I WAS VERY HONOURED to be asked by Professor Brian Haley to give this year's Blackett Memorial Lecture. He and I have worked together on a school governing body and I have great admiration for his gifts. I also appreciate all that industry has gained from the practice of operational research and therefore the debt which we owe to Patrick Blackett, whom we look up to as the discipline's founding father. Against that background I was delighted to accept the Society's invitation, challenging though it was, and I decided to talk on Work and the Future. I recognize that I have chosen a general subject for the annual gathering of a specialist society. There would be general agreement, however, that the key to the effective use of operational research is the correct definition in the first place of the problems to which it is to be applied. Too often we use operational research in industry to optimize the way a particular function is carried out, when the real question is whether that activity should be undertaken at all. My object in discussing Work and the Future is to separate out some of the strands entangled in the broad issue of what the pattern of jobs is likely to be in this country in the years ahead. It will mean treading some well-worn paths, because one of the questions is whether the pattern will be different in Britain from that in other countries. The statistics of Britain's relative economic decline since the Second World War are incontrovertible, but a number of the plausible generalizations which have been advanced to account for that decline are not. This point needs to be explored because if the diagnosis is wrong, some of the simples and nostrums currently being prescribed are unlikely to effect a cure. We should however start by accepting that there is no shortage of work. Quite apart from the natural aspirations of the community for continuing material improvement, Britain is accumulating a backlog of work which needs to be done to maintain the deteriorating fabric of our urban society. To take just one example, the drainage and water systems of our cities are mainly one hundred or more years old and overdue for renewal. A crude estimate of their replacement cost is ?50bn, which gives some idea of the size of that task alone. Maintaining and modernizing the road and rail networks is another vast task which needs to be tackled. People are not therefore without jobs because there is nothing useful for them to do. What is missing is our ability to make an adequate connection between those who are seeking work and work which needs to be done. This is not a peculiarly British problem; it is one which faces the industrialized countries as a whole, and when the world has worked its way through the present depression, it will not be solved even if it becomes less acute. It is unlikely that world trade will return to the rate of growth it registered from the Second World War to the mid-1970s, in the foreseeable future. The 1980s and 1990s are likely to be a period of slow growth and great uncertainty, with the unpredictability of the economic environment being in itself a brake on progress. If this is to be the scene, then we cannot rely on external growth to provide new jobs in this country on the scale of the post-war years. Why is it that we have seen a sharper rise in unemployment in Britain than in other industrialized countries, aside from the effects of current economic policies? There are a number of significant changes in the pattern of employment in this country, which overlap but which need distinguishing in attempting to answer that question.