Tomorrow's world - but where is it?

Predicting the future is tough. This short 1958 film, Magic Highway, shows how the Disney studios imagined transport would develop in future. More than fifty years on we can see how short of the mark they were. A few predictions had it right. Modern cars do have more electronic safety devices on their dashboards and some use TV cameras for reversing.

But it was the bigger picture that the Disney people failed to understand. Some of this could have been predicted. Had they worked out that greater wealth would have meant more cars, they might have suggested that motorway speeds would have been unable to increase because of congestion. Neither did they factor in safety considerations and energy-saving needs that would influence traffic legislation and traffic speeds.

Some predictions, that cars would run automatically with people doing other things as they motored, may yet happen. But where the forecasters really let themselves down was in understanding social trends. In the film when the car gets to the city, father heads off to his office and mother goes shopping with their son. This was still a time when households had one breadwinner, usually the man. It was a time of married couples and nuclear families, not the diverse relationships we have today.

The most mistaken assumption of all, however, was that technology would give people more leisure time. The futurists did not factor in the need for ever greater productivity in capitalism's duty to compete.

It's clear also that environmental factors do not figure much either. The animators did not envisage that environmental concerns would inhibit road building. Indeed they saw the highway as a beautiful construction in its own right, enhancing, rather than despoiling the countryside.

More than anything, however, the film shows the extent to which Americans had fallen in love with the car. In some respects that has not changed. The love affair continues. But the obsession with speed has been contained. Apparently it did not occur to anyone that people might not need to go to the office or the shops.

Own your own space station

I wonder if there will come a time when some people engage very little with each other outside their family homes and local communities. Some, it seems, already value their virtual worlds as much as the world outside their homes.

Erik Novak, who plays a MMORPG (Massively multiplayer online role-playing game) called Planet Calypso, recently spent $330,000 on a virtual space station called Crystal Palace at an online auction. Not, only that, he regards it as a good deal and who is to say that he's mistaken? Virtual worlds attracted $1bn of investment in thew 12 months to October 2007 although most of this was business purchases.

"This is a stunning investment opportunity and I have complete faith I will recover what I spent relatively quickly," said Novak, whose avatar uses the name of Buzz Erik Lightyear. It's good to see that Disney still has some influence on tomorrow's
world.

Elephant in the room

But elsewhere Disney has a patchy record. In this clip outlining the progress, or lack of it, to Disney's House of Tomorrow, the most worrying trend on display is the obesity of the people looking around. Talk about the elephant in the room!

Networks and workplace freedom

I have just renamed this blog to reflect the issues I've covered in my new book, The Future of Work. Collecting material ahead of two speaking engagements last week it was clear that events with an impact on our working futures are happening constantly so I want this to be a living document featuring developments that I think are relevant to the changing workplace.

Some of these may seem surprising. What, for example, does the news that a former Guantanamo Bay inmate now includes his former jailer as a Facebook Friend have to do with work? I think this shows how people are connecting with each other today at levels that are challenging the controls and expectations placed on populations in the past.

Imagine back in December 1914 if British and German soldiers fraternising in no-man's land been able to exchange their Facebook and email details, organising a "let's go home" group on Facebook, for example.

You think it couldn't happen? I'm sure some EMI marketing executives had similar thoughts when Jon and Tracy Morter, a couple living in Essex, decided they would orchestrate a Facebook campaign to ensure that their favourite song by Rage Against the Machine, became the Christmas number one single (see augmented reality blog below).

People didn't just vote for the song, they dug in their pockets and bought it, such was the bloodymindedness of a section of the British public.

Much of the corporate sector has become increasingly controlling in the way it runs business. Employees are often forbidden to talk to journalists about their work without referring queries to press offices. But attempts to create workplace firewalls simply will not work in a world of Twitter and Facebook.

How will China's standoff with Google pan out? It's too early to say but the struggle for communications democracy is important not just for our personal freedoms but also for our freedoms in work.

The disposable worker

Is this the future of work? I sincerely hope not. This BusinessWeek article examines the growth of what it calls "the disposable worker".

If companies choose to concentrate on elites, as they do in some talent management systems, while treating the mass of employees as commodities that can be exchanged at will, they are contributing to an ugly future even for those who have profited at the expense of the less well regarded.

Sense and nonsense

My Uncommon Sense column in Human Resources Magazine is to become highly uncommon after next month as it's had the chop. This is one very good reason why I would never advise anyone to give up their day job without some deep thinking.

Charles Handy's freelance portfolio lifestyle can be an excellent way of making a living when times are good. But when budgets get squeezed as they are just now it is the outsiders whose bum cheeks are closest to those who wield the boot.

My own bum cheeks haven't stopped smarting for more than a year as a once healthy portfolio has been whittled away to a single monthly column in the FT, and who knows how long that might last? The wolf is not at the door anymore, he's making himself comfortable in my favourite armchair, pouring himself a gin and tonic and watching repeats of three little piggies - apart from the ending; he doesn't watch the last bit.

Meanwhile I have started a new book, not about work this time, but about the shape of things to come, although it will not be forecasting the end of the job, a theme I once explored in this old column. Funnily enough one of my sons is inventing computer games these days. Yes, times are hard in the Donkin household. I hope I'll be able to write a happy ending.

Prisoners of the market

All those hard pressed chief executives and bankers worried about the flack they have been receiving on pay and bonuses can sleep more easily in their beds this week after Stephen Hester, chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland gave them what must be the ultimate in justifications. There was nothing highly paid bankers could do about their pay levels, he told an House of Commons select committee, since their employers are "prisoners of the market".

Never again do wealthy executives have to feel cornered at dinner parties. All they need do from now on is throw up their hands and declare: "I'm a prisoner of the market." Case closed, move on.

Augmented reality and the future of work

In my new book The Future of Work I included one chapter of out-and-out futurism. The book concentrates on themes that are influencing workplace change today and which I believe will strengthen in the future.

I thought it would be dishonest to suggest that I had some kind of crystal ball capable of predicting future events. Nonetheless I thought it might be interesting to indulge myself in a description of what life might be like 50 years in to the future.

This presented immediate difficulties. How can we know the rate of resource depletion when we have no idea of the breakthroughs that might, for example, make fossil fuels an unnecessary resource?

Two strands of thinking dominated the projections. The first concentrated on communications technology and the second explored the idea of extending democracy in government to the kind of decision-making we already experience in "vote-off" shows such as the X-Factor and Strictly Come Dancing.

These shows already have a kind of government - an appointed panel to help us with our decisions, aided by a supporting administration of experts who help to find and groom the talent. But the decision about who wins and who loses is taken by the TV-viewing population. Why couldn't this approach be adapted for the process of legislation?

Politicians might point to the dangers of disruptive voting organised by so-called "mavens", under-the-radar influencers who can use modern communications channels to work beyond established norms of market behaviour and control.

A good example of this is the way that husband and wife a Jon and Tracy Morter, unhappy at the way that the Christmas number one music singles were being monopolised by X-factor winners decided to orchestrate a campaign on Facebook to promote the rock group, Rage Against The Machine, as an alternative. Enough people bought downloads of the track, Killing in The Name, to ensure it occupied the number one spot at Christmas 2009.

What started, said Tracy Morter, as a "silly idea to spice up the charts" developed a bandwagon effect, initially through social networking media and latterly through mainstream media as the campaign became a news story.


The old market-dominated rules of transactional behaviour have changed. Yes, the market is cleverly exploiting the new forms of communications, in viral marketing on YouTube, for example. But it no longer controls the winning idea. Winning ideas, such as that of the Morters can and will emerge anywhere. The Morters' success also makes a mockery of so-called talent management. The couple have proved themselves masters at social-network-based manipulation without an ounce of formal expertise.

I believe that it is inevitable that advances in electronic communications will transform democracy. The only question is how long it will take Governments to respond. The age of the metal ballot box where people enter voting booths is coming to an end. In future we shall all vote from our living rooms.

The chapter also looked at screen-based technology. This feature on Augmented Reality - a system for integrating the use of screens with all kinds of decisions we make in everyday life - fits with the scenario I outlined of wall-sized screens in domestic homes. In future I believe that miniaturisation of screens will develop side-by-side with super-sizing. Small size will equate with convenience whereas bigger screens will allow a variety of uses similar to those discussed in the article. The cost and availability of power, however, may be a limiting factor. But in 50 years time I'm sure that other power sources, including human-powered machinery, will have become far more efficient.

Free online personality tests

In a move that could shake up the psychometric testing industry, a team of former-SHL test developers is releasing a series of industry-standard assessments online free of charge.

A new website FindingPotential has been established to access the tests. The first in the series is a personality test and more tests are to be rolled out shortly.

The website explains all you need to know about the so-called big five personality traits. If this testing resource really is as good as the providers says it is it could have a profound impact on the test publishing and assessment industry.

I have just tried the individual personality test. . It looks very like others I have taken and the results correspond with those I have encountered before. The analysis is good too. Why pay when you can have this?