18 Shaping the future

In a world of scarcity, our work and organisations are focused first on surviving, and then on producing enough for a safe and comfortable life. As we are shifting to a world of abundance, doing work which is meaningful to us, and working for organisations with a purpose, becomes much more important. As we become aware of our power to shape the world, we can decide to consciously create the future we want for humanity. 

Transcript

Welcome to Cornucopia, the podcast in which we examine the shift to abundance. My name is Karim Benammar, and on today's episode, let's look at shaping the future.

Before we dive into this exploration of how we shape the future through work, and organizations, and visions, and leadership, let me just describe this glorious day on which we're doing this walk. It's a perfectly clear blue sky behind the leaves in full bloom, late spring. An absolute perfect temperature with low humidity, which makes the body and the mind dance.

I remember when I would come to visit the Netherlands while I was living abroad, and as we arrived, the plane would descend through these clouds and when I left two weeks later, we would take off and go through the clouds, and that was the first time I saw the sun again. So, things have definitely changed; these completely clear days used to be quite rare. 

Let's take this blue sky as a metaphor for a blue-sky future. How do we shape a world that's as comfortable and as invigorating as the weather is today? How can we become a thriving humanity on a thriving planet? And more specifically, what can our work, and our organizations, and our companies, and our leadership contribute to this future? How do we shape our future through work?

My point of entry, my approach is to think of work, our individual work, and our work in groups and in organizations, from the point of view of this shift to abundance. What has an abundant world changed about how we work? About the meaning of work, about the purpose of work, about the function of work, about the role of work in our lives? What does it change for us as individuals? But also, what does it change for companies, for organizations? What does it change in their role, in how they function, in their purpose, in their future? How do we contribute towards shaping a future through our work?

And so, let's start by thinking what the role of work is for an individual. Let's say you work for an organization, or for government, or for a company. And by work, I mean labour in the sense that this is paid work. I mean organized work that you do as part of an arrangement or a contract as opposed to, say, work that you do in the household, or unpaid work, volunteer work, creative work, work you do in the garden and so on.

And  I imagine that the most obvious place to start is to say that labour is done in exchange for an income. Most of us have to make a living, and the way we make a living is by work. Income is the fundamental reason why many people work. 

But apart from income, work also brings structure: work structures our life. We used to have Sundays off, at least in the West, and at some point we took Saturday off as well, and we had the weekend, and we settled into this rhythm, over the last half century, of five days of work and two days of rest. Then there are holidays or holy days, part of a religious calendar such as Christmas when you take time off. Unions in Europe successfully managed to get paid vacations, paid leisure time which might stretch to four or five weeks a year. The rhythm of our days with the famous nine to five, the rhythm of our weeks, with the weekend, the rhythm of our year, with the summer, and the winter holidays. And also, the rhythm of when we start work and when we retire from work. The rhythms of our lives are generally structured by work.

This may not be so obvious at first sight. But it has become very clear to me as I've become a freelancer, and while I can easily decide when I want to work and when I don't want to work, whether it's a Tuesday or a Saturday, I still have to adapt to how the rest of the world organizes itself around the working week.

Now, apart from income and structure, work provides us with an identity. We are what we do to a large extent, especially in countries which are very focused, or very obsessed with work, such as Northern Europe or Northern America, or the Far East. The first question people ask you upon meeting you is: what is your name? And the second question is, often: what do you do? And as the writer Allain de Botton remarked, how you answer that question about what you do determines whether people will want to continue speaking with you, or excuse themselves and go and try and find somebody else to talk to.

Some of us identify very strongly with our job, with our work. We think of ourselves as a teacher, a nurse, a politician, an accountant. We're a manager, we're a builder, we're an electrician, and so on. And we also keep that role, even when we've retired. People still think of themselves as directors, or doctors, or lawyers, even when they've stopped working. They hold onto that identity because what they did is still who they are.

Your identity in your work also gives you status. We rank different kinds of jobs. Being a doctor or lawyer or a CEO is seen in most societies as being higher than being a manual worker or an assistant of some sort. While this traditional ranking gets disrupted by financiers, or programmers, or tech nerds who start companies and become billionaires, there is still a sense that your status in life, in society, comes from what you do. Sometimes it's the status of the company that you work for: the company itself is a brand. Part of the status of the company is also your status.

So: income, structure, identity. Then there's the people that you work with, your colleagues, your bosses, the people who work with you or for you. You spend most of your waking hours at work, more time than you spend with your family, and so work is also a space where you engage in a community, where you work with other people to achieve a certain goal, whether it's your team, or your division, or the whole organization. 

The interpersonal relationships you have with your colleagues are also ways of learning to deal with people that you might not agree with, people that you might dislike. Offices are wonderful settings for comic TV series because of all the intrigue and shenanigans that you can imagine happening there.

So, I would say that these four: income, structure, identity, and colleagues are what work used to be traditionally. Whether you work in an office, or in a factory, or for a government, or in a hospital, or in a school, this was what your work was about. But with the shift to abundance in the last decades, especially in well-off countries, we've seen the emergence of two more aspects of work: work is also about talents and about meaning. 

Talent is about how you engage with your work, how you can use the things that you're good at in your work, how you work with joy and application. You get a sense of pleasure because you can use your talents in what you do. And when there is an alignment between what you love doing and what you're good at, and what you do for money and infrastructure, et cetera, then you probably enjoy your work. 

This idea that work is also enjoyable, that work is not just a question of making a living, but it's also a path to a form of self-fulfilment. When people are higher these days and they say: I want a job that challenges me, I want a job that involves my talents, I want a job where I can learn and develop myself, they are referring to this aspect. And I'm not saying people didn't enjoy their work in the past and that it didn't involve talented people. But if you are struggling to survive, if your job is mainly about making a living, then that is much less important.

And the sixth and final element of work, I think, is meaning. How does our work give meaning to our lives? And how do we give meaning to the world through our work? There's two aspects to this. How does doing our job give meaning to our own lives? And how is our work meaningful for others, for the rest of society. Many of us today want to do work that matters. We want to contribute in some way to society, to the future. We want to make people's lives better. 

In a world of abundance with high levels of automation, where at least some of the drudgery and some of that work can be done by machines, then there's the interesting work that is left, the work that engages you, that challenges you and the work that is meaningful. With a shift to a surplus and luxury, work becomes very much about creating. We create new products, we create new experiences, we create new worlds. We are really shaping the world through what we do. We are really shaping our future.

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This was about individual work and how it's changed from the four elements of income and structure and identity and colleagues to also include using our talents and doing meaningful work. How has it changed then, for organizations? What kind of shift have they made? 

Now, of course there is a wide variety of organizations. There is a difference between government work on all levels and the private sector. In some countries, half the people work for a form of government. Within the private sector, there's a difference between small start-ups, or small and medium enterprises, and larger organizations, and very large multinationals, which may employ hundreds of thousands of people all over the world.

Most companies and organizations, of course, have a reason for existence. They were founded in order to fulfil a need, to feed us or to train us, or to make objects or to take care of us. And so just as income is the fundamental element of labour, the product or the service could be the fundamental element of an organization.

Now, the second element would be workers, employees. A company often is synonymous with the people who work there. It's an organized way of producing things. It's a community of people engaged in labour, and that could be at the level of half a dozen or a hundred thousand people.

Now the third element would be the owners of the company. And this may be a family business, owned by a few individuals. It may be a large company with shareholders, or a foundation of some sort. It could be a government organization, where at a stretch we may say that it's owned by the citizens of a country. And so there is a very wide variety of forms of ownership, which determine the type of identity of the organization, the kind of brand name that it represents, the kind of institution that it is.

And so, at this point, we have a product or a service; we have employees; we have an ownership structure. Then we can think of stakeholders. Stakeholders are people in the vicinity of the organization or the company, who are somehow involved with it. These may be other companies such as suppliers who are part of an ecosystem. The public may be a stakeholder. If these are private companies that provide a fundamental service or a fundamental product such as transport or education or clean water. The idea of stakeholders, then, means that the company, the organization doesn't function in a vacuum. Apart from its customers and clients, it is also related to the group of people around it.

If you want, you can think of customers, or clients, or users as a separate category, as a separate element. But I think you could also include them in the product or service itself: it is a product or service with customers, with users. Or if you want, you could say the customers, the users of this service, of this product are also, in a way, the stakeholders of this organization.

Now, I think in a world of scarcity or in a world of survival, or even the next level, when you're just aiming to produce as much as possible or to perfect the service, when you are directly replying to a need, those four elements may be enough. You have a product/service. You employ people. You have an organizational structure and a structure of ownership. You have a group of stakeholders, including customers, users. And that in itself is enough to be a company or a government organization.

When you reach the next stage of industrialization, where you get a form of saturation - there are enough products, there are enough services, you found the cheapest or the most efficient way to make things at scale, you have mature companies - then other considerations come into play.

And I think the first one is purpose. Just as individual workers, once they have managed survival and they manage to make a living, start thinking about how they can meaningfully contribute to the world, I think a company or an organization can ask itself the same question. In management, there's been a lot of talk about purpose-driven organizations. Organizations whose existence, whose very being, is predicated not just on fulfilling a simple need, but on fulfilling an ambition: an act of creation, trying to contribute. 

This is a form of luxury, a form of higher order. Once you can provide the product or the service at a good price, safely at scale, to everybody who needs it, then you might need something else to motivate you. Your purpose might be that you want to do it in a healthier way, or a more ecologically aware way, or that you want to treat your employees better. Now, often, this sense of purpose is captured in an inspiring slogan about changing the world, or making the world a better place, or powering the planet, or contributing to health, or striving for excellence.

But I do think, and this is the central point, that this is a sign of the times. Our work is changing in a society of abundance, where most of the practical needs have been met, where a lot of our consumption is symbolic, where a lot of our consumption has to do with status games. In that world, the purpose of the organization, the higher purpose, the story it tells itself, the narrative that it has about its activities, and its reason for being, is becoming more and more important. At some point, it's even replacing the reason for starting in the first place. It's not enough to be an energy company; we want to be an energy company that powers the world in a clean way. It's not enough to provide food; we want to provide healthy food while we have healthy employees and healthy stakeholders.

And that brings us to the sixth element, the ecosystem, the place in the world in which the company operates, its environment. Its product may be energy, its purpose may be to provide clean energy for a sustainable future, or preferably a thriving future. The ecosystem would be the way that it goes about it, the way it deals with its stakeholders, the way it deals with its own carbon footprint, the contribution it makes to the global picture.

This relation with the ecosystem is captured in corporate social responsibility - CSR - or being a good corporate citizen. The idea that the organization, the company, even the governmental organization, is part of an ecosystem. And that ecosystem involves taking care, taking care of the environment, taking care of financial responsibilities - such as paying one's taxes -, taking care of one's employees, taking care of the future, representing a diverse society, and so on.

And so for organizations, we also have six elements: product/service, the community of people who work there, the ownership structure, the stakeholders, the sense of purpose, and the ecosystem.

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Up until now, there has been a lot of explanation. It has been very expository: I have told you what I think work individually and in organizations is all about - but I'm really fascinated by this shift. Once we make a shift to abundance, once we live in a world of wealth and wellbeing - and we have managed to create that - how does that change, not just the nature of our individual work, but how does it change the way companies look at themselves, how they understand their function, and how they operate?

And the first point of course, is that both for individuals and for organizations, you have the four basic elements, which are the core components of an organization, or of what we call labour. But the other two: the fact that we work to develop ourselves, to be challenged, to engage with the world. The fact that we want our work to be meaningful, meaningful for ourselves, we want to contribute to something. 

The fact that organizations don't just want to provide a product that people can use, but they want to have a purpose, a higher purpose. They also want to have an ambition and to strive for something. And companies and organizations don't see themselves as separate from the ecosystem, or somehow exempt from it. They increasingly see themselves as part of this community, as good corporate citizens, as a partner with their customers, with the public, with governments.

It's so exciting because the possibility that it opens up is a creative possibility. We shape the world through what we do. We shape the world through our labour, through our work. Our work transforms the world, through agriculture and production and services, and whatever else you can imagine. That, of course, is one of the most obvious things we can ever say: our organizations and companies transform the world. They shape the world. They shape our social communities. They shape civilization. They shape our global economy, which in turn shapes our wellbeing.

When we're involved in this shift, as we have been over the last century, from surviving to most people, having the necessities, and slowly start to build a middle class, to further industrialization, which gives us the consumption society, the production-consumption tandem, which is creating evermore products and services - then we are ready for the next stage, which is a much more creative stage, which is a much more conscious stage. A stage of consciously shaping the future, shaping the world that we want to live in.

Now you might argue that we're not that great at making a global economy, that within countries we have vast differences between rich people and poor people, between people who are juggling jobs in order to survive, basically, and people who do quite well out of the system. When there is a shift from the role of labour to the role of investments, when you can make more money with money and property that you already own than by work, then the people who own stuff are going to do increasingly well while the rest stagnates. 

But if you take a more charitable or more compassionate, or perhaps even a more idealistic view, we could even argue that the economic disparities are created because we have done business as usual too much, because we're still trying to produce for the consumption society, because all this surplus has been pushed into luxuries, into exclusivity, because we make more expensive stuff in a world where we can make fantastic stuff very cheaply,  because we're addicted to an economics of scarcity. In the sense that the products and services we make are low quality for the planet, we are actually destroying the ecological health of the planet. 

This shift to the next stage, I believe, is overdue. Once we've sorted survival and having plenty of stuff, our next challenge and ambition should be a thriving humanity on a thriving planet. We can focus on these higher-level goals, because we've achieved a certain sense of wealth.

And, as we saw on the walk in which we explored this tsunami of content, when we can make plenty of stuff, it's no longer about the quantity, but about the quality. It becomes not just about making stuff, but about making good stuff, making great stuff, making transformative stuff.

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It's also a shift from a reactive position to a proactive position. You're no longer just trying to satisfy a need: there is a need for a product or a service, and you are fulfilling that need as best you can. Now, there is a question of asking: what does the world need? What does the future need? How do we make the society and the world that we want to live in? How do we shape that? And what is my contribution? My contribution as an individual, engaged in labour, working to transform the world - and what is my contribution as an organization, as a company, in making that world possible?

There is a sense of purpose, there is a sense of ambition, there is a sense of vision at stake here. And this vision is more proactive. It's more creative. That future doesn't yet exist, and we're not sure it's going to come into being. We bring it into being, as a creative act, as an individual engaged in labour, as an organization, changing the world at scale, shaping the future at scale.

It's a much more conscious involvement in the future. From unconsciously changing the world by the activities of a large organization, to consciously deciding what your footprint is going to be, what your effect on the world is going to be, what your role and behaviour as a corporate citizen is going to be, what your stake in the future of humanity is going to be. How your vision about the future that you are helping to shape is contributing to the next chapter of humanity's story, humanity's progress, humanity's future.

And I would think: “that is pretty cool”. I think that it's wonderful to be engaged in shaping the future. It's wonderful to think of ourselves as having a stake in it, having a role in it, but also having a say in it, being shapers and creators and builders of that future. Not just as individuals, because what we can do as individuals amongst 8 billion people, is still fairly limited. But in the communities of labour that we've created in these organization - small organizations, larger organizations, very large organizations - as part of government, as part of institutions.

And this brings us to a final note: a note about leadership. There's a lot of talk in management about the role of leadership. What is a good leader? What is a servant leader? What is a visionary leader? To me, the idea of leadership is having this vision, being able to articulate this vision, it is being able to contribute to that story, to that narrative. It's making people aware that they shaped the future, that the organization is shaping the future, that the community of people working for that organization is shaping the future. 

To be a leader, you don't need to be the CEO of the company. You can have leadership at different levels. It could be leadership of your team, it could be leadership of your group, it could be leadership of your division. You can have leadership teams that articulate the vision, and that embody that vision through their action, through their ambition, through their own work, through their own labour.

As we've said, there's nothing strange about claiming that we shape the world, and that we shape the future through labour and companies. But the shift to abundance has radically changed the way we do this. 

Wishing you all the best in your labour, in your team, in your organization, in your company, wishing you all the best in the way in which you are going to shape our future, and I'll see you on the next episode of Cornucopia.