The organization and process of the industrial age regarded efficiency as the best virtue. However, this organization and process have many problems in terms of adaptability to change. Most of the companies we know today are optimized for mass production without defective products and with successful ideas or products. This is not just a story for companies in the manufacturing sector. We are so used to the well-ordered way of sitting on chairs and desks and taking classes of teachers, promoting university professors by the law of well-organized promotion principles, and civil servants whose seniority is set according to the number in front of them. The problem lies in the belief that such a system will no longer be as safe and stable as it was in the past.
On the contrary, the most important thing to think about in preparing for the future is how to manage uncertainty. Growing connections and interdependencies with the world and ambiguity, it is very certain that unexpected things are happening. Don’t you jokingly say, “The surest thing in the world is that there’s nothing for sure?”. The problem is that the current system cannot cope with this situation at all. Most large companies and organizations are good at solving complex and obvious problems. However, they are very poor at solving simple and ambiguous problems. Uncertainty occurs when a variable is defined, but the value is unknown. For example, when you throw a dice and you don’t see any number, it can be said that there is ‘uncertainty’. Ambiguity is a different concept. Ambiguity is not knowing the variable itself. To paraphrase the dice, it’s impossible to set a range of 1 to 6 if you don’t know the shape of the dice, hexahedral or octahedral. The moment you take risks and move toward a vague future, most people or organizations feel fear. From a country’s point of view, there is a fear of such ambiguity in the face of a number of countries facing a crisis in the nation’s system and a large amount of unemployment as the industries that used to work well in the past have been sluggish. In the past, everyone went forward-looking at the predictable form of the future, just like climbing a ladder, but now new things continue to emerge and are under pressure to learn and adapt to them. Job environments continue to change, requiring constant adaptation, and ensuring that jobs are up to retirement in certain industries has become a dreamy environment.
As uncertainty increases, instinctively people become conservative. Looking back on the past and thinking about the simple past, they want to go back to it. However, those times no longer come. Companies are also in this dilemma, having trouble setting up completely new strategies. Top executives desperately seek to find a model that can succeed in the same way as in the past. But, there are no good models anymore. Rather than copying a model, you should build it from scratch. Even if we find a model that will be copied in other industries, it is doubtful how well it will work in our industry, and how long it will last. Facebook is still evolving longer than other social web services because it is constantly changing. Users and experts inside are constantly demanding new features or designs, and Facebook is not negligent in introducing them. Steve Jobs has made Apple a success because of constant change and innovation. He ignored Mac’s compatibility and made a decision to completely flip over the operating system completely and ventured to give up the big hit iPod’s wheel and introduce a touch screen. The decision on such drastic changes has led to the success of today’s Apple and Facebook.
It is not just products or services that must be changed by the digital revolution. There are many areas where the organization and corporate management we know are no longer compatible with this era. The days when such a career was dominated by working for a long time are gone. The seemingly permanent rules began to be broken. Doubt everything, think anew. Dreaming of clearly defined business models and organizational promotion ladders are just nostalgia for the past. You should think that the cataclysm building the boundary between industries must be broken and that anything that seems stable can be dangerous.
Thinking this way, the future looks so difficult and gloomy. However, on the other hand, this has become an age of tremendous opportunity. There is no such thing as a solid castle that is no longer destroyable. With the mindset to embrace change, you can take on a new challenge. It is not easy to predict what will become of future jobs and how the community will change. There is a similar pattern to be observed both now and in the past. Pessimists are always lamenting the present that has changed from the past, and trying to block change. However, how would that help those who are preparing for the future? A more realistic approach is to recognize and actively prepare for change. If a big tsunami continues, it is not wrong to build a bank. However, if it is a tsunami that will cross a bank one day, and if some people do not repair a small crack on the bank, the bank will eventually burst out, and those who believed the bank would protect them will eventually be swept away by the tsunami. But, the people who prepared the ship in a tsunami-hit environment, and those who were on board will survive and start living in a new environment. The answer is relatively clear on which side to choose. What is your choice?