The workplace has no future because it no longer exists [see photo]. The traditional notion of a workplace is defined by location not by people or by work. For example, where is the workplace for those who repair the potholes in our roads. It is here, there, and everywhere. It turns out that here, there, and everywhere is the new location for work even if your team is located in an office down on 34th Street, New York, New York, USA. It is here because this is where the team meets but the work they do is there because it solves a problem that exists in California. But even that explanation is does not do justice to what has happened to work and workplaces in 2021 - so let's push on.
The real reason that the workplace does not exist today is that so much of what we do that we call "work" is networked. For example, even in the office at 34th Street in New York the work is distributed through an intranet [internal loops] and via the internet [external loops]. The intranet may extend to six people in the same building or to fifty thousand people in the same corporation around the globe. Meanwhile the Internet may extend to seven billion people around the Earth.
Perhaps the best way to think about the lack of a workplace is to understand that work is done at the user interface between one tribe and another, one human and another, or one planet and another. This means we all need a new definition for work, workspaces, and productive value of human effort. But that is not my purpose - I will leave that issue with you.
My purpose is to suggest that digital technologies have changed the location, value, and end product of work. This is why I no longer talk about "value adding" work but rather I refer to it as the "use value" of human productivity.
Richard.
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