People are always trying to predict what the world is going to be like in the future. Doing so sometimes involves imagining how current trends might affect the cost of doing business a few years from now, or how new and emerging technologies will impact the way we work and interact with our colleagues and customers. And then sometimes it involves making wild predictions about how someday we’ll all fly to work on giant genetically modified pigeons and sleep standing up because that will somehow be a great way to boost our productivity.
However the conversation goes, though, discussing the future of work almost always involves trying to guess what the future will look like. Which is – what’s the right word here? – kind of dumb, because our predictions are almost always at least a little bit wrong.
In 1946, for example, a Hollywood producer named Darryl Zanuck said, and I quote, that “Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.” And to be fair, he was right about the plywood box part, which is why we invented millimeter-thin LED screens the size of a small car. But television going out of style? Then, in 1995, a computer scientist named Robert Metcalfe, in an attempt to one-up Darryl Zanuck’s famously wrong prediction about television, predicted that the Internet would “soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.” And this from a guy whose work actually helped create the Internet and who eventually founded a billion-dollar networking company.
So yeah, the odds of accurately predicting the future of work with any specificity are rather low. Instead, a better and more actionable approach is to talk about the things that will always be important in the future – tomorrow, and a year from now, and 500 years from now in case they ever figure out how to let us live that long. Because while it may be impossible to know exactly what the future will look like, it’s actually rather easy to know exactly what the future will require of us.
The future may involve cybernetic implants that let us shoot lasers out of our eyeballs, or it may involve a lot of shepherding. But either way, it will require a willingness to learn new skills, the same way that all of us have been required to learn new skills throughout our various careers. Doing so will help us to be adaptable and resilient, which will also be critical as future changes present us with new situations, technologies, and ways of working. And speaking of critical, let’s talk for a moment about the importance of refining our critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Deciding which things to adopt, maintain, improve, ignore, or discard has always been a key element of successful business – and no matter what the future brings, there will certainly be problems that need solving. And last but not least, the most successful individuals and businesses of the future will be those that appreciate and value other perspectives, cultures, and ways of thinking. That may not be quite as important if the future is some kind of post-apocalyptic nightmare where we’re all living in caves scavenging for food – but even in the smallest of circles, people have this pesky tendency to have different ideas than our own, and it’s always been true that we’re at our collective best when we invite everyone to the table.
People have worried for centuries that something would come along any minute to make us all obsolete, and then other people have continuously expected the future to usher in a utopia of luxury and leisure, without the silly hassle of having to work at all. But both of those predictions have always been wrong. The future has always brought change, and it has always required thoughtful, creative, resilient, intentional, and open-minded individuals to successfully navigate those changes. These skills are the same ones that built the businesses we work in today, and they’re the same skills that will allow us to build the successful businesses of tomorrow. So spend your time and energy practicing and perfecting those skills, and you’ll be well-positioned for whatever the future throws our way.
This article is adapted from “Preparing for the Future of Work” available at LevityUniversity.com
