Ah, Break!!

I am finished with my grading and have submitted my grades electronically. So the Fall 2009 semester is officially over for me and I am officially on break. Normal people who have real jobs sometimes look at academics who get three or four weeks off for winter break and think "what a chushy job!!" And, I have to admit, the job does have its cushy aspects. But, it isn't as though I have three or four weeks to lay on the couch and watch daytime TV. I have work to do.

Each semester break I go over my classes for the next semester to revise and improve them. Sometimes this is fairly easy and sometimes it is a huge amount of work. You would think that once you have delivered a class, the work is done. But that is not true. In some classes the technology changes. In other classes you look over what you did the prior semester and try to fix pieces that didn't work very well. Not only does the material change, the students continually change as well. So, you are often organizing one moving target for delivery to another moving target.

In other classes you just add new material to keep the class interesting to teach. For example, in my class Writing Stories to Explore the Ethics of Technology, I am thinking about introducing a collaborative writing assignment using a Wiki. So, I have to come up to speed on Wiki technology and work out the mechanical aspects of grading a collaborative project.

If you have been following my posts, you know that I have been carrying on recently about a new age of mass collaboration. This very large idea translates into a very concrete idea in this collaborative assignment. And this is the way things are supposed to be. You think big thoughts and then explore them in little ways. So break is not just time off. It is time to reflect, revise and hopefully improve.

The GNU World Order

The more I think about it, the more I believe that there is something to this idea of mass collaboration. Much of the progress that we saw in the 20th century can be traced back to two simple but very powerful ideas. Francis Bacon's empirical view of science allowed us to produce huge quantities of reliable scientific knowledge. And Adam Smith's Pin Factory allowed us to produce huge quantities of reliable technology. (To those who always say, "Oh, the world is much more complicated than that.", point taken. I am simplifying things to make a point here.)

Now we take two very simple new ideas. First, people work best when exploiting their strengths. And, second, self organizing collaborative systems allow each person to most effectively achieve their maximum productivity. Taken together, these two ideas comprise The GNU World Order.

I should explain, for the uninitiated, that GNU (pronounced Nu, the G is silent) is a recursive acronym "Gnu's Not Unix". It is the name given to a line of open source software developed by the Free Software Foundation. This is, to my knowledge, the first major example of mass collaboration. So, I though it appropriate to name the new age of mass collaboration the GNU World Order, also playing off "the New World Order" of the enlightenment.

I can honestly say that I don't know where all this is going. But my intuition says that it is definitely going somewhere and is worth keeping an eye on.

Wikinomics: A Possible Soution

I love serendipity. Last week I was rambling on about how difficult it would be to manage in a strengths based environment. At the time, I did not see a clear path to the future. However, I just happened to be in the local public library later that day and just happened to pick up a book on CD that looked interesting. Then Whammo! the whole thing came together.

The book I picked up was Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. The premise of the book is that we are seeing a shift away from traditional hierarchical business models to more collaborative business models. I cannot say much more than that without diminishing the impressive ideas put forth in this book. I would highly recommend it and, for my purposes here, will leave it off by saying that this book jogged my thinking in this area.

In the future you can expect to see more outsourcing of work to individuals. Instead of retaining talent in a sort of corporate studio system, corporations will increasingly acquire the talent they need, when they need it, from the global pool of talent that is available throught the World Wide Web. Professionals will bid for jobs and be paid for the things that they produce rather than being paid for just showing up. Over time people will gravitate to the things they are best at as that will maximize their productivity and their revenue. And businesses will adjust compensation so as to attract the best person for the job at the best price. This will lead to economic efficiency and maximized productivity. And people will work according to their strengths as that will produce the maximum revenue for the least effort.

I don't want to push this idea too far as the future tends to scare people. However, it is easy to see a day, within out lifetimes, where notions such as "going to work" or "working for a company" are simply antiquated. Will we ever get nostalgic and look fondly back on the days when we used to sit in traffic for a hour in the morning and in the evening so we could hang out all day with people we didn't like just so we could go to pointless meetings and engage in any number of pointless repetitive rituals? Perhaps not. Maybe this is a good thing.

The Challenge of Exploiting Strengths

It seems so obvious that organizations would perform better if people could exploit their strengths rather than attempting to mitigate their weaknesses. However, implementing this as a management strategy is not without its challenges. Consider an analogous situation in the realm of politics and economics.

In democratic societies, people pursue their self interests rather than the interests dictated by a monarch. The benefit of this is that people are far more productive doing what they want than they are doing what they are told. The down side is that you have to deal with all their opinions and a concerted focused effort on any one specific thing is virtually impossible. The upside, of course, is that you have higher levels of productivity, advances in knowledge, creative ideas, cultural advances, advances in technology and so on. However, if you were to, some how, take a picture of today's democracies back to a medieval despot, it is unlikely that they would want to have any part of it. It all looks very chaotic and the benefits, to someone who has not experienced them, are unclear. In fact, if the first vote of a new democratic society was to decide on whether or not to be democratic, it is certainly not a foregone conclusion that it would become one.

New social systems require two things: visionaries and huge successes. And the same thing is true with new management systems. I doubt that rank and file organizations will all start cutting over to strengths based management. What is more likely is that organizations will toy with strength based ideas. By doing things this way we will begin to see the benefits and will learn how to deal with the problems that it creates. Over time we will learn more about how to manage this way. Then, at some point, a visionary will coalesce our experiences in a cohesive treatise on managing strength. Some one will try the new vision, hit a home run out of the park, and others will follow.

This is one of the most promising ideas I have seen in a long time. But, don't expect a revolution. A slow and cautious punctuated evolution is probably the best approach and that is, indeed, how I see it happening.

My Strengths: Strategic, Futuristic, Learning, Analytic, and Intellection

My top five strengths, according to the StrengthsFinders test are: strategic, futuristic, learning, analytic, and intellection. Briefly, here is what they mean.

Strategic means that I can see patterns in things and the implications of those patterns. This is not only true, it is one of my defining characteristics. I see patterns and implications everywhere. When I saw the movie A Beautiful Mind where the guy saw patterns everywhere due to schizophrenia I actually began to worry that I might be schizophrenic because I see patterns everywhere as well.

My second strength, futuristic, is also a defining characteristic. I read the future just like most people read the morning paper. I don't always get it right just as most people do not fully understand what they read in the paper. But, I am far more likely to see the future implications of a situation than the present ones.

Third, I am a learner. I love learning about new things. I am always taking on new things just so I have something new to learn about. I cannot drink a beer without learning how beer is made, who makes it, what the different kinds are and so on. I cannot watch a movie without know what other movies the director has made, what other movies the actors have been in, what other things the screenplay author has written, and what other movies may be similar or remakes.

Fourth, I am analytic. I like to see things as they are, how they work, why they work the way they do, and how they relate to other things and the way those other things work, why and so on.

Finally, my fifth strength is intellection. I enjoy intellectual activity. I have always been drawn to philosophy and pursuit of intellectual questions.

I suspect that anyone who knows me will be simply nodding as they read these. They are my defining characteristics. And they didn't come as much of a surprise to me. What did come as a surprise was that these were not things that others are necessarily good at. I thought other people were just being lazy when they did not keep up with me in these areas. I did not realize that they may have different strengths.

Now, Discover Your Strengths

Last week I carried on a bit about a motivational management book I had listened too which suggested that the best way to manage people was to develop their strengths rather than to have them work on their weaknesses. As I listened to this book, I was stunned that something so obvious would take so long for us to figure out. Upon reflection it occured to me that this emphasis on shoring up weaknesses is probably an anomaly. In fact, the values of conformity and measuring up are both industrial age values. And now that we are moving beyond the industrial age, we are also coming to our senses about a few things as well. I don't mean to bash the industrial age. A lot of good came out of it. But, as with any good thing it is easy to get carried away. And in many ways we did.

But, back to the topic at hand. I listened to their second book entitled Now, Discover Your Strenths. This second book reported on a vast amount of research conducted by Gallup to identify categories of strengths. They came up with 34 areas which people seem to have some sort of 'natural' ability. That means that you do things in your area of strength with little effort. You might be good at connecting with people, or working a crowd, or seeing implications, or figuring out how things work. There are things that you are better at than other things. There are things that your are better at than other people. There are things that other people are better at than you. And it only makes sense that you do the things that you are good at and spend your time getting better at them.

Unfortunately, in today's world, we tend to down play our strengths. If we are good at something we tend to dismiss it as unimportant. It is easy for us so we don't value it. And other people resent our strengths. In a world that values conformity, standing out implies that others fall short some how. This all reminds me of a Kurt Vonnegut short story where anyone with a talent was penalized somehow in order to insure that nobody made anyone else feel inadequate. This is funny in a short story, but sad in real life.

If this idea has any appeal to you, I would encourage you to visit the Strengths Finder website. They list the 34 categories and, if you are so motivated they, provide a test that will tell you your strengths. Next time I will discuss my strengths and their implications.

First, Break all the Rules

I listen to a lot of recorded books and lectures. Most of the time it is fairly serious stuff, but occasionally I like to lighten up with a motivational talk. While the quality of motivational talks can vary greatly, I find that the good ones usually give me something worthwhile to think about. And that is exactly what just happened. I went to the library and checked out four or five motivational talks, one of which was a management talk called First, Break All the Rules. This talk caught my attention with the claim that if you want a high performance organization you should focus on your employee's strengths rather than their weaknesses. This was exactly what I was looking for - something to think about.

According to the authors, the most common employee development process in use today will review the employee on an annual basis, identify their areas of weakness and have them work on those weaknesses over the next year. This, again according to the authors, produces mediocre employees who are frustrated and struggling to be good at things they are not naturally good at. Instead it make more sense to have them identify their strengths and work at being better at things that they are naturally good at. This is so obvious, I thought, why did it take so long for someone to figure this out?

I am going to insert my own analogy in here to crystallize the clarity and importance of this idea. Imagine a professional football team where the players spent their time working on their weaknesses. The quarterback would practice blocking. The running back would practice tackles. The tackles would run reception patterns. The kicker would develop his social skills, and so on. How well would this team perform in competition? Probably not very well. In fact, their only hope would be that other teams also practiced using a similarly dysfunctional development strategy. And that is exactly what happens in business, industry and government today.

But, you may ask, how do you know what your strengths are? How do you discover them? How do you develop them? How do you employ them to get better at doing you job? Well, stay tuned, there is more to come.