In the Shift

The recent volcano in Iceland that brought European air travel to a halt, prompted a few people to think about this as a dry run for a world with fewer planes. I am part of a multi-company project thinking about the low carbon world, and here are some comments posted on that project’s message board. It seems working lives were not greatly affected by plane free skies – a fact that prompted some people to conclude that if there’s an air travel crunch, we’d do better to keep tourists flying rather than business folk. Video conferencing has evolved to level of remarkable sophistication, and those that posted comments were not so concerned about the loss of physical human interaction as they were pondering about what sorts of job do and don’t require travel.

Here are the comments … (Names removed for privacy reasons)

Subject: Volcanic Ash – is this showing us what a flightless working environment would be like?
4/20/2010 13:57
Despite the travel chaos that the recent Volcanic Ash incident has caused, does anyone else think that a global incident like this will catalyse the thinking of organisations about how to operate in an environment where air travel is not an option?

If we truly believe that at some point in the future, carbon tax will make air travel the option of only the elite, then surely this is the closest we can get to experiencing what that would feel like.

In our company, people are stranded all over the world – either trying to return from holiday or business travel – and the feeling is that there is not a lot of evidence of a ‘plan B’ with people just riding it out waiting for flights to resume, as opposed to having access to technology to remain connected and mobile.

Interested to hear whether any of your companies are capturing the learnings from this very real role play?

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Subject: Re: Volcanic Ash – is this showing us what a flightless working environment would be like?
4/20/2010 14:20
Air travel will remain an option in the future. There is a lot of talking these days about pessimistic scenarios for the future (think also about films like 2012 and the day after). I suggest we are not pessimistic in this forum and rather optimistic. As W. Churchill would say: The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity, the optimist sees opportunity in every difficulty”. The ash cloud adds to a longer list of recent events like earthquakes, financial crisis, and the like.

These events, on top of megatrends like demographic change and global warming, directly impact the business, which in turn impacts HR. So the answer to your question is a clear YES. The way we work together will rapidly change: more virtual teams, more collaboration tools, social networks and the like. Smart companies need to #1 understand megatrends and impact of negative events #2 turn insights from #1 into points of action for their organization. SAP has a dedicated team in Palo Alto to do this job, other companies too.

Just a few thoughts after lunch …

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Subject: Re: Re: Volcanic Ash – is this showing us what a flightless working environment would be like?
4/20/2010 15:38
I believe there is quite some learning from the volcanic ashes incident. Our company strongly pushed the use of Video Conferencing equipment and alternative travelling. Furthermore there people evaluate these days very well if it is really necessary to fly.

So on a short term I assume people will probably fly fewer and the use of VC equipment and the use of other virtual equipment can increase. But if flights remain cheap, we will see people going back to normality. I believe the Babyboomers and Gen X will always prefer a face-to-face meeting over a VC-Meeting (and is used to make holidays wherever and whenever they want). Maybe a next generation will think differently as they grow up being used to use virtual equipment and not to meet face-to-face, but in FB or other virtual communities.

But we could combine the learnings from this incident with the predictions and thoughts from the low carbon thread and thinking about alternative traveling. We recently did a study within our company how to optimize travel costs. Estimations expect a reduction of 20% of our current carbon footprint.

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Subject: Re: Volcanic Ash – is this showing us what a flightless working environment would be like?
4/20/2010 15:39
Air travel will remain an option of the future but the direction will be increasingly tourism. The necessity to travel from site to site because of business will diminish as we become better at creating virtual teams and even virtual companies and organisations.

The recent events will only serve to advance the research into collaboration tools within organisations as part of their BCP programmes (Business Continuity Programmes). Most large organisations are investing in better technology for phone and video conferencing with everything from web-cam to tele-presence (virtual board rooms) type scenarios, and shared workspace and document management systems.

The drivers for this are differentiated between cost saving, Corporate Social Responsibility (Carbon footprint reduction), efficiency in working on a global platform, corporate risk reduction and a better work life balance.

The longer this volcanic cloud impact goes on the more aggressive the change will become

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