We are roughly half way through 2015 and there has been a barrage of reports outlining what their authors believe will be the future of work.

Recently we had the Fast Forward 2030: The Future of Work and the Workplace report from CBRE and Genesis, which was less about how work will look in 15 years time as what kind of workplace Millennials would love to have right now.

We then had New Ways of Working from the Virgin backed B Team, which looked at some of the things driving the change in our workplace.

We’ve even had the launch of the crowdsourced Workplace Conversation, which is a project supported by a number of UK professional bodies.

Or there was the recent paper from the Hamilton Project, which looked more broadly at the topic and explored some of the social impacts of the changing face of work.

Finally we had the Erik Brynjolfsson led work looking at the kind of skills (or mindset) required to survive the skills race against automation.

The Smart Workplace 2040

Into this rather crowded marketplace has come the Smart Workplace 2040 report from Johnson Controls.  Now I should begin by saying that the latest report comes hot on the heels of the Smart Workplace 2030 report, which was published in 2009.

You might be forgiven for thinking that maybe we should wait until a little bit nearer to 2030 before a new report comes out, and there in lies the problem with such a long event horizon.

Indeed, the report makes clear in its introduction that much has changed since 2009, whether that’s technologies such as the iPhone or social movements such as the sharing economy, none of which were predicted in the 2009 report, and which presumably predicated the publication of a follow up.

By having such a long horizon however, it kind of removes any real sense of accountability.  I mean no one will be coming back to these reports in 2040 and checking whether any of the predictions are correct.

Looking closer to home

Of course, that isn’t to dismiss the findings in the report, nor indeed the expert opinions that went into its construction.  Equally however, I think that anyone looking to these reports for an accurate reflection of working life in 2040 is priming themselves for disappointment.

Life is simply too complex to think that far ahead, and it’s kind of a fools errand to even bother trying.  Companies don’t fail to adapt to changes because they can’t predict how things will be in 25 years time.

They fail because they struggle to adapt to changes that are happening right under their noses.  In that sense, the report may well be a useful look at some of the emerging trends that are happening right now..

For instance, the desire for greater meaning and balance in our lives is not something that we have to wait until 2040 for, it’s something that people are craving right now.

Some of the more science fiction aspects of the report however are much less useful, and will offer little by way of practical advice for managers seeking to make sense of the changing world.

Sense and respond

The track record of such grandiose predictions of the distant future is not a good one at all.  Sadly, the track record of organizational change is equally bad.

A study by Manuel Hensmans found that just 28 of 215 of the biggest companies in the UK retained their status over a two decade period.  What’s more, of those 28, just three were able of undergoing a major strategic change and still maintain their lofty status.

It’s hard to dispute, therefore, that we need to improve both our forecasting ability and our adaptive capabilities, but I’m not sure that this report really helps matters.

It would seem more sensible, and practical, for organizations to develop good sensing capabilities, and having a sufficiently adaptive culture to engage in a ready stream of experiments to test things out.

After all, the future is largely already here in little pockets on the edges of the mainstream.  We just need to get better at hunting it down and testing how well it applies to our own circumstances.