The future is human

It was a process both passive and paternalistic/patriarchal: education built around conformity and rote learning suited to subsequent full-time employment in hierarchically organised mass-production units. A regular pay packet enabled workers to consume goods and services from other manufacturers. Other institutions, such as education, health services, social security, housing and retirement arrangements were bit by bit put in place to support what became a stable techno-economic model. Management and trade unions grew up alongside.

This is the model, together with supporting norms and regulations, that is now collapsing as fast as you can say “internet”. The sedate life story with its predictable beginning, middle and end is going the way of the Victorian novel, replaced by a jagged post-modern mosaic of contrasting gigs, time-outs, reframings, relearnings and full and part-time employment as technology rudely unbundles and reassembles our ways of relating to loved ones, colleagues and paid work.

A benefit of living longer is that, with more productive years, individual range of choice is extended, making the options more valuable. It also makes some choices more critical. The obvious one is ensuring adequate material resources to support a long and active old age. Less obviously, it also puts an unexpected premium on intangible assets such as networks of family and friends.

When everything else is in flux, notes Gratton, it becomes doubly important to have a trusted circle of people to rely on for advice and support. Investing extra time – now a crucial resource – in such intangible assets will be vital. You may have enough cash to buy a retirement property but, while technology enables new kinds of relationships – your 360 friends on Facebook, for example – creating the real mates who will make the world a rewarding place to live when you stop being mobile doesn’t happen overnight, or on a web page.

Can you shape your destiny?

Of course, individuals have always been proactive within the three-stage framing of most lives. But it hasn’t been an imperative, as it is in the context of a multi-stage life – it hasn’t needed to be. “Society has norms and rules because it is sometimes pretty hard on your own to work out how to live your life,” says Scott. “When the world changes you can’t rely on them any more and you have to be proactive to discover the new ones that we need to create – you need to be a social pioneer and be prepared to experiment.”

This is particularly important in a transitional phase like now. It’s daunting, yes; yet inventing, experimenting, planning, imagining and choosing between different scenarios could also be described as asserting agency, and thus humanity in its largest sense.

Crucially, being proactive, Scott and Gratton stress, isn’t being forced to reinvent everything from scratch. But it is saying, yes, we’re humans, we have human insight that enables us to build an agenda and act on it. We don’t have to accept what happens to us as destiny – we can shape it.

“Of course, we have to know what we want to do individually; but also what we need to demand from the institutions of civil society and change that, as we have done in the past, sometimes slowly and painfully, as after the original Industrial Revolution,” says Gratton.

That is, we need to invent our own story, both macro and micro. The current framing is so strong that it’s hard to look beyond today’s institutions, such as the full-time job and the paycheck – “but maybe in time we can come up with something better than that,” Scott muses.

The part institutions will play

Much will depend on the interplay between today’s dominant civil institutions – in particular, education, government and business and corporations – and their responses to change. Some of these are already under way. In education, technology is already placing extraordinary learning resources online, much of it free. In the next few years, Gratton and Scott see the education sector “exploding”’ to meet new kinds of demand, moving from part-life to all-life, and from mostly degrees to other kinds of credentials, intensive upskilling, gap-filling and managing transitions.

Other configurations may take longer to settle into shape. For example, the current generation of managers will have to grapple with a very different agenda from the one they were brought up on. Will they enthusiastically embrace the twin human challenges of technology and longer life, or will they have to be pressured into it?

That means reimagining working patterns, making significant investments in learning, acknowledging those on the periphery of the corporation, not simply those on the full-time payroll.

As educators, Gratton and Scott are optimistic about the future. They cite the impact of The 100-Year Life to justify their confidence that informed debate on the biggest questions can spur reasoned collective action, and they think they can do it again. If this isn’t what business schools – communities of researchers focused on harnessing collective action for the common good – are for, then what is it?

Yet it is optimism of a rather special and conditional kind.

Ultimately, human beings have to live up to their essential, irrepressible, questing humanity: inventing new narratives, exploring new worlds, building new relationships. But none of these things will happen unless we will them. As Gratton puts it, “You can’t expect to do nothing and just hope things will work out for you. If you want to flourish, you have to be curious about your world, be prepared to experiment, and to make some crucial investments, take action. Being human, we do have a choice. It’s up to us to assert it.”