By Martin Davis
I lead a burgeoning foresight practice as a member of the innovation team at a leading cancer center in Texas. We are in the early stages of a foresight effort aimed at crystallizing a strategic initiative already in progress to transform how we work.
The larger effort began before the pandemic, but as we have passed the four year-mark on that event, the lingering issue that is still top-of- mind for most everyone involved in this effort has boiled down to questions about how to manage remote and hybrid work.
And it's not just us.
In a recent poll published in HR Executive magazine, workers' fears about Return-to- Office (RTO), for 43% of the respondents, RTO ranked higher than their fear of divorce.
A couple ideas seem to be dominating the narrative. Putting AI and automation aside, news headlines are still dominated by the concept of "return," which means that much of the discussion surrounding the future of work is anchored in the past. Return to the office means return to familiar ways of working.
To add more dimensions to this dialogue, we are opting to view the organizational design and
change through the lens of worldviews and values, as well as taking a developmental view. The
deconstructive approach offered by Causal Layered Analysis (CLA), and ideas mined from Integral Theory, and the recognition of the inherent complexity of human organizations can offer richer ways to uncover a deeper understanding of the issues at hand and gain traction toward meaningful change.
THE LITANY AND THE MYTH
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy just announced that beginning in 2025, "We've decided that we're going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID." Jassy said he believes the move will better set up Amazon "to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other and our culture to deliver the absolute best for customers and the business."
According to Forbes, this is similar to several other large corporations. This messaging seems to indicate a certain sense of gravity that keeps us fixed rather than pushing us forward into possible futures.
While a graduate student at the University of Houston, I made a minor exploration aimed at furnishing workplaces of the future. A quick journey through 75 years or so of office layouts will offer a sense of the same gravitational pull that seems to underpin the idea of RTO. The progression of office layouts reflects a tension between worker
autonomy and managerial control, underpinned by economic considerations. From regimented factory floors, offices emerged as bullpens, promoting teamwork but enabling surveillance. The Action Office and Office Landscape concepts promised personalization and variation based on contextual research into workers' needs.
However, they ended up instead leading to the cubicle era — another ordered layout that offered privacy but still offered oversight. The shift to the much-maligned open office followed.
While touted as fostering collaboration, it often maximizes space efficiency and facilitates monitoring under the guise of openness and modernity. One could read this as an ongoing story of control.
An oversimplified CLA of this issue would lead us from a litany of RTO, systemically propelled by economic pressures from real estate and tech infrastructure investments, coupled with theoretical challenges of measuring productivity to a conflict in worldview around trust and autonomy and a tension between traditional management styles and emerging work trends.
The myth at the bottom of this iceberg is arguably the panopticon — the watchers and the watched. Visibility equals productivity, or at least perceived productivity. Spending energy rewriting the narrative that begins to emerge from this myth/metaphor looks valuable, but the more telling revelation here is the idea of the clash in worldviews and values.
Building on this, we can view the idea of "work" as a relationship and examine the tensions between workers and management that have emerged over the past few years through an Integral lens.
YOU, ME, AND WE
A recent story features survey data from Bamboo HR illustrates that "Almost two in five (37%) of managers, directors, and executives said their companies had layoffs in the last 12 months because they anticipated that more employees would quit after enacting RTO policies."
As relationships go, this kind of passive-aggressive behavior is not an earmark of a healthy one. This sort of conflict seems rooted in what I see as an offset in development
exposed by the pandemic response.
Working to gain a point of view on the domain led me to Frederic Laloux's Reinventing
Organizations, where I found Ken Wilber's foreword to the first edition. Laloux leverages Wilber’s Integral Theory in his description of highly evolved, or "Teal organizations," referencing the idea of memes and their corresponding colors in spiral dynamics, which also informs Integral Theory. While we don't need Wilber’s entire Theory of Everything, plucking ideas from the core of Integral Theory offers an interesting lens to view this relationship.
As illustrated in his foreword to Laloux's work, Wilber lays out The Quadrants, which offers four major perspectives he believes can be leveraged to view any phenomenon: The Interior and the Exterior and the Individual and the Collective. Integral Theory posits that one can map different aspects of the employees and the organization across all quadrants, but the conflict lies between the interior individual (upper left) and aspects of both the interior and exterior organization (lower left and right).
Again, there is a lot here, but we can take what we need to leverage as a frame to analyze the previously mentioned offset in development that is creating tension between management and employees. As read through the quadrants, the
employees have advanced, and organizations seem to have stagnated.
The discontinuous change brought by a pandemic response meant organizations had to
respond to survive, and that yielded a spike in work from home/anywhere. For folks who hadn't already been engaged in remote work, this offered a glimpse into a different way of working and exposure to the benefits of other ways to manage their time, relationships, and resources they previously didn't have. Essentially, it provided an opportunity where employees evolved, but many organizations
didn't evolve alongside them; instead, they endured the circumstances, and as time went on, it seemed their willingness to progress in concert with employees diminished. Plus, ća change.
Here again, we see an illustration of the gravity of return, rooted in the unchanging worldview of the organizations writ large, while the prospect of a different approach has created a transformational shift in values for employees.
IT’S NEVER SO SIMPLE
In all cases, we need to look at these issues in terms of their complexity. RTO is a heavy- handed response for most organizations that doesn't offer much to account for the many different functional roles and their needs in a typical enterprise. Does an accountant have the same needs for creativity, collaboration, and communication as a software engineer? A project manager? A surgeon?
At a high level, as I look at our institution, we are at least three organizations in one. We encompass a clinical organization, a research organization, and the typical administrative and knowledge work organization. This notion is likely inadequate, but it is a good place to start, and recognizing these as wholes on their own (or holons) seems imperative. Soon, we will begin to understand how these schemes might affect one another, both as organizing principles and the fluidity of professionals moving from one area to another. I have engaged stakeholders whose work requires they move across all three organizations, from patient care to research to work that informs ways of working strategically and procedurally. These are typical roles for us, and the answers don't seem simple.
Our institution is seeing shifts in how we work that yield impacts related to where work
happens. Some of these are driven by technology, and some are accelerated by the pandemic response. In terms of models of care, we see more shifts to virtual care through consultations, virtual nursing, and tele-sitting. We anticipate that these means of care delivery will continue to grow. While we do basic science and work in wet labs, much of the cutting-edge work in research and clinical trials is driven by data. Accelerating clinical research though in-silica trials with synthetic patient cohorts is data science work that happens digitally and much of this work can happen anywhere.
We have also done futures work that offers speculation into how skills and roles might need to be adapted based on the advent of other new technological shifts. As we look 10 years ahead, with the average Post-Doc (clinical researcher) in their late 20's to early 30's, we see Gen Alpha, the first generation born entirely in the 21st century. We need to understand and prepare for their social and technological expectations of work if we want to truly start to move forward, likely towards more decentralized and distributed futures. We aim to continue this deconstructive and comprehensive inquiry to add value to our long-term strategic planning and avoid the noise and myopia of simply telling everyone to "come back to the office."
Martin Davis is an Innovation Strategist at a leading U.S. cancer center—he takes an integrative approach that blends research, design, foresight, and strategy. Over the past two decades, Martin's work has spanned creating immersive experiences in the museum world, UX and product development in various domains, operationalizing strategic design in the enterprise, and now creating a foresight capability within an innovation team. He earned a master's degree in Strategic Foresight from the University of Houston. All opinions in this article are his own.
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