The Unbearable Lightness of Being

With so much of daily work life now being unusual for so many people, one of the biggest questions of all is about which kinds of businesses will be permanently changed from now on and which kinds will continue to try to revert to the previous “normal”.

As strategists, some of us want to aim at that question by determining the pros and cons of going either way, then correlating business models with those pros and cons.

The correlation should leave us with “profiles” that categorize businesses.

Then, in any category or profile, some companies will actually be in better condition to adapt than will be others; so, some will change.

But strategy will also ask the question, if you change, what kind of change will you adopt? Do you reposition, restructure, redefine, reskill, recapitalize, or what?

Whatever the answer, it will have to deal with how individual workers and contributors feel about things. Whether unemployed, relocated, or suddenly reassigned in some way, many currently feel displaced, undervalued, or invisible — and do not know what influence they have.

This article will end up with a provocative but undeveloped response to that question. Subsequent edits of the article can show any additional insights and maturity of the ideas obtained. (All feedback: welcome.)

The future of Working

Now let’s go back to the first sentence in this article. In that statement, there is an individual who is wondering how and where they will fit in to the imminent future of business X or business Y.

The major issue at hand is the difference between that business defining “fitness” and that individual defining fitness.

And the reason why that is the major issue is because in effect, what makes the difference matter is … who has the power to make the definition the selection criteria for inclusion.

What news value is there in calling that out? Almost none.

And the importance of calling it out is precisely that it is NOT news. The situation is exactly that not much, if anything, has changed about selection between a year ago and now.

What do we mean by “selection”?

Any business somehow formulates an idea of what it needs to be able to do. Today, the emphasis is “normally” going to be not on capability (potential) but instead on ability (actual). Selection starts with the mandate, find the ability. The reason for going that route is simple: it is the route that combines minimizing presumed risk with maximizing presumed advantage.

Now here’s a hypothesis: for any given company, the supply of ability is at least three times as large as necessary to make a good selection. Where did that idea come from? The source is a comparison — the number of people who are today, willingly or unwillingly, separated from employment that only 8 (eight) months ago suited them. For many, there is a sense that despite their substance, they no longer exist…

This is an unscientific assertion — that the worker pool is three times as large as necessary. It falsely suggests a 1-in-3 chance of being hired, competitively. But what it does point at is a few common conditions.

Exclusion

1. Replacing employees is more expensive than retaining them. This means that replacement signals an expectation that the business will not achieve sufficient ability from the employee’s observable capability. A released employee has ability to sell, but capability is not similarly demonstrable. Nonetheless, the ability goes back into the labor pool.
2. Unsigned or rejected candidates have no idea how long it will take to sell their ability as required capability. The criteria for competing with each other on the basis of required capability are not standardized, and each individual hiring manager, company, or recruiter brings its idea of what counts.

Inclusion

As a selection criterion, required capability is a characteristic that normally an individual can indicate by only three methods.

1. Testing
2. Same-problem solutions delivered prior
3. References

Compared to each other:

• testing may be available only at the individuals own expense
• same-problem solutions may not be as relevant or convincing, given the current and expected variety, frequency and volume of change
• references “spend” someone else’s reputational “capital”; but let’s just simplify that by calling it Relationships. The individual cannot reliably dictate or manage the relationship between a Reference and another third party, although cultivating it proactively can make it more likely to help later on demand.

Those differences exist for everyone, but the chance that one or more of them is advantageous for the individual is something that a career counselor probably works on, with or for the individual. If you are out of work, you may or may not have a counselor that you can afford, if you have one at all.

A Maslovian World

It definitely means something important that available workers can routinely suffer up to 95% rejection rates when looking for work. And carrying that rate of rejection for 30, 60, 90 or more days must be seen as a characteristic of the employment acceptance mechanisms, not just as a characteristic of the individual’s “market value”. This is not a one-in-three chance of being hired.

When people with demonstrably high levels of experience and skill are suffering high rejection rates, it is fair to ask if the environment is systemically excluding them.

A decade (or less) ago we might have said institutionally excluding them instead of systematically, but the ability to use the internet to discover both supply and demand with equal ease shows that things today are generally beyond institutional control and are more of a heterogeneous ecology.

As a thought experiment: what does a legacy (existing or incumbent) business use to model order in this systemic diversity? Its view of itself and its tolerances generates the model that it uses. Consider the typical business based on competing products. We think that the model is hierarchical, with the top usually offering the fewest opportunities and the bottom offering the most. Again, this is unscientific, but we will bet that it is highly resonant:

strategy (aka aspiration) — this is based on creativity being a high-priority value defined as an investment

competition (aka risk) — this is based on some specific leading indicator such as a profile and a correlation to predefined “performance” measures

compatibility (aka trust) — this is mainly due to, or derived from, relationships, which tend to seek productivity and stability

compliance (aka agreement) — this could be per contract, quota, or even compensation

maintenance (aka necessity) — this is usually technical or foundational

The idea here is that when a company has an open position, the position starts out with some priorities already assigned to the different levels of the hierarchy. Each level in the hierarchy is an attribute. In effect, the opening already carries an idea of what importance each attribute has.

Since that prioritization does NOT have to conform to the hierarchy by giving higher levels greater emphasis, the open position can carry any combination of attributes in any combination of strengths.

Without seeing or knowing what that combination is, the job-seeking individual simply cannot efficiently decode an opportunity advertised by the company. After tens, or even hundreds, of applications, the individual may not have identified any meaningful practical pattern of advancement towards inclusion. Other peripheral businesses instead charge individuals for practically useful information that might help.

Civilization and its Discontents

In the highly disrupted environment for the future of working, the sheer amount of available talent suggests that creating new companies is more likely to put more people to work than relying on existing companies — but of course the problem here is to make those new companies viable, then feasible, then desirable, before they launch.

This suggests that there might be a different model of the demand for work (i.e., applied talent and skill) in the environment. An alternative model, if reasonably reflecting needs to be commercialized, could directly influence the creation of jobs outside of the high-rejection system that most non-working skilled, experienced applicants face today.

We would say that in this model, the “first order of business” is to create and stabilize the view of the new environment of demand. This discovery work becomes the bottom level of the model hierarchy.

Then there needs to be new infrastructure to connect providers to the demand without making the connection unaffordable for individuals.

With connectivity available, transparency that literally creates reliable and agile relationships is key, otherwise there is no reasonable expectation of sustainability.

And on top of that, partnerships should be a primary force in cultivating the ongoing evolution of the environment as a condition that needs ongoing and new work.

Those influences should, finally, provoke new discoveries and ideas about what can be managed and how.

SO… as an attractor and perspective of capabilities, the new hierarchy of need is (from foundation to peak):

demand mapping (aka organize research)

engagement infrastructure (aka producer marketplace)

transparency (aka organizational accountability)

collaboration (aka partnerships)

strategy (aka management and renewal)

That new hierarchy, with its intent to re-envision, leverage, and restructure the demand landscape, hypothetically sidesteps the existing high-rejection system of employment by seeking different attributes and profiles desired and usable immediately. It’s a different value system driving the organizational design and its priorities for inclusion. It is more open source and community-driven.

What it does not do is subsidize individuals to create “equal” opportunity within the altered systemics. But, we argue that this is neither the point nor the need at hand. Instead, alternatives to “business as usual” are the objective, and are urgent even if they are expected to be primarily transitional.

We should expect its impact to be Innovative Disruption.

What Next?

As an end to this episode of the thought experiment, we note that high rates of exclusion cannot be a positive social impact of business. And with that in mind, we note that aside from their funding, universities are intriguingly similar to the alternative model. At a high level of generality, we can say that a university is organized to produce services and infrastructure, rather than products and competition.

If we find that the environment of demand is now weighted more towards the need for services and infrastructure, then the rough example of universities is immediately interesting as a prototype; but of greater special interest is the possibility that paying people to learn might be a better way to handle creating the next normal, than is charging them to learn.

© 2020 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra Research