The future of work is distributed: leadership, space - and time

In building the modern, responsive, antifragile organisation, we have adopted models in which leadership is distributed (think agile, to lean start-up, to holocracy etc). But the accelerating impact of COVID-19 identifies two other ways in which distribution is the key to understanding the future of work.
Distributed across space, has become a given. Many of us have been asked to work from home, accelerating our understanding of the tools which allow us to work in teams operating across distributed space.
And as we consider how we may emerge from lock-down in a pre-vaccine world, we find ourselves rapidly coming to terms with work having to be distributed across time.
The time constraints of traditional working; 9-5; 5 days-a-week; 25 days holiday; bank holidays etc are likely to be a problem to be overcome as we build a new normal.
Imagine, for example, the challenge of mass transit commuting. Could we see regulations limiting our travel to specified and immutable times - eg You are issued with a start and finish time so that there are no commuting peaks. Your start time may be 6am. Mine 7am, my colleagues 8am, etc through to folk starting at 5am 23 hours later. To make that more effective we may have to break that down to 15 minute slots. All to avoid being closer than 2m from the next person on your commute.
Imagine working in manufacture; 24-hour working with reduced numbers 'on' per shift may have to replace a one or two shift models across 'daytime'.
It's a monumental task, which will accelerate distributed leadership, too. The boss can't be there 24/7. A decision maker will have to be. So the pressure to distribute decision making power to those 'on the job' will inevitably build.
It will accelerate distribution through space too - you may only be allowed to travel on certain days, so the push to get still better at working across space, usually from home, will only get harder.
Making the organisation flexible requires that people are flexible too. Cultural norms around 'time off' that everyone can share (weekends, bank holidays, evenings) will inevitably be challenged.
In the next few months all of us will be involved in rapidly innovating new models of distributed work - through leadership, space and time.
The lessons we learn from this crisis will help us create more antifragile organisations, better able to cope with the shocks that are yet to come.
How ready are you?

Photo by Heather Zabriskie on Unsplash

Welcome to the No-Time Web

Time is a construct - a way for us to make sense of a series of events. It is the way we bring clarity to what would otherwise be at risk of being a very confusing reality.
Theoretical physics tells us everything that will ever exist already exists and is at all points in space and time simultaneously.
Perhaps I'm over simplifying and or being far too generalist? What is certain is that the notions of past, present and future are cast seriously into doubt by modern physical thinking; and also that time is the fourth dimension for us three-dimensional dwellers, but that superstring theory requires TEN dimensions.

We don't need to delve much more deeply into this, you will be relieved to know, for us to have a paddle at the edges of these philosophical depths.

Loosely, there are all these additional dimensions, all things that ever happen all happen at once and at every other point in time/space... and we manage to stumble our way through this hard-to-imagine stuff by layering on the 'made in the brain' concepts of time and space. Things appear to happen in order because that's the way we make sense of 'everything'.

A small example. It's widely thought that the way we dream replicates this idea. A whole bucketful of concepts get thrown out and strewn around by our subconscious as we sleep (where time and space is not experienced and so have little value) and these concepts are hurriedly assembled into a story, complete with a linear progression and played out in spaces we can 'get our heads round' as we wake - in order for our conscious mind to make any sense/derive any value from them. The 'dream' if you like, only happens as you wake up. The raw material is generated as you sleep but the plot gets layered on as the conscious mind kicks in.

For many centuries we have supplied a linear narrative to understand the jumble of reality. This makes perfectly excellent sense to us. We plant a seed. It grows. We harvest the outcome. How could it be any other way?

But the emerging reality is a place which is a collection of events. There is no hard and fast order. No hard and fast way in which this reality must be experienced.

In the past (if you'll pardon the continued use of the term) - a mass production world required defined processes with progress contingent on the successful completion of the previous step; a mass production line.

Computers don't function like that when they are processing - Random Access Memory is very different from the indexing you'll find of books in your local library, for example.

And with the web too, we pull information we need at the point we need it. The Web is all of us using all of us as RAM.

This challenges our comfortable linear thinking. It raises doubts about the value of time and 'the right' order that things do or must happen in.

On the web being the first or being the most 'up to date' is less important than being the most relevant - being useful in a particular set of circumstances and from a particular perspective - much more than at a particular time. Hence the rise of the real time web.

In the real time web we find people, things, ideas etc which are useful to us right now. We don't need to have grown-up with the people, we don't need to understand that we must know what A and B are to know why A + B = C (we can go straight to C). We don't need to layer on time or space to make sense of this reality.

What is useful to us at 'this point' is important - not what is newest (a challenge to 'news' that media orgs must get to grips with). Relevant beats recent.

Perhaps the real-time web is in fact a misnomer. Perhaps instead we should call it the no time web. It is a place where processes of progression are less important; where we do loads of things at once - experience lots of things, all at once.

Our growing experience of this has the potential to change the way we experience every element of our reality - not just our online information gathering.

As we learn, we move from temporal order to what some would call chaos. But I wonder if this seeming chaos isn't in fact closer to the reality of our universe than we have ever allowed ourselves to experience before.

The web may be opening our eyes to a RAM reality that sits behind the time-ordered reality we have layered on until now.

Taking those blinkers off is likely to be enlightening and frightening in equal measure.