The future of office work: Difference between revisions

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 Lastly, ''there was no competitive advantage to lockdown''. Everyone was in the same boat. We don’t know how it would have played out, relatively, had [[Goldman]] been allowed back to the office, but Morgan Stanley forced to stay remote. Who would have done better? Maybe being in the office in a time of cholera would have been even ''more'' productive. During COVID, we had no way of knowing. Now, post-COVID, since firms can organise 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 is permanent.
+Just because things worked well during lockdown, doesn’t mean they worked ''best'' that way, or that the change is permanent. Sure, there was an initial productivity bump, as all the physical meetings were cancelled and distractions were sponged off the agenda without replacement. If you need to get stuff done without interruption, working from home is great.
+And there is an element of work creation that comes from incidental interaction. The number of people with whom you socialise an issue depends in some way on how many people you can get hold of.
+In any case, that 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 intray that could use uninterrupted focus dwindled. The temptation to ease up increased.
+What remained was a framework where the flow of informal information were shut off. The firm began to resemble its, formal model, when it is at rest.
 ==== Deep cultural layers don’t change overnight. ====
 {{Quote|Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and by occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. ''Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power''.
-:— {{author|Stewart Brand}}, ''[https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3-brand/release/2 Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning]''}}
+:— {{author|Stewart Brand}}, ''[https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3-brand/release/2 Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning]''}}1
-[[Stewart Brand]]’s pace layers, from the top down, are fashion, commerce, infrastructure, governance, culture and biology. Humans have worked together in communal offices for over two hundred years — that was when the enabling ''infrastructure'' arrived to satisfy our ''cultural'' impulse to be together. That we could centralise and concentrate people in previously unimaginable ways powered the industrial revolution.
+[[Stewart Brand]] has a fabulous insight to see a complex systems developing through the interaction of concentric layers, the outermost being the most provisional, erratic and fast-moving, and the deepest being the most stable, reliable and slow. It applies as well to a biome as to a society.
+In a society the outermost might be fashion, then commerce, infrastructure, governance, culture and at the innermost biology and geology.
+The layers interact with each other. The outer layers pull, the inner ones resist. Perhaps because we can see it moving, we are captivated by fashion but, perhaps because it doesn’t seem to, we are less fixated about our cells and the soil structure.
+But a fashion must persist a while before it will move the commercial system, which must stay moving even longer to influence infrastructure and governance. We can see the effects of the changed infrastructure on the internet, and commerce and fashion. These infrastructural changes of course enabled the extraordinary pivot to remote working at the onset of COVID — has they not been made, the lockdown response may well not have been possible.
+The argument is often put that COVID was the black swan that opened the world’s eyes to an adjacency it hadn’t realised was possible  Once that door is opened and we have moved into it the range of adjacent possibilities changes forever.
+But this is to make an assumption that layers below the infrastructural have shifted in the meantime too, and that's some veil had concealed this alternative better way of working from the collective hear the two. For the technology and infrastructure to permit remote working is not new. It has been there, in plain sight, in regular use, for a couple of decades. Putting its further deployment down to top down stigma would need evidence, and an explanation of why those who did did not feel the same stigma  given the avowed purpose of rightshoring.
+Humans have worked together in communal offices for over two hundred years — that was when the enabling ''infrastructure'' arrived to satisfy our ''cultural'' impulse to be together. That we could centralise and concentrate people in previously unimaginable ways powered the industrial revolution.
 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.