E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

The Crisis of Meaning in the Knowledge Workforce

If you have been reading this blog for a little while now, you may remember how there have been numerous ocassions where I have discussed how I am one of those folks who doesn’t really buy into both the whole generations or digital divide arguments. Gen-Yers, Gen-Xers, Baby Boomers, etc. etc., to me, are all part of the knowledge workforce and, if anything, instead of talking about different generations at work, I always tend to think that it is mostly about embracing and facilitating different working styles within the workforce. But what happens when each and everyone of those work styles don’t have a meaning, nor a purpose, for what they usually do? Well, we have got a crisis. A crisis of meaning.

That’s the main premise that Roger Martin, Dean at Rotman School, talks about at the Big Think Web site under a thought-provoking, and rather evocative, short video clip under the title “The Crisis of Meaning in the Millennial Workforce“, which lasts for nearly three minutes and which I would strongly encourage you all to have a look in order to find out a bit more on the state of things within today’s corporate environment, which surely would sound as a key issue of why we are potentially going through the current turmoil with this financial crisis.

Now, Roger talks about that crisis of meaning for the younger knowledge workers, i.e. that generation of millenials. But, like I mentioned at the beginning of this blog entry, I don’t think it’s just a problem with millennials themselves, but more with the knowledge workforce in general, and with each and everyone of those working styles I mentioned above. So if you go ahead and scratch the word millennials and, instead, you put there Gen-Xers or Baby Boomers, or whatever else, you would still obtain a very similar result: an urge for each of those working styles to define a larger purpose or meaning for what each and everyone of us do in our day to day work.

We could probably say that one of the common themes permeating throughout the short video clip is that one of employee motivation, engagement, or participation in today’s corporate environment; or the lack of, better said, something that seems to be a rather popular topic at the moment, and which I will be covering shortly as well in a separate blog entry, as it really heated up a fantastic conversation over in Google Plus earlier on in the week on corporate culture(s).

But here is a good definition of that lack of motivation from the general workforce that Roger mentions in that video:

““Okay, so let me get this straight.  I’m supposed to come to work for you and work every day with the singular goal of maximizing the value of faceless, nameless people who can blow us off in a nanosecond if they had a bad hair day?  Am I right thus far?”  The truthful answer is, yes.  And the millenials are just saying, “Like, you got to be kidding me.  Seriously?“

Like I said, scratch millennials and insert there whatever other moniker and it would still be spot on! Employee engagement and motivation are really two hot topics within the workplace at the moment. They always have been and will probably be. But perhaps that’s because we may have been looking into this crisis of meaning issue from the wrong end and we could probably very much need to apply some fresh thinking that would help us address the issue in a much more profound way to finally find that solution for it. And in this case, I do believe that Dave Pullin (Wish I could find the right Dave Pullin links to point you to him, but alas I couldn’t find them out just yet…) pretty much nails it as to put on the table what the real issue is at hand and what we, each and everyone of us!, could do to address it and fix it for those younger generations who have already started to enter the workplace. To quote:

“You have the problem 100% backwards. It is NOT “How do we motivate people to devote their existence to the interests of business”, it should be “how do we motivate business to devote their existence to people”.

Business has become the problem.

People want jobs but no business regards itself as having an obligation or objective to create jobs. People want rewarding jobs but business wants to pay the least they can get away with. People want fulfilling jobs but business couldn’t care less whether jobs are fulfilling.

People want healthcare, but we have HealthDontCare Businesses that want profit but couldn’t care less about people’s health. People want as much health care as they can afford, or to be healthy at the least cost, but we have Health “Insurance” businesses whose objective is to maximize the cost and minimize the healthcare” [Emphasis mine]

Etymologically speaking, some people say that crisis means change, decision, choice, judgement, etc. Well, perhaps we do need to go through this crisis of meaning to really evaluate, once again, whether knowledge workers need to adjust to business or whether the business needs to adjust to knowledge workers. Something tells me, deep inside, whether we would want to admit it or not, everyone, that we already know the answer to it. We probably have already made up our own minds, but thing is, the challenge here is, is it *the* right decision, *the* right choice?

Dave, once again, reminds us of what it may well be all about with a final brilliant sentence, extracted from the above comment, that I thought was worth while quoting over here as well:

“Business is an artifact invented by humans for a purpose. But now it is humans that must serve the purpose of the artifact“

Something tells me that it’s probably a good time now to remember, and to reflect, about where our real place at work is at the moment and where it should well be. Somehow, I think we all know the answer already, don’t we?

Have a good one everyone!

IBM THINK Forum – Optimism, Outrageousness and Smart Sense-Making on Leadership

One of the topics that has been in my mind at the moment, within the context of the Social Enterprise, has been that one of Leadership and how, through the use of social software tools, we are now going through that rather exciting phase where traditional management / leadership, i.e. the hierarchical organisation, is starting to mix and mingle with a new kind of networked, interconnected leadership of wild ducks, trust agents, i.e. intrapreneurs, to perhaps help facilitate and create a hybrid of what could be defined as the Leadership of Tomorrow. One that Carmen Medina nicely defined as full of Optimism, Outrageousness and Smarter Sense-Making.

A few days back you would remember how I put together a blog post around the topic of Leadership as Servanthood, as part of some of the highlights from the wonderful IBM THINK Forum event hosted in New York City not long ago. Well, today, I am coming back for more, as one of the short speeches from the event has been making the rounds quite a bit talking about some of the traits from that new generation of leaders that is emerging at the moment in the current workplace. This time around the pitch is coming from Carmen Medina herself (Former Director, CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence), where, over the course of a bit over 4 minutes, she comes to talk about some of the lessons she has learned throughout her career about being a leader within a knowledge organisation.

Some pretty powerful stuff in there, for sure! Priceless quotes like how optimism is probably the greatest act of rebellion, or how each and every organisation or business out there has always been having a whole bunch of heretics who they couldn’t do anything about. Not even today. How instead of trying to put down those heretics companies would probably be much much better off listening and understanding them better, as they are very willing to help fix their problems as an organisation.

Her second priceless lesson is one of those that when you first hear or read about it certainly would make you think about things twice, more than anything, because of how brilliantly it challenges and questions the status-quo. If not, have a look. Here is the exact quote as she mentioned it: “The only way to make an impact in an organisation is to be really outrageous“, which, when combined with lesson #1 (Optimism), can surely be rather powerful and engaging.

Lesson #3 is actually even more provocative. On the topic of making sense of today’s complex knowledge world to try to make and reach the best decisions, as a leader. But I am not going to spoil it further for you folks out there, you would have to watch the remaining of the video to find out some more.

And while you are at it, I would also like to point you in the direction of a recent blog entry that she put together at the Building a Smarter Planet blog under the heading “[...] On the Importance of Sensemaking” where she lays, quite nicely, the main challenge for today’s leaders as follows:

“The contest is not between competing camps of knowledge workers or between us and the machines that we construct. Instead, the contest is between the reality we have and the future we might attain, and sensemaking will be one of our most important aids in making progress.

So our future depends on the ability of leaders to transform the organizations they lead as quickly and effectively as they absorb powerful new technologies–and in sync with the capabilities of those new tools.

Goodness! That’s quite a challenge, don’t you think? So right there it looks like Carmen has put together three different key lessons about leadership in today’s complex workplace, and societal environment: optimism, outrageousness and sensemaking. But what I find really fascinating from her speech is the fact of how such a traditional knowledge organisation as the CIA has always seen, and embraced, the key paramount role of knowledge creation and knowledge sharing, and collaborating through the use of social networking tools!, as one of the most powerful methods out there to help make better informed decisions to tackle and fix specific problems.

Thus, if the CIA has been capable of proving how critical the role of social networking is, both internally and externally, for those knowledge sharing activities, what’s our excuse? What are we doing to help facilitate the leaders of today become the networked, interconnected leaders of tomorrow who would inspire the remaining of the knowledge workforce in this Knowledge Ecology that seems to have become more and more prevalent by the day? Why do we keep forbidding the use of social tools behind, and outside, of the firewall, or why some of our leaders of today are somewhat scared of jumping the shark and joining the conversation? It’s just as well as if we had invented the telephone just today , and people would want to keep forbidding its use, doesn’t it?, but a few decades later still remains a critical, unquestionable tool for communicating and collaborating together. Well, guess what? Social networking tools should be no different. For any knowledge worker out there. Even for our leaders.

Maybe, we / they need to be a bit more optimistically outrageous, don’t you think?

Stop Online Harassment – Create Passionate Users

In the last few years there have been a good number of people, out there on the Social Web, who have come and gone and who have remained quite an inspiration for yours truly in helping shape up plenty of the ideas and thoughts I have been sharing over here, in this blog, over the course of time, around the topics of Social Computing and the Social Enterprise. One of those special thought leaders in the 2.0 social space(s) is Kathy Sierra; someone I do wish would come back to the Internet Blogosphere to continue to inspire all of us with some of her amazingly insightful and rather enlightening articles on her blog, amongst several other places. She surely is thoroughly missed by plenty of us.

Now, for those folks out there who may not have heard about Kathy just recently, or, at all, I can certainly go ahead and recommend you have a read of these two gems that she put together over at gapingvoid (Hugh MacLeod‘s blog) and which would make for some excellent food for thought around the topics of gamification and customer loyalty, respectively. Brilliant reads with lots of great insights to digest, chew on and learn plenty more about two of the most hyped conversations going on at the moment in the social media space. Must-read materials they would surely manage to change your own perception about both subjects. No doubt!

But today’s blog post though doesn’t have anything to do with either of those articles. Perhaps, at a later time, I will talk some more about them. However, for now, I do want to talk about a particular YouTube video that has been making the rounds lately, and which features Kathy herself talking about a rather poignant, controversial, but equally important topic: Stop online harassment.

While plenty of people have been talking about the controversy around the Google Plus policy about using our real identities, instead of fakes or pseudonyms, Kathy just focuses, in a bit over 5 minutes, on what I think is probably the main issue at hand at the moment within the Social Web: the potential risks and harm done by not putting a hard stop to online harassment. It’s a very touchy, thorny issue; one that perhaps does deserve a whole lot more attention by everyone than just this blog post by yours truly, more than anything else, because I suspect that all of us who have been online for a while, at some point in our lives, we have experienced some kind of harassment while making use of the Social Web and various (social networking) sites.

So I thought for today’s blog entry I would go ahead and share the video clip over here, as a way to help bring forward some more awareness of the potential issues at hand, and, most importantly, some good guidance on what each and everyone of us can do to help out. It’s the least we could all do, more than anything else to perhaps show how for those folks involved in such harmful activities that there are better ways of participating from the Social Web, including protecting your own identify and virtual presence with a good purpose. This hasn’t got anything to do with patronising or trying to diminish people’s experiences on the Web, whatever they may well be. This is a whole lot more about educating people on what we could do to finally take a stand about such activities and help prevent them in the near future. All of us. Together.

My good friend, the always sharp and insightful Euan Semple reflected on Kathy’s short video clip as well with a wonderfully inspiring short article under “Be the change” that makes that very same point across of educating and facilitating a better, and smarter, use of the social tools at our hand with this priceless quote:

“Yes act in ways that cultivate positive behaviours and yes, be prepared to stand up and say when someone is “behaving badly”, but stop short of telling other people what they should or shouldn’t be doing – it just tends to wind them up!“

Exactly! I guess that’s the piece of homework that both Kathy and Euan have laid out nicely for all of us: look after each other against that “bad behaviour” and instead inspire, as Kathy would probably state as well, the creation of passionate users, because, at the end of the day that’s what it’s all about, as this priceless quote from “19 Revealing CEO Leadership Quotes” puts it brilliantly:

“It’s so important to be happy in your role and to have passion for the role. I have made a conscious choice to focus on how I love the people and the products, and to be happy each day“

After all, it’s our (virtual) home, isn’t it? I mean, the Social Web. My home. Your home. Our home. So we may as well treat it accordingly, don’t you think?, and start looking after each other in much more meaningful ways. For our own, and everyone else’s, good. It still is the least we could all do.