For the work we do in the long-term-vision-labs and strategy team for the Technology & Innovation board area at SAP is one of the playgrounds for the title question. These topics are good, because they generate exiting and abundant questions, that we believe should be asked by everyone.

How does the future work, the mechanics of change? What is the future of human work and our interactions with machines and each other? Is industrialization of space and 3d printed organs really a “thing” and how do you relate to these? What are the methods to innovate desirable futures? How do you structure such a vast and complex fabric of possibilities in your domain, team, business, boardroom? How long is the history of the future and how does that affect our fear and counter reactions to it in socio-political movement? Most importantly, who designs the future, that you your community will live in? 

We talk about change, but what are the mechanics and the dynamics behind it? How fast is it? What it means to be an innovator, is transforming faster than before, from classic product and service definition of the superficial to computational system design of everything, including social and political systems, deeply rooted in a space of challenges and promises between cutting edge tech and humanism. In an exponential and converging digital-fueled future, we design a relationship, a behaviour, that the product will follow.

What comes before strategy? We love to act on strategies, derive tactics, execute and operate, it is our psychological bias, we love to do what we are good at. But how do we derive a strategy? From what point of view, what narratives, what builds up a “Future fabric” that these narratives a woven from? And who does it in your enterprise? We will have, high level look at how we build a desirable future with these questions in mind, and also what we in our labs consider to be a desirable future of work, at least for the coming decade.

This exponential change is our innovation brief and the stakes are high, It is just too important to be left only to... any single team. Technology is the human evolution, the prior named HuMachine creates a playground for “Human centered“-adventure, this opens new worlds for our imagination in a time when “now” has never been so temporary. Bringing these thoughts together we need to answer the question “What is human, and what is work in a superhuman future?”

Main chapters

1. How Science-Fiction is becoming science-fact, and... business fact, now. The narratives and examples of current futures.
2. What values, attitudes, most of all methods and frameworks can we use to derive our
3. What we, SAP derived as our direction for the future of work and the tech to support it from, the above 2 insights.