By Antony Slumbers
Edition 6 – October 2015 Pages 14-17
Tags: corporate real estate • technology
Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman first introduced the concept of Loss Aversion in 19841, highlighting people’s tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains. Most studies suggest that losses are twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains. Lose £100 and we will feel a remorse that easily outweighs winning £100.
In a similar fashion we find it very hard to see future positives when confronted with short term loses. We understand easily what we have lost but cannot imagine in quite the same way what there is to be gained. Furthermore, as Frederic Bastiat wrote in an 1850 paper2, “That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen”, man has a tendency to “pursue a small present good, which will be followed by a great evil to come, rather than a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil”.
Put these together and it is no wonder that, by and large, the future of work, real estate and the workplace is misunderstood. The strength of argument put behind thinking of the traditional office as a “sustaining technology” as opposed to something crying out for “disruption” is intense. It fits perfectly into Clayton Christensen’s worldview, where innovations are resisted by incumbents, laughed at, and dismissed right up to the point where they reach a position where they can no longer be resisted.3
It is time to be more positive, to stop holding on to a belief system that is no longer applicable. Yes, much is going to change in the next ten years (as it has done in the last ten) and things we are used to are going to disappear. There is though “a great good to come”, if we become cognisant of the huge technological forces at work and learn to embrace new ways of living, thinking and feeling. We need to co-opt technology to augment our lives, our society, and our planet. A computer can beat any human chess player, but cannot beat a human working in conjunction with another computer.4
With society becoming ever more digital we must resist digitising the past. As Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” The future will reflect human predilections, but these will be repurposed around technological capabilities.
Below are several developments that will reshape “work, rest and play”. And that is “will”not “may”; it is up to each of us to make the most of this inevitability. We can shape change, we cannot resist it.
You should assume the office really is dead
Only by embracing the fact that technology has removed the need for an office to undertake work5, will you reimagine the office as somewhere that does have a real, enduring purpose.
We used to need an office because that was where we could access the technology,data and people we needed to get our work done. This is, barring a minority of companies, no longer true. And anyone who still thinks “water cooler” moments make it all worthwhile clearly isn’t living in the real world of social media and streaming, anything, anytime information.
Do believe the hype, the robots ARE coming and they will take 30-40%6 of today’s jobs. And most of those will be the jobs that people do in the office right now. Any work that can be codified will be codified, and thereafter automated.
So what then is the point of the office? Well, to understand that you need to focus intensely on what it is that we humans can do that computers cannot. And that boils down to things that cannot be codified, are unique, require social intelligence and are an amalgam of disparate, unstructured inference and intuition.7
Then, and only then, will you be able to see the future of the office. It has one, but not as most of us currently know it.
Machine learning is a double edged sword
A big difference between computing today and just a few years ago is that, while the notion of computers as being sentient is currently fanciful, they can now do things off their own bat that previously required human instruction. Think of it like a game of “if this then that”; where once the “that” needed to be pre-defined for the “this” to take effect, computers today can infer or induce what the “that” is. The machine can learn from the data it has to hand. It can deduce that if X occurs the next thing to happen will be Y. In effect machine learning means machines can build their own decision trees8. And therein lies the rub.The positive is that we can enlist the help of the machines with complex analysis or the development of predictive analytics. The negative is that the bar is being raised as to what the machines can do without our help.
You need to assess what questions the machines should answer themselves, and what ones you need to work on together, in partnership.
The “Death of Distance” will return
In 1997 The Economist’s Frances Cairncross wrote a much lauded book, The Death of Distance9. It posited the idea that communications technology would free people to work wherever they wanted to, and that people would gravitate to the places that suited them most, safe in the knowledge that they could work anywhere. Well, much to the delight especially of technology naysayers, this hasn’t come to pass. In fact people have gravitated en masse to already successful cities, and clusters of like-minded companies have formed in crowded, urban city centres….