A Shift in Thinking

We’re at a pivotal point in our country’s history. Americans have lost confidence that hard work will bring success. Technology has changed how we talk to one another, buy things, and go places. As a result, there are fewer jobs in many traditional industries. With automation and artificial intelligence poised to disrupt traditional jobs even further, we have never needed a window into the future more than we do right now.

The Shift Commission on Work, Workers, and Technology is a joint project of New America and Bloomberg. Its goal is to study the future of work in America, to envision what our jobs, and our society, might look like 10–20 years from now. The Shift Commission does this in a rare way: an exercise in imagining the future called scenario planning.

Scenario planning is a structured way of fleshing out possible versions of the future, using data, a consistent set of questions about each possible future, and a view that we can compare and contrast possible futures using a small number of essential differences. (It was first adapted from the defense industry to business planning by Shell in the 1970’s, and helped to anticipate the oil shock.) Through this process, Shift will identify several possible future scenarios, describing what work and life could look like under each, and creating a roadmap for how we might respond.

We chose the method of scenario planning to sidestep the usual debates (“robots are taking over! no, tech will solve everything!”) about predicting what will happen, and to bring different communities together to think constructively about solutions. Uniting these different communities — technologists, policymakers, journalists, business leaders, advocates — from all political, cultural, and professional aisles is another reason we chose scenario planning. Our hope is to create a community of leaders prepared to take on the future, together.

Shift’s scenario planning meetings will take place throughout the country. Our participants are always curious what to expect:

Each meeting begins with information about current economic, technological, and cultural trends. Then small groups brainstorm what might happen under four specific scenarios, developed by an early group of contributors — examining what individual lives might look like day to day, how different occupations and industries might change, and what changes in our jobs might mean for our communities. Finally, we create possible responses to these future scenarios as a way of considering potential action steps.

In total, Shift will facilitate six scenario planning sessions, each with 25–35 participants. We’ll also conduct focus groups with affected communities, solicit input from college students and millennials, and survey the public on beliefs about work. Our intent is to get input as broad and diverse as possible.

After we’ve gathered this input, we will assemble it into a clear statement of our possible long-term futures. Our hope is to give the coming debates over the future of work a consistent vocabulary, so that we can get to the heart of the issues as quickly as possible.

In the end, this gets us something more telling than polling, more comprehensive than a typical commission, and more concrete than hand-wringing about the coming “machine age.” It gets us a common story about the future, so we can figure out — together — how to make it a good one.

With thanks to Gideon Mann and Roy Bahat of Bloomberg for their input.