CONCLUSION
What We Can Do Now to Create Better Futures
Even as we grieved, we’ve grown; even fatigued we’ve found that this hill we climb is one we must mount together. We are battered, but bolder; worn but wiser. I’m not telling you not to be tired or afraid. If anything, the very fact that we’re weary means we are, by definition, changed; we are brave enough to listen to, and learn from, our fear. This time will be different because this time we’ll be different. We already are.1
AMANDA GORMAN
Office shock made it possible to create better futures for living and working that used to be perceived as impossible.
Part I of this book introduced office shock and showed how to use futureback thinking to get beyond the noise of the present to answer the question, What Future? We included a brief history of the fifty-year prototyping of new media for distributed work that made it possible for so many organizations to quickly go virtual when COVID-19 hit.
Part II introduced the Office Shock Seven Spectrums of Choice to inform your choices of What Next? for your office and officing.
FIGURE 23: The Office Shock Journey. The book storyline can inspire your navigating office shock toward better futures of working and living.
Part III introduced a Quick Start Guide to help you, your organization, and your communities make smart choices. Figure 23 is a graphic summary of the journey we’ve taken in this book.
Office shock has just begun and there is no going back now.
What Future? Make Impossible Futures Possible
Beliefs about the future create blinders. Office shock has opened our eyes. The impossible has become possible. Fixed ways of working will become ever-more fluid. Thinking futureback in a time of office shock will help you imagine what will be possible.
The types of impossible futures that we shared in the introduction are becoming increasingly possible:
Impossible futures that happen too fast to be believable: Just like before the COVID-19 shutdowns in 2020, many people would have thought it was impossible to have low-cost high-quality desktop or mobile phone video teleconferencing.
You can choose to remake your office into a prototype of a better future for yourself, your organization, and your community.
Impossible futures that require convergence of many low-probability scenarios: Just like a global pandemic of the scale of COVID-19 was viewed as possible in the abstract but was impossible to imagine, it had profound effects on entrenched social norms, disrupted economic activity, and caused further political and cultural schisms.
You can choose to remake your office and officing with more purpose, economic equality, and climate impact.
Impossible futures that break the accepted rules of reality: Just like the rapid development of a vaccine for the novel coronavirus was viewed by many as impossible because it required so much information sharing among competing companies and novel approaches to development.
You can choose to remake your office by collaborating with clarity and flexive intent in mobilizing people across organizational boundaries to accelerate addressing the wicked problems our communities face.
Impossible futures that depend on alien concepts: Just like the rapid development of a vaccine for the novel coronavirus was viewed as impossible because mRNA was a fringe experiment proposed by an atypical scientist.
You can choose to remake your office by applying alien concepts like new economic models that offer more equitable ownership.
There is no simple choice for making a better way of working. Even if you have clarity on direction and an inspirational navigational star, turning impossible futures into new possibilities will not be easy.
What Next? Make Your Choices
In part II, we introduced the Seven Spectrums of Choice for offices and officing. Here in the conclusion, we encourage you to pursue the aspirational scenarios that opened each chapter on a spectrum of choice. Then, we describe what’s next to inspire you to build a better world.
Imagine a world in which more workers are motivated by a sense of purpose and meaning.
Building worlds with more sense of purpose (chapter 4) starts with getting reacquainted with your purpose, the purpose of your organization and your community. Pursuing this aspiration will require individuals who are purpose driven and who seek out organizations with complementary purpose-driven practices. Policy makers would need to incentivize and reward purpose-driven people and purpose-driven organizations.
Imagine a world that generates both financial return for shareholders and social value for stakeholders.
Building worlds with more attention to outcomes (chapter 5) starts with choosing the outcomes you seek and how to measure your progress. Be prepared to be transparent about the results—even if they are not as good as you hoped. The Spectrum of Outcomes is an often-tense mix of financial and social value. While shareholder value has long been the focus of publicly traded companies, these companies are increasingly called on to provide social value as well. Corporations are increasingly seeking engagement with and support from stakeholders like customers, local communities, suppliers, and even gig workers—not just with shareholders, investors, and employees. We expect that this outreach will increase in the future, even as the pressure for short-term financial performance remains strong.
Imagine a world in which people figure out how to equalize the balance between production and consumption.
Building worlds with positive climate impacts (chapter 6) starts with choosing your climate positive goals using accepted global standards, measuring accurately, and sharing your progress and shortcomings. It is too late to have a separate net-zero or even regenerative strategy as part of corporate social responsibility or public relations alone. Now, the climate future is urgent and stinging with chronic emergencies. Climate positive initiatives must be an integral part of corporate strategy.
Imagine a world in which robust diversity is expected and rewarded.
Building worlds with more sense of belonging (chapter 7) starts with choosing a purposely different workforce, with people who know their roots (their genealogies), the routes they’ve taken to get where they are, and the aspirational future that they want for themselves. The majority minority future is already here in many parts of the world, as full-spectrum thinking about race, gender, age, and even thinking styles is becoming the new status quo. Providing a sense of inclusion and belonging will be a critical success factor for all organizations. Understanding the value of purposely different people for your organization will be a critical leadership skill that will yield great value.
Imagine a world in which work will be augmented, amplified, and enhanced, with humans and machines working together to extend human intelligence and enhance work.
Building worlds with more computer-assisted human augmentation (chapter 8) starts with choosing how you and your organization will become even more deeply digital over the next decade. Answer, for you and your organization, these questions: What can humans do best? What can computers do best? Artificial intelligence, machine learning, augmented reality, and a variety of other digital aids will become ubiquitous over the next decade. Ideally, each person will decide how augmented they want to be, both within the workplace and within their private lives. Human and computing resources will be mixed in profound ways.
Imagine a world in which it is easy to move between in-person and virtual experiences. In this future world, we will always be online and enhanced, unless we choose to be offline.
Building worlds with more flexibility of place and time (chapter 9) starts with choosing how to be there without being there—to be even better than being there. Leaders must become skilled at choosing which medium is good for what and how to communicate effectively through each medium, including in-person meetings. The possibilities of dynamic ways of working together regardless of physical place or time constraints will dramatically alter how we office in the future.
Imagine a world in which agility and resilience will be prioritized over certainty and efficiency. Imagine leaders who will be skilled in the art of flexive intent, with great clarity about where they intend to go, but great flexibility about how they will get there.
Building worlds with more agility (chapter 10) starts with working as braids in shape-shifting organizations. Local and global talent will be much more available and eager, although the terms of engagement will be emergent and sometimes problematic—particularly where trust is low.
There is no simple binary choice of how to build a better world. Although you may have clarity on your choices, building better worlds will not be easy. There will be trade-offs. You may not be able to fulfill all your aspirations. If you apply your agency to prototype new offices, your world will become better.
What Now? Try Out New Ways of Officing
In part III, we showed how you can make your own choices and develop your own critical success factors for offices and officing. In chapter 11, we introduced a Quick Start Guide for you to lead futureback with flexive intent to create better futures for working and living.
Here in the conclusion, we remind you of the scenarios that led our chapters 12 to 14 for individuals, organizations, and communities. Then, we describe what’s possible now by prototyping your choices of new offices and officing.
Imagine an office in which you—and most desk workers—have a better chance to find work paths with purpose, success, and fulfillment. It won’t be just getting a job; it will be making a living in good company.
Prototyping new offices that reflect your personal choices (chapter 12) starts with exploring the new array of choices for individuals who, in many cases, were not prepared and did not even realize they had a choice. Rigid career tracking is giving way (finally) to extremely rich mixes of options. The bad news is that there will be fewer full-time jobs. The good news is that there will be many more ways to make a living. The even-better news is that people will be free to pursue different aspects of the career they love—or even totally different careers in parallel. People will combine meaningful work with meaningful contributions to their communities. Technology will provide much more flexibility for every individual and a variety of professional and personal communities will benefit from their talents.
Imagine an office in which the now-separate functions called human resources or people, real estate, and information technology will be strategically integrated and report directly to the CEO. Offices and officing will be too strategic to leave to anyone but the top leadership.
Prototyping new offices that reflect your organizational choices (chapter 13) starts with redefining the “home office” to be both the corporate headquarters and the office at the homes of the workers—including the CEO and the board. Economies of organization are now replacing economies of scale. Bigger will not always be better. You will be what you can organize. Anything that can be distributed will be distributed. Opportunities are growing while limitations are decreasing.
Imagine an office in which policies and laws incentivize and support distributed workplaces and workspaces. Imagine that governments issue a Future State of the Office report in every community.
Prototyping new offices that reflect your community choices (chapter 14) starts by re-asking the question of what we choose to do together, the question of what role governments might play in how we work and live. Policy makers can incentivize and regulate the ecosystems of work; they can encourage or restrain. This is a time to track signals of governments who are making a difference. Often, the most interesting signals we see are from local governments rather than national governments, which are often so polarized nowadays that they cannot imagine how to engage with the impossible futures that are looming.
Seek Harmony—Resist Polarization
Office shock offers a unique opportunity to reevaluate our expectations about how we might work together to create better futures for working and living. Office shock is a perfect storm for change: a convergence of climate change, social justice, economic inequality, and the demand for distributed work. As Jacqui Patterson, director of the NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program, states:
Our future must be rooted in a just transition. This involves moving away from a society functioning on extraction to one rooted in deep democracy and to one integrating regenerative processes, cooperation, and acknowledgment of interdependence and again, where all rights are respected (Indigenous, women, and all marginalized communities) and honored. This absolutely must include earth rights as well. We have to respect the vessel. We have to get to a place where we can live in harmony with each other and the Earth.2
Office shock is a wake-up call, but leaders have ignored calls to change before. Intellectuals and artists have argued eloquently that ways of working and living need to change. Alvin Toffler warned against Future Shock in 1970. Ten years later, director of experimental documentary films Godfrey Reggio captured on film a vision of what was going on. Titled Koyaanisqatsi, which in the Hopi language means “life out of balance,” Reggio and composer Philip Glass sought to open the eyes of the viewers because, as the trailer described: “Until now, you’ve never really seen the world you live in.” Jean-Michel Basquiat tried to communicate the chaos of the 1980s as well, only to take his own life. Grunge bands like Nirvana, Rage Against the Machine, and Green Day in the 1990s foreshadowed the shocks of the new millennium. Today, musician and activist Tom Morello continues the call for change in both music and writing.3
Today’s politics are polarized, with certainty on all sides but little clarity or willingness to work together. Local communities seem more willing to work together, but even in small towns polarities are threatening. Tensions around vaccines and protective masks are vivid examples. When do individual rights yield to community safety or benefit? What do we choose to do together? Public health seems an obvious space to work together, but that logic was questioned during the pandemic.
What can governments do to get past the polarities and find common ground? Looking futureback certainly helps, but policy makers will need to ask what kind of community they want to encourage—given the external future forces.
In embracing more community in officing, we can break down the barrier between public and private. The foreword to Mariana Mazzucato’s The Entrepreneurial State is titled very appropriately “Rediscovering Public Wealth Creation.” Silicon Valley benefited greatly from a rich public/private ecosystem of innovation. Communities need to figure out ways to encourage the next generation of offices and officing. Her research on entrepreneurship revealed that the shining engine of capitalism, usually portrayed as the output of private individuals, is the result of the ecosystem surrounding the entrepreneurs. Mazzucato’s research shows that the famous innovations of companies like Apple were dependent on the innovations of governmental initiatives.4 Private needs the public and the public needs the private.
Working together at a distance has never been so easy and so urgent. We must do as Buckminster Fuller asked us all to do in his classic Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth:
Go to work, and above all co-operate.5
Synchronize Work and Life
As we close this book, we suggest that you ask yourself seven basic questions about offices and officing—think of yourself, your family, your organization, and your communities. Try to think futureback from ten years ahead as you answer these questions thoughtfully:
1. Why do you want an office at all?
2. What outcomes are you seeking from your work?
3. How can your work and life be more climate positive?
4. With whom do you want to work?
5. How do you want to augment your own work and life?
6. In what places and at what times do you want to work?
7. How will you design your life for agile resilience as disruptions pepper you?
Office shock will continue to create dilemmas that you cannot solve, but you can flip them into positives. COVID-19 was awful in so many ways, but it also opened great opportunities to create previously impossible futures for offices, officing, and the officeverse. Office Shock is a story of people making something better out of a bad thing.
By thinking futureback and full spectrum, we can contribute to helping humans develop and sustain more symbiotic relationships. Homeostasis rather than dominance. Relationships amplified by technology rather than controlled by it. You can avoid the insanity of entropy. You can navigate office shock and flip it into great opportunities.