Daily Endeavor Blog

For a few years the Institute for the Future has been tracking how the demands of work (mostly of the knowledge-worker sort) are changing, then forecasting which skills will be valued as a result.

Here are a few from their most recent list of 10:

• Ping Quotient Excellent responsiveness to other people’s requests for engagement; strong propensity and ability to reach out to others in a network

• Longbroading Seeing a much bigger picture; thinking in terms of higher level systems, bigger networks, longer cycles

• Open Authorship Creating content for public modification; the ability to work with massively multiple contributors

• Cooperation Radar The ability to sense, almost intuitively, who would make the best collaborators on a particular task or mission

• Influency Knowing how to be persuasive and tell compelling stories in multiple social media spaces (each space requires a different persuasive strategy and technique)

• Signal/Noise Management Filtering meaningful info, patterns, and commonalities from the massively-multiple streams of data and advice

It’s always interesting to see lists like this because each of the items is a pixel in a bigger picture about how work is changing.

Open, Social & Improvisational

Part of the picture I see is three trends becoming more pronounced: open, social and improvisational. They’ve been happening on the edges, where trends like these start, for the better part of 10 years. But now they’re not just in Palo Alto and NYC, but also in Pittsburgh and Bloomington.

In the context of work life, open, social and improvisational are each distinct, but highly related. Social is involving more people, sometimes at least one more, sometimes radically more. Open is loosening the confines of who sees (and can do something with) the work. Improvisational is working more transparently in real-time — in other words, showing every draft.

Not only do open, social and improvisational overlap with each other, as a group they tend to reinforce each other. They can mutually improve the conditions for all three to occur. Let’s consider an example that we use at Endeavor Prep. In some quarters, like software development, here’s how the progression of work has been changing:

When work is completed more improvisationally with others, there’s more space to chase down flaws and polish up what the customer enjoys most. Instead of being a monolithic task, the work becomes more bite-sized, with significantly more opportunities for feedback. Feedback drives learning. From learning comes whatever you’re looking for.

Most often these trends are applied to workplace skills, as IFTF has. They’re equally valuable to designing the work life you want, or finding your next job.

I’m interested to hear if you see this happening in your workplace. Moreover, are you seeing examples of how people are being more open, social and improvisational in their job search — in setting up the next step in their (or your) work life.