Or perhaps, more importantly, how much knowledge work does your organisation actually do? There's a whole host of recent posts that touch on the collision of innovation, knowledge work and systematisation in business. (e.g. Victoria Axelrod, Dave Snowden.)
One thing I am still struggling to understand and (roughly) quantify is how much "knowledge work" is actually going on. Over the years, many commentators have taken the "Gold Collar Worker" as a starting point and believed that the future of work for many (if not most) will be more flexible, more satisfying and more knowledge-based than before. This leads of course both to a view of education as a tool for income improvement (not to mention as the source of increased value-added for businesses.)
However, my own observation of various "knowledge industries" is that many firms may be large, but many of the people inside are doing rather routine work (which might be termed "mental labour") which is not particularly creative or flexible, but for various reasons is not cheap to automate at this time. So, I'll put the question to knowledge workers reading this, how much of what you do is really "creative knowledge work" and how much will be outsourced to lower-skilled subordinates using a computerised system in the next few years?
1 comment:
Great question. I'll be curious to see if you get any answers.
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