The Age Of Unreason

by Charles Handy

  The creative upside-down thinking of such people is the premise on which this book is built. New ways of thinking about familiar things can release new energies and make all manner of things possible. Upside-down thinking does not have to aspire to the greatness of Einstein or the all-embracing doctrines of Marx. It has its more familiar variants. The person who decides to treat every chore as an opportunity for learning discovers that cooking can be a creative art, chopping wood a craft, childminding an educational experience and shopping a sociological expedition. The organization which treats people like assets, requiring maintenance, love and investment, can behave quite differently from the organization which looks upon them as costs, to be reduced wherever and whenever possible. Upside-down thinking changes nothing save the way we think, but that can make all the difference.

  This book advocates shamrocks, doughnuts and portfolios. These new words are not intended to be humorous devices but to evoke new images of familiar things. Thirty years ago Donald Schon, an American writer on organizations and now on learning, was arguing that creativity, particularly scientific creativity, comes from the ‘displacement of concepts’ – from taking concepts from one field of life and applying them to another in order to bring fresh insights. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity is the great example. It applies equally well, if not more so, to the field of human activities. New imagery, signalled by new words, is as important as new theory; indeed new theory without new imagery can go unnoticed. Most of what is in this book is not new, nor is it being said for the first time, but much of it has gone unnoticed.

  Upside-down thinking invites one to consider the unlikely if not the absurd. If Copernicus could stand the solar system on its head and still be right nothing should be dismissed out of hand in a time of discontinuity.

  — Upside-down thinking suggests that we should stop talking and thinking of employees and employment. They are words, after all, which only entered the English language some 100 years ago. If work were defined as activity, some of which is paid for, then everyone is a worker, for nearly all their natural life. If everyone were treated as self-employed during their active years then by law and logic they could not be unemployed. They might be poor but that can be put right. The words ‘retirement’ and ‘unemployment’ used only as a contrast to ‘employment’ would cease to be useful.

  — Upside-down thinking suggests that if we put everyone on welfare it would no longer be invidious to receive it. That would not mean that no one was expected to work, only that everyone, as of right, got an initial ‘social dividend’, to be repaid progressively as one earns.

  — Upside-down thinking wonders what magic it is that determines that forty hours spread over five days should be the working week for most people. Why cannot one choose to distribute the 2000 hours per year of normal work in a wide variety of chunks?

  — Upside-down thinking notices that marriages in the last century lasted fifteen years and today also for fifteen years. In the last century it was the death of a partner which ended the marriage, now it is divorce. Should all relationships as well as employment contracts have a fixed term?

  — Upside-down thinking suggests that it might be desirable to reward some experts for not using their skills. At present dentists are paid per treatment. There is an inevitable temptation to diagnose the need for treatment. If rewards were related to the number of healthy mouths in the practise not the bad ones, we might need fewer dentists and have better teeth. Similarly, upside-down thinking observes that a national health service is run and rewarded as a national sickness service and wonders why it cannot be reversed.

  — Upside-down thinking suggests that instead of a National Curriculum for education what is really needed is an individual curriculum for every child, within common guidelines maybe, but given expression in a formal contract between the home and the school.

  — Upside-down thinking questions whether more money for more effort is always the right way to reward all the people all the time, or whether at certain stages in life more time might be as welcome as more money.

  — Upside-down thinking wonders why one career or one type of job should be the norm. Why not three careers, switching progressively from energy to wisdom as the years role on?

  — Upside-down thinking wonders why assistants are always younger than their principals or superiors. Why could not people retrain in mid-life to be part-time assistants to doctors, teachers, social workers and lawyers, para-professionals leaving the full professionals to do the more specialized work.

  — Upside-down thinking wonders why roads are free and railways expensive in most countries, and suspects that it ought to be the other way around, as it almost is in Italy.

  — In organizations, upside-down thinking observes that authority now has to be earned from those people over whom it is exercised and that even formal appraisal systems are upside-down in some organizations these days, with the subordinates appraising their bosses.

  — Upside-down thinking notes that before too long there will be more people working outside organizations than inside them and that, even now, organizations only employ, directly, about one-quarter of the people connected in some way with the product or service which they deliver.

  — Upside-down thinking suggests, therefore, that it might be better to pay people for the work they do, not the time they spend, since that time cannot be measured if they are out of sight or out of the organization.

  And so it can go on. At first sight impossible, or ludicrous, many of these ideas have already been canvased as practical possibilities in some quarters. This book will consider some of them in the wake of the changes thrown up by the new discontinuities in work.

  It is a time for new imaginings, of windows opening even if some doors close. We need not stumble backwards into the future, casting longing glances at what used to be; we can turn round and face a changed reality. It is, after all, a safer posture if you want to keep moving.

  Some people, however, do not want to keep moving. Change for them means sacrificing the familiar, even if it is unpleasant, for the unknown, even when it might be better. Better the hole they know rather than the one not yet dug. Sadly for them a time of discontinuous change means that standing still is not an option, for the ground is shifting underneath them. For them, more than for the movers and the shakers, it is essential that they understand what is happening, that they begin to appreciate that to move and to change is essential, and that through change we learn and grow, although not always without pain.

  This book is written particularly for those who live in the midst of change and do not notice it or want it. It is not a textbook for would-be leaders, nor a political tract; more a guidebook to a new country, ending with some tips for the traveller.

  It is, however, only one man’s view. In an age of unreason there can be no certainty. The guidebook is a guide to a country in which few have yet travelled, a country still to be explored. It is not my purpose to convince anyone that all forecasts are inevitable or that all my prescriptions are right. Rather I am concerned to persuade people that the world around them is indeed changing, with consequences yet to be understood. An age of unreason is an age of opportunity even if it looks at first sight more like the end of all ages.

  If this book helps at all to look at things in a different way, if it sometimes creates an ‘Aha’ effect, as when people say ‘Aha, of course, that is the way it is,’ if people start to think ‘unreasonably’ and try to shape their world the way they think it ought to be, then I shall be content.

  2 The Numbers

  THE NUMBERS ARE the key. They explain why things will not continue as they were because they have already gone beyond the point of no return. It is just that most of us have not noticed. The numbers are the numbers of people, the numbers working, numbers dying, numbers growing up. Demography is a boring word for a mesmerizing subject.

  The New Minority

  Less than half of the workforce in the industrialized world will
be in ‘proper’ full-time jobs in organizations by the beginning of the 21st century. Those full-timers or insiders will be the new minority, just when we had begun to think that proper jobs were the norm for everyone. The others will not be all unemployed, although in every country there will be some who belong to this ‘reserve army’ as Marx called it. More will be self-employed, more and more every year; many will be part-timers or temporary workers, sometimes because that is the way they want it, sometimes because that is all that is on offer. And then there is, everywhere, another reserve army of women in waiting, those whom the OECD so accurately calls ‘unpaid domestic workers’, mothers whose talents and energies are not totally absorbed by their families. Add all these disparate groups together and already they just about equal the numbers of those with the full-time proper jobs.

  When less than half the available workforce is in full-time employment it no longer makes sense to think of a full-time job as the norm. Continuous change will have flipped into discontinuous change and we shall begin to change our views of ‘work’, of ‘the job’ and of ‘a career’.

  The reason for the shift is the emergence of the shamrock organization. The shamrock organization is explained in Chapter 3. Essentially, it is a form of organization based around a core of essential executives and workers supported by outside contractors and part-time help. This is not a new way of organizing things – builders large and small have operated this way for generations, as have newspapers with their printers and their stringers, or farmers with contract harvesting and holiday labour. What is new is the growth of this way of organizing in the big businesses and in the institutions of the public sector. All organizations will soon be shamrock organizations.

  It has grown because it is cheaper. Organizations have realized that while it may be convenient to have everyone around all the time, with their time at your command because you have bought all their time, it is a luxurious way of marshalling the necessary resources. It is cheaper to keep them outside the organization, employed by themselves or by specialist contractors, and to buy their services when you need them.

  This is a sensible strategy when labour is plentiful, when you can pick and choose between suppliers. It is a sensible strategy when your work ebbs and flows as it tends to do in service industries. When you are manufacturing things any surplus resources of people or equipment can always be turned to good advantage by producing things for stock for the weeks of peak demand, but the service industries cannot, or at least should not, stockpile their customers and must therefore flex their workforce.

  Both these factors currently exist. The labour supply, the potential workforce, is growing in all the industrialized countries as the boom babies of the 1960s, and their wives, join the workforce during the 1990s – an extra million or so in Britain, for instance. At the same time the shift to the service sector continues inexorably everywhere. Between 1960 and 1985 the share of employees in the service sector in the USA rose from 56 to 69 per cent and in Italy from 33 to 55 per cent. It is unlikely to change back. The two factors work on each other; a growing service sector offers greater opportunities to women, which increases the potential workforce, which in turn increases the potential for more flexible ways of organizing.

  It has been happening slowly, so slowly that most people have not noticed the new dimensions. Like the frog in Chapter 1, the temperature changes so gradually that no reaction is called for – until it is, perhaps, too late. Before very long the full-time worker will be a minority of the working population. Our assumptions about how the world works, how taxes are collected, families supported, lives planned and corporations organized will have to change radically. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which in 1947 guaranteed a choice of job to everyone, will be a clear anachronism. The new minority signals a major discontinuity which will effect every family in every industrialized country within the next generation.

  The New Intelligentsia

  The second number is alarming in a different way. A study by McKinsey’s Amsterdam office in 1986 estimated that 70 per cent of all jobs in Europe in the year 2000 would require cerebral skills rather than manual skills. In the USA the figure is expected to be 80 per cent. That would be a complete reversal of the world of work some fifty years earlier. Discontinuity indeed!

  It is impossible to be precise about such things. There is, to start with, no clearcut distinction between a cerebral job, requiring brain skills, and a manual job, needing muscles. Even simple manual jobs, like gardening, now need a degree of brains to understand the proper use of fertilizers and herbicides, to distinguish plant varieties and maintain machinery. Nonetheless, looking back at the list of occupations in the information sector (see here) a sector where brain skills of some degree are essential, it is hard not to think that 70 per cent is, if anything, an underestimate.

  What is more controversial and even more alarming is the estimate by McKinsey’s that one half of these brain-skill jobs will require the equivalent of a higher education, or a professional qualification, to be done adequately. If that is even approximately true it means that some 35 per cent of an age group should today be entering higher education or its equivalent if the labour force is going to be adequately skilled by the year 2000. McKinsey’s estimate may even be on the conservative side. If we look at the new jobs alone, the current expectation is that 60 per cent of them will be managerial or professional, graduates all, of some sort.

  In spite of these trends the percentage of young people in Britain going on to higher education is currently 14 per cent, rising to 18 per cent by 1992, but only because there will be fewer teenagers in total. In the rest of Europe the overall figure is around 20 per cent, with small national differences. In France, for instance, 36 per cent pass their baccalauréat and are therefore entitled to enter university but nearly half leave, or are asked to leave, at the end of the first year. Only Japan, the USA, Taiwan and South Korea seem to have university populations of the right sort of size for the future, and in all these countries there are concerns about the quality if not the quantity of some of what is called higher education.

  If these estimates of the required levels of education are even partly true it means that not only will we see alarming numbers of skill shortages but that, more seriously still, we may lack the skills and the wits even to create the businesses and the opportunities which will then encounter skill shortages! It will, of course, be an invisible discontinuity. We will not miss the organizations we have not had, and never thought to have. Like the frog in Chapter 1 it will just be a slow unnoticed death.

  The Vanishing Generation

  In the nineties there will be almost one quarter fewer young people leaving school. At first glance this seems like a timely end to the problem of youth unemployment. A second glance changes the picture because it points to even more pressure on the relatively small percentage who have the brain skills needed by today’s workforce. The bulk of the new reduced cohort of young people will still be like those, 43 per cent of them in 1986, who leave British schools without a proper certificate in even one subject.

  A 1988 British Report by the National Economic Development Office and the Training Commission, ‘Young People and the Labour Market, A Challenge for the 1990s’, pointed out that in 1987 less than twenty large employers took on half of all the 27,000 school leavers with two or more A-levels who were looking for work. The vanishing generation, therefore, is a problem because, if nothing is done, it means that the supply of brain skills, already inadequate, will be even more inadequate, and that the skills shortages referred to above will become even more severe. The competition for the more educated will intensify and the rejection of the less educated will be felt even more cruelly. Youth unemployment will not be solved, indeed it will be raised a notch or two.

  The situation is an opportunity, however, if it makes it easier to tackle the task of educating more of our young men and women for life and work in the world of brain skills. Without doing anything, as every
government has discovered, the percentages of those going on to higher and further education are bound to improve as the base number falls. Doing rather more will, in percentage terms, make a deal of difference and will set markers for the future.

  Those markers are important because they must change a culture. There is no innate reason why Britain should be sixteenth in the OECD league table of young people in education after 16 years of age – above only Portugal and Spain. British teenagers are not innately more stupid or less educable; they are the inheritors of a tradition which held that book learning was for the few, that real life, and real money, should begin as soon as possible and that manual and pragmatic skills were best learnt on the job. The past, as so often in Europe, determines the future although, however true these beliefs might have been in the world of work as it used to be, they must be less true today.

  In Japan, top of the OECD table, 98 per cent of young people stay on in formal education until 18 years of age even though that education is far from stimulating and far from being pragmatic. They are the inheritors of a different cultural tradition, one that just happens to be more attuned to the needs of the future than that of Britain and most of the rest of Europe. In America, too, the young stay on in school, but whether they learn anything there is a question of growing concern.

  The information society, after all, uses information, be it in the form of numbers, words, pictures or voices, on screens, in books or in printouts and reports, as its currency. The essential requirement, therefore, of all its workers is that they are able to read, interpret and fit together the elements of this currency, irrespective, almost, of what the data actually relates to. That is a skill of the brain. It can be taught or at least developed in classrooms. It does not, for most people, happen quickly, easily or early but requires years of practice, years which are most conveniently and usefully spent at the beginning of adult life rather than inconveniently in the middle. This general skill is akin to riding a bicycle, once learnt it is never unlearnt, and having learnt it one can then go on to learn its use in particular applications.