Forget the predictions: five questions that will shape work in 2027

The end of the year is typically when I make my predictions about people, technology and the systems in which we work. But the organisations best prepared for what comes next aren’t always those with the firmest answers. They are the ones asking better questions and making time to explore them without demanding immediate clarity.

Here are five questions I believe will shape how we think about work in 2027.

1. Is the job becoming the wrong unit of recruitment?

We hire people for a job. Yet we know that job descriptions bear little resemblance to how people actually contribute, the versatility we expect and the fact that our need today could be very different in 6 months time. The conventional recruitment process assumes that the organisation can define a reasonably stable box and find someone who fits inside it. But if work, technology and organisational priorities continue to change quickly, perhaps organisations need to recruit human capability into a changing system rather than filling a fixed job.

If ‘the job’ is becoming an outdated unit of recruitment, we need to be asking:

• What would we look for in a new recruit if the work itself is likely to change?

• Does the job description still perform a useful function?

• How would workforce planning change?

• What would clients need to tell recruiters about their future direction, not just their current vacancy?

• Is past fit becoming a weaker proxy for future contribution?

Recruiters and hiring managers need to start challenging the ‘vacancy’ model, be innovative around work design and use business strategy not just today’s urgency to inform who joins the organisation.

2. Are we selecting for the compliance future organisations say they don’t want?

The recruitment process favours candidates with answers to interview questions. We like decisiveness, a clearly argued case, confidence. Yet organisations are asking for curiosity, a commitment to learning and growth, judgement, a willingness to challenge and to operate when there is no obvious answer.

Could it be that someone who ticks all the boxes in an interview could give us more of what we don’t want, while someone who performs less well - they are more cautious about having a definitive answer, they ask more questions, they have taken a circuitous career route as they explore and broaden their expertise, they leave silence or even push back on some of the scenarios we use to ‘test them’ - could be precisely the kind of person the organisation needs?

The central question to ask about your process is:

What does your recruitment process reward in candidates, and is that what your future organisation will reward in employees?

This is particularly the case when using AI in your recruitment. You may end up weeding out unconventional, creative, less polished, applicants in favour of those who know how to conform to the patterns an AI-enabled process can recognise. Do you want someone who can game the system, or someone who has a flair that AI finds harder to get a read on?

3. Do we need different people, or different conditions?

However talented your people, their contribution will be determined by the conditions in which they operate. Your culture, your systems, the prevailing norms of the industry, leadership behaviours, resourcing, what gets rewarded (formally and informally) are more powerful than any individual’s capability.

You can hire an absolute star who cannot do their best work in your business.

When leaders say they need people who are more entrepreneurial, accountable, collaborative, innovative or adaptable, we naturally go looking for those attributes. We train for those attributes. We talk about those attributes in our values. But these behaviours do not reside entirely within individuals. They are produced, encouraged or suppressed by the surrounding system.

Put your most curious, independently minded person into an organisation where decisions travel upwards, mistakes are punished and everything requires approval and in six months time they will either have left or become someone who is perceived to lack initiative and who hasn’t lived up to their promise.

The question we need to ask is:

Before looking for different people, what evidence do we have that the people already here couldn’t behave differently under different conditions?

Maybe you don’t need different people. Maybe you need different conditions which allow the people you have to thrive?

4. If AI creates capacity, who gets to decide what that capacity is for?

Many organisations are currently discussing AI in terms of speed, efficiency and cost. But if AI saves employees time, what happens to that time? Do we simply downsize, save money on human resources, reduce our headcount so much that we are left with a few individual contributors whose day to day colleagues are AI agents?

Or, does AI create room for:

• Better thinking and judgement?

• More meaningful customer relationships?

• Learning, experimentation and innovation?

• Stronger working relationships which generate new opportunities?

Or will it simply produce a higher volume of work?

I’ve said before that if you don’t understand people you won’t understand how to use your tech. AI could be a liberator of human talent opening up new revenue sources, new ways to increase customer loyalty, and speed up response time…or it could make work increasingly intense, less humane and make your business so indistinct that you are easily replaced.

The central question to consider might be:

When technology gives people more capacity, will we use it to improve their work or merely give them more work?

5. Are better questions enough without better context?

“Context” is the word for 2027. If you’re not hearing it a lot already, you will.

Organisations say they want employees to exercise judgement, take accountability and contribute more of their intelligence. Yet important information is often retained at the top. People are asked to make good decisions without being given the context in which those decisions make sense.

Not only do you need to ask better questions but you have to provide depth of context. You have to push information down through the organisation to give people the information they need to provide thoughtful answers to those questions. Otherwise you will be constantly disappointed.

There is discomfort in this. If people know how bad the search for new business is going, will they leave in droves? If they know how salaries are negotiated, will then claim unfairness in the system? If they know what goes on in the boardroom, will they lose faith in the leadership?

On the other hand, how can you leverage the true capability of your people if they can’t access essential information? How can they engage intelligently with the solutions?

The questions leaders need to ask themselves include:

• Are we asking people and AI for better answers while withholding the context they need?

• What information would people need to exercise the judgement we say we want from them?

• Does information still confer power when keeping it to yourself diminishes the intelligence of the whole organisation?

• Are leaders solving the immediate problem or examining the system that repeatedly creates it?

• Can leaders tolerate not knowing for long enough for a better question to emerge?

The future leader may not be the person with the best answers, or even the best questions, but the person who ensures that those best placed to solve a problem have the context they need.

I don’t know that 2027 will give us definitive answers to any of these questions. But I suspect our willingness to question these fundamentals will increasingly determine the quality of the organisations we build and the experience of working within them.

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If you want to discuss these ideas and how you could start thinking differently about your talented people drop me a line blaire@thatpeoplething.com and we’ll get a meeting in the diary.