I’ve talked to a lot of people about the future of work and the more people I talk to, the clearer it’s becoming: as we move to greater digital reliance, the more important it is to humanise the workplace.
Then
In the Industrial Era, the thinkers were separated from the doers by an invisible line of them and us. You had the workers and the bosses. L David Marquett in his book, ‘Leadership is Language’, calls out this difference and terms it blue work and red work. Blue work is thinking work and red work is doing work. Red work was done by the factory floor workers and blue work was done by the managers. The people on the factory floor were not invited to think and the thinkers rarely got their hands dirty. It was all about efficiencies on the shop floor, replication of practice and uniformity of output. The two things were proactively separated to maintain the power differential and develop those income-maximising efficiencies on the red work line.
Now
In the knowledge and digital era that we’re now moving deeper into, the separation of red and blue work into concurrent and separated processes is no longer helpful……………………
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