The Human Purpose Behind Smart Cities

March 24, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

It is human priorities that should be driving Smart City initiatives, like the ones in Toronto profiled here last week.

Last week’s post also focused on a pioneering spirit in Toronto that many American cities and towns seem to have lost. While we entrench in the moral righteousness of our sides in the debate—including, for many, a distrust of collective governance, regulation and taxation—we drift towards an uncertain future instead of claiming one that can be built on values we actually share.

In its King Street and Quayside initiatives, Toronto is actively experimenting with the future it wants based on its residents’ commitment to sustaining their natural environment in the face of urban life’s often toxic impacts. They’re conducting these experiments in a relatively civil, collaborative and productive way—an urban role model for places that seem to have forgotten how to work together. Toronto’s bold experiments are also utilizing “smart” technologies in their on-going attempts to “optimize” living and working in new, experimental communities.

During a short trip this week, I got to see the leading edges of New York City’s new Hudson Yards community (spread over 28 acres with an estimated $25 billion price tag) and couldn’t help being struck by how much it catered to those seeking more luxury living, shopping and workspaces than Manhattan already affords. In other words, how much it could have been a bold experiment about new ways that all of its citizens might live and work in America’s first city for the next half-century, but how little it actually was. A hundred years ago, one of the largest immigrant migrations in history made New York City the envy of the world. With half of its current citizens being foreign-born, perhaps the next century, unfurling today, belongs to newer cities like Toronto.

Still, even with its laudable ambition, it will not be easy for Toronto and other future-facing communities to get their Smart City initiatives right, as several of you were also quick to remind me last week. Here is a complaint from a King Street merchant that one of you (thanks Josh!) found and forwarded that seems to cast what is happening in Toronto in a less favorable light than I had focused upon it:

What a wonderful story. But as with [all of] these wonderful plans some seem to be forgotten. As it appears are the actual merchants. Google certainly a big winner here. Below an excerpt written by one of the merchants:

‘The City of Toronto has chosen the worst time, in the worst way, in the worst season to implement the pilot project. Their goal is clearly to move people through King St., not to King St. For years King St. was a destination, now it is a thoroughfare.

‘The goal of the King St. Pilot project was said to be to balance three important principles: to move people more effectively on transit, to support business and economic prosperity and to improve public space. In its current form, the competing principles seem to be decidedly tilted away from the economic well-being of merchants and biases efficiency over convenience. The casual stickiness of pedestrians walking and stopping at stores, restaurants and other merchants is lost.

‘Additionally, the [transit authority] TTC has eliminated a number of stops along King St., forcing passengers to walk further to enter and disembark streetcars, further reducing pedestrian traffic and affecting areas businesses. The TTC appears to believe that if they didn’t have to pick up and drop off people, they could run their system more effectively.

‘The dubious benefits of faster street car traffic on King St. notwithstanding, the collateral damage of the increased traffic of the more than 20,000 cars the TTC alleges are displaced from King St to adjoining streets has turned Adelaide, Queen, Wellington and Front Sts. into a gridlock standstill. Anyone who has tried to navigate the area can attest that much of the time, no matter how close you are you can’t get there from here.

‘Along with the other merchants of King St. and the Toronto Entertainment District we ask that Mayor Tory and Toronto council to consider a simple, reasonable and cost-effective alternative. Put lights on King St. that restrict vehicle traffic during rush hours, but return King St. to its former vibrant self after 7 p.m., on weekends and statutory holidays. It’s smart, fair, reasonable and helps meet the goals of the King St. pilot project.

Two things about this complaint seemed noteworthy. The first is how civil and constructive this criticism is in a process that hopes to “iterate” as real time impacts are assessed. It’s a tribute that Toronto’s experiments not only invite but are also receiving feedback like this. Alas, the second take-away from Josh’s comment is far more nettlesome. “[However many losers there may be along the way:] Google certainly a big winner here.”

The tech giant’s partnership with Canada’s governments in Toronto raises a constellation of challenging issues, but it’s useful to recall that pioneers who dare to claim new frontiers always do so with the best technology that’s available. While the settling of the American West involved significant collateral damage (to Native Americans and Chinese migrants, to the buffalo and the land itself), it would not have been possible without existing innovations and new ones that these pioneers fashioned along the way. Think of the railroads, the telegraph poles, even something as low-tech as the barbed wire that was used to contain livestock.

The problem isn’t human and corporate greed or heartless technology—we know about them already—but failing to recognize and reduce their harmful impacts before it is too late. The objective for pioneers on new frontiers should always be maximizing the benefits while minimizing the harms that can be foreseen from the very beginning instead of looking back with anger after the damage is done.

We have that opportunity with Smart City initiatives today.

Because they concentrate many of the choices that will have to be made when we boldly dare to claim the future of America again, I’ve been looking for a roadmap through the moral thicket in the books and articles that are being written about these initiatives today. Here are some of the markers that I’ve discovered.

Human priorities, realized with the help of technology

1. Markers on the Road to Smarter and More Vibrant Communities

The following insights come almost entirely from a short article by Robert Kitchin, a professor at Maynooth University in Ireland. In my review of the on-going conversation about Smart Cities, I found him to be one of its most helpful observers.

In his article, Kitchin discusses the three principal ways that smart cities are understood, the key promises smart initiatives make to stakeholders, and the perils to be avoided around these promises.

Perhaps not surprisingly, people envision cities and other communities “getting smarter” in different ways. One constituency sees an opportunity to improve both “urban regulation and governance through instrumentation and data-driven systems”–essentially, a management tool. A bolder and more transformative vision sees information and communication technology “re-configur[ing] human capital, creativity, innovation, education, sustainability, and management,” thereby “produc[ing] smarter citizens, workers and public servants” who “can enact polic[ies], produce better products… foster indigenous entrepreneurship and attract inward investment.” The first makes the frontier operate more efficiently while the second improves nearly every corner of it.

The third Smart City vision is “a counter-weight or alternative” to each of them. It wants these technologies “to promote a citizen-centric model of development that fosters social innovation and social justice, civic engagement and hactivism, and transparent and accountable governance.” In this model, technology serves social objectives like greater equality and fairness. Kitchin reminds us that these three visions are not mutually exclusive. It seems to me that the priorities embedded in a community’s vision of a “smarter” future could include elements of each of them, functioning like checks and balances, in tension with one another.

Smart City initiatives promise to solve pressing urban problems, including poor economic performance; government dysfunction; constrained mobility; environmental degradation; a declining quality of life, including risks to safety and security; and a disengaged, unproductive citizen base. Writes Kitchin:

the smart city promises to solve a fundamental conundrum of cities – how to reduce costs and create economic growth and resilience at the same time as producing sustainability and improving services, participation and quality of life – and to do so in commonsensical, pragmatic, neutral and apolitical ways.

Once again, it’s a delicate balancing act with a range of countervailing interests and constituencies, as you can see in the chart from a related discussion above.

The perils of Smart Cities should never overwhelm their promise in my view, but urban pioneers should always have them in mind (from planning through implementation) because some perils only manifest themselves over time. According to Kitchin, the seven dangers in pursuing these initiatives include:

–taking “a ‘one size fits all’ approach, treating cities as generic markets and solutions [that are] straightforwardly scalable and movable”;

–assuming that initiatives are “objective and non-ideological, grounded in either science or commonsense.” You can aim for these ideals, but human and organizational preferences and biases will always be embedded within them.

–believing that the complex social problems in communities can be reduced to “neatly defined technical problems” that smart technology can also solve. The ways that citizens have always framed and resolved their community problems cannot be automated so easily. (This is also the thrust of Ben Green’s Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future, which will be published by MIT Press in April. In it he argues for “smart enough alternatives” that are attainable with the help of technology but never reducible to technology solutions alone.)

–engaging with corporations that are using smart city technologies “to capture government functions as new market opportunities.” One risk of a company like Google to communities like Toronto’s is that Google might lock Toronto in to its proprietary technologies and vendors over a long period of time or use Toronto’s citizen data to gain business opportunities in other cities.

–becoming straddled with “buggy, brittle and hackable” systems that are ever more “complicated, interconnected and dependent on software” while becoming more resistant to manual fixes.

–becoming victimized by “pervasive dataveillance that erodes privacy” through practices like “algorithmic social sorting (whether people get a loan, a tenancy, a job, etc), dynamic pricing (whereby different people pay varying prices depending on their perceived customer value) and anticipatory governance using predictive profiling (wherein data precedes how a person is policed and governed).” Earlier this month, my post on popular on-line games like Fortnite highlighted the additional risk that invasive technologies can use the data they are gathering to change peoples’ behavior.

-and lastly, reinforcing existing power structures and inequalities instead of eroding or reconfiguring them.

While acknowledging the promise of Smart Cities at their best, Kitchin closes his article with this cautionary note:

the realities of implementation are messier and more complex than the marketing hype of corporations or city managers portray and there are a number of social, political, ethical and legal concerns with respect to the kind of society smart city initiatives seek to create. As such, whilst networked urbanism has benefits, it also poses challenges and risks that are often little explored or legislated for ahead of implementation. Indeed, the pace of development and rollout of smart city technologies is proceeding well ahead of wider reflection, critique and regulation.

Putting the cart before a suitably-designed horse is a problem with all new and seductive technologies that get embraced before their harms are identified or can be addressed—a quandary that was also considered here in a post called “Looking Out for the Human Side of Technology.”

2. The Value of Our Data

A few additional considerations about the Smart City are also worth bearing in mind as debate about these initiatives intensifies.

In a March 8, 2019 post, Kurtis McBride wrote about two different ways “to value” the data that these initiatives will produce, and his distinction is an important one. It’s a discussion that citizens, government officials and tech companies should be having, but unfortunately are not having as much as they need to.

When Smart City data is free to everyone, there is the risk that the multinationals generating it will merely use it to increase their power and profits in the growing market for Smart City technologies and services. From the residents’ perspective, McBride argues that it’s “reasonable for citizens to expect to see benefit” from their data, while noting that these same citizens will also be paying dearly for smart upgrades to their communities. His proposal on valuing citizen data depends on how it will be used by tech companies like Google or local service providers. For example, if citizen data is used:

to map the safest and fastest routes for cyclists across the city and offers that information free to all citizens, [the tech company] is providing citizen benefit and should be able to access the needed smart city data free of charge.

But, if a courier company uses real-time traffic data to optimize their routes, improving their productivity and profit margins – there is no broad citizen benefit. In those cases, I think it’s fair to ask those organizations to pay to access the needed city data, providing a revenue stream cities can then use to improve city services for all.

Applying McBride’s reasoning, an impartial body in a city like Toronto would need to decide whether Google has to pay for data generated in its Quayside community by consulting a benefit-to-citizens standard. Clearly, if Google wanted to use Quayside data in a Smart City initiative in say Colorado or California, it would need to pay Toronto for the use of its citizens’ information.

Of course, addressing the imbalance between those (like us) who provide the data and the tech companies that use it to increase their profits and influence is not just a problem for Smart City initiatives, and changing the “value proposition” around our data is surely part of the solution. In her new book Age of Surveillance Capitalism: the Fight for a Human Future in the New Frontier of Power, Harvard Business School’s Shoshana Zuboff says that “you’re the product if these companies aren’t paying you for your data” does not state the case powerfully enough. She argues that the big tech platforms are like elephant poachers and our personal data like those elephants’ ivory tusks. “You are not the product,” she writes. “You are the abandoned carcass.”

Smart City initiatives also provide a way to think about “the value of our data” in the context of our living and working and not merely as the gateway to more convenient shopping, more addictive gaming experiences or “free” search engines like Googles’.

This post is adapted from my March 24, 2019 newsletter. Subscribe today and receive an email copy of future posts in your inbox each week.

Whose Values Will Drive Our Future?

March 17, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

When people decide what is most important to them—and bother to champion it in conversation, in voting, in how they act everyday—they are helping to build the future.

It’s not just making noise, but that’s part of it. For years, when Emily was in grade school, the argument for an all-girl education was that the boys dominated the classroom with their antics and opinions while the girls were ignored or drowned out. Those making the most noise hog the attention, at least at first.

Later on, it’s about the quality of your opinions and the actions that back them up. Power and money in the commons of public life is not synonymous with good commitments or actions, but it does purchase a position with facts and experts and a platform to share it that can hold its own (if not prevail) in the wider debate over what the future will be like and what its trade-offs will cost. Not unlike the over-powered girls in grade school, it takes courage to stand up against what the best-organized, best-financed and most dominant corporate players want.

Part of the problem with these companies today is that many of them are nurturing, so that they can also cater to, lower-level priorities that we all have. For example, we all want convenience in our daily lives and to embrace a certain amount of distraction. The future that some companies want to deliver to us aims at catering to these (as opposed to other) priorities in the most efficient and profitable manner. For example:

-companies like Amazon profit by providing all the convenience you could ever want as a shopper, or

-when when your aim is relief from boredom or stress, social media, on-line games and search engines like Google provide wonderlands of distraction to lose yourself in.

Moreover, with the behavioral data these companies are harvesting from you whenever you’re on their platforms, they’ll hook you with even greater conveniences, forms of escapism and more stuff to buy in the future. Their priorities of efficiency and profit almost perfectly dovetail with ours for convenience and distraction.

This convenient and distracted future—along with a human yearning for something more—is captured with dazzling visuals and melancholy humor in Wall-E, a 10-year old movie from Pixar. (It’s worth every minute for a first or second view of a little trash robot named Wall-E’s bid to save the human race from itself.) In its futuristic world, the round-as-donuts humans who have fled the planet they’ve soiled spend their days on a We’ve-Thought-of-Everything cruise ship that’s floating through space. Except, as it turns out, the ship’s operators aren’t providing everything their passengers want and need, or want and need even more, like a thriving planet to call home.

Wall-E’s brilliance doesn’t come from an either/or future, but from a place where more important priorities are gradually acknowledged and acted upon too. It’s deciding to have more of some things and somewhat less of others. Back in the real world, that change in priorities might involve diverting some of our national resources away from economic efficiency and profit to support thriving families and communities (January 27, 2019 newsletter). Or, as in Wall-E’s case, using fewer of our shared resources for convenience and distraction and more for restoring an environment that can sustain our humanity in deeper ways.

On the other hand, as anyone who has tried it knows: it can be hard to find enough courage to stand up to those who are dominating (while they’re also subverting) the entire conversation about what we should want most. It’s our admiration for Wall-E’s kind of courage that makes Toronto’s citizens so inspiring today. Why these northern neighbors? Because they are trying through their actions to meet a primary shared objective—which is to build a sustainable urban environment that protects its natural resources—without losing sight of other priorities like efficiency, convenience and strengthening the bonds of family and community in their city.

And as if that weren’t enough, there is another wrinkle to the boldness that Torontonians are currently demonstrating. The City is partnering with tech giant Google on a key piece of data-driven redevelopment. As we admire them from afar, maybe we can also learn some lessons about how to test-drive a carbon-free future while helping that future to evolve with data we provide as we live and work. This fascinating and hopeful city is raising the kinds of questions that can only be asked when a place has the courage to stop talking about its convictions and start acting on them.

I was walking in lower Manhattan this week when I caught the sign above, encouraging me to bring my hand in for a palm reading.

I knew the fortuneteller wouldn’t find my future there, but she was probably right about one thing. Your prior experience is etched in the lines on your hands and your face. But as to where these lines will take you next, the story that Toronto is writing today is likely to provide better guidance than she will—and more information about the priorities to be weighed and measured along the way.

1. A Carbon-Free Future

Toronto has initiated two experiments, one is to gradually reduce its carbon footprint to nothing and the other is to build a community from the ground up with the help of data from its new residents. Both experiments are in the early stages, but they provide tantalizing glimpses into the places where we all might be living and working if we commit to the same priorities as Toronto.

When I’ve visited this City, it always seemed futuristic to me but not because of its built environment. Instead, it was its remarkably diverse population drawn in large numbers from every corner of the globe. Only later did I learn that over half of Toronto’s population is foreign-born, giving the place a remarkable sense of optimism and new beginnings.

Declaring its intention to radically reduce its use of fossil fuels, Toronto has taken a long stretch of King Street, one of the City’s busiest commercial and recreational boulevards, and implemented a multi-faceted plan that bans most private traffic, upgrades the existing streetcar system, concentrates new residential and commercial space along its corridor, and utilizes these densities and proximities to encourage both walking and public transportation for work, school, shopping and play.

In contrast to a suburban sprawl of large homes and distant amenities that require driving, Toronto’s urbanized alternative offers smaller living spaces, more contact with other members of the community, far less fuel consumption, and reclaimed spaces for public use that were once devoted to parking or driving. One hope is that people will feel less isolated and lonely as proximity has them bumping into one another more regularly. Another is that residents and workers visiting daily will become more engaged in public life because they’ll need to cooperate in order to share its more concentrated spaces.

Toronto’s King Street experiment envisions a time when all of its streets will be “pedestrianized.” There will still be cars, but fewer will be in private hands and those that remain will be rented as needed—anticipating the rise of on-call autonomous vehicles. Streets and roads will also remain, but they will increasingly be paid for by those who use them most, further reducing the need for underutilized roadways and freeing up space for other uses like parks and recreational corridors.

Toronto’s experiment in urban living also promotes a “sharing economy,” with prices for nearly everything reduced when the cost is shared with others. Academics like Daniel Hoornweg at the University of Ontario’s Institute of Technology have been particularly interested in using reduced prices to drive the necessary changes. It’s “sharing rides, sharing tools, sharing somebody to look after your dog when you’re not there,” says Hoornweg. Eventually, the sharing economy that started with Uber and Airbnb will become almost second nature as it becomes more affordable and residents exchange their needs to own big homes and cars for other priorities like a sustainable environment, greater access to nature within an urban area, and more engagement over shared pursuits with their neighbors.

For a spirited discussion about Toronto’s King Street experiment that includes some of its strongest boosters, you can listen here to an NPR-Morning Edition segment that was broadcast earlier this week.

2. Toronto’s Quayside Re-Development

Much like in Philadelphia where I’m writing this post, some of Toronto’s most desireable waterfront areas have been isolated from the rest of its urban center by a multi-lane highway. In response, Toronto has set aside a particularly lifeless area “of rock-strewn parking lots and heaps of construction materials” that’s spread over a dozen acres for the development of another urban experiment, this time in partnership with a “smart-cities” Google affiliate called Sidewalk Labs. In October, a coalition of the City, Ontario and Canadian governments contracted with Sidewalk to produce a $50 million design for a part of town that’s been renamed Quayside, or what Sidewalk calls “the world’s first neighborhood built from the internet up”—a sensor-enabled, highly wired environment that promises to run itself.

According to a recent article in Politico (that you can also listen to), Quayside will be “a feedback-rich” smart city “whose constant data flow [will] let it optimize services constantly” because it is “not only woven through with sensors and Wi-Fi, but [also] shaped around waves of innovation still to come, like self-driving cars.” For example, in keeping with Toronto’s other pay-as-you-go priorities, one of Quayside’s features will be “pay-as-you-throw” garbage chutes that automatically separate out recyclables and charge households for their waste output.

Here are a couple of views of the future development, including tags on some of the promised innovations.

The new Quayside neighborhood in Toronto

A truly smart city runs on data that is generated from its inhabitants and behaviorally informed algorithms instead of on decisions that are made by Sidewalk’s managers or public officials. Not surprisingly, this raises a series of legal and quality of life questions.

On the legal side, those questions include: who owns the data produced by Sidewalk’s sensors and WiFi monitors; who controls the use of that data after it’s been generated; and whose laws apply when conflicts arise? On the issue of data privacy (and other potential legal differences), the Politico article notes that there are:

few better places to have this conversation than Canada, a Western democracy that takes seriously debates over informational privacy and data ownership—and is known for managing to stay polite while discussing even hot-button civic issues.

Moreover, because Canadians view personal privacy as a fundamental human right instead of one that can be readily traded for a “free” Gmail account or access to Google’s search engine, Sidewalk has already stipulated that data collected in Quayside will never be used to sell targeted advertising.

Undesirable human impacts from machine decision-making have also been raised, and Sidewalk is hoping to minimize these impacts by asking the City’s residents in advance for their own visions and concerns about Quayside. A year of consultations is already informing the initial plan.

Longer term, urbanists like Arielle Arieff worry about “the gap between what data can and cannot do” when running a neighborhood. Part of the beauty of city living is the connections that develop “organically”–chance occurrences and random encounters that a database would never anticipate. Arieff says: “They really do believe in their heart and soul that it’s all algorithmically controllable, but it’s not.” As if to confirm her suspicions, Sidewalk’s lead manager seems equally convinced that today’s technology can “optimize everyone’s needs in a more rational way.”

Given the expertise and perspective Toronto will be gaining from its King Street experiment and its citizens’ sensitivity to human concerns (like privacy) over efficiency concerns (like convenience), there is room for optimism that the City will strike a livable balance with its high tech partner. Moreover, Sidewalk Labs has a significant incentive to get it right in Quayside. There is an adjacent and currently available 800-acre lot known as Port Lands, “a swath of problem space big enough to become home to a dozen new neighborhoods in a growing metropolis.”

To me, Toronto’s Quayside experiment seems to have little downside, with more serious issues arising in Sidewalk’s future smart city projects. Sidewalk may not be selling its Toronto data to advertisers, but it will be vastly more knowledgeable than other cities that lack either the rich pools of behavioral data it has accumulated in Toronto or the in-house expertise to interpret it. Among other things, this creates a power imbalance between a well-funded private contractor and underfunded cities that lack the knowledge to understand what they stand to gain or to forge a working partnership they can actually benefit from. Simone Brody, who runs the Bloomberg Philanthropies’ “What Works Cities” project, says: “When it comes to future negotiations, its frightening that Google will have the data and [other] cities won’t.”

But these are longer-range concerns, and there is reason today for cautious optimism that American regulators (for example) will eventually begin to treat powerful tech companies that are amassing and utilizing public data more like “utilities” that must serve the public as well as their own profit-driven interests. That kind of intervention could help to level the public-private playing field, but it’s also a discussion for another day.

In the meantime, Toronto’s boldness in experimenting its way to a future that champions its priorities through the latest innovations is truly inspiring. The cities and towns where the rest of us live and work have much to learn from Toronto’s willingness to claim the future it wants by the seat of its pants.

This post was adapted from my March 17, 2019 newsletter.

Problem Solving That Affects the Quality of Your Work

February 3, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

People complain that their working lives would be better and more satisfying if only they had at their disposal a ready-built way to solve some of the problems that they see on the job.

With noses closer to the ground, it may be a persistent problem with product or service reliability; with managers who never get back to others inside and outside the company; with the big supplier who always sends a couple fewer than you ordered. Or more broadly, it may be how one of the minerals we use in our technology leads to a hazardous waste problem for end users, how we’re always promising more service than we can deliver at the price quoted, or how our company is sucking all of the high-skill workers out of the broader community and the pipeline is running dry.

Each of these problems has wider implications. They speak to the quality of big and small relationships we have at work and the issues of responsiveness, honesty, over-selling, environmental impact, and local citizenship that affect them. Moreover, each imbalance in these work-based relationships decreases our satisfaction on the job and adds to its shortcomings as long as it festers.

Is there a way-in for us to help address these imbalances from wherever we sit in our organizations?

The problems we know best tend to be the ones we encounter every day and dream about solving, not because we’re visionaries but because we’d enjoy our jobs more if we could make some headway in solving them.

On the other hand, someone above us in the hierarchy may be failing to address them, creating a potentially awkward problem about how we’re viewed in the organization if we raise our voices. But there is a daily cost in our silence too.

We’re always more engaged in our jobs when we believe that our efforts are contributing not only to company objectives but also to personal goals that are important to us. Our goals most commonly overlap with our employers’ objectives when it comes to building stronger working relationships within the organization and outside of it with co-workers, clients, customers, suppliers, and the communities where we work,

Why is our finding ways to help re-balance these relationships so important?

In decades of industrial work studies, one key indicator of job satisfaction has always been locus of control, or believing that you have enough latitude to influence the quality of your work experience on a regular basis. When that ability is stifled in key areas, it’s like putting blinders on the ways that you go to work, narrowing the range where you feel you can make any kind of positive difference. When that narrowing continues, it leads to resignation and disengagement. Instead of presenting opportunities to exercise your autonomy, going to work begins to seem like “going through the motions.”

There are several different responses to that kind of drift on the job, but I’d argue for one in particular: your sponsoring an invitation to a broader conversation that involves every constituency affected by a particular problem at work, both within your organization and outside of it.

It’s you taking the lead in bringing a particular problem into the open and offering everyone with a stake in its resolution an opportunity to find a better way forward. You’d:

-pick the problem whose solution would provide the greatest benefit to the organization, and make your best case for all of its stakeholders coming together to solve it.

-offer to help with outreach, with organizing the conversation, and with leading the eventual process.

This conversation may not solve the problem quickly but could be a fruitful way of bringing those with the most to gain and lose together while they explore longer-term solutions. In the meantime, your actions have declared that your job satisfaction is not something you take for granted or expect to be given to you. Instead, it’s a work reward that’s important enough to put your own stake in the ground by trying to improve the quality of key relationships that make you want to go to work everyday.

+ + +

At a time when more Americans are opting out of the blood-sport of national politics, it is no coincidence that there are increasing numbers of initiatives to gather input and solve common problems more locally. Many of us are fighting against feelings of disempowerment and resignation where reasonable discussion is still possible. That is often around an organization that is important to us as an employee, customer, supplier, or user.

For example, when tech companies like Facebook and Twitter (through their platforms) and Google (through YouTube) were challenging the ways that individuals like Alex Jones were using them to promote what they judged to be “detrimental messaging,” an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal recommended convening “a content congress… to shape content-moderation policies in a more transparent and consistent way” than these platforms making what seemed to be arbitrary decisions barring a user’s access. Because these are public platforms run by private companies, the authors argued that their users (and not just their internal content moderators) needed to “hash out best practices, air grievances, and offer rebuttals.”

Such a body should not be a legally binding authority but an arena for transparent coordination, public representation and human engagement in an industry dominated by algorithms and machines. Companies want feedback; government wants more insight into decision-making; and people want to be heard.

Working groups in such a “content congress” could consider how to deal with videos showing violence or death for example (should they be available when they show police brutality but not when they depict executions by extremist groups?) or the line that social media celebrities like Mr. Jones should be prevented from crossing when they’re egging on potentially violent followers.

In making their case for content moderation by all of the stakeholders, the op-ed’s authors highlight similar, broad-based problem-solving in other areas.

-Icann, the non-profit organization that administers the domain-name system for internet addresses, has always relied on multiple stakeholders (representing businesses, other nonprofits, activists and governments) to maintain fairness and transparency.

-The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority or FINRA increasingly addresses problems like the volatile, high-frequency trading that is automatically triggered by investment algorithms with stakeholder assistance. Instead of seeking new government regulations, FINRA has convened the groups that are most impacted to implement the necessary fixes.

Multi-stakeholder initiatives are rarely the quickest or most efficient ways to understand problems or try to solve them. But they are often preferable to “black box” solutions that seem arbitrary or government regulation from outside the industry groups that are most affected. Moreover, these cooperative attempts at problem-solving often have a positive impact on those who initiate them when they get to participate in the problem-solving itself.

An Invitation to Come In & Broaden the Conversation

I looked at some of the benefits of stakeholder problem-solving in a post eight months ago, but not as a proactive way to address issues that are important to engagement on the job or one’s satisfaction at work.

That post included a discussion about “cooperative work” that is not compensated with a paycheck. Some things that you do at work are within your job description and paid for accordingly, while other things like playing on the company’s softball team or contributing to potluck events are not, but you participate in them for their non-monetary rewards like improving affiliation and camaraderie.

I’d argue that sponsoring stakeholder problem-solving falls within this second, more voluntary category. It is not something you are supposed to do or expect to be paid for. Instead, you take the initiative because it’s important to your continued engagement with the job and to your overall work satisfaction. Your initial “compensation” is calculated in enhanced autonomy, improved engagement, and greater satisfaction as problems that affect the quality of your work begin to be addressed. Because the organization also stands to gain from the stakeholder process that you sponsored, your initiative may result in a raise or bonus, but that’s not why you initiated the discussion in the first place.

My May, 2018 post looked at “cooperative endeavors” like freely contributing to the base of general knowledge in Wikipedia and to the open-source programming of software like Linux, that provide additional unpaid compensations merely by being involved in them. According to an essay about Commons-based Peer Production (or CBPP), these contributions allow us to develop our capabilities to work together collaboratively “in ways that had previously been blocked… by chance or design.”

CBPP allows contributions based on all kinds of motivations such as the need to learn or to communicate. However, most importantly, a key incentive is the desire to create something mutually useful to those contributing. This also generally means that people contribute because they find it meaningful and useful, and they believe the resulting product worthwhile. Wikipedians and hackers primarily want to create something useful for themselves, and for other people, not for the market or for short-term profit. (the italics are mine)

This discussion highlights the independent rewards that come from bringing people together to solve common problems, like the joy of collaborating with others to do something that is mutually useful and beneficial.

It seems to me that “satisfaction from work” is not something that a job necessarily “gives us.” A paycheck covers our time and effort whether we were satisfied spending that time and effort or not. To at least some extent, that makes us is responsible for the satisfaction we derive from our jobs, and sometimes requires us to step outside of our job descriptions in order to secure it. We affirm our autonomy by taking control of our job satisfaction. When we sponsor a stakeholder conversation around a festering work-related problem, we stand to enhance our unpaid rewards from work even further, by collaborating on mutually beneficial solutions that can strengthen our key relationships on the job.

Our work isn’t merely our response to demands and responsibilities that have been put on us. It is also initiatives that we undertake without pay that benefit us as well as others who are impacted by the work that we do.

It’s acting like an owner of our work and not merely an employee. Sometimes that involves turning on the light on your front porch and inviting those in your community of work to sit around your table and help to make your shared experience better than it is today.

This post is adapted from my February 3, 2019 newsletter.

A Winter of Work Needs More Color

January 27, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Over the past week, it’s been cold here, then warm, and now cold again. But one of the constants has been how this season seems to drain the world of its color.

It strikes me as a fitting metaphor for what has been happening to the nature and quality of our work in this economy. Choices have been made, and continue to be made, by policymakers on the left as well as right that are draining the color out of work for many, if not most Americans. To restore some of work’s dignity—its life force if you will—we need to make some different choices in the future than we are making today.

In recent newsletters, I’ve been considering how we landed in this increasingly barren place and what we might do to get out of it. Today, we’ll mull over the bold solutions that Oren Cass offers in his new book The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America. Cass argues that for the sake of our families, communities and individual wellbeing, we need to make some difficult choices about what is good for us as a country and what is not. Before turning to his arguments, here’s a quick review of the discussion we’ve been having recently about the declining prospects for the future of our work.

An immediate challenge is the impending loss of our jobs to machines that can work more efficiently than we can. In an economy that champions “making the most of everything as cheaply as possible,” many of us will simply become too expensive and, at the same time, unable to retrain fast enough for the few jobs that will be left for us to do. My post a couple weeks back considered where opportunities might remain at the “scaling edges” of business today, how an aging workforce can maintain its value during this period of rapid transition, and perhaps most importantly, how government policies that support workers need to be implemented if we want America to continue to capitalize on its human resources.

Around Thanksgiving, I wrote another post about “the mass flourishing” that America enjoyed through much of the 19^thCentury and deep into the 20^th. During the century and a half when the economy flourished, the workforce generally flourished as well. American leaders celebrated the human values of thinking for yourself, working for yourself, competing with others, overcoming obstacles, experimenting and making your mark. On the other hand, for the past 50 years as policy makers have tried to mitigate every kind of modern risk with regulations and safety nets, the psychic rewards that once came from “the rough and tumble working world” were gradually replaced by a different economic promise, one of ever greater material well-being. Edmund Phelps and others argue that this trade-off has undermined “the mass flourishing” we used to enjoy. Instead of worker satisfaction coming from working, the economy is being driven to produce more and more stuff for the workforce to consume when they’re not in order to keep them happy. Unfortunately, the promise of ever cheaper and bigger television sets and faster gadgets cannot meet the “non-material” needs that used to be satisfied for many by working.

Both of these posts assume that work has inherent value—that it is not merely the means that gets you more money, stuff, influence or time off. By giving us an opportuniy to demonstrate our capabilities, work allows us to realize our potential, be proud of our abilities to provide for ourselves and our families, be similarly proud of what we’re making or doing, and be more confident when facing the future because we feel that we have a stake in it and that it is not merely “happening to us.” When enough individual workers flourish like this, Phelps argues, an economy overall flourishes.

Cass’s argument in The Once and Future Worker assumes this too, before he documents how working families and communities are currently in jeopardy across America. What follows are highlights from his book, from a half-hour talk he recently gave to a group of policy wonks, and from some of the reactions to his value judgments and original proposals.

For Cass, the crisis for the American worker is evident from several unassailable facts: that wages have stagnated for a more than a generation while reliance on entitlement programs has grown and life expectancy has fallen due to addiction and obesity. He is concerned about the vast majority of urban, suburban and rural workers who are not sharing in America’s prosperity because of policy choices that have been made over the past 50 years by “the Left” (for more government spending on safety nets) and “the Right” (for its insistence on driving economic growth over every other priority). Putting expensive band-aids on the victims of pro-growth government policies—when we could simply be making better choices—is hardly a sustainable way forward in Cass’s view. He argues that if:

a labor market in which workers can support strong families and communities is the central determinant of long term prosperity, so it should be the central focus of our public policy.

When it comes to work, Cass is convinced that working—and the social benefit it provides—is more satisfying to individuals than being able to consume bigger and cheaper stuff. He is particularly concerned about the human toll, reliying on studies that say workers never recover economically from unemployment; that men only form families when they have work that can provide for them; that unemployment is a trigger for divorce; and that children have better outcomes when at least one parent is working. Moreover, communities where people are working are more vibrant and tend to attract more investment. In other words, communities filled with workers are good for those living there and good for everyone else too.

In addition, Cass cites time-use data indicating that men who are not in the workforce are watching TV or sleeping, not engaged in other productive activities. Making products or providing services that other people want is also satisfying to many who are doing so every day. Where people aren’t working, they (in Cass’s phase) “export their needs” instead, resulting in a massive transfer of payments from taxpayers to meet those needs–the Left’s band-aids. On the Right, a relentless drive to grow the economy with pro-business policies so we have more to consume at the lowest possible price not only overrides other priorities, but also makes the false assumption that short term material gratification will provide long-term economic health and stability. Whatever is satisfying consumer whims in the moment is not necessarily good for any economy long term.

So what can be done about this?

A slice of winter color by the cold Schuylkill River

With the co-dependent (but effectively dead-end) positions of the Left and the Right providing no sustainable way forward, Cass has several ideas.

In addition to questioning many of our investments in growth or safety nets, Cass challenges other allocations that America is making with its wealth, some that I agree with and others less so.

Challenging both sides’ longstanding preference for the elites, Cass would sharply reduce government subsidies for college degrees, noting that most Americans don’t even attend a community college today. These subsidies supposedly produce economic growth because the best students become the most innovative workers. But he argues that a better and fairer result would be less “college prep” and more “vocational training” for the vast majority of students who will never be going to work for a tech company in an innovation hub.

In terms of trade policy, Cass wonders why America has (at least until recently) promoted unfettered access to the cheapest labor in the world instead of creating new jobs here that are equivalent to the ones that were lost through globalization.

He argues for a reduction in environmental investments because (again) they are focused on consumer welfare instead of other considerations. To Cass, the cost of, say, clean air or water is not merely the cost of the equipment that’s needed to produce it but also “the costs” of all the other things that we could be doing for our citizens if we weren’t so preoccupied with environmental safeguards. In his cost-benefit analysis, he’d weigh the costs of subsidies for alternative energy and complying with more EPA regulations with the benefits of more jobs or higher wages. I think weighing, balancing and considering different investment strategies is always a useful exercise, but would question whether environmental investments are “short-term” consumer welfare benefits instead of longer-term, life-sustaining ones.

While admitting that labor unions in America have been overtaken by the politics of the Left, Cass argues that stripped of this influence, we should all be excited by workers who are organizing. He references several initiatives here and in Europe that are challenging pro-growth policies on the Right and championing pro-worker issues that have very few advocates on either side of the political divide.

Cass’s most warmly received proposal has been to take some of the funding for programs that currently support non-workers and give it to low-wage workers in the form of a salary boost, providing them with a supplemented income that can better sustain them and their families. (Think of the vulnerability of many federal employees after recently losing a single paycheck.) Cass notes that we let the government take money from our paychecks (like taxes), why not put additional dollars into them for struggling workers on a regular basis? In addition to encouraging work instead of idleness, such a policy change would be revenue-neutral by moving monies from programs that support non-workers into a new one that bolsters the most vulnerable end of the workforce.

Cass’s bottom line is that investments that help all working families and communities to thrive will sustain our long-term prosperity more effectively than most government investments today. As taxpayers who finance and citizens who vote for the future that we want, he invites us to throw many of our current social expenditures on the table and consider whether they are more (or less) important to the future than enabling all of America’s families and communities to thrive—particularly when much of the country is already missing out on America’s prosperity today. Given the fools bargain we have all accepted, Cass wants us to “try on” his work-based ethic and help to decide whether our country should be embracing very different priorities than it has for the past five decades.

Two prior posts, on June 3 and 10 last summer, argued that whenever a dissenter from the prevailing wisdoms like Cass takes a principled stand, he is inviting those who are unclear about their priorities to clarify them and those who disagree with them to speak up. Principle-based dissent and the conversation that follows almost always makes our “next steps” as stakeholders more assured. To facilitate that forward movement by putting Cass’s ideas into a broader context, here is one helpful reaction to his priority-of-work arguments that also manages to echo what several others have been saying.

Winter color for families and the rest of the community at a playground in Bella Vista

After Cass’s book came out, Ross Douthat wrote a column in the New York Times about the struggle amongst the members of “a small church” of moderates “to claim a middle ground between left-wing pessimism about the post-1970s American economy and right-wing faith in the eternal verities of Reaganomics.” Given the similarity between how they and Cass saw the problem, Douthat summarized some of the issues that he and other moderates have with Cass’s proposed solutions.

[A] common thread is that Cass’s diagnosis overstates the struggles of American workers and exaggerates the downsides of globalization, and in so doing risks giving aid and comfort to populist policies [like Trump’s] — or, for that matter, socialist policies, from the Ocasio-Cortezan left — that would ultimately choke off growth.

Not unlike Edmund Phelps, who would also favors largely unencumbered profit seekers, Douthat initially puts more faith in the continued vibrancy of a growth economy than in the need to make as many new investments in our families and communities as Cass advocates.

On the other hand, Douthat allows that America may have made as much progress as it can along its current path, and that the dead-end many (including me) are feeling may already be here.

[I]s the West’s post-1980 economic performance a hard-won achievement and pretty much the best we could have done, or is there another economic path available, populist or social democratic or something else entirely, that doesn’t just lead back to stagnation?

He concludes with what I’d call a fork in the road. If you tend towards the pessimistic view from the perspective of America’s working families and communities then pursuing some of Cass’s proposals may be the only way to preserve at least some of the American economy’s growth prospects going forward.

Perhaps the best reason to bet on Cass’s specific vision is that the social crisis he wants to address is itself a major long-term drag on growth — because a society whose working class doesn’t work or marry or bear children will age, even faster than the West is presently aging, into stagnation and decline.

At the same time, Douthat also notes (with some of Cass’s other critics) that working America’s challenges may be “cultural” instead of economic. I imagine that he’s thinking of factors like declining commitments to organized religion, marriage, community life and even participation in democracy itself, along with greater self-absorption with our devices and crises like opioid addiction. Encouraging work and redirecting the fruits of growth for the sake of thriving families and communities won’t help if what ails working America can’t be cured by larger investments.

I don’t happen to agree with this last possibility—but there it is.

+ + +

One of the reasons that I write this newsletter is because much of the discussion about work and work-related policy, to the extent that it occurs at all, happens below the radar. I’m convinced it’s a discussion that needs to be heard (and chewed on) more widely.

I’m also convinced that good work is of vital importance to those who are doing it as well as to the health of their families, their communities and to the country generally, and that our policy-makers are not grappling at all today with good work’s rotting underbelly.

My hope is that thinking with you about Phelps’ “flourishing economy,” about proposals to survive the future of work, and about Cass’s ideas on work-based investments in families and communities might help to open a wider policy debate as we enter the long, painful slog towards choosing our leaders again.

This post was adapted from my January 27, 2019 newsletter.

Running Into the Future of Work

January 13, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

We’ve just entered a new year and it’s likely that many of us are thinking about the opportunities and challenges we’ll be facing in the work weeks ahead. Accordingly, it seems a good time to consider what lies ahead with some forward-thinkers who’ve also been busy looking into the future of our work.

In an end-of-the-year article in Forbes called “Re-Humanizing Work: You, AI and the Wisdom of Elders,” Adi Gaskell links us up with three provocative speeches about where our work is headed and what we might do to prepare for it. As he’s eager to tell us, his perspective on the people we need to be listening to is exactly where it needs to be:

“I am a free range human who believes that the future already exists, if we know where to look. From the bustling Knowledge Quarter in London, it is my mission in life to hunt down those things and bring them to a wider audience. I am an innovation consultant and writer, and…my posts will hopefully bring you complex topics in an easy to understand form that will allow you to bring fresh insights to your work, and maybe even your life.”

I’ve involuntarily enlisted this “free-range human” as my guest curator for this week’s post.

In his December article, Gaskell profiles speeches that were given fairly recently by John Hagel, co-chair of Deloitte’s innovation center speaking at a Singularity University summit in Germany; Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz speaking at the Royal Society in London; and Chip Conley an entrepreneur and self-proclaimed “disrupter” speaking to employees at Google’s headquarters last October. In the discussion that follows, I’ll provide video links to their speeches so you can consider what they have to say for yourselves along with “my take-aways” from some of their advice.

We are all running into the future of our work. As the picture above suggests, some are confidently in the lead while others of us (like that poor kid in the red shirt) may simply be struggling to keep up. It will be a time of tremendous change, risk and opportunity and it won’t be an easy run for any of us.

My conviction is that forward movement at work is always steadier when you are clear about your values, ground your priorities in your actions, and remain aware of the choices (including the mistakes) that you’re making along the way. Hagel, Stiglitz and Conley are all talking about what they feel are the next necessary steps along this value-driven path.

1. The Future of Work– August 2017

When John Hagel spoke about the future of work at a German technology summit, he was right to say that most people are gripped by fear. We’re “in the bulls-eye of technology” and paralyzed by the likelihood that our jobs will either be eliminated or change so quickly that we will be unable to hold onto them. However, Hagel goes on to argue (persuasively I think) that the same machines that could replace or reduce our work roles could just as likely become “the catalysts to help us restore our humanity.”

For Hagel, our fears about job elimination and the inability of most workers to avoid this looming joblessness are entirely justified. That’s because today’s economy—and most of our work—is aimed at producing what he calls “scalable efficiency.” This economic model relentlessly drives the consolidation of companies while replacing custom tasks with standardized ones wherever possible for the sake of the bottom line.

Because machines can do nearly everything more efficiently than humans can, our concerns about being replaced by robots and the algorithms that guide them are entirely warranted. And it is not just lower skilled jobs like truckers that will be eliminated en masse. Take a profession like radiology. Machines can already assess the data on x-rays more reliably than radiologists. More tasks that are performed by professionals today will also be performed by machines tomorrow.

Hagel notes that uniquely human aptitudes like curiosity, creativity, imagination, and emotional intelligence are discouraged in a world of scalable efficiency but (of course) it is in this direction that humans will be most indispensible in the future of work. How do we build the jobs of the future around these aptitudes, and do we even want to?

There is a long-standing presumption that most workers don’t want to be curious, creative or imaginative problem-solvers on the job. We’ve presumed that most workers want nothing more than a highly predictable workday with a reliable paycheck at the end of it. But Hagel asks, is this really all we want, or have our educations conditioned us to fit (like replaceable cogs) into an economy that’s based on the scalable efficiency of its workforce? He argues that if you go to any playground and look at how pre-schoolers play, you will see the native curiosity, imagination and inventiveness before it has been bred out of them by their secondary, college and graduate school educations.

So how do companies reconnect us to these deeply human aptitudes that will be most valued in the future of work? Hagel correctly notes that business will never make the massive investment in workforce retraining that will be necessary to recover and re-ignite these problem-solving skills in every worker. Moreover, the drive for scalable efficiency and cost-cutting in most companies will overwhelm whatever initiatives do manage to make it into the re-training room.

Hagel’s alternative roadmap is for companies that are committed to their human workforce to invest in what he calls “the scalable edges” of their business models. These are the discrete parts of any business that have “the potential to become the new core of the institution”—that area where a company is most likely to evolve successfully in the future. Targeted investments in a problem-solving human workforce at these “scalable edges” today will produce a problem-solving workforce that can grow to encompass the entire company tomorrow.

By focusing on worker retraining at a company’s most promising “edges,” Hagel strategically identifies a way to counter the “scalable efficiency” models that will continue to eliminate jobs but refuse to make the investment that’s required to retrain everyone. While traditional jobs will continue to be lost during this transition, and millions of employees will still lose their jobs, Hagel’s approach ensures an eventual future that is powered by human jobs that machines cannot do today and may never be able to do. For him, it’s the fear of machines that drives us to a new business model that re-engages the humanity that we lost in school in the workplace.

I urge you to consider the flow of Hagel’s arguments for yourself. For more of his ideas, a prior newsletter discusses a Harvard Business Review article (which he co-wrote with John Seely Brown) about the benefits of learning that can “scale up.” A closely related post that examines Brown’s commencement address about navigating “the white-water world of work today” can be found here.

*My most important take-aways from Hagel’s talk: Find the most promising, scalable edges of the jobs Im doing. Hone the creative, problem-solving skills that will help me the most in realizing the goals I have set for myself in those jobs. Maintain my continuing value in the workplace by nurturing the skills that machines can never replace.

2. AI and Us– September 2018

Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz begins his talk at London’s Royal Society with three propositions. The first is that artificial intelligence and machine learning are likely to change the labor market in an unprecedented way because of the sheer extent of their disruption. His second proposition is that economic markets do not self-correct in a way that either preserves employment or creates new jobs down the road. His third proposition—and perhaps the most important one—is that there is an inherent “dignity to work” that necessitates government policies that enable everyone who wants to work to have the opportunity to do so.

I agree with each of these propositions, particularly his last one. So if you asked me, the way that Stiglitz was asked by a member of the audience at the end of his talk, about whether he supported governments providing their citizens with “a universal basic income” to offset job elimination as many progressives are proposing, his answer (and mine) would “No.” Instead, we’d argue that governments should be fostering the economic circumstances where everyone who wants to work has the opportunity to do so. It is this opportunity to be productive—and not a new government handout—that rises to the level of basic human right.

Stiglitz argues that new artificial intelligence technologies along with 50 years of hands-off government policies about regulating business (beginning with Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK) have been creating smaller “national pies” that are shared with fewer of their citizens. In a series of charts, he documents the rise of income inequality by showing how wages and economic productivity rose together in most Western economies until the 1980s and have diverged ever since. Labor’s share in the pie has consistently decreased in this timeframe and new technologies like AI are likely to reduce it to even more worrisome levels.

Stiglitz’ proposed solutions include policy making that encourages full employment in addition to fending off inflation, reducing the monopoly power that many businesses enjoy because monopoly restricts the flow of labor, and enacting rules that strengthen workers’ collective bargaining power.

Stiglitz is not a spellbinding speaker, but he is imminently qualified to speak about how the structure of the economy and the policies that maintain it affect the labor markets. You can follow his trains of thought right into the lively Q&A that follows his remarks via the link above. For my part, I’ve been having a continuous conversation about the monopoly power of tech companies like Amazon and the impact of unrestricted power on jobs in newsletter posts like this one from last April as well as on Twitter if you are interested in diving further into the issue.

*My most important take-aways from Stiglitz’ remarks were as follows: since I care deeply about the dignity that work confers, I need (1) to be involved in the political process; (2) to identify and argue in favor of policies that support workers and, in particular, every worker’s opportunity to have a job if she wants one; and (3) to support politicians who advance these policies and oppose those who erroneously claim that when business profits, it follows that we all do.

3.         The Making of a Modern Elder – October 2018

The pictures above suggest the run we’re all on towards the future of work. What these pictures don’t convey as accurately are the ages of the runners. This race includes everyone who either wants or needs to keep working into the future.

Chip Conley’s recent speech at Google headquarters is about how a rapidly aging demographic is disrupting the future workforce and how both businesses and younger workers stand to benefit from it. For the first time in American history, there are more people over age 65 than under age 15. With a markedly different perspective, Conley discusses several of the opportunities for companies when their employees work longer as well as how to improve the intergenerational dynamics when as many as five different generations are working together in the same workplace.

Many of Conley’s insights come from his mentoring of Brian Chesky, the founder of AirBnB, and how he brought what he came to call “elder wisdom” to not only Chesky but also AirBnB’s youthful workforce. Conley begins his talk by referencing our long-standing belief that work teams with gender and race diversity tend to be more successful than less diverse teams, which has led companies to support them. However, Conley notes that only 8% of these same companies actively support age diversity.

To enlist that support, he argues that age diversity adds tremendous value at a time of innovation and rapid change because older workers have both perspective and organizational abilities that younger workers lack. Moreover, these older workers comprise an increasingly numerous group, anywhere from age 35 at some Silicon Valley companies to age 75 and beyond in less entrepreneurial industries. What “value” do these older workers provide, and how do you get employers to recognize it?

Part of the answer comes from a changing career path that no longer begins with learning, peaks with earning, and concludes with retirement. For nearly all workers, your ability to evolve, learn, collaborate and counsel others play roles that are continuously being renegotiated throughout your career. For example, as workers age, they may bring new kinds of value by sharing their institutional knowledge with the group, by understanding less of the technical information but more about how to help the group become more productive, and by asking “why” or “what if” questions instead of “how” or simply “what do we do now” in group discussions. Among other things, that is because older workers spend the first half of their careers accumulating knowledge, skills and experience and the second half editing what they have accumulated (namely what is more and less important) given the perspective they have gained.

When you listen to Conley’s talk, make sure that you stay tuned until the Q&A, which includes some of his strongest insights.

*My most important take-aways from his remarks all involve how older workers can continuously establish their value in the workplace. To do so, older workers must (1) right-size their egos about what they don’t know while maintaining confidence in the wisdom they have to offer; (2) commit to continuous learning instead of being content with what they already know; (3) become more interested and curious instead of assuming that either their age or experience alone will make them interesting; and (4) demonstrate their curiosity publically, listen carefully to where those around them are coming from, and become generous at sharing their wisdom with co-workers privately.  When we do, companies along with their younger workers will come to value their trusted elders.

* * *

This has been a wide-ranging discussion. I hope it has given you some framing devices to think about your jobs as an increasingly disruptive future rushes in your direction. We are all running with the wind in our faces while trying to get the lay of the land below our feet in this brave new world of work.

Note: this post is adapted from my January 13, 2019 newsletter.