‘The Future of X’ Turns to Collaboration in the Workplace. Tune In – OZY

In a new five-part podcast, in partnership with Smartsheet, OZY paints a picture of the workplace to come, from productivity and privacy to social enterprise and the rise of gamification. Listen up on OZY.com, Spotify, Apple or wherever you prefer to stream your audio.

Collaboration. Teamwork. In the superconnected, crazily networked jobs of the future, how we work together will be critical. And so will the teams we work in. This season on The Future of X, OZY is exploring future of the workplace. In the latest episode, we asked some leading futurists and business executives about what the future of work means for one of the most important elements of any business: working with other people.

You should think of it like a rock band.

Liselotte Lyngs, founding partner, Future Navigator

Workplaces have been organized around hierarchical divisions of labor for centuries. And that was a perfectly sensible way of doing things, say, 150 years ago, says Mark Stevenson, a futurist and author of An Optimists Tour of the Future. Now its looking like there are better ways of organizing ourselves, which are more like diverse, bottom-up collaborative systems.

A more collaborative workforce means that finding the right team members, and the best groupings, becomes paramount.You should think of it like a rock band, says Liselotte Lyngs, a founding partner of Future Navigator, a think tank based in Copenhagen. They take a lot of practice working together and you need the same kind of patience in order to get a team that is really working well together.

In the future, companies will move from headhunting to team hunting. Specialized teams will move from company to company and project to project.And the resulting interpersonal relationships that will build up as you and your teammates move across companies and projects as one will be key to not just job performance but also your overall health and well-being.

Were gonna have more diverse teams that are going to add a lot more value to companies in ways they didnt expect, says Lisa Bodell, a futurist and CEO of FutureThink. Innovation is going to really take off in the next 15, 20 years.

This episodes Future Tip? If you want to get ahead in your career, go pick up a book on parenting. Tomorrows workplace values can be found in todays developments in the study of family dynamics. The new rules in childhood development are based on decades of research and moving away from awards systems and tough love and toward empowerment, communication and empathy. Plus, it may help when your boss is acting like a 3-year-old. There are endless parenting books and podcasts, of course, but weve put a few of our favorites here:

Check out the latest episode of The Future of X: The Workplace to learn more about the future of collaboration at work. Now available on OZY and all podcast platforms.

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'The Future of X' Turns to Collaboration in the Workplace. Tune In - OZY