Gartner foretells 10 changes that will happen to the working life in the coming decade

Tom Austin, vice president and Gartner fellow says work will become less routine, characterized by increased volatility, hyper-connectedness, 'swarming' and more. By 2015, 40 percent or more of an organization’s work will be ‘non-routine’, up from 25 percent in 2010. People will swarm more often and work solo less. They’ll work with others with whom they have few links, and teams will include people outside the control of the organization. Additionally, simulation, visualization and unification technologies, working across yottabytes of data per second, will demand an emphasis on new perceptual skills.

The ten changes, summarised, are:

1. De-routinization of Work – with people adding value through  uniquely human, analytical or interactive contributions that result in words such as discovery, innovation, teaming, leading, selling and learning.
2. Work Swarms – a work style characterized by a flurry of collective activity by anyone and everyone conceivably available and able to add value. Here, Gartner draws a distinction between teaming and swarming. Teams comprise people who have worked together before, know each other and often work in the same organization and for the same manager. Swarms, on the other hand, form quickly, attack a problem or opportunity and then dissipate just as quickly.
3. Weak Links – Swarms are made of individuals who do not know each other, or may be just barely via weak links. Weak links are cues people pick up from people who know the people they have to work with, Gartner says, terming them indirect indicators that rely, in part, on the confidence others have in their knowledge of people.
4. Working With the Collective – The Collectives are informal groups of people outside the direct control of the organization who can impact the success or failure of the organization. They are bound together by a common interest, fad or historical accident.
5. Work Sketch-Ups - Most non-routine processes will also be highly informal, and most non-routine processes would not follow meaningful standard patterns, and would be "sketch-ups," created on the fly.
6. Spontaneous Work - Spontaneity implies more than reactive activity, for example, to the emergence of new patterns. It also contains proactive work such as seeking out new opportunities and creating new designs and models.
7. Simulation and Experimentation – Gartner says active engagement with simulated environments (virtual environments), which are similar to technologies depicted in the film Minority Report, will come to replace drilling into cells in spreadsheets. This suggests the use of n-dimensional virtual representations of all different sorts of data. The contents of the simulated environment will be assembled by agent technologies that determine what materials go together based on watching people work with this content. People will interact with the data and actively manipulate various parameters reshaping the world they’re looking at.
8. Pattern Sensitivity – Referring to its published line of research on Pattern-Based Strategy, Gartner says the business world is becoming more volatile, affording people working off of linear models based on past performance far less visibility into the future than ever before. It expects to see a significant growth in the number of organizations that create groups specifically charged with detecting divergent emerging patterns, evaluating them, developing various scenarios for how the disruption might play out and proposing to the management new ways of exploiting (or protecting the organization from) the changes.
9. Hyper-connected - Hyper-connectedness is a property of most organizations, existing within networks of networks, unable to completely control any of them. While key supply chain elements, for example, may be "under contract," there is no guarantee it will perform properly, not even if the supply chain is in-house. Hyper-connectedness will lead to a push for more work to occur in both formal and informal relationships across enterprise boundaries, and that has implications for how people work and how IT supports or augments that work.
10. My Place – Gartner says the workplace is becoming more and more virtual, with meetings occurring across time zones and organizations and with participants who barely know each other, working on swarms attacking rapidly emerging problems, but the employee will still have a "place" where they work. Many will have neither a company-provided physical office nor a desk, and their work will increasingly happen 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In this work environment, the lines between personal, professional, social and family matters, along with organization subjects, will disappear. Individuals, of course, need to manage the complexity created by overlapping demands, whether from the new world of work or from external (non-work-related) phenomena. Those that cannot manage the underlying "expectation and interrupt overloads" will suffer performance deficits as these overloads force individuals to operate in an over-stimulated (information-overload) state.