Inventing The Future Is Everyone’s Job

We’ve been on the road, doing the Future of Work series. It’s been a great experience so far, with sessions in New York, Chicago and Boston. We’ve covered a lot of ground, especially circling around the ways that social tools are changing what people do everyday, nowadays.

One theme that has come through, over and over, is that the future of work is being crafted by the actions of everyone. It is not some whim that occurs to a CEO on the 18th green: it is arising from the billions of small actions taken by millions of people.

Polly LaBarre has writing a piece that digs into this more deeply, suggesting the the future will be crowdsourced and led by community managers:

Polly LaBarre, Inventing The Future Is Everyone’s Job

When Larry Huston faced the challenge of revving Procter & Gamble’s innovation engine to contribute to $5 billion in annual topline growth, he opened up the ranks of the company’s vaunted R&D operation to some 1.8 million scientists and researchers around the globe.

When Rob McEwen desperately needed fresh ideas about where and how to drill for gold in his Red Lake mine, he shared his company’s proprietary data with thousands of potential prospectors, many of whom had no experience in the industry.

When, earlier this year, Iceland decided to craft an entirely new constitution in the wake of the breakdown of its financial system, the 25-person constitutional council decided to open the process to the public by publishing draft clauses and inviting (and later incorporating) comments and suggestions via a dedicated website, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

It’s tempting to conclude that the era of the all-knowing leader with all the answers has given way to a productive populism in which the contribution flows freely to enrich and enliven institutions and individuals alike.

And it’s true that the whole world seems to have woken up to the notion that great ideas can come from anywhere (and anyone)–and that it’s impossible to predict where the next great one will come from (or to employ all the relevant talent in the world). Exhibit A: the surge of crowdsourcing, mass collaboration, co-creation, and open innovation initiatives seeking to channel those ideas and leverage that talent in every realm of endeavor.

But when it comes to taking those ideas and turning them into a comprehensive view of the future, a compelling set of priorities, and a genuinely involving and ongoing collaboration with a community of stakeholders, there aren’t many instructive models.

The fact is, inventing the future of an organization (or “strategic planning” to use the technical term), is still the well-guarded province of the executive elite. The stubborn model is: the boss thinks up the big vision, and the “troops” execute the plan.

Of course, the world is just too complex, change comes too fast, and the challenges we face are too immense (and interconnected), for an insular clique of executives to chart the course of an organization from a blank sheet of paper and sheer brilliance. If the goal is proactive change and continuous renewal, the responsibility for shaping direction must be broadly shared (within and beyond the walls of the organization).

Visionaries are increasingly acting on the premise that innovation will come from getting much more connected in the larger ecosystem outside the walls of the business, not just from the board of directors, or the strategic planning team. This will recast the role of management, moving increasingly toward fostering community: communities within, across, and outside the traditional boundaries of the business.

As companies commit to greater connection with the world, paradoxically, they are more capable of independent action.