The Future of Work is a career braid of our different roles

Steven Forth is co-founder and managing partner at Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.

The future of work will not be about climbing a job ladder. Rather than a series of well-defined jobs, each with growing responsibilities and compensation, we will experience work as a set of overlapping roles. Some of these roles will be part of a formal job whereas others will not. There will be jobs associated with teams and projects. There will also be informal roles, often not recognized, sometimes difficult to describe, but critical to personal success and organizational performance.

What is a role?

Here is how the Merriam Webster dictionary defines ‘role.’

Definition of ‘role’

1a(1): a character assigned or assumed
“had to take on the role of both father and mother”

(2): a socially expected behavior pattern usually determined by an individual's status in a particular society

b: a part played by an actor or singer

2: a function or part performed especially in a particular operation or process
“played a major role in the negotiations"

All of these definitions are operational when we think about roles at work.

“A character assigned or assumed”

A character has a personality (the ‘ba’ in Ibbaka means personality), a set of traits that are stable over time. Competency models developed in Ibbaka often capture these as behaviors, but an important essence of a person’s character is really their skills. This is why Ibbaka allows people to claim their own skills and does not confine them to skills included in a model. No model will ever capture our uniqueness.

“A part played”

Most of us, whether we are individual contributors, managers, or leaders, are part of a team. There are a few one-act plays, but most of the world’s great plays are an ensemble of pieces. The same is true of work. Most work today is done on teams and people can play different roles on different teams. Our Jobs and the roles that compose them are only part of the story. The roles we play on teams, which are often independent of our Jobs and not covered in Job descriptions, can be the main thing that connects us to other people at work. These project teams are often the launchpad for career transitions. Recording the new skills being developed on teams is central to skill management.

“A function or part performed”

Roles are assembled into jobs. Teams are an assemblage of roles. Roles are part of larger wholes. Knowing how roles combine to get work done is one of the key insights that a good skill management platform provides. You should be able to find the answers to questions like …

• Do people with the same Jobs perform the same roles?

• What roles do we find on successful teams?

• Does the presence or absence of certain roles impact outcomes?
  Some recent examples of this are that innovation teams increasingly include people with design thinking roles or that product launch teams include a pricing role. More and more project teams include a data analyst.

• What new roles are emerging? Should these roles start to be built into jobs?

• What new skills are emerging for specific roles?
  Skill tend to appear in roles before they get designed into jobs.

How roles connect and reinforce each other over a career

Most of us will play many different roles over the course of our careers.

In my 20s, I did a lot of work as a Japanese-English translator, initially inside a large financial company, then as a freelancer, and finally as part of a collective. After moving from Tokyo to Vancouver in 1988, I went back to freelancing. There was a lot of work then so I found a partner and started a company. Eventually, I realized I was no longer a translator but had 10 then 20, then 50, then more than 100 people depending on me for their livelihood. My main job was to build teams and then to build capabilities that combined people, relationships, software, and data. At the same time, I kept up my role in the global translation community, organizing conferences, helping people to connect, sponsoring immigrants. I also began to make investments in other people’s companies, cultivating a role as an angel investor. These days my convenor role has moved online. I lead the design thinking group on LinkedIn (more than 140,000 people) and I sponsor a number of MeetUps.

I have played a lot of different roles over the years. Each role has led to the next with much overlapping and transfer of skills. I built certain foundational skills early on. Abstraction through mathematical modeling. An appreciation for multiple meanings and points of view from translation. An understanding that much more is achieved working with others than working alone from the community and then company building. Mathematical modeling informed my translation work. The combination of modeling and poetry feeds my current learning in semantic modeling and graph theory.

I think this is typical and will be the pattern for most people in the future of work. We will play multiple roles, in different contexts, and our careers will depend on how we braind those roles, and the people who support them, together into longer strands.

How roles work in the Ibbaka Talent Platform

There are three types of roles being implemented on Ibbaka Talent.

Job Roles - these are the roles that are included in a job. They are designed in the competency model and inherited into an individual’s profile when it gets connected to a job.

Team or Project Roles - these can come from roles in a competency model, but they more often surface in the context of team building. The below screenshot is part of a competency model for design thinking.

Independent Roles - not all of the roles that we play are part of our formal jobs or project teams. My role curating the LinkedIn Design Thinking group is important to me, I hope is a service to the community, and has some value to Ibbaka.

Conclusion - Manage Your Roles and Not Your Progression up a Job Ladder

Economic and demographic changes mean that most of our careers will extend over forty or fifty years. I have been working for more than forty years already and expect to continue to work for another fifteen or twenty years. No list of Jobs would describe all the things I have done, or hope to do. A combination of skills plus the roles where I built and applied them and the teams I have worked with is a more meaningful way for me to plan my career. How about you? Do you think in terms of Jobs or Roles?