Your View is a recurring series of opinion pieces from members of The New Tropic community. To share your ideas, goals, and work about with the community in a Your View piece, please submit it to [email protected].
The way we work works needs to change.
Seriously.
How many of us are miserable in our jobs? If you’re to trust the polling firm Gallup, about 66 percent of us. 66 percent!
What about robots? They already replaced a bunch of blue-collar jobs — are they coming for white collar ones next?
Will there be enough jobs for everyone in the future? Should the government provide all citizens minimum basic income?
And what about diversity and inclusion? Can technology be used to create more equitable workplaces?
And can organizations be managed in ways that treat employees like, well, humans instead of replaceable cogs in machines?
These are just some of the important questions that are driving the “future of work” discussion.
I was once one of those disengaged employees, counting down hours and minutes until I could l do whatever else other than my job. Surprisingly often, whatever else meant passing out in a pizza-induced coma still wearing business clothes.
After years in the rat race, I didn’t see any meaning in my work. In fact, I didn’t even know who I was anymore. Defeated, empty and exhausted, I drifted into a three-day design thinking workshop by The Design Gym in New York City.
Design Thinking is a way of creatively solving problems. Through a series of mindsets and tools from the design world, design thinking practitioners are able to go past the obvious to create unexpected solutions to all sorts of problems people face, from business to personal to everything in between.
When I moved back to Miami two years ago, I started hosting design thinking workshops with my friends Jess Do and Kiran Carpenter. At our workshops, professionals of all ages reconnected with their creativity and realized that there were different ways of thinking. The joy this experience brought to people gave us life. Soon, I was telling everyone that bringing design thinking into their workplace would make employees happier and better at their jobs.
But that was just the beginning. Earlier this year, I teamed up with a few colleagues to start LeadWise, a digital education company that is helping leaders worldwide transform their organizations by building trust among their teams, sharing power, and creating workplaces built on freedom and respect, all the while delivering better returns.
We believe that the relationship between employers and employees is broken because it’s based on distrust. Future success lies in fixing this relationship, in treating employees like the adults that they are instead of crushing them with meaningless, controlling rules, and getting out of the way of them doing their best work.
Sound too good to be true? You should tell that to our partner Ricardo Semler, a pioneer who’s been shaking up the way organizations work based on these principles for over 30 years. Ricardo’s companies boast incredibly low employee turnover and sustained growth over decades.
I really enjoy this work, and I want to help bring this energy and discussion to Miami.
You see, I don’t want Miami to be left behind because the world of work is already in the process of radical transformation. We have an opportunity to start a discussion now that will help us create a resilient workforce with organizations that are ready to adapt.
To this end, I’ll be teaming up with my friend Andres Rodriguez to host a Future of Work Unconference here in Miami.
Unconferences are really cool events that have an overarching theme, but no preset agenda and speakers. Participants propose discussions they feel are relevant. You don’t have to be an expert to propose a discussion, you just have to have the interest. The agenda is built the morning-of, and discussions lead to rich dialogue and deeper connections than just one-way presentations.
Stay tuned.
Your View is a recurring series of opinion pieces from members of The New Tropic community. To share your ideas, goals, and work about Miami with the community in a Your View piece, please submit it to [email protected].