Winning by Sharing

A summary of fractional work at the Tory party conference

Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to actually speak about the rise of fractional work at the Tory Party conference on the opening day yesterday.  They outsourced the logistics of security passes to Fingerprint events.  Even though they acknowledge receipt of my application, passport and photo id my pass still wasn't ready. After taking two more photos of me at 7am in the morning, the police checking/validating id told me that due to my country of birth, extra checks have to be carried out.  Nice.  It was a Tory MP who invited me to talk there!  I got a text message saying it was ready at 10am, two hours after the speaking slot.  Thanks for that.

Fractional Work

View more presentations from Leon Benjamin.

The good news is that my hosts at JobsGoPublic and Career4Me presented on my behalf.  But here is the point I wanted to make.

The recent announcement by the Conservative Party's plans to cut the benefits of people on incapacity benefits is in some respects laudable because there are no doubt (statistically) some cheats, slackers and chancers on the list of 2.6m claimants.  But why such an emphasis on the supply side of the jobs equation? What's being done on the demand side, you know, to actually create work.  This presentation argues for the economic stimulus of an emerging form of work that has the potential to become the most dominant form of work within a generation.

As an aside, one of things that strikes me with all the political coverage right now on the EU is that politicians never, ever question the validity of their underlying organisational models.  In other words, it isn’t about ‘Broken Britain’ it’s about ‘broken system’.  Companies and governments won’t survive in their present form without decentralising some or all of their decision making.  But we can't go there can we?

Fractional work emerges

I've been writing about the emergence of fractional work for some time now.  The UK's Peopleperhour is a platform for sourcing people on a literally per hour/per day basis.  My contention is that the only area in which we've not seen serious innovation by large companies is with their labour models.  When big companies start to adopt a fractional approach to at least some areas of their workforce......

Winning by Sharing is a collection of true stories combined with market research and analysis about the future of work, how profoundly it will affect people in the next decade, and how this will take most people by surprise.

"Imagine organizations in which most workers aren’t employees at all, but electronically connected freelancers living wherever they want  to. And imagine that all this freedom in business lets people get more of whatever they really want in life – money, interesting work, the chance to help others, or time with their families.” Thomas Malone, The future of work

Are you a loyal rebel?

Young people are now coaching online gaming fanatics to get them through difficult stages in the game.  They earn a living wage from it.  Other gamers derive an income from selling codes that unlock new game levels on eBay . Women still in their teens with huge followings on Twitter and MySpace earn six figure fees from cosmetic brands to influence their followers.  This work is frequently fractional in nature and so allows people to blend work with their passions, creativity and interests.  YouTube (owned by Google) has applied for terrestrial broadcasting licences in its major markets.  What opportunities does this create for our young people?  There should be little doubt in most people’s mind, that a tectonic shift in the nature of work has occurred, even though it is apparently ‘unevenly spread’.

Young people sense the internet has caused a fundamental change in their attitude towards work and the realisation that a 'career' has ceased to be a feasible way to organise working life. They now view work as an instrument of self-development and personal autonomy and entrepreneurship not as a status symbol, but as an attitude - an attitude that everyone is going to need.  We are not preparing our children for this kind of work.  We do not teach them;

•    How to collaborate
•    How to communicate
•    How to network
•    How to thrive on portfolio work
•    How to create sustainable, ethical wealth

It is hardly surprising that Facebook, Twitter, Google and MySpace were created in the US.  We simply don’t teach our young people “to have a healthy disrespect for the impossible”.

The Olympic Legacy – a 21st Century Guild

The most consummate networker of our time recently said;

“If you want to set something in motion on this planet, you need access to people you haven’t met. You need knowledge and information that is not yet at your disposal. You need ideas. You can always get them somewhere. From people.”  Martijn Aslander, Loyal Rebels

The internet and more specifically social software is enabling peer-to-peer connectivity on a breathtaking scale.  This is, historically speaking, a completely new phenomenon. One that’s easily as significant as the invention of the printing press in terms of its societal impact, velocity and rate of adoption.  

Social networks are communities of people who share the same cause, situation, or vocation. They facilitate professional exchange, allow members to establish a bond of common experiences and challenges online, and build networks of relationships which are leveraged offline. 

Research pioneered in the 1970’s by Etienne Wenger on what he called ‘communities of practice’ concluded that “learning is an inherently social process and that it cannot be separated from the social context in which it happens”.

These are in effect, early stage 21st century guilds.  There is an opportunity for the LDA to create a modern day guild that equips young people with the skills to thrive in the networked economy.  Social software means it’s possible to;

•    Provide a teacher for every student, on every subject, on a one to one basis and ‘on demand’
•    Enable the wider local community to contribute to student learning (“it takes a whole village”)
•    Make every component of the guild qualification a practical, real life project, that shifts mindset   from ‘job’ to wealth creation

There is a case for creating a platform that goes beyond online forums and ‘talking shops’.  By re-purposing social software used by existing global business communities, students can be provided with the freedom to organize themselves so that their practical projects can be realised with the help and support of their local communities. 

Members of this community will be drawn from the local business/social ecosystem to create a diverse population of people committed to coaching, mentoring and transferring their knowledge to students as an integral part of the qualification process.  The social, collaborative and communications skills acquired alone will satisfy employers increasingly vocal demand for these skills sets.  This will prepare the country’s Loyal Rebels for a wide range of models of work, provide them with the support networks that are now an essential aspect of achieving personal work/life balance aspirations, and more importantly, make them more ‘employer ready’.

A work survival guide

Great to see more output on the 'future of work' meme.  Ian Sanders's new book Juggle: Re-think work. Reclaim your life.

The book features an interview with the worldwide CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi who says, "Jugglers are living the most liberated, free, entrepreneurial, inspirational lives".

I guess I was way too early (circa 2004) with my book on the future of work;

Winning by Sharing is a collection of true stories combined with market research and analysis about the future of work, how profoundly it will affect people in the next decade, and how this will take most people by surprise.

Summarised by the statement.....

"The internet has caused a fundamental change in attitude towards work and the realisation that a 'career' has ceased to be a feasible way to organise working life. I now view work as an instrument of self-development and personal autonomy and entrepreneurship not as a status symbol, but as an attitude - an attitude that everyone is going to need."

Strong & Connected

Research to be undertaken on platforms for enabling group/team based collaboration as exemplified by ki work.

University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has published its Key transformative research focus on four main areas: Virtual organizations for distributed communities;  high-performance computing; data, visualization, and interaction; and education and workforce development.

NSF article goes onto describe....

PRAC is another smaller-scale program that provides money for people to travel and develop their collaborations. So you might say that's money to develop virtual organizations.

Signs of fractional work continue to emerge.

Fractional work. The next small thing?

Fractional work emerges in the developing nations. An archetypal example of Winning by Sharing. Nathan Eagle, a research fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, in New Mexico, is launching a project similar to Amazon's Mechanical Turk but that distributes tasks via cell phones.  For example, mobile phone menus  are being translated into obscure African languages, small pieces at a time, to a large number of people.  Each translation earns pennies but projects a trebling of the average daily wage in some of the world's poorest countries.  Read the whole thing.

Workplace stress? An exit exists

Just discovered the Work Organisation Labour & Globalisation think tank, based in the UK, that's published research to support the arguments made in Winning by Sharing (A new way of working. A different way of doing business).

There is a downloadable abstract of a paper that "explores the shock experienced by people working in the publishing industry when faced with losing their jobs to the Indian labour market".  It also finds that contrary to perception Indian workers have equally insecure careers. 

There are also studies on the impact of globalisation in the context of work.  "As a result labour is also subjected to the dynamics of the global economy with consequences for working conditions, wages, job security, skills and benefits.  This is one of the reasons why the 'informal' economy is growing.  An exit exists:

from:

a fossil energy regime and its often precarious forms of labour

to:

the use of renewable energy, participatory and cooperative ways to organise production."

Shameless plug:  This is exactly what ki work enables.  The Japanese word ‘ki’ loosely translated means "trusted relationship".

Careers are dead. Long live careers!

Read this short article in the Evening Standard last night on the way home from the West End entitled
"City Workers quit to start new life as freelancers".  There was some early warning about this a few years ago;

...although the cause(s) were different.  Then: the dysfunctional corporate and the stress of command & control. Now: the credit crunch.   Perhaps the same thing?

PeoplePerHour is cited as the UK's answer to eLance, but ki-work enables team based peer production.

Download the whole thing. Download The future of work in 2005

Fractional work:  The Next Small Thing

The credit crunch and the rise of ki work

Winning by Sharing is a collection of true stories combined with market research and analysis about the future of work, how profoundly it will affect people in the next decade, and how this will take most people by surprise. Leon Benjamin, circa 2004.

Michael & Jim Wolff explain in this slide show why ki work is finally making sense for the "people who have been taken by surprise".

Credit Crisis to Collaborative Capitalism

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: internet collaboration)

Ki work: A platform for fractional work

Michael Wolff has been explaining what ki work is for many years.  This is perhaps one of the best explanations because he's set it in context so well. In a recent email thread written in response to a query from an interim management firm Michael says;

people4business.com is a neatly structured freelance marketplace, primarily serving buyers and professionals in the UK. it is one of about a hundred “me-too” businesses that have followed the original models developed by elance and guru. apart from UK focus, it has very little to differentiate itself from the other 100 service providers in this market.

The underlying assumption of all elance look-alikes is that the fundamental organisational principle in all business is that demonstrated by the “firm”* or modern corporation. buyers are some kind of corporation, however small, and sellers are employed contractors to these corporations. the underlying reason is that hitherto it has been more sustainable and cost effective for businesses to be organised in this way, rather than a situation where the economy consisting exclusively of a multitude of independent, self-employed people who contract with one another. this model of business was classically explained by ronald coase in 1937 in his famous article: the nature of the firm.

However ki work is truly part of the online work revolution. we see the emergence of a new organisational model that is structured in such a way that “a multitude of independent, self-employed people who contract with one another” are able to complete transactions as reliably, but more cost-effectively, than the conventional firm. this organisational model has been pioneered within the open source development environment (http://sourceforce.org) and described in Yochai Benkler’s seminal work: coase’s penguin, or linux and the nature of the firm.

ki work takes the organisational concepts of sourceforge (where open source projects are organised on a free basis) and translates them into a model where multiple online work projects can be executed with remuneration for the suppliers. just as sourceforge is a utility enabling virtual open projects, so is ki work the utility for paid virtual projects.

Hence ki work’s main differentiator from the elance model: an organisational structure comprised of category marketplaces, which are  co-ordinated by category leaders and experts. this forms the basis for the creation of virtually outsourced projects, executed by “a multitude of independent, self-employed people who contract with one another”.

What relevance does this have in the interim management market? until you surfaced we did not include “interim management” as a category. our perception is that interim managers focus primarily on getting work in conventional businesses as a form of temporary employment (rather like elance), and as such, are not generally attuned to becoming leading players in the emergent virtual outsourcing market. however, I suspect that a small percentage (maybe 20%) of interim managers would be interested in the emergent opportunities, and I see our “interim management” category as being an alternative to “project management”.

So regarding people4business.com and all the other ones like them, I do not see these as a threat but as a valuable channel for creating awareness in the marketplace. the elance model, now 10 years old, is due to be superseded by the virtual organisational model. ki work is leading the way.

These models are starting to emerge in the creative industries.  Andy Law of St Luke's has created a worldwide network of partners at The LAW Firm, Citizen Agency started as a network of advertising, marketing and web 2,0 professionals, and John Caswell's GroupPartners' expert network delivers most of the value to its clients.  So when will we see Agency.com, AKQA, BBH and others adopt these fractional models of work and start leveraging these platforms to make their biggest cost (people) variable rather than fixed?