“When a paradigm shifts,” wrote Joel Barker, “everything goes back to zero”—individuals and organizations alike. Old ways of working, no matter how successful, have no bearing on the future, because the future demands entirely new ways of working.

Yet many people fear the new. How can organizations help them embrace it?

The answer to this question may determine whether organizations thrive or fail in the next few years. The paradigm shift—from the industrial era to one of more “open access and choice,” from regional scope to global marketplace, from simplicity to complexity—is already upon us, requiring a move FROM “business as usual” TO “business as uncertainty.” Many paradigm shifts are having a major impact on organizations today:

• FROM one-way, top-down communications TO “everyone is heard”
• FROM top-down decision making TO collaborative decisions
• FROM rigorous control of information TO open access to information
• FROM a view of people as “hands and feet”—not thinking, only doing as they are told—TO an environment in which people are valued in their entirety and expected to bring value  

In too many workplaces, people feel comfortable with their routine and may see little reason to make the FROM-TO leap. “What we have been doing has worked up until now,” they reason. “If it isn’t broken, why fix it?” This outlook shows up at all levels of organizations: senior leadership, middle management, and front lines.

What will it take to inspire people to embrace the new ways of working?

It will take courageous leaders who see the need for change and are willing to collaborate with the people of the organization to make change happen. These leaders will need to provide opportunities for everyone to gain new mindsets, behaviors, and skills. Above all, the organization will need to reinvent its most basic building block: the ways in which people interact. The goal is articulated in the following elements from KJCG’s definition of inclusion:

 an environment in which all people feel respected, valued, and seen for who they are; an organization in which collaboration includes all the right people needed to address an issue or opportunity; a workplace in which people at all levels and across divisions give one another supportive energy to do their best work.

Such a transformation, effected through Inclusion as the HOW^SM, can motivate people to give more of their energy and extend themselves further for the organization. As they bring this energy into their collaborations, new perspectives arise, knowledge and best practices pass through the organization more quickly, and people build on one another’s ideas. Decisions and solutions become far better than anything that individuals or teams could come up with by staying in their silos.

Best of all, people see the value of these new ways of working—and embrace them.

Transformed in this way, drawing the best from all people, the organization is in the best possible position to succeed in today’s challenging times.

Can you imagine what the workplace might look like 20 years from now? On a recent retreat, I was asked to do just that. So I imagined. And what I saw—even with all its promise of a better, more efficient life—made me squirm.

It’s easy to predict that technology will only advance faster and become more pervasive. I can see a future in which there is no workplace in the way we think of it now: a physical space where people go to work. Instead of a workforce, we’ll have a webforce—people connected even more virtually than they are today.

For instance: In 2031, I imagine, our online experience won’t be limited to a screen. Thanks to advances in holography and virtual reality, we will attend virtual meetings in virtual rooms, where we see virtual representations of our colleagues. If we need a whiteboard, we’ll be able to produce one out of thin air, as it were.  The need to leave our homes to “go to work” will nearly disappear.

Education and training will change in similar ways, with profound effects. Online schooling will become even more common and cover more disciplines than ever. In my imagined scene, the time will come when, to become an architect, students will either spend years in college or simply master the information they can find on the Internet—again, without leaving their homes.

So why am I uncomfortable with all this? With the education piece, people who learn from the Internet will have a distinct competitive advantage over their college-trained counterparts:  they will absorb the available information more quickly and work at lower salaries because they won’t have student loans to repay. But who’s to say these people will have nearly the skill needed to excel in their chosen field? After all, they would be selecting their own sources of knowledge, rather than learning from a preset curriculum carefully designed to impart the necessary skills. That may lead to many people entering professional fields unprepared to serve their clients at the highest level. Industries and their customers could suffer as a result.

On a broader level, these changes may cause people to see education as more of a commodity than a cherished gift. There is something about the excitement and immediacy of a live class—the intellectual challenge of interacting with professors and peers in physical space—that brings home the value of education. When we lose that sense of value, we can easily start discounting the need for any education beyond technical training.

Similarly, the idea of webforce may well have many advantages. It could eliminate much of the waste that occurs in today’s workplace with its extensive travel and inefficient communication and duplication of effort.

But actually, I’m concerned that all the virtual reality will create more waste, not less. Every new technology sparks endless conversations about how to use it. That’s why we see so many articles on email etiquette and tips on being a good “netizen.” Those conversations will only multiply in the future—and leave us even less time to do our best work.

Even worse, the misunderstandings that arise because of different approaches to the technology will make people feel less valued. If you expect an immediate response to your email when it scrolls across my TV at 10:00 p.m., will you worry if I don’t respond? Will you wonder whether I am deliberately excluding your opinion or simply taking a night off to be with my family?

There’s a broader level to this aspect of the future too. As we connect more virtually, we may connect less in physical space. This is already happening with children who text and IM and game instead of playing outside with actual friends. If living exclusively in the “virtual bubble” isn’t good for kids, it surely isn’t good for the rest of us.

Of course, I don’t know that the future will look exactly like this. But my imaginings are simply projections from what is already happening, so they are not that far-fetched. And I don’t know how we can come to terms with such a future. But I do know that we should start asking the questions now—so we’re more prepared for tomorrow when it comes.