Surviving in the new workplace

This is the first time in history we've been able to measure or quantify human curiosity.

Disruptions of the traditional order are reshaping the world of employment

Disruption is shaking up the existing order in today's workplaces. The aim of Frog Recruitment's final iNTRAPRENEUR breakfast for 2014 was to find out if we need to panic about the breakthrough disruptions that are reshaping the world of work, and what we need to do to survive and thrive in the new order.

Geoff Perry, Vice-Chancellor and Dean of AUT's Business and Law School, explained that the drivers of disruption were new technology, ideas and attitudes. Certain characteristics of markets and products invited disruption. "If something is complex or complicated, like the form-filling involved in applying for insurance, or where trust has been broken, such as loss of faith in finance companies, there's an opportunity for someone to come in and do it better. If there is restrictive access or redundant intermediaries which make it difficult to access goods or services, it creates complexity and there becomes an opportunity to cut out the middleman," he said.

He gave crowd funding as an example, which is estimated to surpass venture capital by 2017. And Kodak, which in 1976 had 90 per cent of the world's share of photographic film sales. Digital photography came along and Kodak was not prepared to challenge its core business of film, ultimately filing for bankruptcy protection.

Perry explained that it didn't happen overnight and there was a chance to respond before it's too late.

Samuel Williams, managing partner of marketing firm Aamplify, said that over the past 60 years there had been three seismic shifts, the first being the digitisation of ideas, information and knowledge. There were now 500 million Google searches every day and 30 million of those were questions that had never been asked before. "This is the first time we've been able to measure or quantify human curiosity."

The second shift was the rise of social media.

"Today, 2.7 billion likes will be generated on Facebook," said Williams. "We can now quantify the extent to which very select segments of the audience out there likes something. In a business context, there are two people joining LinkedIn every second. People are sharing ideas, and ideas are the currency of business interaction."

The third seismic shift was one of demographics. The baby boomers, in terms of their control and influence, were firmly in decline, said Williams.

"The 60-somethings are now the delegators, governors and mentors, but the 20-somethings are the researchers, influencers and recommenders."

Smart devices, cloud computing and data were giving us powerful opportunities. "When you put the cloud and data together to get context, then the offer you make somebody becomes relevant and meaningful."

The way forward was not to panic, but to listen and to design, said Williams. "One ray of hope in this complex world is that it's now possible to pilot, prove and scale like never before."

James Hurman, founder and principal of innovation consultancy Previously Unavailable, spoke about the importance of a creative culture within organisations in order to survive and thrive in a disruptive world.

"To me, disruption is the simple fact that if you don't have a genuinely fantastic product, then it's only a matter of time before someone is going to do it better than you and put you out of business," he said.

"The big question for companies as disruption takes hold, is how do you build an environment that attracts and gets the best out of creative people? Creative people have a really emotional relationship with work. They need to feel fulfilled and be true to themselves. In my experience, building the kind of culture creative people thrive in and want to work in comes down to two things.

"The first is not being a phony. To get the most out of creative people, you need to tell them the truth and uphold your values 100 per cent of the time.

"The second is about spending more time creating than talking. If you want to get the most out of creative people, your company culture needs to be about 10 per cent talking and 90 per cent making things."