The Future Of Collaboration Looks Like LEGO

On diversifying your career portfolio, lego teams and the future of ownership

Many years ago, LEGO blocks were sold individually. Different shapes and sizes were muddled together inside a large box. The value proposition was clear: kids could create anything they wanted. The problem? They weren’t selling.

The company decided to start selling specific blocks together with instructions and illustrations for what to build. Overnight, sales skyrocketed. 

The LEGO story shows us that magic can happen when things are combined in just the right way.

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The future of work looks increasingly like LEGO. Recent reports have shown that there are currently over 77 million freelancers in the US, which is equivalent to almost half of the country’s workforce. Meanwhile, Deloitte’s 2019 Global Human Capital Trend reports that only 42% of respondent companies in Australia use full-time workers to run all their processes, whilst the remaining 58% are powered by independent workers. 

Despite this, today only 16% of companies have a strategic workforce plan to harness independent talent, partly because we haven’t yet figured out what collaboration looks like in this new world of work.

In today’s piece, we’ll explore how the shift towards independent working will fuel new methods of collaboration and ownership, enabling more companies to leverage the liquid workforce.

A Power Shift from Institutions to Individuals

Imagine a world in which Warren Buffett, one of the most successful investors of all time, has just one company in his investment portfolio. Rather than diversifying his risk across hundreds of organisations and setting himself up for unlimited upside, he takes one dangerous bet and limits his potential returns. 

Throughout the twentieth century, this is exactly how professionals managed their careers. Two-thirds of workers joined one company for life. Employers were responsible for your salary, your learning, and your career development. They held all the leverage. Company goes bust? Redundancy bells are ringing. Boss doesn’t like you? Thanks for your service, now off you go. Business doesn’t see your potential? Sarah just seemed like a better fit for the role...

Your employer was synonymous with your career. This meant that institutions were far more important than individuals. 

The advent of the internet kickstarted the job board era. Suddenly, workers were empowered to shop around for different jobs, putting the onus on employers to make themselves stand out in an increasingly competitive market. Today, this trend is going one step further. Work is being commoditised and individuals are becoming more important than institutions.

The Age of the Career Portfolio

In The Portfolio Career Revolution, I wrote about the rise of independent working. With 54% of Gen Z wanting to start their own business and 42% of people under the age of 35 already freelancing, Gen Zers are taking a bet on themselves to go it alone, dictate their own fortunes and build generational wealth.

And unlike their Boomer parents, young people are starting to build the professional equivalent of an investment portfolio: the career portfolio.

Why take one bet, when you can take multiple? 

Contra, a startup that brands itself as the new professional network for independent workers, recently released a report showcasing how income streams are diversifying in the independent working economy: “The trend is shifting from having a full time job to creating a fluid portfolio of revenue streams.”

It seems intuitive that a career portfolio is something you build by yourself, but working independently does not necessarily mean working alone. As independent working and career portfolios become more mainstream, a natural question is how people–with greater autonomy and flexibility than ever before–choose to collaborate. 

The Birth of the LEGO Team

From agriculture and trade to building and waging war, cooperation between people has remained a bedrock of human culture throughout the ages. The boom of independent work, coupled with our continued desire to collaborate, will create novel ways of working together. 

I like to think of the future of collaboration as LEGO (hear me out…). Let’s imagine the traditional corporation as a mammoth LEGO tower–each brick is so reliant on the foundation provided by the blocks beneath it, that as the tower grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to detach each block from the others. Each block has little room to move around and limited exposure to what’s going on at the top of the tower.

In a liquid workforce, the large foundational blocks are removed, providing the individual blocks with the freedom to attach and detach themselves to other blocks as and when it suits them. In this world, each block has more wiggle room, greater exposure to what’s happening at all levels of the tower, and the flexibility to join forces with others they admire. I anticipate that individuals collaborating with each other will iterate and innovate with less friction than corporations competing with each other.

As this architecture becomes more mainstream, LEGO teams will stack and unstack, packaging their bespoke offerings as a product that is purchased by firms, rather than paid for on an hourly or project-based basis. 

The Decentralisation of Ownership

With new ways of collaboration, must come new methods of ownership. The thing that will make this lego architecture truly transformative is the way ownership structures are changing to allow both society and individuals to capture and share the value they create, rather than giving it up to middlemen.

Let’s take the creator economy as an example. Traditionally, creatives have been a heavily underserved segment of society. For thousands of years, the business model that propelled the sector was based on the public’s generosity, as opposed to an intrinsic relationship between the work an artist produced and how much they chose to sell it for.  

At the turn of the century, something changed. As Jack Conte, co-founder of Patreon says: “Essentially what happened was humans figured out how to record what would otherwise be ephemeral art onto physical objects. We figured out how to record light onto celluloid. We figured out how to record sound onto wax cylinders. That replaced, eventually, the business model of patronage, with unit sales being the primary revenue mechanism for artists.”

But then the internet was born. Overnight, the key ingredient that made this model work–scarcity–disappeared. Creators found themselves in the same situation as before–providing immense value, but capturing a marginal percentage of it. Today, decentralised finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs)–are creating a new infrastructure for creators to be rewarded for their work by directly linking the value they capture with the engagement their work receives. This decentralised infrastructure returns ownership and control to the individual worker or LEGO team.

As we move further into the future of work, new ways of collaborating, coupled with this paradigm shift in ownership, will create immense value for independent professionals.

We’ve got the LEGO blocks. Now it’s time for us to figure out how best to assemble them. 

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Inspiration:

Contra State of Independence Report

Power to the Person

The Cooperation Economy

The Ponzi Career