Stowe Boyd: The Ecology of Work

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The nature of work itself is fundamentally about the way people organize themselves and how they make decisions in a group. Even though change in the workplace is accelerating, Boyd notes, “most businesses still run on folklore—they’re not founded on principles that are supported by any kind of research.”

The future of work looks something like this: small workgroups, self-organizing teams, fewer top-down controls, less time spent keeping everyone moving in the same direction and more diversity in the play of ideas.

Stowe Boyd, a work ecologist and Editor in Chief/Curator of Work Futures, calls it simply “the new way of work.”  It’s hard to call it anything different, he says, because its newness is the only thing people can agree on.

“In its totality, it’s very subversive when you compare it to what an ideal company of 2000 might have been,” he says. “We’re in a situation where things are changing all the time. People are involved in these changes but aren’t necessarily cognitively aware of what’s going on.”

His advice? To not only imagine what you want your own future of work will look like it and sharpen your skills to go after it. The responsibility lies within our own right to take on new skills, to broaden our networks, and connect in ways that develop emergent leadership characteristics to operate in a new era of work.