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The Triptych of the Future of Work

Triptych

For some strange reason, the word ‘Triptych” keeps coming up in my world.

It comes from two Greek words – tri (meaning three) and ptysso (an ancient greek word for fold or drape – trust me I had to look that one up).

A triptych is an art term that is a painting on three panel that are connected together to form a story or a scene.

When I first saw the term, I immediately thought of the the paining of the Miracles of Christ, a triptych that is on Level 1 of the National Gallery of Victoria. (For the record, it’s NOT the photo on the left, that’s the Dresden triptych of Virgin and Child (with angel St Michael on left there) a painting by Jan Van Eyck.

In all honesty, I think it’s because I’ve been reading some books related to art so that may be it but I’m now seeing it pop up outside of the art world. I’m wondering how long it would take before someone in the business world starts to use it as an example of expression or story around particular themes.

So that got my mind all creative which usually happens.  Neurons tend to fire and scatter all over the place (usually going towards ‘left field’) and I thought the following:

If I was to create my own triptych of the future of work, what would it look like?

So I tweeted some thoughts…

Are We Stuck in the Middle?

For the last couple of weeks, I have been doing a Teamwork Assessment on behalf of Microsoft for a company.

It’s effectively a workplace analysis with IT and Business Leaders to identify business cases where collaboration and teamwork would help solve business problems.  The process involves an assessment engine, scenario-based workshops and immersion experiences to show possibilities of the use of the collaboration functions of Microsoft products.  We work on actual business scenarios with the specific teams and help them not only build the solution but start them off on changing behaviours about how they think about collaboration in the workplace; in documents and in meetings.

There’s no doubt in my mind that already, the uptake and actually using real-life cases I’m seeing a shift in the workplace with more of an openness to learn more because it helps them save time in spending in their email inboxes or non-value add tasks.

So what I’m seeing is a “whetting of the appetite” as you can see their curiosity piqued about how they can do their work differently in the near future. However, they’re still stuck in the ‘today” picture with questions like:

  • “I do xyz as part of my process, can I still do the same in this new way?”
  • “What if I don’t want people to make changes to my document?”
  • “Oh, I’ll need to vet what changes people make to my Word document”
  • “Do you mean they can see everything I write?”
  • “Oh, I save things to my desktop and always have”
  • “No, I can’t possibly use a tablet and a stylus, what’s the point of that. Much prefer to type”
  • “Can we turn off the video, I hate having my face on video”
  • And so it goes

The question that is floating around in my mind is…”are we still stuck in the middle?”  Can people see past this uncertainty and discomfort and form a future picture of what these changes mean for them in the bigger picture of the future of their work?

A Workplace Activity

I’m thinking that getting people to create their own ‘triptych’ could be an interesting activity as part of a facilitation exercise to get people to imagine what their future of work may be and to start a conversation about it.

After all, I can paint a picture of how the future of work would look like but in all honesty, I really don’t know.  That’s MY version of it.  It’s what I want MY life to be.  Other people would have completely different pictures so isn’t it up to us – and their organisations – to involve them and ask them what this may look like for them?

So this exercise would be a great way to get people to even talk about their own experiences of work – tryptically – (is that a word?) so that they can make their own meaning of the flow of how they want their work life to evolve over time.

I like the idea of the connecting pieces – the hinges – the make the panel fold and unfold to one big picture or story.  Hinges denote that our work and life learning are connected in some way, so in that way, they form a kind of ‘bridge’ –  and they will form the larger picture of what we want our lives to look like.  We can’t separate them from each other because each panel or phase leads us to the next one in our life.

What would your future of work triptych look like?

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