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"Thomas Frey is a futurist. It's his job to predict the future by identifying emerging global trends. What Frey does might sound a little like fortune telling but spotting new trends is an important way of ensuring your business is well positioned for the future. Frey spoke to SmartCompany from the United States ahead of his upcoming visit to Australia for the Ci2012 conference. Here are his seven predictions for the future:"

The future of work will be about temporary groupings of independent actors to deliver specific projects and the deployment of new organizational structures that will support these activities.

A future of project-based work does call for the emergence of new organisational structures to support the activities of the individual contributors. How will this be done and by whom?

The disconnectedness of people and information in today's enterprises is often the unfortunate by-product of a relentless drive for more growth, expansion, cost reduction and unnecessary control. However, disconnectedness as such is not a bad thing. Moreover, future enterprises should be intentionally designed for disconnectedness.

With Enterprise 2.0, we are trying to solve some of the problems of today's business organisations. However, we must not forget that our business environment is rapidly evolving and therefore, we might be solving the problems of the past instead of those of the future.

When trying to explain new concepts or paradigms, analogies can be a great tool. However, we should avoid using them for carrying the message of the guarantee of future success.

Gartner research analysts recently convened to discuss the changing nature of work and table some predictions for the coming decade. Their consensus view was that chaotic, distributed and ad-hoc teams of people, along with blurred organizational boundaries, would become the norm for most modes of work.

The past belonged to push, but the future belongs to pull.\nThat's an argument we've made before and in our most recent post, "Why Do Companies Exist?" --as well as more expansively in this Journal of Service Science article. What will pull-based institutions look like? How will they be organized? What dispositions, or mindsets, will they require? And what management practices will help them succeed?

Businesses already have tools to support strategic planning to lower cost, increase quality, and decrease time to market. Agility is another, albeit new and different, factor that proactive managers will use in designing the future of their organizations. A central issue is how to create a strategy that has the most beneficial balance of agility with other qualities. Such decisions have a life cycle. And at the end of the planning life cycle, we have the situation where a strategy has been created. The questions are what decisions are the correct ones to support that strategy, to attain the desired agility. Our agility metrics support this end of strategic planning.

Earlier this week, Menlo Park, Calif.-based startup oDesk announced a new service called oDesk Staffing, which gives U.S.-based freelancers access to benefits (including health coverage, retirement plans and education savings accounts), along with other services. This move by oDesk, which describes itself as a marketplace for work, is a smart one, as it positions the company to take advantage of a major societal shift.

Design and "design thinking" is gaining recognition as an important integrative concept in management practice and education. But it will fail to have a lasting impact, unless we learn from the mistakes of earlier, related ideas. For instance, "system thinking", which shares many of the conceptual foundations of "design thinking", promised to be a powerful guide to management practice, but it has never achieved the success its proponents hoped for. If systems thinking had been successful in gaining a foothold in management education over the last half of the 20th century, there would be no manage by designing movement, or calls for integrative or design thinking.

The credit crunch has forced people across many sectors to rethink their assumptions about how they do business, the roles of the individual in the larger system, and the very future of the system itself.

Not large corporations, but networks of small companies and individuals will be the future drivers for innovation and prosperity. A policy paper of The Lisbon Council.

Business colonies as temporary collaboration structures in order to deliver a given project. The concept seems simple enough. However, is it really that simple?

In the social enterprise debate, we always talk about collaboration, about connecting individuals. However, connecting more people as such should not be an objective. The thing that really matters is connecting the right people, which implies disconnecting from the wrong ones.

Collaboration is the mantra of the Enterprise 2.0 movement, but organisational boundaries complicate adoption and progress. Therefore, we need someone who takes a holistic view of what is needed to get employees to work across silos. Good idea?

The economy is doing rather well over here in Europe, but organisations are facing growing problems while looking for additional resources. Are people no longer interested in work?

When talking about 'social business', most of us see this as an evolution of today's companies, supported by new communication and collaboration technologies. It is not. Social business is a choice for another, more meaningful business.