Question

What will the future look like?

Im regards to organizational dynamics and effectiveness, what do you project for future challenges, trends and opportunities for organizations? Support at least one of your ideas with one academic reference, appropriately cited. Feel free to use more supporting documentation if you wish.

Answer 1

Similar to how organisms evolve, the same can be seen for organization. The organizations and management strategies used today are vastly different from what they were decades ago. As a result, we can expect difference challenges, trends and opportunities in the future. Here are some of these that we will face in the future

Challenges

• Knowledge shortage: There is an expectation that by 2020, there will be a shortage of about 40 million skilled workers. This is not because there will not be skilled people, but because the skilled people will likely move out of organizations to work with smaller teams or to start their own venture. This will cause a challenge for organizations to retain talent. A report from McKinsey Global Institute titled “World at work” covers the details.
• Focus on experience: Products and services are going to be more focused on experience. Features such as free trial, demo, etc are already quite well known. However, some companies such as banking, financial services, and medical services may face challenges due to their conventional offering. The consumer mentality is likely to shift towards experience based buying.
• Security and asset management: We have organizations that implements cultures such as work from home, bring your own device, flexible work hours. With these systems, organizations are going to face challenges in efficiently managing their assets and overall security of data and information. These trends are going to increase and the security challenges are only going to get bigger.

Trends

• Organization loyalty: The trend of being loyal to organization is diminishing. In the future, there is likely going to be a complete collapse of this concept. The trend of being loyal to an organization will no longer exist. Changing companies rapidly will not be seen as a negative property in one’s career.
• Technology: Companies are going to be even more dependent on technology. Currently we have already seen how internet is key to business operations around the world. Technology is eventually going take over different operations from sales, marketing, manufacturing, operations, and HR. Automation trends are going to kick in very strongly in the near future.
• Communication: Once upon a time we only had a formal communication in organization in form of email or memos. However, in the future, we can expect many other forms of communication. This could include the like so social media, messaging apps and more. With more flexibility and mobility at work place, organizations will adapt to these trends in the future.

Opportunities

• Systematic forecasting: In the future, we will be using technology, past data and different data sources more efficiently. As a result, we will likely be able to forecast many of the future events within the organization.
• New leadership: Our leadership principles so far has been traditional by standard. However, with employee loyalties shifting, new challenges arising and heavy influence of technology, we will likely see new leadership types emerging that could be a hybrid of existing styles and new ones