- The speaker recalls a story about taking the London Underground with a colleague and observing a woman wearing badges that say "Baby on board" and "The only constant is change."
- The speaker discusses the importance of looking back and not just focusing on the next big thing.
- Scenario planning is introduced as a process used by Herman Miller, and the speaker explains the steps involved.
- A multidisciplinary panel was assembled to create scenarios for the future, and three distinct scenarios emerged.
- The speaker highlights the limitations of scenario planning and the need for a realistic and broad perspective.
- The importance of engaging with different perspectives and considering sociological, technological, economical, environmental, and political factors is emphasized.

The speaker discusses three scenarios and the trends that connect them. They then identify eight actionable points related to these trends, including informed choice, digitally mediated relationships, and swarm-focused work. The speaker focuses on digitally mediated relationships and how workplaces need to adapt to accommodate them. They also briefly mention the Hollywood model of work as a contrast to the traditional BBC model.

- The Hollywood model of work breaks traditional working norms by assembling a team for a specific project and then disbanding afterwards.
- Deloitte predicts that 40% of work will be of a contractual nature within a year.
- Flexible workspaces like impact hubs and co-working spaces help accommodate the changing needs of workers.
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of being prepared for constant change and climate change.

- Story about observing a woman with "Baby on board" and "The only constant is change" badges on the London Underground
- Importance of looking back and not just focusing on the future
- Introduction of scenario planning used by Herman Miller and its steps
- Assembly of a multidisciplinary panel to create future scenarios
- Limitations of scenario planning and need for a realistic and broad perspective
- Emphasis on engaging with different perspectives and considering various factors
- Three scenarios and the trends connecting them
- Eight actionable points related to these trends, including informed choice and digitally mediated relationships
- Adaptation of workplaces to accommodate digitally mediated relationships
- Mention of the Hollywood model of work as a contrast to the traditional BBC model
- Prediction that 40% of work will be contractual within a year
- Importance of flexible workspaces in accommodating changing needs
- Emphasis on being prepared for constant change and climate change.

Oliver works with the Herman Miller Insight Group, which is responsible for the commissioning, overseeing and presenting of Insights into the latest thinking in workplace design and associated issues. The subjects covered include Happiness in the workplace, Generations at Work, Creativity in the Workplace, Agile Working and the Psychology of Collaboration. After completing his Masters in 2009 Oliver moved to Norway to begin a teaching career in applied
Psychology before joining Herman Miller in January 2011. Since then he has become a valued member of the Insight team working closely with the international sales force, as well as public and private sector clients. 

He has been involved with a variety of international office projects and has been based in Dubai since 2015 to deliver Insights throughout APAC &amp; MEA regions.
Oliver also has an active interest in social media and technology. His valued insights can be found at
@HMInsightMEA" This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

Translators note Thank you very much for the introduction and the warm welcome.

It really is a pleasure being here this afternoon.

When I first started to discuss scenario planning or futurology, I was based in London at the time, working out of our headquarters on Aldwych Corner, and I was about to see a very large architectural practice called HOK, attending that with my wonderful colleague Shazia Shaikh.

Actually, she's more like a work mum than she is a colleague.

We all have them, she's just such a wonderful creature.

So me and Shazzy, we decided we were going to take the London Underground, as most people do when they're in London, and we were walking down the Strand heading towards Charing Cross Station.

As we breezed through the turnstiles heading down the escalator towards the center of the earth.

We felt the air get a little warmer, a little thicker, and absolutely a little bit more polluted.

As we were stood waiting for the tube to arrive, me and Shazi were just having our normal jesting with 1 another.

The tube doors open and we get on and Shazi's so quick, she's quite nimble, she grabs 2 seats, you know, it's unheard of almost in London, grabs 2 seats and beckons me over to come and take the other.

So we start to feel the shift of the cart moving as we go towards the next station.

Of course, the doors open, some get off, and some more people get on.

So from a seated position, I could see this lady enter the tube, and she was having a little bit of difficulty at the time.

But what really stood out to me on this lady was that she was wearing 2 badges on her blouse.

The first 1 being that all-important badge that every gentleman in London is supposed to look out for.

And if you've been to London, you'll know what that badge says.

And she was indeed sporting said badge on her blouse.

I knew it was my duty to offer her my seat.

So I made eye contact with the lady and I gestured her to come over.

As she got a little bit closer towards me, I saw that she was wearing that second badge and I could actually start to pick out what it said now.

And it said that the only constant is change.

And I thought that was particularly interesting for the talk that I was about to deliver that day.

So I'd like you to bear that in mind as we go through the futurology and scenario planning for the next 15 minutes.

Now, you will have just had some lunch, So what will be happening right now is all the blood from your brain will be redistributed to digest the heavily carbohydrated food in your stomachs.

So I thought what better time than to position this quote.

It's a bit discombobulating, so let me talk you through it.

The task is not so much to see what no 1 has yet seen, but to think about what no 1 has yet thought about, that which everyone has seen.

So if you take that last part of the the phrase into consideration, I'll explain and unpack it a little bit, to Think about what no 1 has yet thought about, that which everyone has seen.

I think sometimes when we're discussing futurology or scenario planning, we can get too caught up into thinking, what's the next big thing?

Sometimes leapfrogging to something completely new.

At Herman Miller, we like to say that the next big thing isn't for you.

Instead of just blindly jumping on these trains, sometimes it's important to look back and see what we've missed along the way.

So in my mind, this quote is saying exactly that.

And if you think about it, in history, sometimes we've jumped so far ahead, we've missed some of the little things along the way.

So of course, in 1969, we famously went to the moon.

Pretty monumental human experience, right?

But it wasn't until 2 years later that some bright Spark decided to put the oldest form of technology, that being the wheel, and put it on luggage.

Because before then, gentlemen, you would all be carrying 1 piece of luggage under each arm and then 1 in each of your hands as you went towards the airport.

So it wasn't until 2 years after the moon landing that we started to assign the oldest form of technology to solve a real world issue.

So that for me is 1 of the reasons why I think we shouldn't always just be jumping on the next big bandwagon.

We should also be looking back and seeing what we've missed in the past.

So I would like to explain a little bit about what scenario planning is, what it looks like.

I believe that we all do it in our personal lives, maybe not so much in our business lives, in our careers, and hopefully I can make a case for you doing that.

I'll explain how we went about our process of scenario planning so that you can implement it too.

And of course I will highlight a few of the findings, the trends, the so what's, the actionable points that we teased out from this research towards the latter part of this presentation.

So scenario planning is relatively new in the context of work actually.

Before then, it was only used in military applications.

It was actually this gentleman, Peter Schwartz, who first brought it into the context of business.

Now Peter worked for a little known organization called Shell, 1 of the first oil and gas firms to actually start to understand that you know what, these resources are going to run out at some point, and maybe we should start to diversify our portfolio to cater for this ever-changing future.

So Peter writes, the scenarios are thus the most powerful vehicles I know, for challenging our mental models about the world and lifting the blinders that limit our creativity and resourcefulness.

And this was kind of adhered to from Peter's book, The Art of the Long View.

We wanted to take a realistic but also a long view.

Now when we did futurology or scenario planning in the past, we asked people, you know, this is what the world might look like in 25 years, 30 years.

The first 1 being, well, Oliver, in 25 years, so far ahead into the future, you could stand there and say absolutely anything.

So how do I know that what you're saying is reliable?

The second piece of feedback, well Oliver I'm not going to be at work in 25 years, so to be quite frank I don't really care.

Again another really interesting piece of feedback, so when we're talking about a long view it has to be a realistic 1.

So we like to look 6 years into the future when we're doing our scenario planning.

Because 6 years is realistic, but long enough to take that perspective.

As a furniture manufacturer, you might mistakenly believe that we wanted to look at what is the future of chairs.

Well, actually, probably 90% of the audience if that's what we were talking about today.

So we wanted to start with the world of work and then chunk in to align our point of view and also our product development as well.

We also wanted to engage in multiple different perspectives.

We didn't want to just unlock the door that we keep the Herma Miller research team in, under the stairs, just so you're aware.

We didn't just want to use the Herma Miller research team to do this content.

We wanted to engage with a multidisciplinary panel, people who didn't have Herman Miller in their job title.

So this is the list of people that we brought in to do this research.

We've got anthropologists, political scientists, entrepreneurs from some very prestigious institutions such as MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley, from all over the world, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, the United States, and the UK.

So we really have a good multidisciplinary panel here.

Now When you're talking about futurology or scenario planning, usually you hear an acronym called STEEP.

It stands for sociological, technological, economical, environmental, because economics always becomes before environmental, right?

That's 1 of the hardest things to imagine.

So when we were doing this research, nobody saw Donald Trump coming or some of the issues that we're experiencing in the UK where I'm from.

We just didn't see it happening because politics is 1 of those really shifting tides that we struggle to figure out.

So it was interesting and we engaged with these guys to kind of come up with that perspective.

So what we did is we put them all in a room with 1 another, very similar to the room that we're in now.

And we aligned them with the topic of that six-year view into the future.

We then gave them no food or water so they could really start to hallucinate.

No, it turns out without food or water, it's a human's rights issue, so we had to give them food and water.

But we all aligned them with that topic of focusing 6 years into the future.

When you hear someone present from a different perspective than yours, even though you're a leader in your own right, in your own discipline, it starts to mold and shape the way that you see the world as well.

So when this expert multidisciplinary panel heard from 1 another, present their views of what they thought 6 years might look like from a sociological, technological, economical, environmental and political standpoint, we started to see 3 distinct scenarios of the future emerge.

So let me just again familiarize you with what scenarios are.

So if you're thinking of going on holiday as an example, you're not just contemplating 1 destination, right?

You're contemplating a few and then you imagine what your life will be like in 1 of those 3 or all 3 of those scenarios or maybe more.

You think about the finances, you think about the weather, You think about whether your partner would like it, and you imagine what those perspectives will look like, and then you make a decision based on those imaginings.

We started to see these 3 scenarios naturally form from our expert judging panel.

Now, I don't know about you, but a group of people imagining stuff, I don't really want to bet my mortgage on that.

So what we were looking at is some of the trends that link these 3 scenarios together, some of the actionable points that could be teased out of that.

And that's what we started to put our money on when it came to product development and also our point of view around work and place.

So here are the scenarios, this is what we entitled them.

The data sphere, it's not data sphere for any Americans in the room, It's the data sphere.

Now I said they're really interesting, but what's more interesting is the trends that link them together.

Now I really like this quote where it says that the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed, which is very similar to another quote by Charles Handy, that the future's already here, it's just in smaller portions.

So some of what I'm about to tell you, you're probably already very familiar with.

It's putting your money behind something that already exists that you imagine will grow to become a larger portion in the future.

Of course, this is definitely an art more than it is a science.

I don't have a crystal ball, I really don't.

This is just a lot of calculated what-ifs.

Anyone that says that they can predict the future, I would be very wary of that.

So when the scenarios were created, we then looked at the trends that linked them all together, and we teased them out into what we call 8 actionable points, or propositions, if you will.

We have informed choice, digitally mediated relationships, swarm focused work, interdependence, hackable and kinetic nodes, algorithm assisted decision-making, uBeware, which is basically wearable technology, and then finally cultural tectonics.

Now I would love to be able to do a deep dive into all 8 of these with you this afternoon, but unfortunately I only have 15 minutes.

This content can take me up to about 6 hours to go through and I don't want to do that to you.

So I'm just going to be focusing on a couple and just lightly touching on them.

If you are interested in finding out about the other 6 to a deeper degree, we will be posting the white paper of this research underneath in a link from the video, and everyone that attended, we will send the link out as well.

So you can check out the other 6 for yourself.

So the 2 that I'd like to look at is digitally mediated relationships and swarm-focused work.

I don't know about you, but when I was younger, I used to tug on my mum's skirt and say, Mummy, I'm bored.

Of which she would reply, Oliver, only boring people get bored.

And then throw a tennis ball to me and say, go and play outside with your friends.

Many people in the room will be familiar with that scenario.

We started off many years ago as being very much physical creatures.

It was all about physical interactions and now has technologies playing an ever more important part in our lives.

We're starting to see these physical interactions dwindle down into significantly more digital ones.

So much so that some people have friends that they've never met.

Who can honestly say that they've met every single person that they are connecting with on LinkedIn?

We're starting to move towards more digital interactions.

Now what we're saying with this proposition is that now we're starting to see these digital interactions form physical ones as well.

If I asked you that question 15 years ago, there would be no hands because that would be a very embarrassing thing to admit that you met your partner through a social media or dating website.

Now of course it's a little bit strange if you have met your person physically.

You met down the pub or playing sports or something like that, you now have to come up with a reason, no we met on plenty of fish or Tinder or Happn or something like that.

Because it's just so normal now for us to have relationships based off digital interactions.

In fact, I attended a wedding 3 years ago.

1 of my best friends, Thomas Tilbrook, he married his beautiful wife, Chloe, and the hashtag for their wedding was hashtag Tinderworks.

So we're starting to see that these digital interactions are bearing fruit in the form of long-term relationships, marriages, and even children, which I think is incredibly interesting.

Now KLM, the Dutch airline, a little while ago, was starting to experiment with a new form of allocated seating.

Now this is an opt-in, opt-out situation before anyone loses their minds when I say this.

They started to experiment with doing allocated seating based on your LinkedIn profile.

So based on how many degrees of freedom you had from the people on the plane, you could be sat next to somebody who you know, at least digitally.

Now I can already start to see who the salespeople in the room because they're getting very excited right now.

Everybody else is like, oh god that sounds like a nightmare.

But I think that's an interesting thing to experiment with, because why not kill some dead time while you're flying?

Talking to somebody, of course, that's great for extroverts, not necessarily so much so for the introverted populace.

And again, something that salespeople might like, but not necessarily everybody else.

Now when I explained this KLM initiative to my friend Charlie, he said, Oliver, that sounds very interesting.

Please tell me that KLM are also experimenting with Tinder.

Because then, then I could be sat next to my ideal partner for the next 6 to 8 hours, and they can't escape from just the useless conversations that I have and my inability to flirt.

I said, Charles, I haven't heard anything, But if I do, you'll be the first to know.

Well, in workplace, we're not really catering for these digital interactions.

We're now having to start to plan spaces through the eye of a lens.

I travel the world talking to organizations about how dreadful their boardrooms are whilst I'm in a boardroom.

They think I'm being really mean, but if you think about it, a boardroom was designed 100 years ago to cater for the CEO barking orders to the rest of the people in the room.

It was about authoritarian dictatorships.

Now we're expected to have idea generation and communication, more democratization, which is basically in a nutshell, pyramid to pancake organizations.

So how on earth can we do that with a rectangular table?

And from the digital interaction, that's dreadful, both from the person who's remotely viewing that space and also for the people using that technology.

Have you ever been in a meeting room and you have to go like this to see the technology or the presenter, and then you try and get from the back of the room to use the technology at the front of the room and you have to do that awkward shuffle because they've only allowed for the customary 1.5 meters from the edge of the desk to the wall for fire, health and safety, not for accessibility so you have to get, oh excuse me, sorry, coming through and you do this awkward shuffle as you get to the front.

So now we're having to start to design spaces where it's better for people physically and for the digital attendee as well.

Because in those long 12 to 25 person meeting room environments, you can probably see the first 4 through this field of vision, right?

There are always glass walls at least on 1 side because they put them near the window so they can get really hot.

And then of course the acoustics is dreadful because you've got glass there, you've probably got some hard walls, you're definitely gonna have a whiteboard there because you need a whiteboard for when the TV eventually breaks down.

So we're starting to look at maybe, let's put some plectrum shaped tables in there.

They don't cost that much more money but it's better for field of view, both from the physical people in that space and also the digital users.

And it doesn't cost any more money, right?

It's about the same, it's just more purposeful design.

And it is challenging a belief, a strongly held belief about what we need in terms of meeting rooms that we've had for 100 years.

So that's digitally mediated relationships.

Has anyone heard of the Hollywood model of work?

Okay, a couple of people nodding their heads.

Has anyone heard of the BBC model of work?

Probably not, because I just came up with it.

So, if we contrast the 2, and we look at those 2 work styles.

The BBC model of work, so the British broadcasting company.

Any company really you could use and swap that out, you could use HBO or whatever that you wanted to, but any company that is producing like a series, so like a soap opera or even Game of Thrones as an example.

So in the BBC model of work, it's like the traditional model of work that we're experiencing right now.

So you have a group of script writers that are the same all day, every day, right?

You have a couple of people that are doing the sound.

You have a couple of people that are doing the lights, some camera crew, some visual effects, of course, and then the same people day in, day out, and the cast, of course, is exactly the same.

Sorry, Game of Thrones probably isn't a good example there.

But usually it's the same people all day, every day, right?

That's the BBC model of work, and that's what we're used to.

The Hollywood model of work, on the other hand, is breaking those traditional working norms.

So the Hollywood model of work is you have a great script and somebody decides to fund it, maybe a studio or a private investor, and then they assign a director that they believe can fully imagine these words into reality.

The director then assigns a leading lady and a leading man and the rest of the cast.

They find some light people, some sound people, and everybody comes together to work on this specific project, and then after it's done, they break apart, and they may never work together again.

That is, unless it's a Tarantino movie, and then you're guaranteed to see them all working together again at another point in time.

Okay, so that is the more, that's breaking the norms of the traditional method of work and that is what we're starting to see.

Deloitte have hypothesized that within just 1 year's time, 40% of work will be that contractual nature.

Right, People will be coming in for shorter periods of time, so how can we start to cater for that in terms of the workplace?

How can we design environments for people that we don't know are gonna be there?

It's gonna have to grow and shrink on a daily basis.

We have to start thinking differently about the workplace.

So these flexible models, right, like your impact hubs, your WeWorks, your executive centers, these service office co-working spaces are really helping to bridge that gap of the ebb and flow of workplace needs.

So I apologize for not being able to go through the other 6.

I really would have loved that opportunity and time with you.

And if the only constant is change, then I think we better be prepared for it.

And whether you believe it's man-made or is a natural cycle of the world, we are contributing to that.

I think we're past that tipping point now, and I think we better prepare for the consequences.

So when I was able to read the detail of that badge on the lady's blouse, and she came past me to sit down next to my colleague Shazia, she said, thank you for paying attention because not everybody does.

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Scenario planning - the future of work and place | Oliver Baxter | TEDxALC