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If you feel like work is getting harder, it's not just your imagination, says Malcolm Gladwell.

The bestselling author of Blink and The Tipping Point says the mental demands of the workplace are steadily growing — and we're all going to have to smarten up if we want to succeed.

"I'm quite prepared for the possibility that the next revolution is not going to come from a machine," says Mr. Gladwell, 44, a staff writer for New Yorker magazine, who has carved out his own niche as a business guru. "It's going to come from creating a more thoughtful work force and giving people the opportunity to be thoughtful."

Among his recommendations: Business leaders should get more involved in education policy debates, Canada should consider other countries' models for teaching advanced mathematics, and hiring managers should stop looking for a perfect fit when scouting for employees.

A native of Ontario, Mr. Gladwell is returning home this month (Oct. 14-16) for the University of Waterloo's "Workplace 2017" conference, where he will interview Research In Motion co-chief executive officer Jim Balsillie about the future of work. In a recent interview, Mr. Gladwell talked about the challenges ahead for businesses as the nature of work evolves and the baby boom generation retires.

Imagining the workplace in 10 or 20 years is tough … How do we think about the future in a way that's helpful and not just an exercise in futility?

Probably the wisest course is to stay away from the areas where there's the greatest uncertainty. So I don't think we can predict what the hot areas will be 10 to 15 years from now; that's just a sure path to embarrassment to try to figure out what the much-needed technology will be. But we can have a pretty good sense of things like demographic trends. We know with absolute certainty that the cognitive demands of the workplace will be greater, not less; we know that Western industrial nations are unlikely to be regaining manufacturing jobs. We can be reasonably certain of those kinds of broad trends.

When you say that the cognitive demands of the workplace will be growing, what do you mean?

We will require, from a larger and larger percentage of our work force, the ability to engage in relatively complicated analytical and cognitive tasks. So it's not that we're going to need more geniuses, but the 50th percentile is going to have to be better educated than they are now. We're going to have to graduate more people from high school who've done advanced math, is a very simple way of putting it.

Unfortunately, it seems like we're heading in the opposite direction in terms of test scores and math literacy. How do we turn that around?

There's a cheap solution, which Canada has actually excelled at, which is simply to import your brains. As the son of an Englishman who came to Canada to teach math, the Gladwells [and myself] are part of that earlier cheap solution. So that's one route, and we can continue to do that, there's nothing stopping us. And Canada will not become less desirable over time; I suspect that 10 years from now, Canada will be an even more desirable location for lots of people from less-developed countries.

But you can't keep doing that forever. At a certain point you have to address what's going on with the people who are already here. ... We have to look at models of other countries that have successfully taught those kinds of skills to a broader percentage of the population, like Korea and Japan. If you look at their education systems, they have shown it is perfectly possible to create a much more mathematically literate work force.

Why hasn't the workplace changed more? We've heard so much about telecommuting, flex time and these other ideas, but we see so little of it on a large scale. Do we even need an office at this point, or will that become outdated?

I think it's changed a lot already. Maybe some of the changes aren't visible, but I think the concept of the workplace has become more flexible and I think that's only going to accelerate. When I walk around Manhattan in the middle of a weekday I see untold numbers of people sitting in coffee shops with their laptops. I mean, they're working; but they're not working in a way that would have been recognizable to anyone 10 years ago. I suspect that kind of thing will only increase.

But I think a lot of the changes are probably invisible for the moment because they have to do with the way people think, not with the way they behave, necessarily. Jobs have gotten harder and more demanding. You're still going into the same place and wearing the same clothes, but a lot more is being asked of you.

I see that you'll be interviewing Jim Balsillie [at the Workplace 2017 conference]; It seems the BlackBerry is emblematic of the way people live with their work all the time now. Do you see any pushback from the blurring of the line between life and work?

I think it's a mistake to look at it as pushed in one direction or the other. I remember having a conversation with a lawyer who told me that they now do in two weeks deals that used to take two months, and he said the reason for that is very simple: it's FedEx and the BlackBerry. And he can now do all kinds of things in cabs and at home putting his kids to bed that he wouldn't have been able to do before. So that's one model where things have sped up and work has invaded home space.

But I could make the case in my own life — and I know many people feel the same way — that the BlackBerry has in fact freed up an enormous amount of time because it has allowed me to be productive in what would have been dead space. If I am sitting on a subway, stuck, I can take out my BlackBerry and I can answer 30 e-mails so that when I finally get to my destination I have time to do what I really want to do.

How do you see technological advances changing the workplace in the coming years?

I don't know. That's the kind of question I think one only embarrasses oneself by trying to answer. But I know that the next problem we need to solve is, we have given people virtually unlimited access to data, to information; the next question is, can we give them better tools for making sense of that information?

Google in a sense is a symbol of the solution to an old problem. We don't need more Googles; what we need is a way to prioritize and analyze and make sense of the information we have at our fingertips. And maybe those kinds of solutions aren't technological at all. I'm quite prepared for the possibility that the next revolution is not going to come from a machine; it's going to come from creating a more thoughtful work force and giving people the opportunity to be thoughtful.

It seems like hiring is an area that is so fraught with misunderstanding for companies; they want so badly to hire the right people but often have no idea how to do that. What are some ways businesses can improve their hiring practices?

In the short term I have to say this is a problem that's going to get worse, not better. One prediction I feel very certain about making is that we are headed, in the short term, toward a time of severe labour shortages. Trying to find a qualified person is going to be tougher in the next 10 years for most sophisticated businesses than it has ever been. This is not a problem that's going away, it's one that's going to get worse.

I don't know that there is an easy solution. We have to get better at helping people learn on the job. The idea that you can decide whether someone is a good or bad fit for your organization at point zero is going to have to be thrown out the window, because you're not going to be able to find somebody with those credentials.

You're going to have to create internal structures that will help people grow into positions; that's really where the real opportunity is going to be. That's what we're going to have to do. That means being more patient with people, being willing to experiment with people, and being willing to nurture people. Those are three things we're reluctant to do at the moment.

How is the demographic shift of the baby boomers retiring going to affect the workplace?

It's going to have huge repercussions. … Not long ago, I looked at the year-by-year hiring in Ontario of teachers starting in 1950, and you can see it: In the year when they hire the most teachers, they hire twice as many teachers as the year when they hired the fewest teachers. You've got these bulges. And when the bulges go, unless you can convince people to stay longer you're going to have these acute shortages. That kind of thing requires a lot of planning in advance.

The other problem with that is, it's not across the board. It's not that every industry feels the pinch in the same way; industries differ dramatically in their age profiles and where that bulge is. So we could lose an incredible number of math teachers in Ontario one year, and five years later the same kind of crisis could hit the energy industry. The energy industry is actually one of the many industries in Canada and the United States that is an old industry that will face this problem of an incredible number of highly experienced technical people walking out the door at the same time.

The short-term goal is, we have to convince people to stay longer, that 65 is unrealistic given what we're up against. We have to recognize as a society that 65 is an unrealistic retirement age and we have to find ways to get people to work longer.

What is one idea that you think is not on business leaders' radar screens right now that should be?

I would just say if I were a CEO of a major company in Canada or the United States, I would be much more involved in public education. I know there are many who are, but I would consider that a priority along the lines of things that are specific to my own company. The competitiveness of any organization is so dependent on the quality of the work force, and it would be so much easier for us to improve public education if corporations publicly and loudly lined up behind the public school system. I think that would make an enormous difference. They should be a lot freer with their time and with their wallets in supporting public education.