Work Futures

A connective of futurists exploring the shifting realities of work

Skills for Success in a Disruptive World of Work

Skills for Success in a Disruptive World of Work

Many years back, my dad retired as a Library Science professional and soon after that, the profession of Library management was transformed…

Tanmay Vora9 hrs ago

Medium’s Experiment with Holacracy Failed. Long Live the Experiment!

Medium’s Experiment with Holacracy Failed. Long Live the Experiment!

In March 2016, Medium abandoned Holacracy. The carnivores of the business press, who had been circling the blog publishing company since it…

Tim RaynerMar 29

Reduce bias and resentment with a transparent salary and skills matrix

Reduce bias and resentment with a transparent salary and skills matrix

When it comes to retention, I don’t believe in playing a defensive game. I think you just try your best to create an awesome place to work…

Giff ConstableApr 3

Work is solving problems

Work is solving problems

The lessons from Google

Esko KilpiMar 30

New Research on Email: Social is more important than Importance

We seldom see affordances in our tools based on the strength of our social connections In a recently reported study on email (the grandiosely entitled Evolution of Conversations in the Age of Email Overload, by Kooti et al) one interesting factoid was uncovered: ¶ Emailing behavior was studied predominantly on small-scale data and often using qualitative methods. The attitude of email users towards work email was investigated through organizational surveys, finding that the social nature of the message is a stronger motivation to reply than the “importance” of the message.

Stowe BoydMar 31

The Rise of Work Chat Anti-Hype

Jason Fried of Basecamp is only the most recent to come out strongly condemning the hype around work chat, and perhaps, the leading…protagonist in the market: Slack. He enumerates a short list of positives (4), and then a staggeringly long list of negatives (17). I will synthesize his points down to these: work chat is good for quick-and-dirty, once-in-awhile discussions, and for team building, but the costs are considerable, since work chat is tiring, obsessive, interruptive, and leads to focusing people’s attention on the near-term, while fracturing our concentration on what’s really important.

Stowe BoydMar 8

The solution to ‘Short Sleeping’ is to start work later

The solution to ‘Short Sleeping’ is to start work later

We should stop operating around the agricultural notion of getting up when the rooster crows, and readjust to modern life.

Stowe Boyd4 days ago

Work Management in Theory: Context

Work Management in Theory: Context

This is an excerpt of the upcoming report, Work Management Narrative, in which I will be reviewing around a dozen products, including Asana…

Stowe BoydMar 24

The Thick of It

The Thick of It

We live in two worlds , the old and the new, while building the path we walk on.

Jean M RussellMar 23

Today’s business organization is an oligarchy, and that needs to change

Today’s business organization is an oligarchy, and that needs to change

We need to move to hyperdemocratic cooperative work, and drop oligarchic management.

Stowe BoydMar 10

The New Aesthetics of Work

The New Aesthetics of Work

The largest disruptive factor at work has been the emergence of the Web and the impact it had on us as individuals.

Stowe BoydMar 17

Understanding the Failed Promise of ‘Social Collaboration’

The individual is the new group.I’ve been using a phrase in my work with clients recently — the failed promise of social collaboration — and I thought I would take a few minutes to write down the thinking behind it, because I think we are at an inflection point in the market for work technologies. ¶ Work tech is the spectrum of digital tools we use to get our work done, ranging from hardware like our mobile devices, wearables, tablets, and laptops, but more specifically the software tools that mediate our work communications…

Stowe BoydFeb 16, 2015

Work Futures digest — 2016–03–21

Work chat, social crowding, and ambient awareness.Jason Fried had some thoughts about work chat — Is group chat making you sweat?. I responded with The Rise of Work Chat Anti-Hype, where I started by summarizing his piece this way: ¶ I will synthesize his [Fried’s] points down to these: work chat is good for quick-and-dirty, once-in-awhile discussions, and for team building, but the costs are considerable, since work chat is tiring, obsessive, interruptive, and leads to focusing people’s attention on the near-term, while fracturing our…

Stowe BoydMar 21

The chat overload is just beginning

There have been several articles recently where people push back on the hype surrounding the rapid growth of Slack as a team chat tool, and…Stowe Boyd has written a good response to these articles, which we could broadly characterise as expressing real-time-chat-fatigue. ¶ This is a great issue to be talking about, firstly because it shows that the goal of social technology within the workplace is not simply to maximise engagement, but rather to support work activities without getting in the way. Secondly, we need to acknowledge that the reason this issue has come into focus is because of the crazy explosion in chat use — in other…

Lee BryantMar 8

Stowe Boyd2 days ago1 min read

Female Work Futures Speakers

I’ve been influenced by the kind folks at August, who amassed a list of women who are up for the challenge of speaking on topics under the work futures topic. I pored through various things I’ve researched and created a similar list, and — big surprise — several of my selections…

Stowe Boyd3 days ago2 min read

Why does Etsy’s CEO get involved in petty details, like trash collection in the office?

From small gestures culture is grown

Stowe BoydApr 49 min read

Interview with Jennifer Magnolfi

The ability of space to shape as well as support certain kinds of behaviors and human interactions is at the heart of what I’m interested in. — Jennifer Magnolfi

Stowe BoydApr 41 min read

How are you going to get them to buy Fords?

Quote Investigator tracked down the earliest references to union leader Walter…

Ayelet BaronJan 263 min read

The Future of Work: Awakening the Artist Within

More people will pick themselves in the 21st century…

Stowe BoydApr 33 min read

Sending Signals

When you go to work for a company, they tell you something about the values of the…

Stowe BoydApr 11 min read

The Work Futures connective is growing

The screenshot above shows the front page of Work Futures, the Medium publication I am…

Lee BryantNov 25, 20153 min read

Transformation at the speed of Haier

The Financial Times published an update on Chinese firm Haier’s ongoing transformation yesterday that provides a useful insight into the thinking of CEO Zhang Ruimin.

Stowe BoydMar 294 min read

Work Futures digest — 2016–03–29

Leadership, gender bias in pay, hypocrisy in ‘speak your mind’ cultures, and new workfutures.io posts

Joshua Rothman, in What is Leadership, Anyway, pulls together one of the best researched and disarming essays on leadership I’ve ever read…

Celine SchillingerMar 275 min read

How to Measure Culture Change Without Killing It

Those things that contribute to performance are never produced by measurement. — Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers

Stowe BoydMar 284 min read

ScribblePost: A Content-Centric Work Management Tool

I’ve realized — principally because of stumbling across a few new tools — that there’s at least one more category of work management tools along with the task-centric and message-centric forms: I am encountering content-centric work…

Stowe BoydMar 199 min read

Moving To The Edge: The Hunter/Gatherer Future

We have so much to do, so much to lose, so much to regain. — Stowe Boyd

A post from 2006.

Stowe BoydMar 172 min read

Ten of the most popular posts on Work Futures

Here’s a sampler of some posts that have gained the most attention on workfutures.io.

Millennials and the leadership gap

Stowe BoydMar 171 min read

A Recent Interview — The new normal is there is no normal

Jame Kotecki, Researcher Stowe Boyd on the Future and Postfuture of Work

James Kotecki: At the end of the day, what’s your personal feeling about the future of work? Are you scared? Excited? Does it vary…

Stowe BoydMar 155 min read

The Inexorable Logic Of Infrastructurization

The Internet Giants — Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, and Google — turn breakthrough tools into infrastructure, and consolidate competition.

Stowe BoydOct 2, 20135 min read

Dig your own hole, sharpen your own shovel

All work is personal.

In a recent post (see Deep business culture eats shallow corporate culture), I took a somewhat different path to the question of reengagement in business. It’s well known that only 30% of the…

Stowe BoydMar 75 min read

Work Futures digest — 2016–03–07

Giving Letters a try, so I’m dropping the recent experiment at Flipboard (and previous experiment at Getrevue).

This will be a weekly (ish) collation of pointers to interesting things that I may include in future writing or research, but that I…

Stowe BoydMar 62 min read

Management and Organization at Medium

Re: Management and Organization at Medium

Holacracy versus deep culture?

It sounds like — and this is from far off, not from any discussions with folks at Medium — that those working this at Medium have come to a realization: boiling down a set of key…

Stowe BoydFeb 238 min read

The Game-changing Economics of Fractional Availability

The tech world is in many ways like a large city. While we spend most of our time in a few neighborhoods, it doesn’t really come as a surprise to encounter an old friend or colleague that you haven’t talked to in years, hanging out in…

Stowe BoydFeb 231 min read

Felt Instead Of Walls

I actually like this strange piece of ‘acoustic micro architecture’ from Vivero, called Tomago.

Work Futures

A connective of futurists exploring the shifting realities of work

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