Today, we are moving to ‘office-less work’.
You see, we use the lens of the old to describe the new, so we’re using the old ways of working to describe the future.
That why the first cars were called ‘horseless carriages’ because, well, people travelled around in a carriage but these new things didn’t have any horses pulling them. In fact, for many years the driver sat high up and in the open, just like on a carriage, before it was realised that you could put the driver under cover too. And so began the slow evolution to what we have today – and it’s still evolving.
So where we are today is ‘office-less work’.
We’ve made the first step by detaching the work from the need to have an office, in the same way that those early car designers detached the travelling bit from the horses.
What we must avoid now is people insisting it’s unsafe and putting the metaphorical ‘man with a red flag’ in front to slow it down.
Instead, we need to embrace the new ways of working and quickly move to the level of sophistication we take for granted in our cars today.
The future of work will be as different from the office-based desk factories of the past as a Tesla is to a coach and horses.
‘Office-less work’ is just the start.