Graeme Codrington's Future of Work

Season 5 of our Future Scenarios series is coming next week, starting August 2024. I hope you've enjoyed the past few weeks as we have profiled the work I am doing with Buhle Dlamini on The TomorrowToday Podcast. See http://www.tomorrowtodayglobal.com/podcast for previous episodes, summaries and links to your favourite podcast platform. Please subscribe, like and review The TomorrowToday Podcast - especially on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. It really will help us.

In episode 3 of The TomorrowToday Podcast, Buhle Dlamini and I take a deeper look into organisational design and what it takes to build successful and future-ready businesses with competitive edge in the modern, connection-driven economy. In this excerpt you can hear a snipper of my interview with Keith Coats about "The Connection Economy", and how the past helps us understand the future. Are our businesses ready for the future, or are we stuck in past practices that no longer serve us? This episode covers essential questions about transformation, organisational structures, leadership and executive team agendas. Search for 'The TomorrowToday Podcast' wherever you listen to podcasts, or find direct links at http://www.tomorrowtodayglobal.com/podcast

In the latest episode of The TomorrowToday Podcast, Buhle Dlamini and I take a deeper look into organisational design and what it takes to build successful and future-ready businesses with competitive edge in the modern, connection-driven economy. Are our businesses ready for the future, or are we stuck in past practices that no longer serve us? This episode covers essential questions about transformation, organisational structures, leadership and executive team agendas. In this excerpt you can hear a snipper of my interview with psychologist, Tamryn Batcheller-Adams about her book "Mavericks: How Bold Leadership Changes the World". Search for 'The TomorrowToday Podcast' wherever you listen to podcasts, or find direct links at http://www.tomorrowtodayglobal.com/podcast

We are still taking a break from our regular future scenarios, while my colleague Buhle Dlamini and I share an our new podcast, The TomorrowToday Podcast with you. We are looking at the characteristics of future-ready organisations, and in Episode 2 we hear from Dean van Leeuwen about the Three Dimensional Strategy Framework. A 3D strategy has three distinct elements: (1) a strategic foundation that aligns purpose, values and a true north, (2) strategic essentials required to compete well, and (3) strategic differentiators that elevate your performance. Most companies focus just the second dimension, asking what we have to do to compete well and be effective and efficient. But to be future-ready, the foundations need to be aligned with elements that will really set you apart from others in your industry, not just now but in the foreseeable future and beyond. This is a brief excerpt from the full episode. You can sign up to listen to The TomorrowToday Podcast wherever you get your podcasts, and listen to the full Episode 2 with Dean and Buhle and myself. Get links to your podcast platform of choice at http://www.tomorrowtodayglobal.com/podcast

Here is a short excerpt from Episode 2 of our new offering, The TomorrowToday Podcast. Together with my colleague, Buhle Dlamini, we are mapping the future of business, looking at the key characteristics of organisations that are designed to be future-ready. In Episode 2 we look at the Future of Organisational Design. If you like this sample, please find our podcast on your favourite platform and listen to the full episode. Links to various podcast platforms can be found at http://www.tomorrowtodayglobal.com/podcast OR: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tomorrowtoday-podcast/id1746264816?uo=4 https://open.spotify.com/show/0fphQFAXYCGNIAxbJtyn38 https://overcast.fm/itunes1746264816 https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/1436a5d9-920a-4820-b5d7-d89623ff0fd0/the-tomorrowtoday-podcast https://castbox.fm/channel/id6149206 https://podcastindex.org/podcast/6911071 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhZgoak3HZrDFgfAUcrDmF6oY63MEJq2d

A special bonus edition to introduce our new Podcast to you. Sign up now so you don't miss any of the episodes of The TomorrowToday Podcast. Buhle Dlamini and I are the co-hosts, mapping the future of business for you and your team. Our goal is to show you what it will take to build an organisation that can handle the rest of this decade and the 2030s. We will show you what a true future-proof business looks like, and what changes you need to make now to build one. Each episode highlights key research and our experiences, providing resources and actionable insights. Sign up links to various podcast platforms are : https://www.buzzsprout.com/2365037 OR: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tomorrowtoday-podcast/id1746264816?uo=4 https://open.spotify.com/show/0fphQFAXYCGNIAxbJtyn38 https://overcast.fm/itunes1746264816 https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/1436a5d9-920a-4820-b5d7-d89623ff0fd0/the-tomorrowtoday-podcast https://castbox.fm/channel/id6149206 https://podcastindex.org/podcast/6911071 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhZgoak3HZrDFgfAUcrDmF6oY63MEJq2d

This is the final episode of Season 4 of ThrowForward Thursday. It's a longer episode today, as we review the most significant theme of the last 40 episodes. This is your reminder that the future isn't just written in data — it's shaped by those who know how to use it. Lead with data, and let it lead you to unprecedented success. Download the Strategic Imagination Toolkit at http://bit.ly/SIToolkit

Come with me to the future, where we realise that Artificial General Intelligence is not just an improvement on Generative AI but something different, developed on a different path. GenAI / LLMs are brilliant. They're amazing tools, taking the sum of human knowledge (including all the incorrect stuff lots of people believe) and making it very accessible. Keep using and improving GenAI, but don't get sucked in by the hype of AGI just yet. AGI is coming. But it is coming down a different path than we are on right now.

Imagine a world where the boring parts of learning - the dumping data into our brains - is all done easily using neural transfers, augmentation and technology assistants. What's left is for the human brain to do what it does best: creative thinking, problem solving, idea generation, and more. This week's leap into the future takes a view that Generative AI is not actually that intelligent - it just has access to all the data. When human beings have access to the same data, we will come up with much better new ideas, insights and wisdom than GenAI seems capable of now. The future is bionic: humans and machines working together, each doing what they do best to move our world forward.

Imagine the Indian elections in 2052 taking just 5 minutes to process, rather than the 6 weeks it takes this year. The vision is of digital first, ubiquitous, secure, personal technology connections in every sector and industry, reducing friction, demolishing time scales, flattening barriers.

Ageing musicians still touring, and ageing fans still wanting to go to their concerts, might prefer an afternoon start time rather than waiting until 9pm or later for the main event. It's not just Festivals that should schedule afternoon concerts - maybe every band should do so. The theme of this week's "jump into the future" is that we should be open to questioning what is considered "normal" in our industries, especially when doing so could open us up to new opportunities, markets and customers. What's "normal" in your industry? And what experiments could you try to see how you could change that?

All plants extract minerals and nutrients from the soil they're growing in, but some appear to be able to extract metals as well, or at least metal ions that we can in turn extract from the plants. If we can do this at scale, we can use phytomining to get the metals we need to build the batteries we use to power our lives. Here are some links to experiments underway on phytomining, and the promise of what this might bring in the future: https://thebulletin.org/2024/03/the-greenest-way-to-mine-metals-for-batteries-could-be-with-plants/ https://resoilfoundation.org/en/innovation-technology/tropical-plants-contaminated-soils/ https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/metal-guzzling-plants-harvested-to-make-nanomaterials/2500240.article

As we watch elections in 2024 spanning nearly 70 countries and 4.2 billion people, one thing is clear: the current systems are not working. Voters are not happy, and have little enthusiasm for the politicians they can choose between (if they have any real choices at all). So, come with me to the future, and consider four 'ridiculous ideas' for new approaches to Parliaments and Governments. We need to stretch our strategic imaginations in an effort to come up with new political systems. Watch episode 9 about AI Politicians: http://bit.ly/TFTAIPolitics Download the Strategic Imagination Toolkit sample: http://bit.ly/SIToolkit

ChatGPT, CoPilot, Llama, Bard, Grok and all the other Generative AI Large Language Models have demonstrated that we can engage with our technology using natural language. Now we need to get our devices to understand the heuristics of requests and actions we ask them to do. Rabbit R1 was launched to much fanfare in December 2023, as a first model of a device that can do this. I doubt it can deliver yet, but it's definitely heading in the right direction. And I love their coining of the LAM: Large ACTION models. I think that Apple's AI play later this year will integrate Siri with early algorithm capabilities that take another step down this path of getting our devices to understand how the world actually works and be able to do a lot of repetitive and mundane tasks for us. Your company should already be working on which tasks could be given to LAMs, building the algorithm systems to make these work seamlessly, and deciding how humans and machines will continue to become more bionic as we work together in the future. If you're just thinking about automation you're not thinking correctly about this.

As the world gets more and more water stressed, those who control water supplies in rivers, lakes and dams, will exercise more power and restrict access to water to those downstream. This could lead to conflict - legal and physical - that is both internal and crosses national boundaries. Some countries may even use the need for water as a reason to invade a neighbour. Whether as an individual or a business, or a region or country, we need to have a plan for water security that is equitable, agreed on by everyone, and future proof. We cannot live without water.

We have to do this! In our lifetimes we have to find a way to end the use of plastic as we use it now, so that we stop adding more toxins and pollution to our planet.

Imagine a world in which Rogue Waves made the oceans too dangerous for ships to sail, and we had to stop cruise liners and container ships from sailing. It would change our world as we know it. It is an extreme and alarmist scenario, with one of the worse cases for the impact of climate change and global warming. It's designed to keep us thinking about what needs to be done to mitigate the impact of extreme weather on our world.

It's not a horror movie, with spider-like robots clambering around the outside of buildings. This is the future of the $40 billion window cleaning industry, using robots. They can do more than clean, though - they do real-time, ongoing analysis of the external skin of the buildings, keeping a record of issues and greatly enhancing preventative maintenance. This is just one example of the potential of predictive data analytics when applied to real world objects that are instrumented and analysed. How might you be able to these data analytic ideas to your business?

A company is suing its own AI chatbot for providing misleading information to a client. I wish I could make up a headline from the future that was better than this - its actually a real story from February 2024 involving Air Canada. The practical lesson is that we need to be careful of automating our workforces, rather than augmenting them. People who use AI are better than people who don't. AI, though, is better when it is used by people than when it is left on its own. Learn from Air Canada's mistake.

Would you trust an AI-driven algorithm to help choose your life partner? If people were honest about the data they entered into these systems, and genuine in their desire to find a true life-partner match, this would definitely be an improvement on the basically random, luck-based most of us rely on. Happy Valentine's Day... from the Love Algorithm. ❤️