Category: Blog

It’s now longer about whether to CCO or not. New model of knowledge work needed.

Posted onLeave a comment

When knowledge workers worked in centralized offices, they commuted to them because that’s where the tools of their trade were. Typewriters, mimeograph machines, photocopiers, plug and PBX switchboards and desk telephones and later, facsimile machines.

When desktop microcomputers emerged in the 1980s and later laptops and cell phones known as “personal communication devices,” their portability enabled their use in home offices just as easily as centralized commuter offices (CCOs). That was the beginning of the end of the office as it was known for a century.

It was the next development in information and communications technology that obsoleted the commute to CCO routine: the mass market Internet in the 1990s. That allowed these portable devices to transmit and receive and later virtually process (in the cloud and with generative AI) all forms of information: documents, data, numbers and voice and video communications.

The CCO’s primary function then became a gathering place for group work. How much gathering is necessary is currently a topic of much discussion and debate among knowledge organizations and their staffs. Every workday? Just some days of the week? For those who live within 50 miles of the CCO?

The topic has cleaved into two camps: office centralists and virtualtists.

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan, laments the Internet that disintermediated real time communication out of CCOs via “fucking Zoom” videoconferencing as it put it in a viral online rant. Dimon and other old school leaders like him believe co-located gathering is essential to knowledge work and career development. They’re willing to invest substantial amounts of money to create office space resembling first class hotel suites and associated amenities to facilitate assembling in person. There’s some practical rationale for this position relative to career development and training for younger workers.

For the other school of thought, gatherings requiring a commute to a CCO should be limited and purpose driven and not the everyday mode of working. Commuting to a CCO simply to do work that can be done in a home office isn’t worth the personal time and expense incurred. It’s a very strong utilitarian argument.

Resolving this split going forward will require the development of a new model of knowledge work disposes of quotidian office attendance and focuses on purposefully defining the need for gathering and the expected outcome, i.e. reaching a consensus or reaching a decision. That’s in line with the view of knowledge organizations as “decision factories” as Roger L. Martin described them in a 2013 Harvard Business Review article.

Distance isn’t quite dead. It’s being defined and justified. And it remains a burden.

Posted on2 Comments

In her book The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Is Changing our Lives, (Rev. 2001) Frances Cairncross posited the rapid and widespread adoption of information and telecommunications technologies (ICT) would render physical distance an “irrelevant” or “imperceptible” concept. She argued that the drastic reduction in the cost and time of transmitting information would become the most significant economic force to reshape society in the first half of the 21st century. In other words, it would be so easy to move bytes – digital information – there would be no need to move bodies to create and process it.

In order to slow disease and death arising from the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, government health agencies issued social distancing recommendations. Knowledge organizations complied by leaving centralized commuter offices vacant and having staff work from home or other locations.

What they didn’t do deal a final death blow to distance that Cairncross predicted a decade earlier.

While the pandemic didn’t kill distance, it did lead to knowledge organizations defining it in their employment policies. Exhibit A is the return to office attendance mandates. They defined distance for the purpose of determining who would have to return to the centralized commuter office (CCO) and when.  

The metric: “reasonable” commute distance between a knowledge worker’s home and the CCO. Obtained from metro area or census data on commute distance. The definition varies but falls around 50 miles or one hour. Those who reside farther out are exempt from in office attendance requirements. As for when, that could be two to four days a week in the CCO.

The practical effect is organizations remain geographically centered as they have been historically for decades. The Puget Sound area for Microsoft. For Dell, Austin. Seattle and Amazon. In the public sector, Washington DC and state capitals. Knowledge workers are likely to meet colleagues and build professional networks and referrals to work opportunities by virtue of proximity.

Cairncross pointed to this agglomeration effect to revoke her death sentence on distance. But it’s not a binary matter of the life or death of distance. Agglomeration drives transportation demand that produces traffic congestion that make distance burdensome for knowledge workers by virtue of the time and expense it incurs to bridge it. It also drives housing demand and costs that increase distance as workers seek more affordable housing at the edges of metro areas and adjoining exurbs.

ICT eliminates the burden of distance by delinking knowledge work and transportation demand. The challenge for organizations is to determine how to best leverage it for that purpose while choosing co-located work wisely and with clear purpose.

RTO mandates part of push-pull struggle to redefine employment amid ICT advances

Posted onLeave a comment

Proponents of the argument that return-to-office mandates are a kind of layoff-in-disguise notched a grim win this week.

Business leaders from across the country told the Federal Reserve’s Beige Book that their RTO policies had “encouraged” a reduction in their workforces via attrition, rather leaders having to resort to layoffs.

The remark came ahead of a starkly weak jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that showed 22,000 net jobs added in August, where white-collar job losses were offset by gains in health care.

https://www.businessinsider.com/rto-mandates-driving-workers-quit-helping-employers-avoid-layoffs-2025-9

This isn’t the typical recessionary business cycle downsizing: layoffs either directly — or indirectly via attrition as described here. It’s something more fundamental. It’s a debate about how employment is defined as information and communications technologies virtualize and decentralize knowledge work.

RTO mandates are an attempt to adhere to the traditional definition of employment: showing up at the office. That fits with the legal definition of employment wherein an employer determines when, where and how the work is done.

But that’s clearly no longer essential to employment as ICT has rapidly advanced and demonstrated its capabilities to support knowledge work independent of time and location and thus requiring transportation of knowledge workers. The assumption that employment must necessarily involve an office setting controlled by an employer is under challenge.

It’s not surprising employers prefer the traditional definition of employment since it’s they who are doing the employing. But the knowledge workers they employ have a different perspective.

It was dawning years before the pandemic’s social distancing measures and then solidly reinforced during it. It’s now being reinforced again with RTO, requiring work in a cube farm, videoconferencing and otherwise communicating on their computers with co-workers nearby that they could easily do elsewhere.

Steve Jobs’ “bicycle for our minds” and the current standoff between office centralists and virtualists

Posted onLeave a comment

The microcomputer is the “bicycle for our minds” as it was termed  by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. The Internet the multi lane bike path over which we cruise along, steering with our keyboards, mice and monitors.

The world of knowledge work didn’t adjust well to Steve Jobs’ bicycle. The reason is it began the obsolescence of commuting Arthur C. Clarke predicted in his 1964 City of the Future video. A lot of orgs however chose to shun the bicycle and have staff trek to a centralized, commute in office (CCO) just as they did for decades before personal computing and later, personal communication devices.

They basically told their staffs, “You can ride a bicycle and should learn to do so. But only with company issued bicycles that must be ridden only on company premises.” That policy derives from the mainframe and minicomputers that preceded PCs that were located at company offices. And later, file servers. All kept in “computer rooms” in offices before they were chained together in server farms to power the cloud. The computer is in the office and therefore so must be the users.

That paradigm continues to play out today with the continuing expectation of knowledge organizations that the CCO is the only place where real knowledge work can be done. Hence, the tensions between the virtualists who see their home office as just suitable and the centralists, managers who expect staff to be in the office on designed days or number of days each work week. And return to the CCO starting in 2022 as the COVID-19 pandemic waned and social distancing protective measures ended.

These are very different views of the world of knowledge work roiled by rapid advances in information and communications technology. The latest being generative artificial intelligence that could make Steve Jobs’ microcomputer bicycle like a modern one with electronic gear shifting. Or into a fast motorbike that can even drive itself.

These advances will fuel a new debate, this one on AI’s role in knowledge work and how knowledge workers should best use it.

From Office to Output: Redefining Knowledge Work

Posted onLeave a comment

In the first half of the 2020s, two developments emerged with major implications for knowledge work.

The first is virtualization that is deemphasizing when and where it’s performed. The social distancing public health measures of the COVID-19 pandemic saw a tipping point for the longer term trend of information and communications technology (ICT) advances connecting knowledge workers outside of co-located office settings, effectively obsoleting the daily commute.

Then in 2022-23, another ICT development emerged: generative artificial intelligence accepting plain language queries and largely replacing traditional web searches, synthesizing and greatly speeding up access to online information. On its heels came agentic AI that can analyze data, set goals, and take independent actions at the direction of knowledge workers.

Both developments have the potential to profoundly alter knowledge work as we know it, which has been traditionally defined by doing defined tasks while present in a centralized, commute-in office during scheduled work hours.

One likely outcome is knowledge work will be more defined by outputs and deliverables rather than inputs and presence in an office. That could mean dispersed, small project teams that form up for the purpose of completing a project and disbanding when it’s accepted by the sponsor as complete. They may meet up in a co-located setting. Or not, depending on project needs and the team’s preference.

For the knowledge workforce, the implications are similarly sizeable. Less permanent employment by a single knowledge organization. More projectized contract work arrangements where specific subject matter expertise and experience is required. These contractors may work independently or as part of a professional services firm.

This points to a decline in employment in the conventional sense where knowledge work is defined by the terms and conditions of the employer: when, where and how work is to be done.

That in turn has implications for medical care finance in the United States where employers are mandated by state laws to pay for medical care arising from job duties and for large employers, medical benefit plans for non work-related care.

Knowledge workers saying no to the negative externality of commuting. Push back has implications for employment.

Posted onLeave a comment

As has been widely reported, tensions have erupted over the past two years or so between knowledge workers and their employers regarding expectations regarding office attendance. The tensions are largely economic over what economists call “negative externalities.”

Negative externalities are costs created by organizations as a consequence of their activities that are not directly borne by them but instead by external parties and society at large. A commonly cited example is environmental pollution by industrial activity. Or carbon emissions from commuting.

Post pandemic, knowledge workers have come to view the costs of personal time, transportation and other expenses of commuting to an office as a negative externality borne by them. Moreover, a negative externality that doesn’t make sense for them to incur in order to sit at a computer desk in a cube farm when they can just as easily do the same at home.

The push back has broader implications for employment since as traditionally defined, employers determine when, where and how work by employees is performed. For knowledge work, that has meant in a centralized, commute in office and mandatory attendance during specified hours.

Knowledge workers are effectively renegotiating the terms and conditions of employment. They are willing to do the work but are not as inclined to bear the costs of commuting to an office to accomplish it. For knowledge organizations, the situation may prompt them to reassess employment and question whether the industrial age model based on presence in a centralized office setting continues to make sense. They might instead rely more on contract work with agencies and individuals, seeing more value in paying for project deliverables and outcomes rather retaining large permanent staffs.

ICT’s disruption of traditional employment relationship basis of RTO tensions

Posted on1 Comment

Advances in information and communications technology (ICT) over recent decades are fundamentally altering our perceptions of knowledge work: what it is and how and where it’s performed. Particularly in the context of the employment relationship between knowledge workers and knowledge organizations.

As legally defined in the United States, employment empowers the employer to determine when, where and how employees do their jobs. For knowledge work, that has traditionally meant 8-5, Monday through Friday in a commute in office setting owned or leased by the employer.

ICT advances have virtualized and decentralized knowledge work to the point that arrangement makes less and less sense. Knowledge workers can increasingly get their work done outside of those constraints of time and location. That gives them more ability to choose when and where they work.

Having that agency – the ability to decide – is at the heart of the return to office tensions between knowledge workers and their employers. To employers, it appears to undermine their traditional role to direct how, where and when work is performed.

Knowledge workers are now claiming agency over those domains, recognizing going through the motions of commuting daily to an office to use computers and phones in a sea of cubicles during a set time frame no longer makes much sense.

It really hasn’t since the dawn of the commercial Internet in the 1990s. The social distancing public health measures taken during the COVID-19 pandemic broke the habit of the daily commute to the office for both knowledge workers and knowledge organizations.

Habits change when behavior changes. The pandemic forced a change in behavior, making knowledge work less dependent on transportation of knowledge workers to commute in office locations. Modifying habits is how change fundamentally begins and becomes the new norm.

Toffler’s second and third waves colliding in U.S. federal government

Posted onLeave a comment

In his 1980 book The Third Wave, futurist Alvin Toffler depicted the long-term evolution of modern socio-economy as a series of three waves. The first was agrarian – the cultivation and sale of plant crops and animals. The second was the industrial era that began in the 18th century. According to Toffler, this wave reached its peak in the 1970s when services took on a more dominant role relative to manufacturing – the third wave.

The transitions between the waves play out over many decades and are fraught with tension between the receding and rising waves. Not surprisingly since in each, the scale of social and economic change is enormous with broad implications for how and where people work and live. The previous socio-economy and its industries and settlement patterns is remade into the next.

Toffler wrote of advances in information and communications technology and fiber optic telecommunications infrastructure that would fundamentally alter the second wave industrial era based on centralization of production in offices and factories in metro centers. The third wave, Toffler prognosticated, would instead bring about decentralization.

Second wave office work would migrate back to homes that Toffler termed “the electronic cottage.” Toffler’s prediction came just six years after fellow futurist Arthur C. Clarke issued a similar forecast, envisioning the end of commuting to urban downtown office buildings. “Men Will No Longer Commute, They Will Communicate.” And plenty of women too who have entered the workforce since Clarke’s 1964 prognostication.

Toffler’s and Clarke’s future has arrived – gradually since the mass market personal computer in the 1980s and Internet in the 1990s – and suddenly following the social distancing public health measures of the 2020 viral pandemic. Millions of office workers migrated to the electronic cottage, creating home offices and no longer regularly commuting.

The tension between the second industrial era and third information era waves is now starkly evident in the federal government and in two prominent figures of the current American administration: President Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Trump is a product of the second wave and the 1980s in particular when he developed his identity as a real estate developer including office buildings. The younger Musk is more complex, a creature of both the second and third waves. He embraces technology but largely in the context of second wave transportation advances: automobiles (Tesla) and rocket ships (SpaceX).

Both men are essentially second wave industrialists. For them, Toffler’s postindustrial third wave electronic cottage doesn’t exist. It’s a dwelling, not a place to work. Working there instead of commuting to a distant office is even “immoral” as Musk put it. Consequently, the administration has ordered federal workers to report for duty at the office.

Organizational change: Shifting communication culture from real time spoken to async, writing-based.

Posted onLeave a comment

The current tensions between knowledge organizations their thought worker staffs over office presence didn’t start with the social distancing public health measures taken in response to the 2020 viral pandemic. They began decades earlier in the 1980s and 1990s with the widespread adoption of personal desktop – and later laptop – computers.

Those tools gave desk workers what Apple founder Steve Jobs called a “bicycle for our minds.” That freed them from relying on handwritten memos that were typed up and later, word processed. Memos, projects, financial documents, project and plans could now be created independently.

Then in the following decade came the mass market Internet. It effectively created bicycle lanes for all those new bicycles and personal communication devices like mobile phones and a decade later, smartphones.

Those bicycle lanes allow information to be created, collected, analyzed and decisions based upon it wherever a thought worker could “pedal” their devices. The paved concrete and asphalt motor vehicle lanes that once physically transported workers to centralized, commute in offices were no longer needed. Even meetings can be conducted without being seated around the traditional conference table.

For knowledge organizations, this is an enormous shift requiring adjustment. That transition from the pre-early 1980s office hasn’t been an easy one. That’s why organizations only gradually implemented it over four decades until the pandemic’s public health measures forced their hand.

That forcing function is generating the pushback we are seeing presently in the form of “return to office” mandates requiring everyone to commute into the office five days a week. But it goes against the longer-term trend wrought by the rapid advances in information and communications technology. They’ve come so fast — and to a head in 2020 – that organizations are undergoing what futurist Alvin Toffler termed “future shock” in his 1970 book of the same name.

Perhaps the most critical adjustment knowledge organizations must navigate on the bicycle lanes lies in their communication culture. In earlier decades when everyone gathered in centralized commuter offices, the communications culture was largely spoken more than written. Hence, lots of meetings. That supports a mindset that knowledge work requires co location so people can speak to one other face to face real time, whether in meeting rooms or passing by another’s desk on the way to the restroom or break room.

The spoken communication culture remained in place as organizations shifted meetings to videoconferences during the pandemic, leading to “Zoom fatigue” from hours of back-to-back online meetings. Here, the bicycles operated like their analog counterparts like when used by children to meet up in real time at a friend’s house.

But that’s not the best use of the digital bicycles and bike lanes. It’s using them like analog devices and not the digital ones they are, facilitating written and asynchronous communication. One company has outlined a communications framework that could serve as a framework knowledge organizations can use and modify as needed.

This is not to say real time spoken communication isn’t valuable. It certainly is and honors our human nature as social beings. However, it must be intentionally organized and conducted and not the default mode as it was in the pre-digital era.

Knowledge organizations suffer “future shock”

Posted onLeave a comment

In 1970, futurist Alvin Toffler coined term “future shock.” It occurs when the future arrives too quickly for people and organizations to adapt to it. Consequently, they get out of sync with the onrushing change in their environments, leading to maladaptive behaviors such as:

 • Crisis-Driven Decision-Making – Reactive rather than proactive approaches to industry disruption (e.g., panic layoffs, rushed technology investments).

• Over-Centralization & Micromanagement – Leadership tightens control in response to perceived chaos, stifling innovation.

• Resistance to virtual work — A rigid preference for traditional centralized commuter office-based operations, despite clear benefits of decentralization.

• Internal Conflict & Cultural Breakdown – Generational clashes between leadership and younger, more digitally native employees.

Two related major forces of change are affecting knowledge organizations. Both have been building over the past five decades or so and have reached critical inflection points in the past few years, accelerated by public health measures taken in response to the 2020 pandemic.

The first is advances in information and communications technology (ICT) that has decentralized knowledge work out of commute-in offices in metro areas. Microcomputers and personal communication devices like smartphones allow knowledge work – researching, reviewing, analyzing and communicating information to arrive at decisions on how to use it – to be done most anywhere. Beforehand, that required dedicated office space and meeting rooms — and staff to commute to and from them.

The second is housing costs and transportation systems in metro areas. Housing tends to cost more nearer to their centers, increasing demand for more affordable, lower cost housing more distant from them. That in turn boosts demand on transportation systems that could in earlier decades enable knowledge workers to rapidly commute from homes located far from centralized commuter offices but no longer have adequate capacity to do so.

Knowledge organizations can overcome future shock, build resilience and adjust to change that shows no sign of slowing down. This requires them to assess and examine the evidence supporting how they conceptualize how their work is done, how their value proposition and strategic advantages are created and the best means to sustain them.

It takes courage to challenge long held assumptions and thinking. This isn’t an easy task for many knowledge organizations since for many, their foundations are built on a pre-digital era where ICT played a far less prominent role. But the benefits are many, allowing them reduce internal tensions and move forward more confidently and with greater capacity to adapt to the changing world of knowledge work. Help is available.