The Future Is Already Unfolding: How Work and Society Will Evolve by 2030
Musings on our collective reinvention to cooperative, connected, and human spaces as a reaction to tech outpacing ethics.
Society wields influence over workplaces and the individuals within them. The geo-political fragmentation, polarizing across belief systems, forced dichotomy of right versus wrong, and of course, the craving for money, fuels what’s next.
We’ve lost sight of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As we all discover what those things mean, work gets a redefinition. Over the next few years, I expect technology to outpace ethics, human creation to be novel, and a retreat from the grind into fractional, part-time, or even off-the-grid existences. A new world emerges—one that’s feminine, cooperative, connected, and shows reverence for the interdependence of humanity, including at the workplace.
The following divinations are part research, part intuition, and part hope. For the full article, subscribe now to be notified when it's released.
The Team of the Future
Generalists v. Experts: Companies hire and work to retain generalists, while contracting experts for niche and complex challenges. Experts find fractional work is an antidote to corporate grind.
Co-op work models: As more folks opt for self-employment, co-op, collective, and agency models spring up. These tailored networks market themselves as a fully formed team for hire. It gives them control over culture compatibility, and companies benefit by hiring all the resources needed to solve a problem at once. Companies mimic this model by matchmaking folks into pods to prioritize team dynamics over individual performance.
Company historians: A new role materializes to analyze company mistakes and failures from point of origin to prevent history from repeating itself. They’re part anthropologist and part investigator, finding better ways of working across pods.
Contract negotiations: Companies react to the fractional migration by evaluating compensation and contracts in hopes of employee retention. Expect add-on pay for accomplishments and milestones, as well as guaranteed separation or soft landing exit packages. Perhaps unions will enter the chat.
Closing pay gaps: Humanity and ingenuity are currency. Roles rooted in human interaction (e.g., therapy, training, people ops, customer support) increase in pay while technical roles decrease. To be fair, this is a right-sizing to close gaps and disparities in pay between soft, women-dominated careers and technical ones.
Micro-retirement: Folks stop waiting until their career is over to pause; micro-retirement is all the rage. Companies counter with team sabbaticals after major milestones to retain talent while giving them a paid break, effectively cycling entire development teams in and out to preserve energy and creativity.
The Leaders of the Future
Rejection of leadership: Respect for authority is on the decline due to a lack of trust in systems and those in power. Employees reject leaders who don’t understand what it’s like to be an employee. Diversifying socioeconomic status within a leadership team may be the only way to shift the tide.
Flat organizations: Meritocracy feels like a myth, and the stress of management seems less appealing. So, there’s waning aspiration toward management and leadership. The narrowing talent pool alongside fractional workers flattens hierarchical structures, which is a sneaky (but needed) path into matriarchal, cooperative environments.
Parasocial relationships: The parasocial relationships between leaders and cult-like influencers, such as Elon Musk, escalate the harm done to employees. Leaders emulate these influencers to prioritize profits over worker well-being. Society overlooks these moral quandaries when the results seem impressive or beneficial. This practice has an expiration date that’s coming soon.
Mystical leadership: Leaders wear mood rings, consult tarot and psychics, leverage Feng Shui, and share their astrology chart to emotionally regulate and make decisions. Mysticism surges in popularity as a way to understand oneself.
Gentle parents beget gentle leaders: More and more leaders embrace the soft. The Millennial counter to authoritative parenting was gentle parenting, and they’ll parlay that into work as they become managers, leaders, and founders.
Work healers: A role mixing reflection, coaching, and counseling creates support for those ready to heal from corporate harm. Individuals see themselves as the constant in their career, with identity and values separate from work.
The Office of the Future
Despite obstacles to RTO mandates, companies find more and more folks wanting to interact IRL. The neglected office space gets its renaissance.
Office studios: Storytelling, trust, and personality carry more weight than the templated perfection of AI. To conjure originality, where and how people work evolves with offices serving as studios for tinkering, failing, and playing as a path to problem-solving. Even remote offices introduce curated virtual spaces.
Simulated reality: Remote companies span geography with virtual workspaces. Digital hallways support connection, flexibility, and accessibility. But, in the wrong hands, the design treats virtual presence as a proxy for productivity. Folks weigh whether disembodiment or a commute is best for their circumstances.
The new office manager: Companies hire “experience designers” or “belonging coordinators” to evolve the office into a destination for work. Individuals want bespoke experiences tailored to them, including being connected to real friends, mentors, and managers based on their preferences.
Book club: A third space emerges with a burgeoning book club scene. At work, it’s a safe place to practice debate and disagreement. Fiction book clubs slyly become the new method for teaching empathy through imagining novel worlds.
The Tools of the Future
AI takes the mic: AI is the biggest influence on performance—synthesizing trends, patterns, and feedback. But it won’t necessarily improve development, feedback loops, or impact, as flawed inputs still produce flawed outcomes.
Gamifying growth: AI gamifies management, training, and growth plans. You have limited “lives” at a company, a few boosters, and a call-a-friend lifeline. With enough points, you level up. Lose all your lives, it’s the chopping block.
Bias alerts: AI listens in on all conversations to send up beacons, signals, and blaring alarms when bias creeps in. Shaming and naming work together to surface offenders and move them to remediation.
Sci-Fi to reality: Companies explore extreme tools such as brain implants to remove bias or privilege, AI bots to resolve interpersonal conflict without emotion, glasses to see a person based on their soul, a la Shallow Hal, all decisions go through a system serving as the company’s “ethical heart”, and biometric readers to track individual health and burnout risk for benefits.
Influencers as monarchy: The enamourment with the rich and royal allows influencers to sway corporate buying cycles based on their recommendations. Buying software and services from influencers with no insight or experience with the problems “solved” by the tool bloats the already inefficient tech stack.
The Hiring of the Future
Talent mapping: Traditional hiring and performance reviews aren’t beloved by any. Instead, companies focus on talent mapping—understanding the company problems alongside who has experience/potential to solve that problem. It’s a pseudo-succession plan as well as a roadmap for hiring employees and experts.
The resume dies: The resume and job description are artifacts of the past. Companies focus on problems to solve and who has the talent to do it, which furthers the migration to fractional employment. They pluck generalists out of college or from referrals to join their in-house teams.
The law of polarity: Feminine energy tempers the prevalence of masculine energy, ego, and materialism. We see the rise of tenets like interdependence, introspection, generosity, and empathy, which flow into hiring, role creation, compensation, and communication through the candidate experience.
Entry level goes to the robots: The trend of companies demanding everyone come with experience alongside technological advancements (ahem, AI) means the field of entry-level roles continues to winnow. There may also be a cycle of laying off roles in favor of robots before the pendulum swings back to humanity.
The Society of the Future
In examining fashion, art, music, literature, and personal essays—we’re craving stability, nostalgia, and something real. The ways we connect with each other personally and professionally take profound lessons from our analog past.
Alternative education: Trade schools continue to surge in popularity, with alternative paths considered earlier. By teaching kids independence, critical thinking, and defining happiness on their terms, education becomes less about conformity and more about individual purpose. This shift not only affirms that each person has a unique place in society but also weakens our collective dependence on hierarchical leadership and the burden of education debt.
Dead internet rebuke: Authentic interactions become increasingly important as the digital world rings hollow. On and offline, we see micro-communities, hobby clubs, and curated platforms rise. Mass networks like LinkedIn lose validity due to bot noise, copy-paste content, click farming, and other disingenuous activities.
Digital decay: Some people disintegrate into zombie existences through excessive social media brain rot and outsourcing their imagination and intellect to AI models. Their minds atrophy, leaving them easy to control with ads and propaganda. The attention economy has them locked in.
Business as art: With artificial intelligence and automations, the work left to humans is creative, feminine, and moral. Each choice shapes the soul of society. So, there’s a surge for liberal arts and legal backgrounds to examine if the decisions spit out by AI are ethical and representative of company values.
Taste replaces trends: A rejection of minimalism, unbaked souls, and uniformity across music, fashion, and home decor weaves back into companies. We resist everything sounding, looking, and feeling the same. Rebelling against trends through a unique point of view is a competitive advantage.
Collectivism outpaces rugged individualism: People crave a return to shared social constructs. Norms of reciprocity, gratitude, mutual goodwill, and spatial awareness become hallmarks of daily interactions to ensure better everyday moments in a way that the company values never could.
Communal restoration: Generations come together in local spaces to share their talents with others. Fading arts like mending clothing, car maintenance, woodworking, basic electrical repairs, growing vegetables, and more are taught by experts to anyone looking to live sustainably and be post-capitalist.
Downfall of subscriptions: Products which allow ownership and personalization, such as free alterations at point of purchase, harken back to a romanticized era before everything was subscription-based. The increase of analog purchases such as film cameras, vinyl records, typewriters, and board games demonstrate the intersection of ownership, tactile experiences, and unplugged interactions.
Mental health: Protecting one’s mental health or setting boundaries became misused as a way to avoid any friction, inconvenience, or annoyance. Society reexamines its take on mental health to connect and stymie loneliness, which is its own hindrance to mental and physical health.
Introductions: We stop asking each other—What do you do and start asking—Who are you? Who and what do you love? What moves you to tears? When are you most joyful? We collectively redefine meaning.
Work gives us an answer to a stranger’s “what do you do?”, but reverence for the whole human means understanding the person and the role work plays within their life. For too long, we’ve started with the work. With increasingly dystopian technology, humanity is our greatest currency. All future versions of work have to honor that, so shape the world you want day by day.
Add your predictions and hopes in the comments, and yes, I appreciate the weird and the dreamy.
xoxo,
Courtney