We're not yet ready for a future so different

Five coupled mini essays on our future role in work

Paid to think

Many of us are, anyway. And do. Paid to think and do. But what differentiates today’s Knowledge Economy and much of today’s “white collar” work is thinking.

Problems are ambiguous. There is hardly ever perfect information. You have to gather it, refine it and go. So you can creatively do.

But how much thinking does modern work actually allow?

A recent article¹ from The Atlantic describes it as the “Meeting Industrial Complex” and that this complex has grown to the point that communications have eclipsed creativity² as the central skill of modern work.

Now there isn’t data on aggregate statistics to hone in on a trend, say “Gross Meetings Prescheduled” as The Atlantic points out. But for the average individual contributor its common to be in meetings on average at least 4 hours a day. The remaining balance consumed with Slack messages and e-mail. Oh and creative work.

But you and I know — having been there and in it — how this becomes a modern kabuki theater of stylized performance for most.

And it’s quite worse the higher up you go.

The job is a beast

As an executive, your role is ostensibly to “make decisions”. Let’s say you’re in the C-Suite. You focus more on the “why” then the “how” and “what”. Plenty good has been written about that.

But how does it feel to sit atop the pinnacle of a modern organization?

Your calendar is a horror show. Between customers, partners, external stakeholders (e.g. your board) and internal teams its not rare to have at least 10 hours of continuous meetings, often back to back, in thirty minute increments with few breaks.

Finding space to consolidate learnings, share them and ultimately make decisions has to happen within or after the never ceasing game of Tetris that becomes your calendar — and its potential rule over you. Mini “second workdays” form before or after your regularly scheduled meeting intervals.

Managing your energy is more important than managing your time. You’ll never have enough time to do or delegate all the work you potentially could. You’ll often be tired. Hungry. Between bouts of desperation and euphoria.

Your job is to figure out what requires your focused energy the most and remove other obstacles.

This is the principle of maximum leverage. Do what you’re uniquely suited to do — not necessarily what you like doing — and delegate as much of the rest as possible.

I often would schedule important stakeholder conversations that I was uniquely suited to perform (e.g. a strategic customer roadmap review) in the morning because I knew I would be the least worn down from the day’s inevitable context switching.

Your dynamic range will be tested. It’s hardly enough to cruise at 35,000 feet. You have to have enough command over the details important to your function or concern to ask the right questions at important junctures. You need to be able to uncover the sharp points so as to avoid blundering.

This requires a lot of “pre-work”. Cruising into a meeting without more than a cursory review of the relevant material can spell disaster — especially when a decision is called for and its of consequence.

Why? Because your job is to make decisions. Now it could be that more information is required but in cases where its been laid out for you — being the bottleneck because you weren’t ready creates a cascade of pungent organizational miasma.

Even if you think you do, you don’t communicate enough. You’ll have more context about the future strategy of the business, the constraints and goals than nearly anyone else. You are an important keystone in the “meeting industrial complex” after all.

There will be information asymmetry in various forms, always. You need to break this down — methodically and repeatedly. You won’t be the closest to solving a problem on most days and so you need to be “Chief Context Provider” in order to spell out the degrees of freedom by which a solution may take form.

The conclusion: this feeling is hardly sustainable.

Are we actually solving productivity?

In the world of software, we’ve spent the last twenty years attacking “productivity” to make knowledge workers more efficient.

Every use case, industry and function has software (much of it SaaS) purpose built to take the “drudgery” out of tasks and augment workflows.

And each function also now has a litany of “ops” functions that purportedly allow the main function to focus on the pure essence of what their its primary “job to be done” is: salespeople close deals, marketers market, lawyers provide advice, engineers emit code from their keyboards.

These ops examples (imho it has become quite comical) abound — SalesOps, RevOps, MarketingOps, LegalOps, ProductOps, EngineeringOps, DesignOps, etc.

But despite — or perhaps because of this — this we’re still rarely able to do deep work.

The siren song of meetings to collaborate and gather context pulls and nags at us. More functions and sub-functions increase the number of nodes needed to collaborate with.

Deep work becomes ever more elusive. Where our wellspring of creativity emerges from tackling a problem via concerted thinking.

This qualitative opinion is enhanced with quantitive evidence.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (“BLS”) on September 5th, 2024 just updated the average annual productivity percent change for this cycle (2019 Q4 - 2024 Q2).

The main takeaway? Productivity³ has gone up. But the rate of change is still only very marginal at 1.6%. It lags the early aughts and its explosive relative rate of growth.

The best/worst part is that in 2024 Q2 output increased 3.5 percent and hours worked increased 1.0 percent.

We continue working meeting even more to achieve gains.

Smaller, nimbler companies

Like the rise and fall of conglomerates⁴, we will see another cycle of nimbleness emerge.

Through upstarts democratized via even cheaper startup costs AND existing business that will continue to shed employees and functions to do things differently.

Swedish Fintech company Klarna made viral headlines recently with the following proclamation:

There are large ongoing internal initiatives that are a combination of AI, standardization, and simplification. As an example, we just shut down Salesforce. Within a few weeks, we will shut down Workday. We are shutting down a lot of our SaaS providers, as we are able to consolidate," said Siemiatkowski on a conference call

Now there is plenty of skepticism and rolling of eyes: “they have money problems” or “they said it for the press”.

But let’s say they do replace both pieces of massive horizontal SaaS with a homegrown solution that covers the necessary bases.

Its the true harbinger for change on the heels of the recent “do more with less” era.

Change and flux constantly remake the world, just as the incessant progression of time remakes eternity. — VI. 15

Conductors, not locomotive engineers

At a coffee meeting with a friend recently he stated the following:

I’m helping an e-commerce company grow their business. The best sales period we had in recent memory was a random two day period in August where the whole company was off. None of our ads being run changed, no code changed, nothing. There wasn’t a holiday or other seasonal event — we just gave everyone two days off and the business had awesome performance.

This was remarkable I thought. The point without unpacking more of the detail: the best change can be no change at all — especially if you have winners running, let em ride!

But as much as we fear change, we’re also obsessed with it.

We’re in constant motion trying to drive the train to create impact and make modifications to the future so we can nicely package the results into our performance review.

But the future is beginning to look a lot more like the role of conductor than the locomotive engineer.

Being in charge of driving the business will cede to managing the care of its cargo and on-time arrival — intervening only in the case of an emergency. Because algorithms, robots and AI⁵ will be able to drive much more effectively.

We’re on the cusp of another “productivity” S-Curve and how we adapt to it will be telling: the rupturing of the roles, jobs and norms of the past 20 years will happen sooner than we think.

1. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/07/white-collar-meetings-more-frequent/678941/

2. The Microsoft study referenced in the Atlantic article points to the fact that on average 57% of time is spent in meetings. That other 43% is spent creating documents, presentations and spreadsheets… one wonders: what percentage of that is _for_ those meetings?

3. The BLS defines productivity by comparing the number of hours worked to the output produced during that time.

4. https://www.stern.nyu.edu/experience-stern/faculty-research/rise-fall-and-rise-conglomerates

5. One of my favorite newest discoveries is https://theresanaiforthat.com/. On this site, there is a sub section that denotes and correlates tasks of job roles (https://theresanaiforthat.com/job-impact/) with the number of AI services that can already now do them. Even if they have not yet been empirically validated as valid substitutions the sheer count and growth in these services is astounding.