Note: Excerpt from Make Work Matter (Baker 2021). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
We don’t make our way to the meaningful work we crave without a bit of holy wrestling. We need to outfit ourselves with the tools to do this deep work. Because change is happening so fast, most of us are perpetually living and working in a new world with old tools. This requires us to both reevaluate old tools that have worked well for generations and invest in new tools suited for navigating change. In order to build a new toolkit, we have to start with naming why the old one no longer works. The last thing we want to do is replace outdated tools with unhelpful ones.
Start by thinking about why there are fewer places where people can count on steady and long-term work. Consider that even as recently as a generation ago, it was common for people to stay with a company or in an industry for the duration of their careers. Young farmers became old farmers. Junior executives became senior ones. Teachers sometimes stayed with schools for thirty years. But today, the average person changes jobs many times. And the number of people active in the independent economy has more than tripled in the last two decades. Why is it that over forty million people have some kind of side hustle, do gig work, or are working for themselves full-time?
400 Million Ways to Make Banana Bread
Picture a set of well-worn paths that are eroding or perhaps even barricaded. The disappearing of seemingly well-worn paths has a lot to do with the fact that our collective relationship to knowledge has changed. Hear me out. As a society, we’ve moved from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. If the Industrial Age was a time marked by efficiency and mass production because of machines, the Information Age is a time marked by cultural disruption and digital acceleration powered by technology.
Knowledge is easier to both access and distribute than it was just a couple decades ago. Take something as simple as a recipe for banana bread. Thirty years ago, if you wanted to make banana bread for the first time, chances are you would have consulted a family member or a cookbook you owned. The information you could access came via established and predictable channels.
If you set out to make banana bread today, you have the option to consult not only family or a trusty cookbook but also the entire world. If you google “banana bread recipe,” you are met with over 400 million relevant hits in less than a second. And because of the power of algorithms, the first several hundred hits are recipes you might actually want to try. Let’s say that after reading a dozen recipes, you decide to bake a hybrid – essentially creating your own new recipe. Later, you take a picture of your creation and post it along with the recipe on social media using #bananabread. Now any number of people you’ve never met have access to your knowledge and can make the bread you invented.
As our ways of knowing have diversified, how we conceptualize and access work has been disrupted. Instead of a fixed set of well-worn career paths, we now have seemingly limitless opportunities. Some of the same jobs remain, but the paths toward them feel different. Plus, there are so many new ways to make a living than there were just a decade ago. As with making banana bread, it is now up to individuals to piece together something that works for them.
Decentralized Responsibility
Beyond just how we access work, diversified knowledge streams have impacted how we do our work, what we work on, and who we work with. Consider the apps or platforms you use that weren’t invented ten years ago. Consider the projects you’ve worked on in the last year and all the different skills you had to have to do so. And consider how an increasingly diverse workforce changes everything. From an aging population to transnational companies to the shifting ethnic demographics of the population of America, chances are that you’re working in less homogeneous groups than the workers of thirty years ago. These shifts make work more complex (and more wonderful and more like the kingdom of God!). A more diverse workforce makes the inequities that are still so deeply ingrained in our society feel both increasingly more noticeable and less tolerable in our workplaces. As a result, some companies are rightly reckoning with racial and gender equity in their ranks and practices. Interestingly, that reckoning is often not coming from the center of an organization. In other words, it’s not happening on a well-worn path. No, the reckoning is coming largely through decentralized yet interconnected, well-organized individuals on the margins. Knowledge feels flipped inside out.
At the heart of all this disruption is a shift in what I’ll call the burden of responsibility. When knowledge is centralized, the implicit burden of responsibility for making sure the world and the economy work is largely on the places that presumed to hold that knowledge – educational institutions, government, big systems and corporations. The results were well-worn pathways in and out of those centers and guides who knew the way. But as our relationship with knowledge has changed and when knowledge feels flipped inside out, we’re forced to wrestle with what was once assumed. When this happens, sometimes the center grasps for power and life and fights back against the new ways of doing things. Other times, the center fractures and disintegrates. Still other times, there’s a blending of the old and the new. Whatever the case, we are – in real time – synthesizing knowledge from a variety of sources so that we can go where no path yet exists! If you ever feel as if you’re just sort of making it up as you go, know that you’re not alone. We’re all in this shift together.
Always On, On Demand
It’s not only information that’s more accessible. It’s people too. Technology has made our greatest resource as a species – ourselves – feel constantly available. As a result, we live in an always-on, on-demand culture. Think about what this means for expectations and boundaries between work and the rest of our lives. They start to get blurry fast, especially if a portion of our work happens on a computer or via email – the same places from which we send texts to our friends or look at pictures of our families. Thirty years ago, if someone worked in an office environment, they were largely out of reach after hours. A nine-to-five job was just that. But today, when the average person checks their smartphone a hundred times a day, it’s harder to distinguish if and when we’re truly unplugged.
It’s no surprise, then, that our always-on, on-demand way of being has given birth to hustle culture. As a culture, we reward accomplishments and ambition. That’s not all bad, of course. In fact, hustle can be an agent of good. But when the collective speak is that every goal we meet was worth whatever it took to get there, things get problematic. It’s painful for me to admit how often I’ve found myself buying into hyped-up hustle as a viable path forward, how often I’ve abused my own energy in the name of accomplishments, progress and meaningful work.
Are Educators Preparing Us for This World?
Now consider the way the West prepares its citizens for work and if the tools we need today are prioritized in our spaces for formal learning: Do we prioritize preparing people for continuous change and ambiguity? Do we work to cultivate resilience and creativity above all else in the classroom? Do we encourage experimentation with skills such as empathy and risk-taking as means for career exploration? Do we teach people to mitigate pressures to unhealthy hustle in an on-demand world?
As an educator myself, I can say that it’s been nearly impossible to keep up with the rate of change in the world and to apply it fully to lessons in the classroom. Partly, this is because our educational systems are built around fixed milestones, reflecting the former era where pathways into work were clearer and more well-established. Starting in kindergarten, young minds progress through different phases of education – elementary, middle and high school, and eventually college. In every phase, there are clear goals that define the progression. The gifts of humans we call teachers are charged with helping students to reach these milestones of success. The measures we’re all aiming for are set in place by schools and districts, government and accreditation boards at various points. It’s almost as if we’re on an assembly line.
One of the central goals of this assembly line is to adequately prepare us for the workforce. The assumption of the well-worn path is that checking certain boxes sets us up to contribute meaningfully and productively to society. Up until fairly recently, this assembly line would pop out workers, ready to take their places in the industries of America – industries such as business, manufacturing, education, retail, health care, entertainment and government.
But today, because the world is changing faster than education can keep up with, there’s a gap between our education and preparation for work. Closing this gap is the work that now undergirds all the rest of our work. We won’t solve all this at once or all by ourselves. Just when we adopt and adapt to this new world of work, it’s bound to change again.
Michaela O’Donnell, senior director, De Pree Center for Leadership, Fuller Theological Seminary
