What made me think about it is that while the macro political landscape seems to be heading in the opposite direction to COoperation, you could even say towards disintegration, the micro-economic trend is towards a sharing economy, where we look for joint benefits of being close together and not separating ourselves from our surroundings.

CO-working

There has been a massive wave of CO-working space reaching the Polish office market in recent years. Is it a sustainable trend and in what direction will it develop? Flexible space that makes it easy for companies to scale up or down obviously makes sense, so does the possibility of having a meeting space for virtual companies that don’t have a physical office.

Still, I can’t see the real benefits of an office space where you have to share a sofa, a pool table, a kitchen and a toilet with others. Isn’t it more disruptive than advantageous? I mean, we are living in times where home office is also an accepted and healthy solution. Isn’t it more effective to be focused on your work, eliminate the travel time to the “office” and if you lack inspiration, exchanging ideas and camaraderie with people, then break up your working day with calls, Skype meetings, a meeting at a café or the gym, or simply use the local coffee shop where the internet is great and you will always feel welcome. It will certainly be exciting to see how the business of workplace-centric coffee shops evolves.

CO-existing

Another big and hot topic, particularly when another heat wave envelops the city, is how we – humans – treat the Earth, nature and the animals and species living with us here.  Global warming is a fixed item on the agenda, at least in countries and societies that can afford to think about more than survival, but the progress towards a common plan with measurable results still seems far away. Real estate developers and architects have talked about green for a decade now, and we are finally starting to see how nature is actually being integrated in parts of new buildings. It’s done mainly for people and their wellbeing, but also to support nature and focus on the needs of plants and trees and the air that we all breath!

COoperation/COllaboration

The whole idea about having a company is that people have different skills and if you put them together in the right mix then 1+1 no longer equals just 2. Here, however, we can also see disruption on the horizon, it’s maybe not human COoperation, but human and AI COllaboration that will secure companies’ success. The big task here is of course to ensure that it will be actual COoperation. But if the darkest scenarios of ruthless AIs that become smarter than people come to pass…, then we may be facing COllapse rather than peaceful CO-existence with machines.

CO-owners

Are we children of the world or are we just borrowing the earth and passing it onto our children? I cannot end my little “CO-story” without pointing to perhaps the biggest challenges to our and future generations. Ensuring that there is a future worth experiencing will require making a CO-responsible and COmmon plan that will bring world leaders and all of humanity together in realizing that COoperation is now the COre issue to our survival.