The first post of an occasional series.

Imagine you’re heading home from work in your driverless car while scrolling through emails on the touchscreen dashboard. As you digest thoughts from your global team that has never met in person, you feel a pang of hunger and so you say, “Order takeout.” You audibly choose from a list of recent orders that appears on your dashboard from your favorite restaurant. Your voice is transmitted and recognized by the restaurant’s automated order system which includes GPS that determines how long it will be until you arrive at home. That system will set the timing for robots to prepare the food and for drones to deliver it within minutes of your arrival to your house. The garage door will open after doing a retinal scan as your car approaches it. That scan will also open the door to the house, send instructions to turn the TV on to your regular channel and direct the refrigerator to pour a draft of your favorite ale.

This imaginative story – where you didn’t interact with a single other person – is far-fetched only to the degree that it is probably not far-out enough. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is on the horizon and it will change our relationships to the world, life, work and each other in fundamental and far-reaching ways.

The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam to power automated machinery. The Second Industrial Revolution used electricity to power communication and mass production assembly lines. The Third Industrial Revolution used the internet and digital information technology to connect people and production in unprecedented ways. Now a Fourth Industrial Revolution [4IR] is emerging out of the Third with a boundaryless convergence of physical, biological, digital and social realms. The speed (exponential acceleration), scope (global magnitude) and systemic impact (production, management and governance) of the developments and innovations we will be subjected to during this revolution will be unlike anything we’ve ever experienced before.

My interests in the 4IR are in how it will impact people in the workplace – whatever “workplace” will come to mean – in terms of how they will lead, follow and collaborate to produce results within their organizations. The increased dependency on machines will mean less direct interaction with other people. Paradoxically, I believe that the quality of our relationships, communication and collaboration will need to increase. Whatever changes occur in terms of how we work together, our contacts with each other will need to be more productive, constructive and efficient so that the output from our less frequent interactions will be maximized. This will heighten the requirement for people skills in the workplace.

The 4IR will also bring a need to be proactive and purposeful about balancing economic concerns with social, human and cultural concerns. Through interdependent empathy and stewardship, organizations must seek to do well for all by doing good for all. The challenge we face in this regard is that technological capabilities are moving faster than our moral and ethical systems to govern them. The current debate over the ability to make guns with 3-D printers is a cogent case in point for our inability to coalesce around common values to govern this application of technology. We are about to be confronted by many more such clashes between innovation and collective stewardship.

The 4IR is bringing technology into every aspect of what it means to be human. There is virtually no way to predict what this will look like. But what it means for us as co-creators of this future is that we will need to be progressively more mindful, creative and intentional about the ways in which we lead, follow and collaborate with each other.