The Future of Work needs Inner Work

VPreface

This book will help you find out which leadership styles and forms of cooperation best suit you and your company. At a time of widespread discussion about new forms of work and changing company cultures, we see the need for more precise and differentiated research into which organisational forms are suitable for which teams, tasks and markets. By “Future of Work” we mean a transformation of the world of work that puts the employee and her abilities at the centre, in which hierarchies are flattened or even completely abolished and replaced by collective leadership or self-organisation. But should every company change its hierarchical structures and be self-organised? And what prerequisites and steps are necessary for new forms of work to become successful? These are the questions we want to explore in this book.

Our handbook is practice-oriented and follows the working process of organisational development. Many steps can be taken by teams on their own, even without external support. For some further developments, especially when it comes to identifying and dealing with areas of conflict, we consider external support in the form of a coach to be necessary. But the handbook is also useful here, as it provides the reader with a guide to assess the quality of the coach or organisational developer. In our experience, there are many concepts and tools that are too general and superficial. As a result, change processes fail and leave management and teams frustrated.

One major reason for the failure of organisational developments is that they concentrate on the external, visible dimension of change. This problem lies at the centre of our interest. Every external change in structures and processes must be accompanied by an inner transformation. Therefore, we dedicate this book in particular to the “inner innovation” of teams. By this we mean the way in which employees and teams can mature and grow, so that they can design their increasingly complex and fluid outside world more competently and fulfillingly. As the title says: The Future of Work needs Inner Work.

Coming from the startup world, we see this book as an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). We want to succinctly share our own insights from five years of self-organisation with people who are just starting out on their own journey towards new forms of work and leadership. VIThat’s why this book is also an invitation: to exchange ideas with us and to promote the topic of the Future of Work co-creatively. We are curious about your knowledge. This is because our own experience is based on working with small and medium-sized companies (between 12 and 120 employees) in Germany and Europe, and we do not yet know whether this experience can be transferred to much larger transnational corporations. A collaborative approach is necessary if we are to better understand the potentials and limitations of new forms of work. Our interest in knowledge is not limited to the world of work alone. We are convinced that new, more flexible forms of organisation and the associated principles and competencies, will play an important role in the next phase of human development. As Peter F. Drucker wrote: “Only a few changes have such a lasting effect on civilisation as a change in the principle on which the organisation of work is based” (Drucker, 2002). The skills described in this book are necessary to master the great social and environmental challenges of our time.

As you may have already noticed, we employ an informal style of writing. This corresponds to the kind of relationship we want to build in this book. Improving the (working) world is only possible if we open up to each other and build real relationships. For the sake of better readability, we have also decided against a strict gender-neutral form and instead intermix feminine, masculine and neutral pronouns. Every pronoun refers to all of our readers.

In order to make the book as useful as possible, we have integrated a selection of practical exercises at the end, which should serve you and your company to easily test what you have read. All of the exercises come from Bettina’s repertoire and can be freely adopted and adapted à la Creative Commons.