The Covid pandemic has triggered a Great Reset: a re-calibration of every aspect of our lives. Perhaps the most significant has been in the nature and act of work.

Necessity accelerated the pace of digital transformation by decades. Organizations and leaders reluctant to honour workers with adaptable hours and work-from-home flexibility suddenly had no choice but to trust their people to get their jobs done – and they did. Front-line and often underpaid workers across dozens of industries endured daily risks to deliver fundamental services and, in the process, discovered and demanded their true economic value.

For a while now, I have been referring to our entry into the post pandemic time period as an inflection point. Perhaps it is the way the pandemic has compressed time, accelerating our transformation to digital, or the way it held us in prolonged uncertainty. I decided to dig deeper and consider what economists, sociologists, and philosophers noted about the past and what it might mean to the changing nature of the future of work. Robert Putnam’s latest book, The Upswing, maps our 100+ year journey only to return to the income inequality and political polarization of the 1920s.

In a previous post, I posited that we are on the precipice of the human capital era, where investing in human potential offers the greatest return on investment. Here I explain why the skills gap, is no longer a “gap” at all, but what my friend and co-author Chris Shipley has coined as the gaping “Skills Abyss” that will never close. That, I believe, is actually be a good thing. Hear me out.

In the weeks since the US Government shutdown over a partisan border wall dispute, an essay written more than two years ago had jumped back into the conversation, with more than 35,000 new readers in recent days.

Many of new comments debate the contributions illegal immigrants make to our economy. More argue that “their ancestors” entered legally and so, too, should everyone else. No doubt, immigration is a complex issue with no easy answers, and we are not suggesting that we have an appropriate policy recommendation. We do, however, believe that this complex issue must be addressed in a fact-based discussion. To ground and advance discussion, we offer these facts:

Few topics spike the ire of American voters like jobs, immigration, and trade, no doubt because the three are inexorably tied together, at least in the rhetoric of politicians who point to immigration and trade as the villains of the American jobs story.

This narrative was clearly in evidence during the presidential campaign, as candidates in nearly every race made admirable pledges to “bring back jobs” through any number of means: reducing immigration by building a wall on our “southern border”, tearing up trade deals, punishing companies that relocate jobs outside of the US, and/or rounding up and deporting undocumented workers. That political rhetoric has spilled into the post-election zeitgeist in the comment sections of online media, like our Immigration, We Simply Cannot Afford This post that examined the economic contribution of legal immigration over the last half century. The comments section was a river of outrage over illegal immigration and trade, even though neither topic was the focus of the piece. Still, the post hit a cord and has reached over 500,000 views.

For a decade we have talked about accelerated change. More than any other factor, the pace of change in technology, the economy, and society are reshaping the future of work. Yet even as forward-thinking leaders have pondered effects of accelerated change on their organizations, actual transformation has been, paradoxically, slow.

That is, until now.

If the future of work requires restructured workplaces, redefined roles, rapid learning, and reserves of trust—and it does, organizations are being challenged to do all that and more as they address the coronavirus pandemic. While we have long spoken about VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) environments, we are finally and undoubtedly facing one.

On May 6, 2022, I was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Pennsylvania College of Art and Design. Following that I was invited to give the commencement address. What follows is my address edited for clarity.

President Molla, trustees, faculty, staff, students, graduates or soon to be alumni and their families, thank you very much for this distinct honor and the opportunity to address you here today. I make my living as a keynote speaker. I travel all over the world, addressing audiences about the changing nature of work, but this is my first commencement address. To prepare for this, I listened to all the commencement addresses out there that I could find on YouTube. I then reflected on my own graduations and commencement addresses. I asked everybody I ran into for the past two months what they remember most about their commencement address. They had one thing in common. No one remembered their commencement address. That fact made this task a whole lot less daunting.

In this first of a series of essays, we’ll examine Who works. Later, we’ll explore how we measure work. The current 8-hour day/40-hour week work environment is the result of Henry Ford’s observations in 1926 that accidents and errors occurred after 8 hours of work because routine physical labor breaks down at eight hours. Fewer and fewer of us do routine physical work today. Cognitive labor breaks down differently. Perhaps our workday structure should be different, too.

What we do for work is changing, too. As more and more work becomes collaborative the routine and predictable tasks are increasingly offloaded to technology. That shift demands that we continually re-tool ourselves for new types of work. Indeed, the shelf life of (technical) skills is shortening so quickly that the skills gap will never close.