"The Future is plastics" was uttered 55 years ago in 1967's groundbreaking movie The Graduate. The "plastics" industry then boomed for decades but "plastic" also meant fake, or artificial, unnatural. The statement "The future is plastics" was also code for all things that needed to be changed.
Today the word would be "elastic." Here is a simple definition of that word: Elastic, resilient, springy, flexible, supple means able to endure strain without being permanently injured. Elastic implies the property of resisting deformation by stretching.
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The future is elastic.
People are increasingly living elastically in the way they shop, consume media and work. They are stretching definitions and flexing and twisting. Those individuals most elastic in mindset who are ready to continuously iterate and adapt are more likely to thrive in transforming and changing times.
The organizations that will thrive in the future will align with peoples' new expectations and behaviors by being elastic in their structure and approach.
How people shop and consume media today are increasing elastic.
The customer "journey" or "funnel" is no longer recognizable. Once upon an imaginary time there was a purchase funnel with awareness, consideration, intent and purchase as its four key movements and one could map a consumer journey.
In a world of fragmentation, empowered customers with super computers in their pockets and media like TikTok which collapse above the line with below the line, fuse offline and online commerce and destroy any line between search, e-commerce, video, social and mobile, businesses are dealing with millions of journeys beginning, ending and lurching all over.
The neat little boxes and orchestrated behavior have dissolved into a cacophony of improvised jazz as the Gartner chart above illustrates.
Elastic companies will need to be not just omni-channel across all analog and digital platforms but also across multi-verses as the future of AR and VR begin to scale. (Source for chart below: World Economic Forum and Upwork.)
How people will work increasingly elastically.
Within five years projections suggest that most workers will have multiple employers. Today we are living in a world of distributed and unbundled work (a process that began before COVID-19 and was just accelerated) across office, home, third places and event. In a world where software, hardware and the Cloud allow many individuals to have access to the same technologies and platforms as large firms the nature of work is in flux. The future of employee will be a flexible combination of the full-time employee, the contract employee, the fractionalized employee and the freelance employee.
In addition, in most countries with declining populations (pretty much everywhere outside of Africa and for a little while India) businesses will combine advanced technology and cast a wide net for employees who are increasingly diverse, older and distributed around a multitude of locations working for a varying number of hours. The work forces will span generations, cultures, working styles and mindsets like never before.
A multi-verse of talent is what companies will need to be prepared for. Their big tent will need to be elastically stretchy offering a wide menu of ways to work.