Next week I will be facilitating a small group in a large conversation at the Confederation Centre - 8.30 - 1pm.
This is the start of a 3 year project to find out what the reality of the new workplace might be and to discover how best to design it so that we can be more aligned to our need to work productively and also to live properly.
Just we when I began this work at NPR back in 2005 when NPR asked itself what will the web do and how must we prepare - we don't and cannot know the answers.
So when I say that we will start to have a conversation, I mean this. Not a series of speeches but a real conversation. We will try our best to find out what the best questions are rather than jumpt to a "Plan". For if we don't know the context, we might plan to do the wrong thing. After all I like many who have been in this field for decades know that so far we have failed.
We have failed to find a practical way to make the workplace work for both the employer and the employed.
This project will take 3 years. We plan to visit all of Canada and build up a picture of what we think is going on. As we go from community to community we will add what we learned to the rough sketch that we hope to create here in Charlottetown.
I hope that we might be able to co create a picture of where we are going and hence begin to see the areas where we might best work.
This is how we started this work back in 2005 at NPR:
As you can see our early work produced not answers but questions. Questions based in time and on choices.
From this picture thousands of conversations took place. Many were able to push through the norms of the day and see for themselves what the future held. These people had prepared their mind for the future. It is no surprise to me that NPR itself is way ahead of the pack in media in creating their own future - of being protagonists in the act of creation.
I think that what we know a lot already about the future - the smaller workforce, the higher percentage of women, the wide spread adoption of social media, peak oil, a revolution in the economy - suggests to me that we might be able to construct such a framework.
What do you think? Do you have something to contribute and to learn?
