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Chapter 2

Fragmentation: A Three-Minute World

Jill’s story

It is 6.00 a.m. on a cold morning in London in January 2025 and Jill is awakened to the sound of the alarm. As soon as her eyes begin to focus, her attention is grabbed by the 300 messages that flash up on her wall screen. During the night, colleagues, friends, current employers and our future employers from across the world are keen to share their ideas with her, check information and ask her opinion on pressing issues. Getting out of bed, as her eyes become accustomed to the dawn light, the first hologram call comes in. Over the next ten minutes Jill works with her avatar, as it is needed for a meeting across the globe that will begin in two hours’ time and will require broad directions.

By 7.00 Jill is connected to her cognitive assistant that has created the timetable for her day and made the preparations for the teleconferencing and video-presence connections she will need. Her first conference call is to her colleagues in the Beijing office who are keen to link up with her, and so the next 30 minutes is spent in a conference call with the team. As she listens to their voices over the telephone she is able to work on another 30 messages – thank goodness for the mute button! The next 50 minutes are spent still in her bedroom taking another quick look at the nighttime messages, briefing her avatar and working on a project that is key to the group.

By 10.00, still in her pyjamas, Jill snatches a quick bite of breakfast, holds back on the demands from her colleagues for yet more feedback from them, and logs on to her worksite to see if any new work has come in overnight.

The next hour is spent on conference calls to clients, negotiating a couple of deals and agreeing delivery times. She has the final call with Mumbai before they go offline. They are using the recently developed hologram technology to project themselves, and Jill is pleased with the clarity of the representations. It is 10.30 and her team in Boston are awake and keen to ask her opinion about a particular deal they have put together: it involves linking with the Shanghai team so she agrees to brief her Chinese colleagues the following morning.

By 11.00 Jill is ready to take the train into the office hub that has been built about 10 miles away. This hub is used by any employee of the company who lives in the vicinity and provides an opportunity for people to work together in an office environment. As Jill jumps on the train she spends the next 15 minutes on her handheld computer answering more messages and taking a couple of calls to her team members. There is a particularly tricky problem in Johannesburg and her colleagues are keen to get her advice about how to proceed with the sales. By 11.30 Jill has arrived in the hub where she takes a quick look around to find a workstation that is vacant and then logs in, saying a quick hello to the others who have also decided to work in the hub that morning. Some of the people she knows, others are new faces.

Her boss Jerry is keen to talk with her about the daily sales figures, so by 3.00 p.m. she is patched through to his home office in Los Angeles. It’s early morning there, so he has chosen to use his avatar to present for him – no one wants to be seen working in their pyjamas. The conversation goes pretty well – one of Jill’s major clients is a telecoms company based in Rwanda in West Africa and they are negotiating a substantial order for the chips for handheld devices. Jill had caught up with the client earlier in the day, so was able to brief Jerry about how the process was going and the likely revenue stream. Jerry also wants Jill’s views on how best to build the market in Patagonia and Peru. For the last two decades, Essar in Kenya and MTN in South Africa have been leaders in the field and have been particularly adept at encouraging their customers to use their mobiles to make money transfers. It’s become big business, and Jerry is keen to know Jill’s views on how their experiences in Kenya could be transferred to the steadily growing markets of Chile and Argentina. His plan is to link with the Chinese telecom giant that is making impressive investments in these countries.

By 4.00 the conversation with Jerry is over, so Jill takes a last look at her messages before her 4.30 team briefing. It’s an opportunity to catch up with her US team members and also to hear their views on the situation in Rwanda. A couple of them have gone to the company hub in downtown Phoenix and have booked the telepresence room for the next 30 minutes. Jill waits a moment for the telepresence to be free and then is able to link through to her group. As always the sound and visual quality is first class – and she is able to really get a real sense of how the Phoenix team are feeling about the project. By 5.00 the conference is over and Jill grabs her bags before rushing to the station to get the train home. For Jill, it is a ritual that she cooks supper at home every Wednesday when she is at home, and today is Wednesday. She is in the local supermarket by 6.00 to pick up the evening food and opens the door to her home by 6.30.

A moment of peace – food on the table, conversation with her teenage daughter and a great cup of coffee.

By 10.00 p.m. that evening Jill is in her study booting up her videoconference to Beijing; she wants to catch up on one of her team members before their day begins – Jerry wants to form a stronger partnership with the Chinese telecom company and she wants to know her colleague’s view on how best to do this. By 10.20 the videoconference is over and Jill has her last cup of coffee before turning on the television to catch the evening news. Her eyes are caught by the fires that are raging across Russia, and by the floods that continue to devastate Pakistan. As her eyes close her final image is of Greenpeace protesters calling for the protection of the small part of the Amazon forest that still remains …

Welcome to the fragmented world, where it seems that no activity lasts more than three minutes, and where those in employment are continuously competing with people across the globe to strive to serve the different stakeholders they work with.

Do you think your world is already fragmented? Right now you are already likely to be interrupted at least every three minutes.¹ If you feel that technology is already out of control, fast forward to 2025 and it’s only got worse. It’s a global world that’s so interconnected that working 24/7 is the norm, a world where 5 billion people are connected to each other through their handheld devices and as many as want to can connect to you. Imagine it – no peace, no quiet, no reflection time. Constantly plugged in, hooked up, online.

Work began to really fragment from around 2000. This was the time when internet access reached half a billion people, when desktop computers and email brought hundreds of messages into your daily inbox, and when your mobile phone began to interrupt you as often as it could.

Rewinding to the past: a pre-fragmented day in 1990

Can you remember a time when work was not fragmented? Perhaps the writer Jared Diamond is right that this has become ‘creeping normalcy’.² The fragmentation of our working lives has unfolded so slowly that the build-up of pain occurs in small, almost unnoticeable steps. As a consequence of this slow unfolding, we accept the outcome without resistance, even if the same outcome, had it come about in one sudden leap, would have earned a vigorous response.

It reminds me of the story of the frog and the boiling water. The story goes like this. If you throw a frog into a pan of boiling water it jumps out as fast as possible to escape. However, if instead you place a frog into a pan of cold water, and then heat the water very, very slowly, the frog acclimatises to the slow increase in temperature and never tries to escape – until it is eventually boiled alive.

Have we indeed become so used to this ‘creeping normalcy’ that we fail to recognise what it means to our working lives now, and even more so in the future? To test this idea, let’s try and recreate a pre-fragmented working day by rewinding to the past rather than fast-forwarding to the future. I’m going to rewind to 1990 because it’s a time when mobile phones were very rare, and when many offices outside of the West Coast of the USA did not have internet connection, and when no homes had internet connectivity.

To get a feel for this, you will either have to recollect from your own experience (as I am able to do), or find someone who was working 20 years ago and can describe to you in detail a typical working day. It’s important, by the way, that they describe the working day in detail – that’s where the important stuff lurks. Here is my memory of how a working day in 1990 played out for me – as far as I can remember.

At that time I worked as a senior consultant in one of the large UK-based consulting practices. I wake in the morning, have breakfast with my husband while listening to the news on the radio, and then leave for work at 8.00. By 9.00 I am in the office and my assistant joins me to go through the letters that have arrived that morning. On average, 20 letters arrive every morning, so we go through these letters and I dictate to her my responses. By 10.00 I spend two hours working on a proposal for a client; this I write by hand and it is then taken through to the typing pool to be typed. By 12.30 it’s lunchtime and I join my colleagues in my office for a quick lunch in the local pub.

By 1.30 I’m back at my desk and ready for two meetings with my team. It’s 3.00, and I’m in a cab to the headquarters of a multinational to present to a group of potential clients. I’m back in the office by 4.30 to sign the letters I dictated that morning to my assistant, to take two more telephone calls, and to check the proposal that’s now back from the typing pool. I make a number of changes to the proposal and send it back to the typing pool. By 5.30 the office is beginning to empty. I round up a few friends in the office and we wander across the road to the local pub for a quick drink before getting back home by 6.30 and dinner with my husband at 7.30.

By the time I reached home, my working day was over. Perhaps I brought home a document or two to read, but not often. I certainly did not write anything at home because I did not have a typewriter at home – and of course there was no computer. So my means of production was pretty much limited to the office hours. I certainly never, ever spoke with clients after 6.00 p.m. They did not have my home number, and mobile phones were not in use.

I don’t mean to be Pollyanna about the past. I could tell the tale again, adding in the fact that this was a deeply sexist work-place (I was the first female senior consultant and considered something of a freak), and that it was very unhealthy (we smoked constantly in the office and drank at lunchtime and every evening). This is no exercise in nostalgia. But as we look forward 10, possibly 20 years from now, it’s useful to also look back. By looking back we can get a good idea about velocity and direction, and about the rhythms and trajectories of working life.

However, before we leave this day in 1990 let me ask you to take another look at this story and consider what’s missing. Did I talk with my friends about where to meet that evening? No – I did not have a mobile phone and they did not ring me at work – so we made the arrangement well in advance with few last-minute changes. Did I have a close working relationship with my clients? Yes – we did not use the internet and so instead we met, spoke on the telephone or exchanged letters. Finally, did I link into clients all over the world? Well, yes and no. I did indeed have a client in South Africa and we exchanged letters and faxes, and talked on the phone. I went over to Pretoria three times a year and stayed for two weeks. At that time, two weeks was considered a decent length of time for what was called an ‘overseas trip’.

What I want to draw your attention to is that, unlike Jill’s, mine was not a fragmented day. If you watched me with a stopwatch you would have found that on average I spent about half an hour on each activity. When I wrote the client proposals I was uninterrupted for two hours. Only 20 letters arrived, they were read and replied to by the next day, no one expected instant responses – and if the timing was too long we could always say, ‘The letter must have been lost in the post!’ There was no internet, in fact I did not have a typewriter in my room, typing was the job of my secretary and the women (they were all women) in the typing pool.

I’ve chosen 1990 as the date for our memory experiment because in many ways this year marked the beginning of the extreme fragmentation of work. Over the following 10 years the forces of technology and globalisation began to snip work into ever-smaller pieces. By 2000, and the following decade, this fragmentation began to become really noticeable. In 2006, for example, the popular author Stefan Klein wrote Time: A User’s Guide – Making Sense of Life’s Scarcest Commodity.³ At the same time, the academic community began to study this fragmentation. By 2008 a group of scholars from Australia and Finland had co-authored Discretionary Time: A New Measure of Freedom, documenting the time pressure felt by people across the world.⁴ Work had begun a process of fragmentation that has accelerated over the last decade, and there is every sign that this acceleration will continue over the coming decades.

You could say that because the increase in fragmentation has been ‘creeping’ rather than instant we have all become boiled frogs. I bet if I was to be transported from my life in 1990 to 2010, I would be amazed, probably horrified, by the fragmentation of my life. But like everyone else, it has happened so slowly that I have made very little resistance.

As I reflect on Jill’s storyline, I think about the impact of fragmentation around me, in the programmes I teach, the executives who reach for their mobile phones the moment I stop teaching – even though we have shown how important reflection and concentration are to the learning process. Or the way my children manage to watch television, update their Facebook entry and watch a movie on their computers – all at the same time.

Our world have become ever more fragmented over the last 20 years, and, as we can see in Jill’s story, for many people this fragmentation will only increase in the coming 20 years. Is yours a world of fragmentation? If it is, or will increasingly be so, then it is important to understand the consequences of fragmentation.

When your working life fragments

Does it matter that our lives are so fragmented and will increasingly be so? Does it matter that globalisation and technology will increasingly bring fragmentation to those in developed countries, and also spread it to those in developing countries? What’s the real downside of fragmentation – who really misses out? As we reflect on our current working lives, we can assume that overload and time compression will only increase over the coming decades. So what effect will this have? I believe that fragmentation, overload and compression will decrease concentration, reduce our capacity to really observe and learn, and could make the future working lives of our children more frenzied, more focused … and less whimsical and playful.

The concentration of mastery is lost

When our working time fragments, then one of the first victims is real concentration. Breaking up her life into such small pieces has meant for Jill that she never really has the time, the opportunity or the focus to become very good at anything. She has never concentrated enough to achieve the mastery that would put her in a different league and which, as I will argue later, is going to be so crucial for future success. There is no doubt that Jill is good at what she does, but the challenge is that she has never learnt to be really, really good. The reason for her lack of mastery is wrapped up in her three-minute life. It takes time and concentration to become masterful, and Jill has neither time nor concentration.

The importance of time and concentration is shown clearly in psychologist Daniel Levitin’s study of people who have achieved mastery. He looked at the lives of ‘composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters … and master criminals’.⁵ He found that, despite their very different areas of skill, they all had one thing in common. What they all shared was a capacity to concentrate on developing their skill for long periods of time. In fact, he found that 10,000 hours is the common touchstone for how long it takes to achieve mastery. That would translate to Jill concentrating and practising three hours a day, for ten years. Of course, Jill does not aspire to becoming a concert pianist or a world-class novelist, so this level of concentration would be excessive. However, to gain real value in the world she inhabits, Jill does need some form of mastery – and at the moment she rarely achieves concentration of more than three minutes, let alone three hours.

The capacity to observe and learn is reduced

It is not just concentrated practice that suffers. When a working life is as fragmented as Jill’s – broken up into three-minute time frames – what also gets lost is the opportunity to simply sit back and watch others more skilled.⁶ This is important since it is through watching others more masterful than ourselves that we begin to absorb the subtle changes in what they do that can be transformed into our own working practice.⁷

I notice this in the development of teaching skills. When rookie assistant professors join London Business School they are expected to teach an MBA class in their first year. The experience can be gruesome. They get their timing wrong, the class overruns and the students are up in arms. They fudge their exam rating and marking protocol, and the class loses confidence in them. They fill their slides with hundreds of words and the students cannot read them. The list of what can go wrong is endless. At first, in order to try and make the whole experience less tough we decide to write a list of ‘dos and don’ts’ to help. But, though useful, the list never covers all the challenges. For example, we might have told them to manage the timing of the class – but then found that they concentrated so much on their timing that they forgot to speak sufficiently loud for those at the back to hear.

What we learnt was that mastering the teaching of a good MBA class is a skill that takes many hours to hone. It’s also a skill that has much ‘tacit’ knowledge embedded in it – that’s the type of knowledge that is difficult to describe in the ten points, and is often held deep within the unconscious of how tasks are performed. What we began to realise is that the best way for these rookies to learn was by simply observing others teach – not once, but many, many times, and to watch very, very carefully. That’s not to say this was observation with the planned outcome of mimicry. We certainly don’t want everyone to teach the same. However, by careful observation, these new professors began to learn deeply and to forge their own point of view about how to teach. To do this they had to concentrate, to observe for hours at a time, without recourse to checking their emails, or indeed to marking past papers!

The notion of mastery sits at the heart of the first shift I believe will be crucial for successful lives in the future. The challenge is that often the development of mastery is subtle and takes time. When our working lives become fragmented, as they inevitably will in the future, then we lose the opportunity to concentrate on watching others more skilled than ourselves. When Jill yields to a fragmented working life, she is sub-optimising the possibilities of honing deep and valuable skills and capabilities. Fragmentation means she never devotes sufficient time to move from the basics to mastery, and she rarely watches others with sufficient concentration to understand the often-subtle nuances that accompany mastery.

It is in the intersection between the forces of increasing globalisation and ever more sophisticated technological developments that work will fragment and observation and concentration are lost. The choices we make about how we spend our time, and how we focus our energy and resources, will prove to be crucial to our future success. It is through the shift to mastery that the trade-offs can be made. If not, then we, like the frogs in the warming water, will simply boil. But before we leave a future world of intense fragmentation, I’d like to consider one final aspect of working life that could also be lost – whimsy and play.

The creativity of whimsy and play is denuded

One of the most exciting aspects of the future is that it will provide extraordinary opportunities for creativity and impassioned productivity. That is in a sense what the third shift is about, and that is what drives the lives of many of the people we will meet when we take a brighter view of the future. However, here is the rub. When time becomes fragmented, and when every moment counts, then what is lost is the very chance to be creative, to play … to be whimsical. Instead we demand instant gratification and compressed learning. If you only have three minutes, then the rewards have to be instant and the lessons delivered clearly, fast and compressed.

When time fragments, what suffers is whimsy and play. I remember as a child being enchanted by the cookery writer Elizabeth David’s descriptions of how to make Mediterranean food.⁸ She introduced me to the ingredients, to their sight and smell and provenance. She took four pages to describe the making of a tomato soup, starting with a trip to the market to choose the tomatoes, then a page on how to skin and de-pip them, and only then preparing them into soup. Reading her descriptions I was transported from the cold of northern England where I was brought up to the fragrant markets of the south of France. At that time I had never stepped outside of the UK – but that did not stop me dreaming.

American readers may have had the same experience when they first read Julia Child’s whimsical cookery books.⁹ You may recall her description of creating French classics such as Poularde à la d’Albufera – from the moment the chicken is bought at the market, to the moment it enters the mouths of grateful guests. What Julia Child and Elizabeth David did was to illustrate, with good humour, time and sympathy, their own cookery journey, and by doing so empathised with the novice cook on her journey. This stuff takes time. Julia’s instructions for Poularde à la d’Albufera take over six pages – way more than a precise description of the recipe. What this more elaborate, human and emotional description actually does, however, is to connect with you the reader in a way that a ten-step recipe could never do.¹⁰

The challenge is that this sort of elongation of time has no place in the three-minute episodes that punctuate Jill’s world. In her world, precise and short directions will always win over the more whimsical, sympathetic illustrations – after all, who has time to fuss about Poularde à la d’Albufera?

Well, you might say, who indeed has time to make Poularde à la d’Albufera, and anyway, what’s it got to do with the future of work? In a sense this classic dish is a metaphor for mastery. It’s similar to a rookie professor sitting patiently as they watch hour after hour while others more masterful than they teach; it’s similar to the hours and hours of patient crafting that goes into learning how to write a report, prepare a presentation or lead a team.

By 2025 the attention spans of Jill and those around her have become so much shorter, so much more parcelled up, so much more prone to disruption, so much more fragmented, that it’s almost impossible for her to develop and learn to the depth of mastery which will be so crucial to her success.

It’s not just concentration, observation and whimsy that are lost in this fragmented world. It’s also play. With fragmentation comes less time to share a joke; less time to work on an idea we love but are not sure how we will develop; less time to play, to have fun times, to celebrate the joys of working. As the working world becomes more mechanised, so the boundaries between what’s work and what’s play become increasingly solid. When time becomes tighter and work fragments, what can get lost is the freedom to play. Ask Jill about playing at work and she will throw her head back and laugh out loud. With every moment accounted for, with 100 emails to be answered and another on its way – playing is way down her list of priorities.

Yet we have known for some time just how important play is to building creativity and fostering new ideas and models. The challenge for the future of work is that the compression of time pushes play out. As my colleagues Babis Mainemelis and Sarah Ronson have shown, we play when we believe we have the time and space, when we feel flexible about what we are doing and free from constraints.¹¹ This is the stuff that play is made of. Play is important because we are more likely to love our work when we see it as play. If you are in advertising or design, you know your play through fantasy and imagination is at the core of innovation; if you are a consultant or researcher like me, your play through exploration and questioning is at the heart of how you create value. If you are a mathematician or a theorist, the play of solving problems is what really excites you. Isn’t the absolutely best work to have, both now and in the future, work of which you can say, ‘I cannot believe that people pay me to do my hobby’? It’s those times you are simply ‘building castles in the sky’ – exploring new ideas, and putting old ideas together in new ways, or in other words, playing. But to play you need time and a feeling of control over constant interruptions.

The challenge with the fragmentation of the future is that both are lost. When you are ‘on’ all the time, what gets lost is the opportunity to blur work and non-work – to get to the opera, theatre or a sports game, events that though playful can give you new insights and ways of thinking about problems. Absolutely the best way to work creatively in the future will be to blur the distinctions between work and play. The most rewarding jobs will be those in which your work is also your passion and hobby, and vice versa.

Our world is already fragmented, but, as we shall see, the combination of technology that connects most people on the planet with globalisation that will see more work following the sun 24/7 can only make this fragmentation more profound.

The forces that created fragmentation

It matters that work becomes ever more fragmented. It matters because with this fragmentation comes the incapacity to create the focus, concentration and creativity that will be so important to the shift from shallow generalist to serial mastery. So we have to understand why work will become increasingly fragmented, and what can be done to reconnect the parts.

In describing working lives in 2025, we began to glimpse the impact that technology had on Jill’s working day in 2025 compared with my own working day in 1990. The exponential growth in technological capacity and developments in Cloud technology enable Jill to download advanced programmes from the web. At the same time, her day’s work is shaped by the avatars and cognitive assistants that support her. But the fragmentation of Jill’s work is not just about technology – it is also about globalisation. We see it as she struggles to join up across timezones that range from Beijing to Los Angeles. She lives in a 24/7 joined-up global world, with colleagues and customers in every part of what has become a more and more industrialised world.

The force of technology: technological capability increases exponentially

Working lives like Jill’s in 2025 are fragmented by the sheer breadth and depth of communication and information that weighs on everyday working life.

What underlies this is the extraordinary processing power that has grown at an exponential rate over the previous decades.¹² In fact, this annual doubling has continued every year and has been accompanied by an equally dramatic year-on-year fall in the cost of microchips. For example, in 1975 the price of a single transistor was $0.028 dollars – by 1980 it had fallen to $0.0013 and within the next decade to $0.00002. By 2010, Moore’s law was showing no sign of slowing, and we can anticipate that more transistors will be packed onto smaller microchips for less money and that processing power will continue to grow at an exponential rate.

Jill’s working life has also fragmented as a result of the advanced handheld device she carries around with her. The performance of these mobile devices has grown exponentially with a short doubling time (typically a couple of years). In 2010 a phone contained the same amount of computing power as a Mac from 2000. The device that Jill carries has the same processing power and capabilities as the high-end desktop computer I used in 2010. What this means for Jill is that in those evenings when she is not online with others she is using her computer to crunch the terabytes of data that have poured out that day from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. And when she is not doing that, she is linked into the data beaming from the Mars station to join with millions of other people who are scouring the universe for alien life.

This increasing power and the falling cost have enabled these machines to be capable of ever-increasing feats of power, from simultaneous translation, to the lifelike graphics of Jill’s personal avatar and the way that she has been able to build complex performance models for her clients. It could be that by 2025 miniature computers are baked into every brick, every piece of clothing and every item of food. What this means is that data is streamed into the office and homes at an extraordinary rate. But it’s not just computing power that has fragmented these lives – it’s also the location and speed of downloading.

The force of technology: the Cloud becomes ubiquitous

Jill is able to download highly complex data and programs anywhere, anytime. Already by 2010 most of the regions of the world had a level of connectivity that enabled fishermen in India or the weavers in Tanzania to talk with others and access some information. Over the coming decades this was augmented by an ever faster and easier connectivity to the web and access to bandwidth that enabled the telepresence and holograms which are part of Jill’s everyday working life. Behind this connectivity have been rapid developments in the Cloud. This was first conceived in the early 2000s as an expertise, control and technological infrastructure that would be all-enveloping – hence the name the ‘cloud’. By 2010 services, applications and resources were already available as a service over the internet, although corporate adoption of the Cloud was relatively low, only in the beta phase, and there were many concerns about security.

These concerns were resolved over the next two decades and by 2025 the global range of the Cloud had increased, with the services available becoming ever more complex. This had allowed hundreds of thousands of independent programming teams to develop their ideas, in much the same way that applications for the iPhone were developed in 2010. What Jill loves about the Cloud is that it is convenient, on-demand and allows her to work with her colleagues to pool their resources. Jill does not actually own the physical infrastructure she uses or the applications she downloads. Instead she rents usage as and when she needs it – paying only for the resources she uses.

The Cloud has also created endless possibilities for people across the world to access pooled resources. That’s one of the reasons why avatars and holographs are the norm. To use her avatar or work in a holographic representation of her office, Jill simply has to hook up to the immense computational power available on demand from Cloud computing.

Notice that the fragmentation of Jill’s working life is created by technology in which she has personally invested, and which she uses from her home and the hub she works in. By 2010 the gulf between personal use of technology and corporate use had already begun to narrow as more people decided to invest in home-based technology rather than rely on the technology companies provide for them. By 2010 people had already begun to see their workplace technology lagging behind their personal investment in technology.¹³ Like most of her colleagues, Jill has made a personal investment in the technology in her home and the technology she carries with her.

The force of technology: ever-present avatars and virtual worlds

In the pre-fragmented day at least you had the opportunity to relax when you where ‘offline’. By 2025 you are ‘online’ 24/7 and your presence is augmented by avatars and virtual worlds. This development had begun in 2008 when Xbox Live launched its Xbox 360 avatars, which acted as the player’s emotive representative when communicating with other players. Gamers began to customise their avatars’ physical appearance, dress them in clothes bought from an online marketplace, and use them to virtually interact with other gamers’ avatars from around the world. Though initially limited to online gaming, the use of avatars continued to expand into all aspects of life, to such an extent that for Jill her avatar is her primary interface between the virtually connected people she works with. Jill has designed her avatar to be as near a two-dimensional representation of herself as possible. In the online games she plays, she has other more fantastic avatars – but when she is working she keeps to a form that is close to her own.¹⁴

One of the ways that Jill works with her colleagues is through her virtual workplace, which is a graphic representation of a workplace where all her colleagues can virtually congregate. So as soon as she logs on in the morning, she can walk through her work community to see who else is around. Her virtual timetable tells her when group sessions have been planned, and so she can link up using both her avatar and virtual 3D telepresence to talk in real time with her colleagues.

For Jill, working and learning in a virtual environment has been a way of life since she attended a virtual university in 2015. She registered and met her instructors and colleagues online and then the instructors used the virtual platform to deliver to the worldwide audience at minimum cost.

The force of technology: the rise of the cognitive assistants

The first interruption Jill has on that cold morning in 2025 is her cognitive assistant – or Alfie as she calls it. Alfie has been with her for a couple of years now. It understands how she likes to work, keeps a record of who she knows, monitors her inward communication for interesting strangers and logs the amount of time she works every day – automatically billing her employers for the hours works. Over the years Alfie has learnt how she works and how her working life can be best organised, and this has become more and more accurate to the extent that Jill now relies on Alfie for much of the everyday running of her life. Alfie checks her carbon use, reminds her when her personal carbon budget is beginning to run out, and makes sure that the travel she needs to do works within her personal carbon budget. With so much information coming through every moment of the day, Alfie helps her manage her daily tasks, prioritise what’s important and manage her weekly goals. Alfie is unique – it’s a machine that uses artificial intelligence to build a logic which best fits Jill’s context and working patterns, and evolves as Jill’s preferences become clearer.¹⁵

Is Alfie like a human? Ask Jill and she will tell you she could not do without Alfie to the extent that it (he?) simplifies her already highly fragmented life. Alfie is not alone. Across the globe billions of cognitive assistants are collecting information, monitoring the behaviour of people like Jill and taking actions from their preferences. This massive crowd of computers is becoming increasingly capable of learning and creating new knowledge entirely on their own and with no human help. For decades now they have been scanning the enormous content of the internet and ‘know’ literally every single piece of public information (every scientific discovery, every book and movie, every public statement) generated by human beings.

The force of globalisation: 24/7 and the global world

Jill lives in a world that never sleeps, with colleagues from many timezones expecting to connect to her – it’s a 24/7 world. The most obvious driver of the fragmentation of her world has been computing capability and connectivity. However, behind that is an ever-globalised and competitive world that puts immense pressure on her and her colleagues to deliver with speed and accuracy.

The joining up of the working timezones across the world began seriously from 1990 onwards, when the markets of the world become truly global. It was from this time that there was extraordinary growth in emerging markets such as China and India, Brazil and South Korea, among others. In fact, by 2009 the emerging markets accounted for half of the global economy, and by 2010 were generating the bulk of the growth in the world economy. During that year the six largest emerging economies (the ‘B6’ – Brazil, China, India, Mexico, Russia and South Korea) grew by 5.1%. In the next two decades they were joined by a second wave of economic activity in locations such as Egypt, Nigeria, Turkey, Indonesia and Malaysia.

To get the scale of globalisation – consider that in 1995 only 20 companies from the emerging markets were listed on the Global Fortune 500. By 2010 that number stood at 91.¹⁶ In 1990 the company that Jill often works for, Arcelor Mittal, was an unknown producer of steel in Indonesia; by 2010 Arcelor Mittal was the world’s largest steel company, and by 2025 one of the world’s largest conglomerates with diverse interests ranging from steel to telecoms to chip manufacturing.¹⁷ The combination of the technological forces we have described – Cloud computing, mobile communications and collaborative computing – have the potential, in concert with the momentum of emerging-market growth, to form a tipping point for globalisation and 24/7 working. Every year, millions of new consumers and small-business operators join the global economy, even from the most rural of villages. Over the coming decades we can anticipate that the economic power of the world will shift from the developed countries of the West and Japan – to be dispersed to an ever wider group of countries and regions.¹⁸

Like many people working in the West, much of Jill’s day is spent connecting to clients, suppliers and customers in Asia. This is a booming market fuelled in part by the sheer size of the population. In 2010 there were 1.2 billion people in the more developed regions (including Europe, North America, Australia and Japan) and 5.7 billion in the less developed regions (including China, India, Africa and Latin America).¹⁹ By 2030 it is forecast that while the developed regions of the world will have expanded by around 44 million people, the developing regions will expand by a mighty 1.3 billion – that’s more than the entire population of the developed world. Jill and her colleagues know that within five years the 7 billion living in the less developed regions will increasingly overshadow the 1.3 billion in the more developed regions.²⁰

How can you reconnect the fragments?

What will it take for you to reconnect the fragments of working life into something with more cohesion? What will it take to craft a working life that has greater opportunity for sustained concentration, more time for deep learning, and for a life that has woven into it occasions for whimsy and play? What can you do to create a working life that does not leave you exhausted, and does not denude your capacity to sustain your energy and talent?

Of course it is impossible to wind back the clock to the slower-paced working life of 1990, when technology was basic and globalisation in its infancy. It may indeed be that technological developments such as the cognitive assistants themselves become part of the answer to reconnecting the fragments as they make it ever easier for people to prioritise and focus.

It is also impossible for you to significantly change the context in which you are living. Beyond moving to a desert island, you will always be part of the global economy, more and more people will want to connect to you and to others, and technology will create greater demands on productivity and outcome. So there is no easy answer to reconnecting the fragments. It is fundamentally about working from the inside out – being clear about the choices you are presented with, and being mature about the consequences of these choices.

I believe there are three future-proofed shifts that will play a role in ensuring that your future working life is not simply torn apart by fragmentation.

The first shift is your conscious construction of a working life that is based on mastery. By that I mean developing a career that is built from dedication and focus – remember, it takes 10,000 hours to learn something to the point of mastery. To do so will require the willpower to resist the temptation of fragmentation, and to be prepared to set aside significant time for apprenticeship, learning and practice.

The second shift is the realisation that the opposite of fragmentation is not isolation. The challenge is to construct a working life in the future that has both self focus and also strong relationships with others. It can be that, through the relationships with others, work can be simplified and shared. Perhaps one of the lessons we all have to learn for the future is that we tend to fragment our lives by trying to do too much ourselves, rather than creating sufficiently strong networks to really take some of the burden off our shoulders. Your relationships with others will also be a crucial balance to fragmentation as a strong regenerative community of people around you, who love and support you, could well help you to create boundaries for your time.

However, it’s the last shift, from voracious consumer to impassioned producer, that is most able to address the challenges of an increasingly fragmented working life. This shift is fundamentally about the way you choose to live your working life and your preparedness to make bold choices, to confront the consequences of these choices and to exercise free will. Looking back to Jill’s story, did she really have to take the call at 7.00 in the morning or 10.00 that evening? Did she really have to eat lunch at her desk on her own? Did she really have to look at hundreds of emails? These are decisions that many of the forces that will shape your working future will make ever more attractive. It will also make Jill’s way of working increasingly the norm. In a global, technologically enhanced and joined-up world, there is always something you can do – whatever the time, and wherever you are. And these issues of choices and priorities become ever more poignant when you consider that Jill, like many others in 2025, will be expected to be working into her 70s. Like you, what Jill faces is a long marathon – not a short sprint.

It is clear that crafting a working life through the choices you make will become increasingly important in the coming decades. When I think about my own working life, I did not have to make any really tough choices back in 1990; emerging technology and nascent globalisation had created a world that was a lot less frantic. If you are to address the ‘creeping normalcy’ of fragmentation, then it will require seeing it for what it is – constant pressure with no boundaries to protect you. In this third future-proofed shift – towards a deeper, more profound way of constructing a working life – we will address these issues. It is actively making wise choices, clearly understanding the consequences, and facing up to the sorts of dilemmas that Jill faces, that will be ever more crucial. Without this there will be no boundaries to protect people like Jill, and indeed to protect you from the ever-growing demands of a joined-up world.