A future way of working in the Networked Society
One of the things I enjoy most about my work is that I have a variety of different roles. I’m constantly learning new ways of approaching and fulfilling my responsibilities. I also get to interact with a wide range of people. In this sense, I am a generalist. But in the future, this way of working is likely to change.
What we are seeing today as we move toward the Networked Society is the emergence of a hyperspecialized workforce – a workforce that’s broken down into specialists who can be sought from all over the world to work in parallel, each performing a single task.
This growing trend was explored in an article that appeared last July in the Harvard Business Review, called The Big Idea: The Age of Hyperspecialization. In the article, Thomas W. Malone, Robert J. Laubacher and Tammy Johns write that cheaper, faster, improved communication is driving hyperspecialization, and that the trend is providing greater flexibility both for the employee and the employer.
This is similar to what happened in the Industrial Revolution, when manufacturing lines separated the work done by a single person into several specialized tasks so that productivity could increase. Today, as the files and programs we used to have on our hard drives at work and at home move up to the cloud and become networked, it has once again become possible to separate different tasks. We are now working together in a new virtual way, sharing and producing our work with specialized people.
Young creatives are already working like this – utilizing specialized resources in their network, often in a barter-like way. For example, one person in the network might be very good at JavaScript programming, while another is a master of photography and his friend is a highly skilled designer – so that together they have all the skills needed to set up a site, or create an app or service. The combination of skills and people lasts as long as the project needs it, and then the people move on to other constellations.
These ways of working are going to change the way we lead, manage and work, and this evolution begs the question: what parts of your job could be broken down and completed by a specialist who could perform the task better than you can? And how would you feel about that?
Written by Mikael Eriksson Björling
Mikael is an Ericsson Networked Society Evangelist. He is also an Expert on consumer behavior at Ericsson ConsumerLab with a focus on explorative and strategic consumer research. Mikael works to translate findings into key insights by combining consumer understanding with technology and business understanding. Follow Mikael on Twitter @mikaeleb
