The security, predictability and safety of permanent jobs will most likely disappear either completely or in part in the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). Innovation and knowledge workers will not need to adhere to a nine-to-five workday – a trend that will eventually spread to the entire workforce.
When everything is changing, how can you succeed when you don’t know what will be required of you in the future?
There are three areas that will determine who succeeds and who fails. The first is their intellectual capital, which concerns the level of education. For the innovation and knowledge workers, this will require a Master’s degree or PhD. However, a high level of education is only one necessary condition to achieving success.
There are two other sufficient conditions that need to be in place if one is to succeed in the 4IR: One factor is social capital, which concerns the social network you are part of and how tightly knit the relationships are that you have in this network.
The other factor is one’s political capital: How close the ties are that you have to the person(s) who make decisions that may affect your future.
It is the system composed of these three factors that will be crucial to one’s success, when all known work is transformed into something new and unknown.
The rules of the game change when everything is transformed into something new and unknown. Consider companies such as Uber, Google, Instagram, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, IBM, SunTrust, and so on. These companies behaved strategically, had an extreme customer focus and were capable of extreme change. However, the most important thing about these companies was that they changed the rules of the industry.
Written by Jon-Arild Johannessen, a Norwegian academic who specialises in knowledge management and innovation
