better? ''There was no control group.'' Maybe being in the office would have been even ''more'' productive. During COVID, we had no way of knowing. Now, post-COVID, since firms can choose their own approaches to hybrid and remote, we ''do''. We will see. | Lastly, ''there was no competitive advantage''. Everyone was in the same boat. How it would have played out, had [[Goldman]] been allowed back to the office, but Morgan Stanley forced to stay remote. Who would have done better? ''There was no control group.'' Maybe being in the office would have been even ''more'' productive. During COVID, we had no way of knowing. Now, post-COVID, since firms can choose their own approaches to hybrid and remote, we ''do''. We will see. | ||
Just because things worked well during lockdown, doesn’t mean they worked ''best'' that way, or that the change wrought is secular and permanent. | Just because things worked well during lockdown, doesn’t mean they worked ''best'' that way, or that the change wrought is secular and permanent. In any case, the productivity bump faded as lockdown carried on and the novelty settled into the mundane. The bureaucrats sorted themselves out and rescheduled their meetings on Zoom. The stack of thing in the in-tray that needed uninterrupted focus dwindled. The temptation to ease up increased. | ||
In any case, the productivity bump faded as lockdown carried on and the novelty settled into the mundane. The bureaucrats sorted themselves out and rescheduled their meetings on Zoom. The stack of thing in the in-tray that needed uninterrupted focus dwindled. The temptation to ease up increased. | |||
What remained was a way of working where informal information flow — those quick chats , bumpings into, and vibes dried up. The firm began to resemble its formal model: a [[work-to-rule]]. | What remained was a way of working where informal information flow — those quick chats , bumpings into, and vibes dried up. The firm began to resemble its formal model: a [[work-to-rule]]. | ||
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The “layers” are sets of abstract impulses, grouped by their significance and way in which they act upon the system as a whole. In a society, for example, the outermost layer might be “fashion”, then successively inside that, “commerce”, “infrastructure”, “governance”, “culture”, “biology” and finally “geology”. Fashion moves the fastest, geology the slowest. (But if the geology suddenly moves, everything else moves pronto!) | The “layers” are sets of abstract impulses, grouped by their significance and way in which they act upon the system as a whole. In a society, for example, the outermost layer might be “fashion”, then successively inside that, “commerce”, “infrastructure”, “governance”, “culture”, “biology” and finally “geology”. Fashion moves the fastest, geology the slowest. (But if the geology suddenly moves, everything else moves pronto!) | ||
Adjacent [[Pace layering|pace layers]] interact with each other and thereby the system self-regulates: the “fast” layers pull towards the new and exciting, the “slow” ones resist, clinging on to the tried and tested. Fast layers are shiny | Adjacent [[Pace layering|pace layers]] interact with each other and thereby the system self-regulates: the “fast” layers pull towards the new and exciting, the “slow” ones resist, clinging on to the tried and tested. Fast layers are shiny, new and destabilising and so command our ''attention''; slow layers store deep system knowledge and stop the system failing and so should command our ''respect''. | ||
====How fashion changes the world: slowly==== | ====How fashion changes the world: slowly==== | ||
So a fashionable idea will not change the world overnight | So a fashionable idea will not change the world overnight. It must persist until the commercial layer has embraced it. The shift in the commercial layer must, in turn, persist even longer to influence the infrastructural and governance layers it sits on. | ||
The personal computer revolution — think IBM 386, Apple IIe, Sinclair ZX-81 and Commodore 64 — started as a fad. As it persisted, it picked up commercial momentum and the infrastructure began to respond to the ongoing commercial demand. These infrastructural changes — laying a ton of fibre around the world and across the Atlantic (bless you, Global Crossing!) — created more capacity. This in turn enabled novel applications for networked computers, which in turn provided commercial incentives to develop faster processors and more storage and to lay more cable: this positive feedback loop was a strong [[system effect]]. | |||
Twenty years later that infrastructure allowed services industries to make their extraordinary instant pivot to remote working at the onset of COVID. Had that system effect not been running for twenty years, the COVID experience may have been very different. (Such are the impossibilities of predicting the future from the past, by the way). | |||
====COVID and the adjacent possible==== | ====COVID and the adjacent possible==== | ||
We often hear the argument put that COVID was the “[[black swan]]” that opened the white collar world’s eyes to an adjacency it hadn’t previously noticed. No one could ''credit'' that we could all work remotely. The barriers to trying it out were too high. It took an [[Act of God]] to push us across the threshold: Once we moved through that door the range of [[Adjacent possible|adjacent possibilities]] changes forever.<ref>The “hero’s challenge”, in which the hero at first rejects the call to adventure until he is forced into it by circumstances beyond his control, is a favourite trope of Joseph Campbell ’s “monomyth”, as set out in {{br|The Hero with a Thousand Faces}}. Luke Skywalker rejecting the call of the Rebel Alliance until the Empire murders his aunt and uncle and destroys the family farm. It is an appealing figurative device — it appears in almost all movies these days — but our dappled moral world is rarely quite so cut and dried.</ref> | We often hear the argument put that COVID was the “[[black swan]]” that opened the white collar world’s eyes to an adjacency it hadn’t previously noticed. No one could ''credit'' that we could all work remotely. The barriers to trying it out were too high. It took an [[Act of God]] to push us across the threshold: Once we moved through that door the range of [[Adjacent possible|adjacent possibilities]] changes forever.<ref>The “hero’s challenge”, in which the hero at first rejects the call to adventure until he is forced into it by circumstances beyond his control, is a favourite trope of Joseph Campbell ’s “monomyth”, as set out in {{br|The Hero with a Thousand Faces}}. Luke Skywalker rejecting the call of the Rebel Alliance until the Empire murders his aunt and uncle and destroys the family farm. It is an appealing figurative device — it appears in almost all movies these days — but our dappled moral world is rarely quite so cut and dried.</ref> | ||
But this is to make an assumption that layers ''below'' the infrastructural have shifted in the meantime too — namely cultural and biological ones — and that some veil had concealed this better way of working from the collective | But this is to make an assumption that layers ''below'' the infrastructural have shifted in the meantime too — namely cultural and biological ones — and that some veil had hitherto concealed this better way of working from the collective, for ''decades'': the tools that enabled remote working were not new. Nor, indeed, was remote working. | ||
Nor was the concept or remote work any kind of corporate anathema. Quite the contrary: relocating subsidiary and administrative tasks away from head office — [[outsourcing]] and [[offshoring]] — is a central dogma of modern management, as the JC frequently complains: “[[Bring your own premises|bring your own office]]” was really just its final logical step. So, if it really were an effective way of working, why hadn’t McKinsey already gone there? | |||
Humans have worked together in communal offices for | Humans have worked together in communal offices for hundreds of years. That we could centralise and concentrate people in previously unimaginable ways powered the industrial revolution. But it is not like our communal office model was settled at a stroke in 1760 and never subsequently changed. It has iterated, adapted, updated and evolved ever since. All kinds of innovations and inventions since have shaped how we collaborate: mass transit, the elevator, curtain wall architecture, pneumatic messaging, modular office furniture, the typewriter, postal services, [[telex]], [[Facsimile|fax machines]], computer networks, [[email]] and the internet. Human collaboration models have constantly adapted, always tending to [[Local maximum|local maxima]]. | ||
Then came COVID. For a brief moment, the biological imperative, to be distant, overrode everything else. Culture and governance fell into line, and the network infrastructure stunned everyone by ''coping''. Commerce carried on, in rude health. | Then came COVID. For a brief moment, the biological imperative, to be distant, overrode everything else. Culture and governance fell into line, and the network infrastructure stunned everyone by ''coping''. Commerce carried on, in rude health. | ||
But we had been networked for decades. Was the fact that we still congregated until COVID just a matter of habit? Is our cultural and biological impulse to be together fully satisfied via a real-time webcam and a headset? | But we had been networked for decades. Was the fact that we still congregated until COVID just a matter of habit? Is our cultural and biological impulse to be together fully satisfied via a real-time webcam and a headset? This is the question: has COVID so fractured how we work as to create a new [[local maximum]]? | ||
Now COVID’s biological and governance imperatives have gone, remote working must satisfy all the other cultural, infrastructural and commercial imperatives — ideally better than modern communal working does. It might to that if it solves ''new'' problems or presents new opportunities we didn’t know we had until the pandemic illustrated them. | |||
But remember: COVID was a weird time. Only ''non''-weird time will tell, as a whole generation steps through its working life-cycle. We must judge that over forty years: not ''four''. | |||
And we middle-agers, with our wealth, nice houses, home offices and expensive pyjamas, who have largely exhausted our practical avenues for career advancement even if we ''do'' show up — ''we are not the ones to judge''. We will be long gone. Energetic, hungry youngsters, who don’t yet have home offices and nice PJs, for whom success is yet a potential not an actual, who are hungry to learn, change the world, advance, get preferment and take over the wheel from the comfy fifty-somethings — ''they'' will shape working culture over the next twenty years. They aren’t likely to do that working from home. | |||
==== A word about pyjamas ==== | |||
==== Being shocked into looking round corners ==== | ==== Being shocked into looking round corners ==== | ||