Future of work

What will the world of work look like in 2035?

Asheem Singh – the RSA

The robots are coming for our jobs. That will bring mass unemployment and social collapse. Or perhaps a benign world of plenty with universal more than basic incomes. That’s if they are coming at all.

There is no shortage of predictions about the future of work, often driven from simple – or simplistic – extrapolations of technological progress. The RSA has consistently avoided that trap, crafting more nuanced accounts of potential futures, and their latest report continues that approach. It’s built round four scenarios, introduced with an unusually clear and succinct description of the approach:

These are not predictions but scenarios. What we mean by this is, we are not saying any one of them will come to be. However taken together they capture what we feel is the entire area of plausible future, and each one, we hope, shines a distinct light on an urgent set of challenges and opportunities that our future might hold.

As is often the case with scenario based approaches, it’s debatable how far they are independent of each other. But that is almost to miss the point: however structured, the scenarios bring out some profound social and political choices – but with little sign of the wider engagement, understanding and debate that that demands.

Innovation

Getting it right this time: Why the strategy is not about delivery for NHSX

Mark Thompson – Computer Weekly

This article starts with the strategy of an anonymous pharmaceutical company, or rather with a discussion of its weaknesses. Rather more promisingly, it then broadens out to look at the NHS and digital health information.

There is a long and largely unhappy history of bold claims for the application of information management to the health service, which have consumed a lot of money but have had proportionately little to show for it. NHSX is the latest attempt to bring it all together, and the argument here is that this still represents technology modernisation rather than digital radicalism.

That leads to a still more fundamental issue, a challenge to one of the great mantras of digital government, that the strategy is delivery. That’s always been a naive view – it’s fine to argue that a strategy which doesn’t result in delivery isn’t much of a strategy, but the argument that the strategy emerges from delivery doesn’t really hold up. Instead, the question here is whether government should be rethinking its role more radically, embracing the idea of government as a platform, rather than building another platform for government.

Government and politics Innovation

Street lighting in suburban London: a parable for digital government

Richard Pope – Platform Land

A history of street lighting in Croydon might not seem like immediately compelling reading. But both the history and the parallels with digital government are unexpectedly fascinating.

A few points stand out. The first is the retrospective inevitability of commoditisation. The parallel between electricity networks and data networks may seem obvious, how far that moves up the stack and with what consequences is rather less so (because less of that had happened yet).

The second is a different way of coming at a question which has arisen around digital public services pretty much from their first appearance: does a model of government drive the design of online services, or does the building of online services drive thinking about government?

And the third is a good reminder that changing and modernising can be much harder than building from scratch, and that for governments more than most, the new is almost invariably intertwined with the old.

Social and economic change

Is the Solow Paradox back?

Mekala Krishnan, Jan Mischke, and Jaana Remes – McKinsey Quarterly

In 1987, the economist Robert Solow observed that the computer age was everywhere except for the productivity statistics. In some sectors, that started to change a decade or so later. Now, a further two decades on, the nature of ‘the computer age’ is very different and there is a further round of technology-driven change with even greater potential than the last one. The main conclusion of this article is that there is another surge of productivity growth waiting to be captured, though acknowledging some significant transition inefficiencies along the way. And there are still wider effects not directly reflected here – autonomous vehicles, for example, have the potential to be more immediately efficient but might add to externalities elsewhere through increased congestion.

Stepping back from that, perhaps the deeper message of Solow’s paradox, now as much as when he posed it, is that technology-based change is never just about the technology and that understanding the social and economic context in which it is deployed is always a vital part of the overall picture.

Future of work

We’re Not All Going to Be Gig Economy Workers After All

Adewale Maye – CEPR

The rise of the gig economy and the relentless undermining of traditional employment structures is often seen and presented as an inexorable characteristic of modern digital economies. That’s partly a consequence of skewed observation, partly a recognition that organisations can increasingly trade rich information for formal structures, and perhaps partly a change in the reality of people’s working lives. This article addresses the last of those points using recent US data – and concludes that the number of people working in the gig economy is small and growing only relatively slowly.

That’s a helpful balance to some of the hype, though it does unavoidably leave one of the central questions unanswered. If we can, to adapt Solow’s paradox, see the effects of the gig economy everywhere except in the productivity statistics, is that because they aren’t there to be seen, or because we are at the very early stage of what may be exponential growth? Perhaps, as with Solow’s original, it will take a decade or two to tell.

Government and politics Innovation Organisational change

Government as a Platform, the hard problems: part 1 — Introduction

Richard Pope – Platform Land

The idea of describing things in terms of stacks is a familiar one in the worlds of technology and of operating models. It’s not such a familiar way of describing government, though it’s an idea with an honourable history, including Mark Foden’s essential summary in his gubbins video.

This post is a trailer for a series of forthcoming posts under the banner of Platform Land, which promises to be compelling reading. That promise rests in part on the recognition in this introduction of the fact that governments are both organisations with much in common with other kinds of organisation and at the same time organisations with some very specific characteristics which go well beyond service delivery:

Considerations of safety, accountability, and democracy must at all times be viewed as equal to considerations of efficiency.

The emergence of government platforms represents a new way of organizing the work of government. As such, the task at hand is not to understand how we patch existing systems of government, but of how we adapt to something new that will come with its own set of opportunities and challenges, risks and prizes.

Innovation Organisational change

Rewired State: 10 years on

Richard Pope and James Darling

Poster advertising Rewired State, 2009What do you have to do to make government work better? People have been asking that question for a very long time (it’s over 150 years since the Northcote-Trevelyan report asked a version of it for the UK government), but answers continue to be elusive.

Ten years ago, there was an attempt to approach the problem bottom up rather than top down: demonstrating better government by building some small pieces of it to demonstrate what could be – and should be – possible. It was an attempt which was small to vanishing in its direct effect, but was an influential precursor of much of what followed. That influence is still visible in the way things get designed and built across government, but something of the radical edge has got lost along the way.

This post both celebrates what was done in those heady days and poses the challenging question of where the equivalent radicalism needs to come from now. Gradual change is not enough, it argues, now is not a time for patching. Given that build up, the call to action falls a little flat – a resounding cry for a committee of enquiry into the civil service hardly sets the heart racing. But the fact that better answers may be needed emphasises rather than undermines the power of the question.

Behavioural science Policy and analysis

The Surprising Value of Obvious Insights

Adam Grant – Sloan Management Review

It is counter intuitive that insights don’t have to be counter intuitive.

There is excitement and recognition in grand discoveries, uncovering what we didn’t know as a critical step towards doing a better thing. The bigger the surprise, the better the achievement. And at the other end of the spectrum, the time honoured way of sneering at consultants is to say that they have borrowed your watch so that they can tell you the time. Over and over again, though, big organisations pay expensive consultancies to do exactly that. There are various reasons why that might be rational (or at least understandable) behaviour, one is perhaps that the obvious is not actually obvious until it is made obvious.

This interesting article expands on the power of obviousness made obvious as an enabler and driver of change. It’s focus is on internal management practices, but the approach clearly has wider application:

Findings don’t have to be earth-shattering to be useful. In fact, I’ve come to believe that in many workplaces, obvious insights are the most powerful forces for change.

Policy and analysis Service design

How service ownership works in DfE

Rachel Hope – DfE Digital and Transformation

In this photo there is a central circle with lots of postits arranged inside and out. These postits cannot be read clearly but they represent different users of a service and the stakeholders involved in the delivery of that service.Most of government is mostly service design most of the time. That’s a pithy and powerful assertion, and has been deservedly influential since Matt Edgar coined it a few years ago. But influential is not the same as right – and indeed the title of Matt’s original blog post ended more tentatively with ‘…Discuss.’

This post, which is in effect a case study of acting as if the assertion were true, throws useful light on what it could mean. In doing so it makes it easier to see that there is a risk of eliding two questions and that it is worth answering them separately. The easy first question is whether policy and delivery should understand and respect each other and expect to work in close partnership – to which the answer must be yes. The harder second question is whether the venn diagram does – or should – eventually consume itself to become a single all encompassing circle. Verbally and visually, the argument of this post it that it does, and that argument is powerfully made in respect of the service it describes. But that still leaves open the question of whether the model works as well when the service is less specific or delivered less directly.