A playbook for Canadian communities wanting to create grassroots “complex adaptive coalitions” to address the future of work for their citizens is a step closer to reality, thanks to participants at True North 2019.
The 120 attendees at the Manulife-hosted workshop on June 19, titled Future of Work and Learning – Taking Community Action, crowd-sourced their experience and aspirations to help shape a Communitech-inspired initiative that addresses how workers will adapt as automation and artificial intelligence drive workplace change.
Katie Kitchen, Assistant Vice-President of Human Resources for Manulife, told the crowd: “Every voice in this room will contribute to the future world of work.”
The June 19 workshop built on learnings from meetings earlier this year, involving Communitech, Manulife, Deloitte and the University of Waterloo, that examined the challenges facing today’s workers as they transition to the work of tomorrow: aka future work.
Two breakfast meetings in January and February led by community thought leaders attracted a complex coalition of participants, from academia, government, industry to scaleups, to discuss how communities can adapt to future work. Those sessions identified various demographic groups affected by future work, and an April meeting featured real people from those demographic groups who shared their successes and frustrations.
Participants in the Future of Work workshop focused their discussions on three key
worker groups, including Freelancers. (Communitech photo: Sara Jalali)
The True North workshop offered the opportunity for new eyes – including cryptography companies, environmental activists, academics, marketing firms, software developers and many others (the workshop was arguably the most popular at True North, since it was the first to have been fully subscribed) – to review the challenges in three key demographics: Mid-Career Workers; Freelancers; and Co-op Students, each of them rendered into three subsets.
For instance: Mid-Career workers increasingly expect their jobs to adapt to their lifestyle, so employers might respond with jobs that are results-focused rather than evaluated by facetime. Or, Freelancers want to know that their freelance lifestyle choice is celebrated, so business and educational institutions might need to do more to promote the viability of the freelance lifestyle.
Participants used a mobile app to comment on, or make additions to, the demographic summaries at nine “stations” around the room. The only sounds in the room being the tapping of cellphone keys, it was likely the quietest event at True North.
In an interview while attendees tapped, Simon Chan, Vice-President of Talent, Academy and Future of Work at Communitech and a project leader, explained that the result is “a collection of community-based ideas about, say, how you might help a mid-career with understanding what are some of the continuous lifelong learning challenges, how do they know how to start when they are upscaling or rescaling.
“Since we’ve started this in the last few months, we’ve had a number of organizations reach out to us and say, ‘You know what, we really actually want to be a part of this complex coalition.’”
Chan said the interest is not limited to universities or major players: “We’ve had startups and scaleups reaching out to us and saying, ‘We don’t have large HR departments like at Manulife, but we would benefit from the community perspective of some of the learnings.’”
An attendee takes part in the Future of Work workshop during True North 2019.
(Communitech photo: Sara Jalali)
After attendees finished their comments, the results were summarized and Christine Robinson, head of Human Resources at Manulife, promised that a working group would convene this fall to activate the project.
Chan said that implementing a complex adaptive coalition in Waterloo Region will be a talent attractant: “You’ll realize that when you come to this region that every organization that is here already understands why you need to be future-work ready.”
Speaking to the crowd, he noted that he had been the escort for the day for New York Times columnist and True North keynote speaker Thomas Friedman, who is himself a champion of complex adaptive coalitions. “When I told him what we were doing, he said this is exactly what communities should be doing, this working together across academia, government and industry to move these solutions forward.”
Chan said Waterloo Region is just the first stop for the complex adaptive coalition playbook: “I’m an aspirational guy. I’d like to see this as a playbook that we can send to other communities. That’s what True North is all about: big ideas.”
