chapter 12

What do teams look like in the future?

Teams will be even more important in future, and supercharged teams are the only ones that will succeed. The National Research Council found that when companies are dealing with unclear goals and uncertain markets, teamwork is more important to success than ever before.¹

We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.

Bill Gates²

Artificial intelligence will measure our performance and help us to improve, whether as a team member, or as a team, or as the organisation itself, and will help us identify new opportunities quickly. We may be overwhelmed with information for decision-making, and will need to prioritise faster, better decisions and avoid data paralysis. We are likely to face a high turnover of team members to bring in the expertise to deal with market disruption, and because gig-style working means people won’t be permanent. Team rules of engagement will be continually reset to keep us on course, so supercharging your team regularly will be a necessity not a choice.

We will need to preserve and value what people bring in a world that is increasingly machine-led. We will need human-machine collaboration to get the best results. We will need to constantly evolve, both as individuals and as teams.

In the end, it all comes down to people and values. We need to shape a future that works for all of us by putting people first and empowering them.

Klaus Schwab³

What you will learn in this chapter:

• • How teams of the future will include machines . . .
• • . . . and our customers.
• • How teams will continually evolve and develop.
• • What will drive our teams in future.

Machines will join our teams

Artificial intelligence (AI) is when we create technology systems that can function intelligently and independently. Experts agree that while AI will take on the heavy lifting of data analysis and scenario planning, the key challenge is how we help humans to make better, cleverer decisions with that information. To put it another way, we will need to collaborate with machines to make decisions together.

It’s fair to say AI will increasingly take on routine and repetitious tasks. That means it’ll be up to teams of humans to assess the options AI provides, but also build on those options with intuitive, creative, non-standard solutions.

Greg Orme⁴

Pedro Uria-Recio Group Head of Analytics and Artificial Intelligence at Axiata, one of Asia’s leading telecommunications groups, says that it is collaboration between humans and machines that will increase our performance in future. According to Harvard research, while AI algorithms can read medical diagnostic scans with 92% accuracy, and humans can do the same with 96% accuracy, working together they can achieve 99% accuracy.

Future teams will need to use data to make creative, innovative and intelligent decisions. Emotional intelligence, creativity and persuasion will become all the more valuable in future to facilitate teamwork and good decision-making.⁵ Team–machine collaboration will become core to a great team.

Customers will join our teams

We are already seeing a massive increase in the importance of transparency across brands and business. More than ever, consumers require the businesses they support and work for to be ethically sound.⁶

Consumers are getting involved, both alongside and increasingly in the place of, brands. Increasingly aware that personality, purpose and profit can be compatible, consumers seek brands with meaning and character; that are open, honest, sympathetic, and, most importantly, stand for something.

Henry Mason⁷

Information that used to be hard to find will increasingly be accessed and communicated by our customers, and even our own competitors. In a climate of radical transparency, instead of keeping our projects a secret from our customers, we will involve them in our decision-making. This is already being done by companies like Coca-Cola, which brings in its retail and restaurant customers to help it create more relevant products together, from the KOLab Innovation Centre at the Atlanta HQ.⁸

In future, augmented by collaboration platforms, we will be able to engage our customers to help us at every stage of a project journey to make sure they have a say in the decisions we take. Truly open innovation in the public and private sector will mean we need to balance between what the team wants to achieve, and how to qualify and improve that by consumer involvement. This is not being told what consumers want. As Henry Ford said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Consumers can’t direct what they want, but by involving people at every stage to test and learn, we can make products and services that are a perfect fit to customers’ needs.

We will evolve to thrive

As team members, we will be able to measure our own performance, from how we interact, the hours we work, and how big our network is, to the effectiveness of our personal performance on the company profit. We will be guided by self-improvement at home and at work.

Microsoft already provides users with a productivity score based on the data it collects about how you work when using its systems.⁹ There is already a trend in constant learning and self-improvement at work, with one study finding that 83% of employees see keeping their skills up-to-date as their responsibility rather than the company’s, and 51% willing to take on an internal gig to gain experience.¹⁰ This fits with a growing desire people will have to improve their health, their knowledge, and their skills away from work too.¹¹

Michael Schrage says our ‘selvesware’ (the digital tools we use to help us manage our multiple roles in life, both professional and personal) will give us advice on how we can improve our performance, collaboration, efficiency and productivity within these different roles, and he calls this ‘augmented introspection’.¹²

More and more people are being chosen for elite sports teams based not only on their existing talent but their ability to be coached, to be improved, to learn from the performance data. Choose people for your team who are open to learning, measurement, who will choose to improve and evolve. Average is over.

Michael Schrage¹³

In the Pareto principle, or the 80/20 rule, it is argued that 20% of our work results in 80% of the impact we make.¹⁴ For example, we overestimate the importance of answering all of our emails (which could take up 80% of our time), not realising that it might be the water cooler chat with our boss that had the most impact on our successful decision-making (the 20%). In future, we will be able to trace all of our impact back to the specific actions we took, and our selvesware will advise us to create more water cooler moments and spend less time answering emails.

For future teams, optimised individual and team performance will be the basic expectation of joining a team. People will be chosen for teams not only based on past evidence of performance and their ability to contribute to teamwork, but also their ability to learn and improve on the job. Their performance, and the performance of the whole team will be tracked and measured and constantly sharpened to get the best results for the business.

This means future teams will focus on nurturing agility, adaptability and re-skilling team members.

Teams and machines will be driven by a sense of purpose

We will continue to rely on human creativity, insight and collaboration to achieve the best results, even in a machine-led world. Companies will be challenged to be ethical by their customers, because it is increasingly difficult for them to hide unethical practices or how they treat their teams.

People are becoming more driven by purpose at work.¹⁵ In future our need for purpose-driven work will not only accelerate, it will also become more possible. Meaning may come from the team’s ethical objectives, the feeling of belonging to a team, the investment offered in learning and self-improvement, or the way the teamwork fits around other personal projects.

Teams will be the human experience that people seek and enjoy, because they are freed by technology to focus on the uniquely human. Because AI frees up time that would otherwise be spent on data-crunching, repetitive tasks or analysis, people will have more time to work together better.

Henry Mason, author of Trend Driven Innovation says it’s not just that AI will free us up to do better work, but that ‘beneficial intelligence’ will deliver more ethical outcomes. Walt Disney is already using AI to analyse scripts to identify gender bias, and the United Nations World Food Programme can identify real-time food needs based on public information. AI gives us a huge opportunity to make each other’s lives better too.

Organizations will become more collaborative and increasingly agile and nonhierarchical. Higher employee satisfaction, more creativity, more free time, reduced employee churn, and increased customer satisfaction will be some of the positive consequences of AI in the workplace. AI will make the workplace more human, not less. This is the gift of AI to mankind.

Pedro Uria-Reco¹⁶

Teams will need to keep supercharging

The future is already here – it’s just unevenly distributed.

William Gibson¹⁷

Today, and in the future, we cannot keep working in the same way we always have, only faster, hoping to keep up. We will no longer be able to accept inherited team cultures or team members who do not directly contribute to our impact. We need to reassess and reset how our teams work.

Supercharged teams will be an imperative rather than a choice, the only way to keep up with the evolving demands of work, data and technology. This book gives you the permission and the tools to reset your team, and create your best possible future success.

Key take outs

• • In the future our team members will include artificial intelligence . . .
• • . . . and our customers will be key members of our teams too.
• • To keep thriving teams will continually learn and develop new skills . . .
• • . . . and be driven by an ever-greater sense of purpose.
• • Crucially, teams will keep supercharging!