Workplace of Tomorrow
Knowledge Diffusion
In February 2023, the Australian Government’s Productivity Commission released its 5-year inquiry into productivity.
It painted a worrying picture of the Australian economy. The drivers for innovation have stalled.
The reason: Knowledge Diffusion
Productivity Commission Findings
In Chapter 5, the Productivity Commission describes a Knowledge diffusion as perhaps the most significant productivity challenge facing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) today.
Without effective tools and processes for collecting and sharing knowledge, businesses waste valuable time and resources repeatedly solving the same problems. Employees can waste up to 40% of their time on tasks that could be automated with existing technology. Most are unaware of what’s available.
This has a massive negative effect on productivity.
Technology Mindset of Complexity
A major reason for this is mindset. With our technology centric approach, employees are expected to adapt their needs to existing system.
In fact, many internal IT departments discourage the use of non-Microsoft tools. They’d prefer employees stumble along with Excel instead having to manage another software platform.
Their needs are standardization and cost control, not employee productivity and efficiency.
As a result, IT departments deploy big, standardized self-service solutions, which push low-level tasks back onto already overburdened employees.
This mindset scatters knowledge across the organisation and across various Microsoft products —shared drives, Teams, emails— all of which leads to silos and confusion.
The technology mindset is pushes complexity to the employee.
Information and Knowledge
Many industry people use the terms information and knowledge interchangeably, but they are two distinct concepts.
We can think of information like cocoa powder, a processed form of the raw beans harvested from the cocoa plant. Knowledge, however, is like chocolate—transformed by humans into something of high value.
Information is abundant, and it can be stored forever – like books in a library. We now have access to so much information that no human could possibly read it.
Knowledge on the other hand is scarce – deeply rooted in human experience. And, it is fleeting, which means unless consciously preserved, knowledge disappears.
Too much information leads to confusion, which slows down the decision making process.
So we put a lot of effort into sorting and filtering through this excess information, trying to find what’s actually relevant for making a decision. Too much information can lead the organisation astray.
Knowledge, on the other hand, is scare and fleeting.
This is how information technology can lead an organisation astray.
But we can never have too much knowledge, because the pursuit of knowledge is the pursuit of excellence.
People Workplace Mindset
In the last few decades, information technology has entered the workplace and transformed the way we operate.
However, instead of making work easier, information technology is now making things harder as we spend more and more of our time gathering and processing information ourselves.
Generative AI offers a new way to interact with technology. It allows us to redefine the way the workplace operates and focus on making technology work for humans, not the other way around.
Technology Thinking
The truth is, employees don’t need more information technology—the need more knowledge technology.
People need access to the right knowledge to make decisions.
Decisions lead to actions, and actions lead to outcomes.
The faster we allow people to make decisions, the more productive they will become.
Once we understand your data, we can write you the algorithm. Our human centric mindset pushes complexity back to the technology.
Human Thinking
If we want to unlock employee productivity, we need to focus on people.
Instead of giving everyone spreadsheets, we should design business processes that eliminate their need entirely.
Rather than relying on self-service reports and dashboards, we must create delivery platforms that provide employees with the knowledge they need, without them having to ask.
This future is now within reach, but it demands a shift in mindset—one that not all organizations may be ready or able to embrace. But those that do will experience a different kind of productivity.
Workplace of Tomorrow
We see the workplace of tomorrow becoming much more like a digital community, where people are connected through ideas, rather than a shared phsical space.
While many of us will still go to the office as required, more and more of our daily routine will be replaced by technology which lets us know when a decision needs to be made.
The focus will shift from individual productivity to enterprise-wide productivity, with leaders taking a deeper interest in fostering a culture of continuous learning and knowledge sharing. Together, these elements will shape and ultimately replace the workplace models we rely on today.
Organisations that make this shift quickly will be the ones with the competitive advantage.
That’s the workplace of tomorrow.
