Since about the year 2000, I’ve been thinking about how the lower transaction costs of the internet would lead to some kind of organization of the future. Around 2015, some colleagues and I began to realize it would happen in the 2020s. The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically accelerated that.

Here’s a sign that we’re at the tipping point: go to a company and ask the workers, “Who’s your boss?” What percentage come back and say, “I don’t exactly have a boss in the traditional sense”? Fifty years ago, everyone would have given you one name. More recently, in matrix organizations, they might have said, “I have two bosses.” But now, at some companies—not enough, but many—you get a lot of people who say, “I don’t have a traditional boss.”

That role—a boss who micromanages and dictates what to do—is not going to fly for very much longer. It’s a vestige.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has shown more than ever, the gig economy is real. And with remote, hybrid work, you don’t even have to move to a new location to go work for another company. Over the past 30 years, the number of jobs you’ll work for in your life has gone way up, while the number of times you’ll move has gone way down. You can get a paycheck anywhere now. That’s just table stakes. So why should I now work for company A instead of B? The answer: purpose, culture, belonging, wanting to be a part of something. Instead of bosses and division of labor, you work on project-based teams and get paid according to the value you create. The wave of the future is that you can be a leader even if you’re not the boss.

Personally, I think the thing that holds organizations back the most from being more adaptive, more innovative, more productive, and faster is the mindset of people. We still have the predominantly Industrial Age mindset. We’re moving to a postindustrial paradigm that’s more human-centered, which creates a whole different employee experience and unleashes their full potential. It can make everybody’s life at work better, more fun, more exciting, and more engaging. It changes the world. We can do things faster and better and solve the biggest problems. We can solve climate change.

If you’ve lived in the old world, this notion of giving up the ability to plan and control everything feels very uncomfortable. But if you can embrace the new mindset, it’s liberating. You’ll find yourself thinking, “Well, I wanted to predict and control everything because I don’t like surprises. But actually, a lot of surprises are good surprises. My predicting and controlling everything was killing the good ones as well as the bad.”

I don’t exactly know what work life will look like in a decade. But there’s no question that we are on the edge of a paradigm shift. If you’re a senior leader, that paradigm shift is happening somewhere in your company right now, maybe several layers below you, where someone has started experimenting with things and you don’t know about it. They’re afraid you’ll kill it. It’s working well, but it feels countercultural enough that they’re keeping it under wraps because “if the people up top knew we were doing this, they would definitely not let us get away with it.” If you can figure out where those people are and what those projects are and embrace them, you will begin the journey. And it will be a fun one. And it will pay off.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aaron De Smet is a senior partner in McKinsey’s New Jersey office.

MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR

IN TWO WEEKS

Too many of us are too narrowly focused on money. We need an overhaul of mindsets around what constitutes a good life and good work.

Share these insights

Did you enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to colleagues and friends so they can subscribe too.

Was this issue forwarded to you? Sign up for our McKinsey Quarterly alert to get future issues and other Quarterly articles.