This book is about the impact of digital on us as individuals and how we organize together to get things done. It is also about what we have learned, in terms of how to make the most of all that digital has to offer whilst avoiding its pitfalls.

The book consists of our understanding of the context of digital humans – what is happening and how we understand it. We identify 23 trends that we believe are important to pay attention to. We have researched what primary research is already starting to tell us about what we have learned through the global pandemic. We look at 12 fundamentally new ways that we believe are impacting digital humans and their organizations.

The original version of this book's research was printed before the huge global experience of the pandemic. We have sought to understand the shifts that took place for organizational survival. The conditions of economies grinding to a halt and people being kept at home meant that the only way economies could survive was by adopting digital work. We have sought to update our research with what we have learned through this period and what we feel will be lasting in its impact.

The book is not intended to be an academic thesis or a technical manual. Instead, it is a document of what we have learned, our experiences, and the important principles we have synthesized through working in this way.

We have tried to avoid jargon and to write a book that everyone might find interesting and accessible. At the end of the book, we have included our ‘terms of art’. This provides our working definitions for the various technical terms that we use within the text.

It is, above all, a contribution to the conversation about our joint future, in the hope that we as humans will use the opportunities digital provides to create a future world in which we all want to live together.