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Office Shock with Bob Johansen · Humanity Working

• 0:19
  SPEAKER_02: Hi everyone, I'm delighted to be joined today by Bob Johansson.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_02: Now, Bob is a distinguished fellow at the Institute for the Future in Silicon Valley.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_02: He is the co-author of an amazing new book that we're gonna get into today.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_02: It's called Office Shock Creating Better Futures for Working and Living.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_02: And we're gonna go into a lot of the themes explored in the book today.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to the pod, Bob.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: That's great, Paul.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: And the book just came out.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's great to be able to talk to you about it just as it gets gets out there and gets around.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I was really, really, really happy to get an early copy of it.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_02: And uh and I will say we'll get into some more of the detail, but this is a this is an absolutely fascinating read.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_02: But before we get into that, um let why don't you tell me just a little bit around or about the Institute for the Future um or IFTF.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um tell me tell me a little bit about what the origins of it were and what the role of the organization is.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: So we're the longest running futures think tank in the world now.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: We started in 1968 as a spinoff of Rand Corporation.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: So it really grew out of the kind of military NASA world of the 60s.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: And it's focused uh on thinking 10 or more years ahead and thinking future back.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: So where most people are kind of immersed in the noisy now and kind of thinking forward to the future, we're actually 10 years out thinking back most of the time.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: So in the book Office Shock, we look 10 years out and work backwards.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: And we're dedicated, we're an independent nonprofit, so we're dedicated to that idea of thinking long and looking back, um, seeing the advantage of looking long in the sense of trying to find your clarity, find your direction, uh, even in a face of very complex futures that we're we're confronting.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you get into a lot of that um in the book as well.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_02: And actually, you know, when I was reading, uh when I was reading through it, the the sort of techniques that you use, one of the things that struck me about it is just how useful um this style of thinking can be for any type of change that organizations are going through, or individuals for that matter.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, or individuals.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: And actually the book kind of slices it for individuals as they think about the future of work and organizations and then policymakers and communities.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um of the neat things about being an independent nonprofit is we're not we're not uh biased toward any particular methodology for studying the future.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: We're methodologically agnostic.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: So we'll we'll take any serious method of exploring the future and we'll bring in people who understand it and we'll learn from it.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: So we're using expert opinion aggregation, we're really good at that.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: And our founders developed the Delphi technique and cross-impact matrix analysis.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, all of us are trained in quantitative methods, but looking 10 years ahead, there aren't any facts.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: There's only beliefs or opinions or kind of directions of change to follow.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: And we distinguish between trends, which are patterns of change you can extrapolate from with confidence, and disruptions, which are breaks in the pattern of change.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: So, for example, demography is a trend.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the digital natives are what we call the cross-reality natives, those 16 or less in 2023, those young people are disruptions.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, so you can't just extrapolate from the past.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: We're actually focused on disruptions, and office shock is a major disruption that we think is going to take about a decade to play out.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, trends are for us the easy part.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: So we we look at trends, but but that's the easy part.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: The hard part is when you see these more fundamental disruptions.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_02: Now, Bob, I know that one of the techniques you're using as futurists is that you're effectively dealing in in 60-year time horizons.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_02: You mentioned the 10 years forward, but you're also looking back quite a bit as well, looking back, say 50 years.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um, to me, that's that's hugely interesting.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it might be quite surprising for some people who just think that futurists live solely in the future.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so can you explain why that is?
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so one of the big surprises, I I've been doing this a long time.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: One of my big surprises is that almost nothing happens that's truly new.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: Almost everything that happens was tried and failed years before.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so we're video conferencing is something that's happened a lot in COVID.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: People think that it all started with Zoom or Teams or WebEx or something, uh Google Meet.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: But in fact, it started in the late 70s, early 80s, um, and many companies failed trying to do it.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, video conferencing took uh 60, 50 years to be an overnight success.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: So uh the real question as futurists, the real question isn't what's new, because if it's truly new, it's almost certainly not going to happen anytime soon.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: What we're really asking is what's ready to take off.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: And if you look 50 years back, as we do in Office Shock to look back at the history of offices, you see a number of things that's that have failed, but they tended to fail in interesting ways.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so we're always looking at least 50 years back and at least 10 years ahead.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: So we think in 60 year, 60 year swaths of time.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_02: Well, talking off that, let's get into some of the specifics of the book.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: Again, uh Office Shock, Creating Better Futures for Working and Living.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I should have mentioned, by the way, that you have co-authors as well.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_02: So uh Bob is one of the authors.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_02: There's Joseph Press and Christine Bullen as well, are the two other authors.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um and um first off, I just want to say that like this has been a really, really interesting read for me.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_02: Great.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I would really recommend it to anybody who is interested in how and if you like the how of work and how that's gonna change.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I think it's probably a particular use to anybody who has a significant role to play in defining the future of their organization or if they're involved in policymaking, as you mentioned as well.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_02: So definitely.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but particularly CEOs, CIOs, even because there's quite a lot of um of technical considerations that you talk about, um CFOs, chief people officers.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um, let's let's start with the overall premise.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_02: So, what do you mean by the term office shock and what's the derivation of that term, if you like?
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so we're we're again looking back, uh the term office shock kind of links back um more than 50 years to the book called Future Shock that was written by Alvin Toffler, who was actually on the planning committee for Institute for the Future.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: And Toffler defined future shock as the kind of disruption that happens when too many big changes happen in too short of a time.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and what he said was, is you need to kind of space your changes.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: And he was particularly overwhelmed by tech changes.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: And this was 1970.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: So the tech changes we're having now are just far beyond what he was talking about.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: So we were inspired by that title, and we were looking at the shifts that were happening during COVID, and we define office shock as abrupt, unsettling change in how, where, when, or even why, even why we work.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I decided to write this book with uh two other co-authors.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: This is my 13th book, and I've always focused on the future.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: And in my last few books, um, I've been focusing on leadership in the future.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: But in this case, I brought in Joseph Press, who's an architect by training, and now a digital transformation expert, and Christine Bullen, who's an information systems professional.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: So architecture is so important, digital media are so important.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a sociology PhD by training, but when I did my doctorate, I was just very lucky at Northwestern.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: The ARPANET was just getting going.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I was one of the first social scientists to get on board and kind of study the social impacts and the social effects, the organizational effects.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: So the idea of the book is to look future back at this abrupt, unsettling change that's underway.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: And as we were framing the book, the common language of the time was people were calling it the great resignation.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: And then it was called the great reset.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: And then it was called quiet quitting.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: We call it, we call it, Paul, the great opportunity.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's the opportunity to take a pause.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: And indeed it's a threatening pause, and it wasn't a good thing for many people, but it's a pause that allow us to think thoughts that have never been thought before about how, when, where, and why we work, to reimagine how we work and indeed reimagine how we live.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I love that, Bob.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's interesting how our paths kind of intersect.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we were we've been referring to it as the great reevaluation, which is a very similar kind of thing, but with a with a human dimension.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_02: There was so much that was going on in that in that period of time that all happened at once.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it was a grand social experiment that nobody really uh, or very few people expected.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um and for individuals, it gave, in many cases space and time for people to re-evaluate and an abrupt, unexpected change that was uh that was happening uh all amongst that.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_02: And so we interviewed thousands of people over that period of time, and and I will say the vast majority of people went through some period of reflection or re-evaluation.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_02: Heck, we formed our company as a result of doing it ourselves.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_02: So I I I totally um I totally resonate uh with that.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_02: It was way more than just the idea of a bunch of people going, oh, I guess I'll quit today.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it's that's that's underselling it an enormous amount.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, you're where you live in Tulsa, you did a very creative program there, Tulsa Remote.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: There's a number of programs around the world now to attract digital nomads or digital workers and people who want to rethink the issue around office shock, and the reason we kind of use the shock metaphor and the earthquake metaphor is it is kind of a quake in how we think about work, how we think about living.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: And it wasn't fair.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, the way it played out, it was surprisingly productive and surprisingly freeing for many people.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: It was also awful for other people who had uh no didn't have a quiet place to work at home, uh, had child care or senior care to take care of.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: So they they couldn't really work remotely.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_01: So it was it wasn't fair.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: But if you think future back, we've got a chance to reimagine how we work in ways that are much more equitable and much more flexible, and indeed much more productive.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: So we've got a chance to both do it better and do it in more humane ways.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, completely agree.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_02: Now, you make a really interesting put uh uh point fairly early on in the book about how um the office has already changed dramatically over previous decades.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_02: And so when you start to think that through, it would be kind of irrational not to expect it to change dramatically further.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_02: So, can you give me some examples of significant changes that have happened, let's say, over the past 50 years in order to create some context for people?
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so my colleague Joseph, the architect, his PhDs from MIT in architecture and design, he did a more historical look um in one of the opening chapters, and we include photographs of the kind of early sort of 50s style offices.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_01: And um, you know, the movie Nine to Five kind of made a spoof out of out of that.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and you see the early architecture, which is actually designed for efficiency, you know, as if the as if the office were a factory.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: And indeed, uh, and as digital media moved in, uh, my colleague co-author Christine Bullen, she was involved in the first efforts at MIT and the Center for Information Systems Research to study the strategic impact of computers.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: Because early on, they weren't used strategically.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: They were used for what was then called office automation.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: Office automation.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: And indeed, the physical offices were kind of like automation, where you're treating people like machines and office work like it was factory work.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that was in retrospect, maybe understandable, but very unfortunate and often inhumane in terms of how it played out.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: So you saw gradually over that 50-year swath of time before COVID, um, gradually offices did get more attractive, you know, more natural light, um, more flexibility in how you structured them.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_01: But still, when the first open offices came in, Hewlett-Packard was one of the early ones.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: And the model at Hewlett-Packard Open Offices was the manager should be able to stand up and see everybody that reports to him or her.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: A really backward, control-oriented, engineering mindset way of viewing um management.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so there were efforts.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, gradually, offices, particularly in Silicon Valley and more creative spaces, there were gradual efforts to make the office more attractive and more humane.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: All along, it tended to be very negative from a climate point of view.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: You know, offices were never very energy efficient.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um gradually, again, they started to become better.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but in our book, we suggest they've still got a long way to go.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_01: In this next decade, there's a great opportunity to make them much more to make work uh what we call offices, the places, and officing the processes, to make that much more environmentally positive than it was.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: So you saw gradual changes that we document in the book uh from the office's factory to the office as a mildly pleasant place to work, but hardly inspiring.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: So and then we hit office shock, which is a chance to say, well, what do you really want to do?
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_02: And then of course, um, as you say, we hit office shock, and a huge factor in that is COVID.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so, but I I'm really interested because when you talk about COVID, you you must describe it as like the first wave of us of a set of shocks that um is uh can and will fundamentally change what the Office of the Future is like Yeah, very definitely.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we we've been talking about COVID-like pandemics since 2009.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, we're we're tenure forecasters, as I said.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: We don't predict the future, nobody can do that.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: But we do baseline forecasts and then we do scenarios off the baseline forecasts.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um and we're usually right.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: We've been doing this more than 50 years.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_01: And um, the first question you should always ask a futurist is have you outlived your forecast?
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: And and uh and the second question is if you have, do you keep track?
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: And and we do.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: Uh 60 to 80 percent of our forecasted futures have actually happened.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: So we're usually right.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: But it turns out that's not how you evaluate a futurist.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_01: That's how you evaluate a fortune teller.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, how you evaluate a futurist is does our foresight provoke your insight that leads to better decisions in the present?
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: And those big waves of change that you're talking about, the shocks, pandemics, and the COVID experience, that's just the beginning.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: We were doing a forecast on the future of public health before COVID broke.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: And we're expecting the rolling risk of other pandemics.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: So the phrase I actually use now is we're in an inter-pandemic period.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: The pandemic is not over.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and we're probably gonna be wearing masks periodically for the rest of our lives if you're smart, uh, in terms of your cautious living strategy.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: So we're gonna be living with interpandemic realities.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: And pandemics are only a part of it.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um chronic climate emergencies are a second big kind of risk factor that's quite obvious now, especially for the next decade.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I teach at the Army War College, I teach the new generals their first week in Washington, and they read my books, including this new book.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and we're focused now there on the future of warfare in 2040.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and it's going to be increasingly cyber warfare, but there's going to be links back to physical warfare.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_01: And there's going to be, unfortunately, these bizarre examples of old-fashioned war like we're seeing in Ukraine now, um, that was quite a wild card.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, nobody expected that, or at least very few people expected, that something that crazy would actually happen.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: But it did.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: It did.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: So we're going to see that rolling risk of big waves of change that are larger than any of us.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, some of those waves we'll be able to ride, but others we're gonna just have to avoid being hit by, or we're gonna have to try to steer the wave in a different direction, say in the case of climate.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think I really think that's really fascinating, Bob, and for a couple of reasons.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_02: One of the one of the thoughts that it provoked to me as I was reading the book is sort of the relationship between these uh issues like uh like obviously COVID itself, and then the follow-on, the the follow-on effects of those.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_02: So in the in this case, we've already talked about how COVID ostensibly coincided with a great re-evaluation.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I mean, the great reevaluation was really caused um by the fact that people had that opportunity because they were sitting home.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_02: So, in other words, there was there was there's causality there that's pretty obvious to be able to see.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_02: And then, of course, when you do re-evaluate as a species, what do you actually do as a result of that re-evaluation?
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_02: Well, part of it was was resigning, but a lot of it was migrating too.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_02: So you see a lot of like many of us at this point are living in a different place than we were before the pandemic.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_02: And the this re-evaluation caused us to make that change.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, both you and I are living in a different spot at this uh at this very point.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_02: And what's really intriguing about that from a work perspective, and something that we've looked at quite a bit at Billy Mines, is that what that ostensibly means is that you now have a bunch of people who work hundreds or thousands of miles away from what ostensibly was their home office.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_02: And so even in situations where you are yanking people back into the office, we'll get into that and and uh the wisdom or otherwise of that later.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_02: But even in a situation where you are doing that and you're consciously looking back and trying to pull back in, something's gonna give, right?
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_02: You're either not gonna, you're either gonna lose those people because they've gone elsewhere, or you're gonna cause those people to uh to come back.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_02: Something dramatic will change by virtue of that sort of clash, if you like, between um the policies that organizations might have and the lifestyles that individuals have chosen.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_02: And we are now in a situation where there's been this sort of resorting of where people live relative to where they work, all of it caused by COVID, but you wouldn't, most people, if they were just going, oh, you know, a pandemic equals go home and wear masks, aren't really capturing the whole big picture of this.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's a very complicated dynamic, but I I think you're right.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_01: COVID did cause the pause that allowed us to think about alternatives.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: And not only did it cause the pause, it opened our aperture about possibilities.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_01: So in the book, we talk a lot about how futures that used to seem impossible now seem possible.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and then it becomes a choice factor.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I was I was um on the road um most of the time before COVID.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: I'm, you know, I'm a public speaker, I write books, I'm uh on stage a lot of the time.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: Now I'm mostly virtual.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_01: I've got VR goggles hanging on my wall behind me, and I'm willing to go there when people want to go there.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: Not many takers yet, but there will be.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I've got cameras all around me, I've got lighting all around me, I've got sound absorbancy all around me, and I'm inviting people into my study, and my goal is better than being there.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and how can I be better as a futurist working with my clients uh than if I were on stage?
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_01: And there are ways.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: There are ways to do that.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: I do think face-to-face is still going to be important for certain things.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: And we're, in a certain sense, the more digital we become, the more we value in person.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_01: But we're going to be much smarter about that in-person, in-person experience, and much smarter about how we design the office space that we still choose to have.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: Making remote work is brought to you by Billion Minds.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: Remote and hybrid is a new reality for organizations all over the world.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's one thing to support remote work, but entirely another to get strategic advantage from it.
• 22:48
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• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: And be sure to mention making remote work in the subject line.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: Billionminds.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: Making remote work for everyone.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_02: Now, Bob, as you're going into the details of this, um, you want leaders and in fact all of us to think about our future relationship with work across seven different dimensions.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_02: You call them spectrums of choice.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_02: So can you outline what those seven are for our audience?
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, this is our big challenge as you look 10 years ahead, and we're not here to tell people what to do.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: We're humble futurists.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um and what we're trying to identify is what are these big waves of changes?
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: But even more importantly, what are your choices?
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so we're here to provoke people to make smarter choices.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: So as you say, and as we're going to talk about a little later, it's a spectrum of choice.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's not binary, it's not either or.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and the purpose question, the purpose spectrum, is a spectrum from individual purpose to collective purpose.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: And it'll vary depending on your age and your background.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: And you need to sort out why an office at all.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: Then there's the spectrum of outcomes.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, where purpose is all about intent, outcomes, the outcome spectrum is all about results.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: You know, what are your results?
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: And the spectrum here is from shareholder value to stakeholder value, or from profit to prosperity.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_01: And where do you want to fit on that scale?
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_01: And interestingly, during the same period, we're having young people in particular.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_01: Greta Thunberg is the kind of poster child for this, but Greta Greta Thunberg and a large number of young people and a lot of older people now are saying, wait a minute, wait a minute, the big result is climate.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and and our backs are to the wall over the next decade.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_01: So the most important outcome that we identified as futurists was climate impact.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_01: So it's looking specifically, and the scale here is from net zero to regenerative.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: Then we get to our fourth spectrum, which is belonging.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, how do you create a sense of belonging if you're increasingly at a distance?
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and how do you create a sense of inclusion?
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: How do you create a sense of equity?
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: How do you carry a corporate culture, even if you're not physically there in person all the time?
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: And then we get to what, as futurists, we found the most mind-expanding, which was the spectrum of augmentation.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's a spectrum from solely human to solely tech.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: And ideally it's a blend, because I I think 10 years from now, uh, if you're in any kind of leadership position, you're a cyborg.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you're you're augmented.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so the question is how?
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_01: And what are those human skills that we want to keep for ourselves?
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_01: And what are those things where we want to be augmented?
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I hope we get a chance to come back to this because we actually used GPT-3 to help write that chapter.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um and now, of course, ChatGPT has come out and kind of broadened that conversation.
• 26:16
  unknown: Yeah.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: Then we get to the question of time and place, the spectrum of time and place.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I know we're going to talk about that in more depth, but it's basically a spectrum from buildings to virtual.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_01: And then finally, we talk about agility.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: How do you hold together these more shape-shifting organizations?
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: And how do you, as a leader, um, become a corporate athlete?
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_01: We have to be physically, mentally, and even spiritually grounded, not necessarily religiously, but grounded in a way that we can deal with this uh, you know, what the Army War College calls the VUCA world, you know, volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_01: And it's going to get worse.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's going to get worse.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: But for organizations that expect that and that gamefully prepare for that and that teach people the skills they need to thrive in that, it's going to be a period where it is possible not only to survive, but it will be possible to thrive.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_01: So those are seven anyway.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, Bob, a ton of deep thinking across all of these spectrums of choice.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_02: And I'll tell you that I learned a ton in particular when it came to the belonging dimension.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and it's really, really intriguing because in our work, we're starting to see a really deep interplay between the issue of, you know, sometimes it's called DEI, DEIB, but but this um but a really deep interplay between these issues and the ability to be able to work outside of formal office settings, um, both in terms of uh of opportunity and in terms of uh and in terms of challenges for people from different groups.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_02: And I and we don't have a lot of time to go into it today, but one of the things I will say is that for anybody in particular who's uh uh an HR leader, go into that section um a great deal because um I think I think what you paint is a very, very interesting um future in terms of what um belonging uh means inside uh inside organizations and um and also how it's likely to change dramatically from uh from where we sit today.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_02: I think very useful and very helpful for organizations that have those types of initiatives inside their companies right now and are struggling to figure out how those need to evolve.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it is really a critical spectrum.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_01: We're actually gonna do a LinkedIn live session specifically on that spectrum of belonging.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: And we're inviting in Ibrahim Jackson, who's one of the world's leading consultants now on DEI, uh, and we're gonna have a dialogue on this particular spectrum of choice.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_01: He advised us on that chapter.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I think you're right, it's really critical.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_01: So maybe we can post at the end.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: We'll post a link to that session.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yep, we absolutely will do that uh for folks that are interested.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um now um I do want uh in in the time that we have left here uh to go into just one of these dimensions in a little bit more detail.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_02: This is, I was saying to you as we were leading into this, this is one of these pods where you know we've we've only got about 40 minutes, and I wish that we've this was the length of one of those Andrew Huberman podcasts, like three hours, because there are so many different things that we could uh that we could be going into.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_02: But um, let's go into one in a little bit more detail, which is, I think, going to be of particular interest to our audience, focused on you know, hybrid and remote work settings and so on.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you refer to it as place and time.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um and just for folks that have uh have heard us talk about this, you'll recall that on previous podcasts we have spoken about, we call it space and time.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but we've spoken about kind of like the the interplay between space and time and what it means for your organization in terms of modeling the different parts of your organization and which parts of your organization need to be uh there at a particular time and a particular place, and in which cases it's just one of those different dimensions.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um, your work absolutely uh maps to that uh super, really, uh super well.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_02: But you introduce a concept of something else, which I think is of real interest for people that are looking to uh to um to think about this in a more forward-looking way.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_02: That's the concept of the Office Verse.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_02: So can you explain what makes up the Office Verse and uh and then why it's a useful concept for folks?
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_01: We we thought a lot about this, and we see Office Verse as what's coming.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_01: So we're looking future back, and the Office Verse is this kind of archipelago of options, of possibilities, this archipelago collection of all these different possibilities and how that all fits together.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we thought a lot about language here, and we grounded ourselves in the office buildings, because that was where people started.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_01: Then we we took that noun and we changed it into a verb, office in, and then we created, we coined a new word, office verse.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_01: As we were writing the book, um, and you know, we're based in Silicon Valley, a bunch of people in Silicon Valley, one company in particular, were trying to brand and own the term metaverse.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I don't think that's going to work in the long run, but we didn't want to get into that conversation.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_01: We wanted to take the ideas of the metaverse, which in simple terms means what's next for the internet.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we wanted to take that notion and apply it to office work.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_01: And what happened during COVID that I thought was most remarkable is a large number of office workers without any training, without any preparation, were actually very productive without offices at all.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_01: So office workers were productive without offices.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_01: So what does that suggest?
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_01: It suggests that we could reimagine how that kind of work gets done and really plan for it and plan for how to do it better.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_01: So we wanted to coin a term that was aspirational, not utopian, but aspirational, um, that could pull people into it.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_01: And we do talk in there about the downsides of the Office verse, and there are many, but it's a very promising, hopeful future to me as well.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_01: And it challenges you.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_01: I I like the way you think about that too, in terms of place and space.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: It challenges you to think about, you know, our matrix began with a kind of simple time place four by four, you know, sort of same time, same place is the face-to-face meeting or the or the in-person office.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, different times, different places is kind of the office verse, the distributed part.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, the same time, different place is what we're doing right now, say video conferencing or could be audio or whatever, the same place, different times, that might be a store.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we work with Walmart a lot.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_01: For their world, uh, it's the retail verse.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: And the center of the retail verse is the store.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: And the next best is the distribution center.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_01: Offices are kind of down the line for for Walmart and for many big uh big retailers.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_01: So that's what we mean by the office verse.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's the the future um archipelago of possibilities.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and you break it down interestingly into um the when you talk about the emerging office first, you break it down into office buildings, home offices, shared places, and networked offices.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_02: What I think is really intriguing about that is that no nobody, I think, at this point, uh uh at least in some of the more mature discussions that you hear about this, is suggesting that there is no role for real estate in this.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um it's just it's just that the way in which we're gonna think about the space element of this will change over time.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_01: That's exactly what I think.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's an important concept.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think real estate needs to be in the conversation, um, but not alone.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's gotta be a combination of real estate, of human resources or the people function, and of digital or IT.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and they've got to be working together, and it's a strategic conversation.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's not just an operational or a tactical conversation.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's the that's really important for your listeners to understand is that for many companies, they're viewing this as an operational choice.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, there are operational elements, but it's really a strategic choice.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_01: And your CEO needs to be involved, the C-suite people need to be involved, the board even needs to be involved because this is reimagining how you're going to work.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not going to settle quickly.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's going to take five to ten years to resettle.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and there's a lot of potential in that period to prototype, to figure out how to do this much better.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_01: There still will be a role for offices.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_01: And we talk in the book about the research, and this is really pretty clear and very well documented.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_01: What offices are good for, um, in-person meetings, that is, um, is orientation, you know, basically, why am I here?
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, trust building, basically, who are you, early stage creativity, culture building for a corporate culture, and renewal or refreshing of that corporate culture.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_01: And in-person experiences are particularly important for new employees and for young people.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_01: And food plays an important element in that.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_01: So I had an interesting conversation with a big Midwestern company, a very traditional one, uh, and I explained just what I just told you about the purpose of in-person offices.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_01: And the CEO was in his office, and he kind of looked around and he said, Bob, our office isn't very good for any of those things.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_01: And and our our cafeteria is closed down uh because there's not enough people here.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_01: And we've got people commuting two hours to go into their office, close the door, and sit in Zoom meetings.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_01: Now, that's not a good scenario.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_01: So when when we think about offices in the future and what's the future of real estate, there is a role for the office.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_01: But you've got to ask yourself, what is the purpose?
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_01: What are the outcomes you're seeking?
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_01: And then you've got to design your office to meet that purpose.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_01: And many old-fashioned offices, many traditional offices before COVID, they weren't very good at doing the things that in-person experiences are supposed to do.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I there's there's some interesting things that you call out there.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_02: Bob, you talk about this being, you know, something that's going to take five to ten years to play out.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely, that's true.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I will say that one thing that we've uh spoken to leaders about quite a bit is that there are things that you can do now.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you talk about this in some of the book, um, that can be a source of strategic advantage for you right now.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so I think that's the important point.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_02: That's that's that's why even we're doing all of this, right?
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_02: In a sense, is to have a vision of what the future is.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_02: But once we start moving towards it, it can be a source of strategic advantage at this point.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_01: I think you're right.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_01: And and the important part, Paul, is that you view those things you're doing as prototypes.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they're you're prototyping the future because nobody knows quite what it'll be.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, this is not the time to lock into any strategy.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_01: And perhaps the most disturbing thing I've heard is I've talked, you know, our book just came out last week.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_01: And for the last couple months, I've been talking with CEOs and C-suite people.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_01: One of the most disturbing things I heard during those conversations is a CEO who said, I'm finished with this.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sick of all this conversation.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_01: I want people back in the office.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_01: And for me, I'm going to give them a little bit of hybrid, but it's hybrid and done.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_01: So, from my point of view, that guy is done.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_01: He's done in the marketplace.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: He's done in the war for talent because you it's not done.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_01: You may think it's done, but it's not done.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and actually that I think that's a great way to almost wrap us up here.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_02: There's a point that you make in the uh in the book about uh about that and almost related to it.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna read just a um a tiny piece um from the book here um because it sums up a lot of this discussion that we've been having about the role of the physical space.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um it's from your chapter, Better Uh Better There, Better Than Being There, sorry, in the spectrum of place and time.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_02: And you lead it off with where you where you say, imagine a world in which it is easy to move between in-person and virtual experiences.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_02: In this future world, we will always be online and enhanced unless we choose to be offline.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_02: While the goal of virtual meetings used to be a pro to approximate face-to-face meetings, the new mantra will be to create ways of working that are better than in-person offices alone.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_02: Better ways of working, better ways of living, better ways of making the future.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_02: COVID-19's hybrid work was only an incremental step towards the Office verse, a nested network of networks.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that really kind of brings home the point that you're you're making there.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_02: You're effectively helping leaders understand how hybrid and remote are really just a staging post to an entirely different Office verse.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_02: And that might seem out there to some folks, and particularly to some leaders, but to me it seems a very reasonable proposition when you also mentioned that for the first time, the largest generational group um in the world is 24 and under.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I think that's a very important point.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_02: Fundamentally, this is not the end of the journey.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so what do you think of?
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_02: You kind of alluded to a little bit, but you but this person, the leader that you were talking about, was not alone.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_02: There are headlines of leaders all over the place, people that uh people that are considered to be extremely smart and extremely high profile, who are hauling people back into a traditional office.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um and what we're also seeing right now, which is very interesting, is that after we almost like it looks like um the trend of people doing more remote work is dipping a little bit right now as remote work job opportunities are going down and stuff like that.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_02: What do you make of it when you see that?
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_02: And where do you what do you think that means in terms of where we are taking a longer view?
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think we're in a period of experimentation, and that's how we need to view it.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's a churning of possibilities.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_01: And if we can view these as prototypes and we can document our experiences, what we need is to develop great clarity of direction in this highly uncertain time, great clarity of direction, and the seven spectrums of choice help you develop that, but great flexibility, great flexibility of execution.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_01: Part of that clarity of direction is because of office shock, which created this pause that allows us to imagine new things, and because of the sophistication and the practicality now of the tech, particularly around what we used to call artificial intelligence, what we call augmented intelligence, but it's also neuroscience, modern neuroscience is getting practical in ways that are very helpful.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_01: We talk a lot in our book about Tom Malone's book called Superminds.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, what Tom argues is that the big story, as you look 10 years ahead, is not computers replacing humans, uh automation, although that will happen in some limited ways.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_01: The big story is humans and computers doing things that have never been done before.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_01: Never been done before.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_01: That's the next decade.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a decade of possibilities.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_01: And we've got young people coming in, some of them already here.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_01: The true digital natives, by our definition, are 27 or less in 2023, and what we call the cross-reality natives are 17 or less in 2023.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_01: Those young people, I'm very optimistic about them because they're growing up with mental capabilities, a lot of them enhanced by their video gaming experiences.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_01: Capabilities that are going to give them a competitive advantage as they join the Office Verse.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_01: They're going to be better at this than we are.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and they're going to help create the Office Verse.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_01: I'm really optimistic about this generation of young people if they have hope.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_01: If they have hope.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why purpose-driven companies are so important to help encourage purpose-driven people.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we know now from the literature that purpose-driven people are happier, they're healthier, and they live longer.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_01: We know that purpose-driven companies perform better.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_01: So we need to create a climate in the Office Verse where that clarity is grounded in purpose and that purpose gives people hope.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_02: Bob, thank you so much for joining us today.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_02: Really appreciate your time.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_02: I know our audience will find it fascinating.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_02: Great, great, so great to be with you.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_00: For this episode, Bob Johansson was interviewed by Paul Slater, and the episode was produced by me, Matt Neal.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: If you liked it, please rate it, review it, and share it.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_00: Are you one of the more than one billion people who work out of a formal office setting at least one day a week?
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