This week’s curator, Lee Bryant, looks at the future of the firm in professional services, shares some updates on Shift*Base activity and picks 5 recommended links from things we have read this week.
The Chat Overload is Just Beginning…
The rapid rise of Slack as a chat and messaging app for small teams has been truly remarkable. But it has also resulted in more people hitting perceived chat overload quicker than they would with less engaging and less well-adopted tools. So we have seen people like Sam and Jason Fried declare they are ‘over’ Slack and 24/7 real-time chat in general.
This week, I wrote a long-ish blog post reflecting on the recent history of chat and activity streams in the workplace and laying out a case for why I think chat overload is just beginning and why that is a good thing that should add value to most peoples’ work, if used sensibly. I think we are going to see conversational interfaces used more widely, and a highly-integrated chat/activity stream tool like Slack could show us the way towards a hybrid human/machine notification and sense-making space in the enterprise.
Shift*Base Updates
The Shift*Base guides to techniques and methods for new ways of working continues to develop, and we are open to suggestions for new ideas or theories we should cover.
If you work in the accounting profession, please consider taking part in our research project with the ICAEW about the future of the firm.
Shift*Groups Updates
Our (free) invitation-only community for change agents and internal practitioners of social business, collaboration and digital transformationremains open for new members, whilst we conduct a review of the site and look at how to improve its user experience and utility and consult on how we can better support the community.
Weekly Linklog
- Stowe Boyd covers the rise of anti-Slack hype: The Rise of Work Chat Anti-Hype — Work Futures Institute
- Grant Thornton are doing some great stuff recently – here they are seeking to stimulate ideas and actions that can create a vibrant economy that realises the shared potential of businesses, cities, people and communities across the UK: Home – Grant Thornton – Vibrant Economy
- Deloitte just launched one of the world’s largest studies of people challenges in business, Deloitte Human Capital Trends 2016, and the results were striking. Among the 7,000+ companies who responded (in over 130 countries), the #1 issue on leaders minds is “how to redesign our organizational structure” to meet the demands of the workforce and business climate today: The New Organization: Different By Design
- How Medium moved on from Holacracy in pursuit of non-bureaucratic working: Management and Organization at Medium — The Story
- Robert Bosch GmbH is launching its own cloud for the Internet of Things, the latest step in the German engineering group’s transition from a traditional industrial company to equal parts manufacturer and information technology group: Robert Bosch Launches Own Cloud for Internet of Things
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