Perth: Preparing for the Future of Work
The Scottish city of Perth punches above its weight for entrepreneurship. Is its understanding of tomorrow’s workplace the key to its success?
Over the past decade, the way we work has changed drastically. Digital technologies have made location less relevant than ever, and the COVID-19 crisis has forced even the most sceptical companies to work remote. The number of people freelancing or going self-employed continues to rise alongside. There are interesting opportunities for cities that pay attention, even if their population is small.
Only 47,000 people live in the Scottish city of Perth, yet it’s a hub for new business creation in the UK. The local economy has 42.6 businesses registered per 10,000 residents—well above the Scottish average of 30.1. The city has SMEs, startups and highly-skilled workers on an unprecedented scale for a place of its size.
So what’s Perth’s secret? How has the city achieved such impressive levels of entrepreneurship and attracted so much talent, despite poor economic prospects nationally and globally?
The uncoupling of work and location
In 2015, Perth and Kinross Council launched a smart growth plan to drive change in a few key areas including economic prosperity and enterprise, knowledge and learning, and “the Perth experience”. Their ambition is to “become one of Europe's best small cities”. Policymakers have recognised the opportunity ahead and become early adopters of the tactics necessary to excel in the economy of the 21st century.
A prominent strand in global thinking about the future of work concerns the relationship between work and place. We now have the technology to keep us connected wherever we go. This was already causing an uptick in location-independent work before COVID-19, but in its wake, remote work has truly won the race. Crisis policies have also established precedents for new freelancer rights across Europe, while some furloughed workers may soon start businesses out of pure boredom.
When work no longer requires you to live in the congestion and pollution of an expensive major city, the criteria for where you want to live changes. Factors like quality of life, proximity to nature and the general “vibe” of a place come to the fore. For small cities in beautiful, affordable and laid-back locations like Perth, this signals an opportunity to become talent hubs—especially if the city knows how to nurture that talent.
Distributed teams and an innovative business ecosystem
An enormous part of Perth’s success to date has been its collaborative ecosystem; one defined by thinking small and ensuring the support that matters is available to residents who have ambitious ideas or unique competencies. In pursuing this strategy, the city is refusing to play by the old rules of work and looking boldly ahead. So far, the long view is paying off.
Lynne Martin is project manager at the Famous Grouse Ideas Centre (FGIC). This Perth-based creative accelerator programme has been running since January 2018 with financial support from the Scottish social enterprise Elevator.
Its intensive 12-week programme provides talented creatives with the support and resources they need to earn a living from their craft. Rather than focusing on scaling, investment, and headcount like a more conventional accelerator, FGIC aims to help people become freelancers and solo entrepreneurs—encouraging them to define and pursue their own, personalised paths to success. Lynne says:
“One man we’ve worked with is a world-leading paleontological illustrator — he draws dinosaurs. He recently earned his Australian citizenship off the back of it, which is a testament to how good he is. Before he came to us, though, he had no idea how to think commercially about his business, or even that it was a business. Now, he’s released a product and has someone handling the finances. That mindset shift—from ‘this is a thing I’m good at’ to ‘this is how I make a living’—is profound. What we do transforms how people see themselves and guides them to reach their potential.”
But the most important aspect of all this is something else: community. It turns out when you empower and equip a bunch of creative people to succeed, they respond by investing in and uplifting others around them. Many who’ve gone through the FGIC accelerator continue building their businesses after the programme, and they do it using non-hierarchical structures. They engage other freelancers and solo entrepreneurs, developing collaborative relationships that are flat and distributed. Meaning: nobody is anybody else’s boss, and there’s a lot of mutual respect.
An innovative approach to new business creation isn’t about gimmicky technologies or bundles of cash. It’s about something much simpler: Designing systems that work effectively for real human needs and desires.
Designing for the human cloud
Matthew Mottola is an entrepreneur and product leader who built the Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit, a system designed to help enterprises leverage freelance talent more efficiently and effectively. His forthcoming book, The Human Cloud, explores a model of work that is digital, remote, and outcome-based.
Matt believes that the simple, seamless technologies available to us today influence people to start up or go freelance:
“Entrepreneurship has never been easier. It used to be if you wanted to start a business, it wasn’t easy to take an idea to market and then global—that just wasn’t an option for most people. Today, you as one person can do what used to take thousands of people to do. Instead of hiring a legal department or a finance arm, you can use affordable and accessible tools like DocuSign and Quickbooks. Smaller entrepreneurs are empowered to carve out their own path and to accomplish crazy things with little to no resources. But to unlock the potential, we need to design better systems for moving people from ‘amateur’ to ‘expert’. We need to rethink our whole idea of the career ladder.”
On that last point, Perth is ahead of the curve. Its talent ecosystem is already more effective and mature than those of cities many times larger. The number of new businesses launching in the city shows no signs of slowing down.
Perth shows that you don’t have to be a massive, global city to look for signals and act on them to enhance your long-term prospects. It also tells us that looking at the human side of possible futures is a guiding principle for success on the urban scale. There are fascinating lessons to be learned from Perth’s strategy and experience. Other cities with the ambition to thrive in the Fourth Industrial Revolution would do well to take note.
As always, thank you to Lauren Razavi for her research and editorial support, and to Robyn Johnston for her illustrations.
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Further Reading: Practising Futures and Foresight as a Service Designer
Nile futures and foresight practice director Neil Collman has written two blog posts for people interested in learning more about the field and thinking.
In part one, he outlines the four hard-learned lessons every practical futurist needs to get to grips with. In part two, he offers practical guidance on the four habits to cultivate with your team today if you’re going to build a practice that sticks. Hit reply or email us to share your thoughts after reading.