82,891
edits
The future of office work: Difference between revisions
no edit summary
Amwelladmin (talk | contribs) No edit summary Tags: Mobile edit Mobile web edit |
Amwelladmin (talk | contribs) No edit summary Tags: Mobile edit Mobile web edit |
||
| Line 116: | Line 116: | ||
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. | 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 and new and destabilising, so command our attention, but the slow layers store deep system knowledge and stop the system failing, so they should command our ''respect''. | ||
====How fashion changes the world: slowly==== | |||
So a fashionable idea will not change the world overnight but must persist until the commercial system has embraced it. Commerce must in turn persist even longer to influence infrastructure and governance. | |||
The | The consumer computer revolution started in the 1980s as a fad — Sinclair ZX81s and Commodore 64s — but the fad persisted and gradually picked up commercial momentum. Before long the infrastructure began to respond to and accommodate the commercial demand. These infrastructural changes — laying a ton of fibre around the world and across the Atlantic in the nineties (bless you, Global Crossing!) — in turn fueled new applications for networked computers which provided commercial incentives to develop faster processors and more storage: this positive feedback loop was a strong [[system effect]]. Twenty years later it enabled the 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 inpossibilities of predicting the future from the past, by the way). | ||
But this is to make an assumption that layers below the infrastructural have shifted in the meantime too | ====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> | |||
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 hitherto. And for ''decades'': the technology and infrastructure enabling remote working is not new. Nor is remote working. Indeed, accomplishing subsidiary and adminstrative tasks remotely from head office — [[outsourcing]] and [[offshoring]] — is a central dogma of modern management consultancy. Putting the absence of “[[bring your own office]]" — its final logical extension — down to management intransigence seems implausible to say the least.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. | 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. | ||