We are the future?

This week, I'll be part of a panel at National Housing Federation's Comms Event in Manchester, futuregazing at the communications role in the future; this takes me back a bit. While I was working at Jisc a great deal of time was allocated to looking at new ideas, which is what first got me into looking at how local government could enhance communications with the then very new social media platforms.

Paul Simon wrote that "after changes upon changes we are more or less the same" and I think these timeless lyrics can be applied to futuregazing too; we've seen the world of communications turned upside down by social media, we've seen agile working take force across the public / formally public sector and we've seen automation take so many of our roles and modify them to make them easier, or more complicated, depending on the system.

However, conversely we've not learned from this. I was in a great position to see social media coming, but others ignored in. In 2010 I worked with American mega-thinker Chris Brogan and home internet pioneer Rob Wilmot to organise the "social media - are you ready podcamp" (later renamed LearnPod for obvious reasons) to try and show the learning sector that social media would impact. We were greeted with enthusiasm rather than hostility, but also with a certain amount of skepticism; would these new start-up platforms really transform how we did things? Nearly a decade later, most people in communications and customer services admit that they have, though opinions still differ on whether that's for good or for bad. Some were ready but many, in fact most, were not. Those who were not are still playing catch up, so the lesson has to be to futureproof - but how can we do this?

A recent report from PWC Global looks towards the workforce of the future. Taking 2030 as a goal they predict not the technology but the culture. That may seem like a long time in the future, but remember that 11 years ago, when I was taking my first steps in social media, no one could have anticipated where we are today; Facebook is not the megalith I thought it would be, Amazon being the big that that could be delivering by drones seemed like science fiction and I'd never considered the Internet of Things having an impact...but the communications revolution, the culture change that meant agile working, the fall of the fourth-estate in terms of controlling the message, the bottom-up / top-down model that we could see coming did arrive.

PWC see four types of approach in the future:

• YELLOW WORLD: This is about very small business, social enterprise, artisans and makers.
• GREEN WORLD: Companies embrace a Green economy and social responsibility - sustainability is a business driver
• RED WORLD: Change happens, get over it. We'll push the boundaries and meet every need, but sometimes at the expense of past business models.
• BLUE WORLD: Capitalism flourishes; what makes money matters. Huge, mega-corporations drive change and set the agenda for R&D

While the future may well hold a mix of these at different times, PWC does see an impact on jobs. Automation will mean people will need to retrain and be adaptable; a Universal Basic Income may be vital in this and people will need the skills to help themselves.

So what will that mean for our roles and our jobs? What will we see on the horizon? The answer PWC have is that we need to prioritise our skills where the gaps will be. Computers still can't write strategy or master really creative thought and it will be generations, if ever, that this occurs. We need leadership qualities, adaptive qualities, creativity and ideas. The processes will be automated.

As an educator, this worries me. I see little sign in our data-driven, process-ridden education system that these are the skills we are developing. As a communicator, it worries me further. The flow of information is a process and the social-media revolution has turned the social conversation into a process driven one. If this all becomes automated, where then for the communication?

The answer won't be any more apparent to me today than Alexa was 11 years ago, but the culture change is. We need to see ourselves as leaders, as big picture artists. Gartner says that Deep Neural nets and ASICs will be the rage...and I'm about to google them to find out what they even are. But it's knowing where to look, how to Google and then inspiration in how shape that technology in a way that means we can communicate the messages that we will always need to communicate that matters. If we want to look to futureproofing our future, we need to look no further than our own skills.