What time is it where you are in the world? When was the last time you looked at your preferred mobile device? 5 minutes ago? Are you reading this on it right now? Recent research shows that we are spending spend more and more time on such devices. According to communications regulator Ofcom UK adults spend an average of eight hours and 41 minutes a day on media devices, compared with the average night’s sleep of eight hours and 21 minutes. Is this cause for concern, are we losing how to be socially agile or is this just the way of the modern tech dominated world?

Despite our technology, we cannot resist the lure of our social tribe. Melbourne has once again won the accolade of being the world’s most livable city by the Economist Intelligence Unit. In another survey by Conde Nast readers released the same week, Melbourne was also voted (alongside Auckland) the world’s friendliest city. These two things are not mutually exclusive.

We are social beings. Even alone we long to be together. We need to be socially agile.

Why are so many solitary acts performed in public? Why do we make the effort to leave the relative comfort of our own homes to go and sit in a public space to read a book? To send emails from a coffee shop? To listen to music with earphones on a park bench? It is because we are inherently social animals. Although technology has enabled us to connect virtually to anyone from anywhere we still love to just hang out with other human beings. We need to be socially agile. This applies in our working lives just as much as it does in our personal lives.

In the early days of the internet there was speculation that such technology would deliver to us a utopian world of working in our pajamas. The reality is that this simply doesn’t work for most of us. We like the idea of working autonomously in our on time and on our own terms but after the initial attraction has faded we quickly realize we actually don’t want to work from home, all alone and in our jimjams. We may lack purpose and become lethargic and lonely. As of 2012, estimates suggest that over fifty million U.S. workers (about 40% of the working population) could work from home at least part of the time – but less than 10% actually do (Matthews & Williams, February 2012). The future of work is not only about what we do but what we are. And what we are – at our very core – is social. We also means we have to be good at being socially agile.

Lawyers, accountants, doctors, engineers. That’s what our parents encouraged us to be when we grew up. However, although very well intentioned, Mum and Dad may have been wrong. According to author Daniel H. Pink in ‘A Whole New Mind’, the future of work belongs to a very different person with a very different kind of mind. There is research evidence to suggest that the left brain influence of information is giving way to more right brain values at work: inventiveness, meaning and empathy. This is influencing the way we consume and communicate, the way we run our businesses and as such the future of work. Pink suggests we are seeing a shift from our current information age to a future conceptual age. Where ideas are the currency of success. Where divergent thinking and innovation are replacing set process and problem solving. This has huge implications for the new world of work. How can we embrace this conceptual age without changing the way we work? Alone but together?

This is of course only one possible suggestion on the future of work. We hypothesize about the new world of work because in reality no one really knows how things will play out. However, seeing as it is a possible future let’s start with the notion that work could be a happy place. How would we generally like to work and play? Traditional thinking suggests we would start with a space. The office. The workplace. The spare bedroom. Modern, Gen Y oriented working environments tend to focus on this. Google’s Silicon Valley HQ ‘The Googleplex’ features everything from a slide to flamingo adorned dinosaur skeletons. Exciting? Maybe. Social? Perhaps.

Let’s turn that on it’s head for a moment by reconsidering the new world of work in the context of what we are at our core: social animals. With that in mind here are 5 stages to establishing a socially agile new world of work that ends rather than starts with a space:

1. Connection

Find others. There is no substitute for human contact and being socially agile. We have established in previous articles and research that it’s good for you. It makes you happier, healthier and more successful. That’s it. Hanging at home with the cat is good for the soul only up to a point.

2. Communication

Start a dialogue. Once you’re out, about and connected it’s time to say hello. Find common ground and literally have a catch up chat. It will release endorphins to lift your mood as a minimum. Other than that the sky’s the limit.

3. Creation

It’s amazing what can happen once people get together and talk. It’s extraordinary in its simplicity. Remember the days at University, as a backpacker or just in social settings when you gathered plans to change the world? Why has that changed now you are at work and yet success is all about the ideas?

4. Collaboration

Make things happen. Ideas and people are wonderful but they can exist in a cloud-like vacuum of unicorns and rainbows. They are beautiful but can you eat them? The other fantastic aspect of the new world of work is that we need to be socially agile. We can get things done with others, through others, for others. Quickly and with input and validation from a range of sources.

5. Community

Then, and only then, do we create a space for all of the above. In doing so the space will be relevant to all and will serve the purpose of points 1-4 rather than the opposite. Google may have done just that. One of the planet’s biggest companies simply modeled on how they all got together in the first place: through a tech-nerd world of pizza and gaming.

In doing this the need to belong can be reconciled with a sense of freedom. In this brave new world of work we can collide like neutrons to form molecules with like-minded clusters of people. We connect with each other as human beings, not just via LinkedIn or departmental meetings. We can meet in the kitchen as well as the boardroom. Corridor conversations are spontaneous happenings not HR policy. Coffee can be functional but never forced. We choose the working life we want to lead. We engage as diverse groups: new or experienced, Melbourne or Manchester, black or white, male, female or transgender, gay or straight. What matters are the ideas.

We bubble up and validate our creativity socially through divergent thinking in groups.

We take action based on collaborations with those who think, those who know and those who do. Bolstered by this nurturing network of support we are free to explore what is best for us as people, what is relevant for our customers and for our businesses as the enabler of our free spirits, wellbeing and success. We embrace the conceptual age and in doing so find a fresh identity in this new world of work.

This new world of work calls for a more socially agile approach to our working days. Step away from the iPad and towards another human. Beautiful things can and will happen.

With all that said, let us leave you with a quote from a standard bearer for the free, the social and the creative.

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars. – Jack Kerouac