“The
E-Competent Workforce:
Pragmatism and
Paranoia in a Wired World”
Keynote presentation by
Godfrey
Parkin
President, MindRise
2002 Human
Capital
It’s here. It is not going to go away. It’s
just going to get more complicated. It: the new economy; the Internet; the
wired world; e-business; the digital age. Your IT people and your strategic
managers, and possibly your marketing people may be exploiting this new
operating environment. But is the majority of your workforce floundering,
faking it, or just hoping to get by? It matters! The power of networked people
grows exponentially with every added mind.
Building e-competence is more than simply
teaching people to use a Web browser, it is about creating a profound
understanding in each employee of their significance and potential in your
wired world, and encouraging them to contribute to the way the company
innovates, solves problems, makes decisions, and manages. You have to get the
company fit to thrive in the new economy by fundamentally changing the way it
thinks and behaves. But how? Never has the fear of doing things wrong been such
a prominent reason for doing nothing. Never has fear of being left behind been
such a motivator for doing, well, anything.
The nature of the new economy is not linear
evolution, it’s churn and burn. Suddenly “managing change” goes way beyond a
finite project. You have to give your people the competencies to assimilate—and
generate—change on an ongoing basis, at every level in the organization. And if
your wired workforce is going to use its new competencies to collective
advantage, you’d better be ready to relinquish some of those ideas about
hierarchy and central control, and empower people to learn from each other.
Traditional
businesses tend to define their corporate competencies by their internal
processes, the things that they do well. But the more businesses move online,
the more they are starting to define their competencies by the value they add
to their customers’ processes. That’s because e-businesses share the same
nervous system as their business partners, suppliers, and customers. It is
people, not technologies, who are the architects and caretakers of your
processes. The e-competence of those people is a determining factor in the
health of the nervous system, and consequently of the company’s competence.
E-what? “E-”: the
universal adjective and adverb of the new millennium. If you want to make what
you do sound modern or hip, stick an “e-” in front of it and you have joined
the bandwagon. While the ubiquitous “e-” was once helpful in differentiating
new-economy processes from traditional processes, its over-use has diluted its
value and made it mean just about anything you want it to. That is precisely
why I use the term “e-competent” in the title of this talk. What does an
e-competent workforce mean? If I had everyone write down their definition, we
would probably produce dozens of divergent notions.
What comes into
your head when you hear that “e-” term? Amazon.com? Supply chain management? XML?
Do you envision selling through your Web site? How about strategic IT
infrastructures? Online learning? Dot-com stock disasters? All of these are
components of the whole “new economy” phenomenon, and fresh issues get
imprinted in our minds daily as the headlines change and our work priorities
shift. But the overwhelming impact of the Web—the central thread that makes
e-business so different—is connectedness, and the resulting communication and
synergy.
Who in your
organization is most fundamentally affected by all of the e-phenomena? The
obvious answer is your IT people. But the obvious is invariably not enough.
Clearly your marketing people are affected because they are doing all of that
Web-site development and e-mail marketing. And, of course, your business
development folks are migrating into online sales, and that in turn affects
your value-added resellers. And there are the corporate communication people
doing all the online PR work. Don’t forget the customer service people who are
having to deal with the customers who bought online. Your administrative
departments have to integrate their operations online with those of suppliers
and business partners. And then there are the strategy groups and senior executives
who are building a new vision for the future of the organization. Come to think
of it, your legal people are rethinking contracts, intellectual property
issues, and management of privacy. Your corporate campus is increasingly moving
learning online. Your HR systems are becoming real-time, and more of your
recruiting is being done through the Internet. Your financial people are doing
more transactions online, with customers, suppliers, and financial
institutions. And anyone who is not directly responsible for making e-changes
is finding that the world they used to understand is increasingly unfamiliar.
They are being asked to speak a new language, use new tools, and to think and
communicate in new ways.
For companies, the
“e-” in e-business heralds efficiency. For individuals, it heralds disruption,
uncertainty, and even alienation. And it affects everyone profoundly.
The Web as we know
it started only about nine years ago. That is when Marc Andreessen released
Mosaic, the first graphical user interface to let you click your way through
the Internet. More content has gone online in the past two years than in the
previous seven. Today half a billion people world-wide have access to the Web,
and most of them are still new to the environment. And, because the wired world
is changing so rapidly, there are no experts.
As recently as
1997, I was told by a business partner, quite adamantly, that the Internet
would never amount to anything. The first irony was that he had been knighted
for his services as technology advisor to the British government. The second
irony, which escaped him completely, was that he said it in an e-mail. He is
now running a restaurant.
We now live in a world of
perishable competencies, as companies and as individuals. Lifelong learning is
no longer a Utopian ideal, it’s a survival requirement. What you know today is
often irrelevant tomorrow, and it is foolish to think of your familiarity with
current processes as having a shelf-life of more than a few months. Indeed, the
more expert we are in how we do things today, the less able we are to even
conceive of dramatic changes, let alone make them. We go into denial, we
rationalize the viability of the status quo, and we seek evidence to support
our intransigence. That is probably why the media spend so much more time
reporting failure than they do success.
We all know that the world
is changing, and that the pace of change is accelerating. If that were all that
was happening, we’d have our jobs cut out for us just trying to climb an exponentially
steepening learning curve. But the reality is worse—change itself is changing.
We can no longer rely on change to be a linear extrapolation of the past.
Frequently, it’s a demolition of the past. Steady progress gives way to
unexpected disruption. As Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine has so clearly
described it, we can struggle to climb the hill we are on, and find when we get
to the summit that it is the wrong hill. And the more desirable hill that we
are looking at across the valley wasn’t even there when we started out up this
one. This is particularly true of corporations, and has scary implications for
individuals. That unpredictability, and its implied requirement to continually
redefine yourself, is tough for people to adjust to. And in the field of human
capital, it’s not just our personal competence that we have to worry about—it’s
everyone in the organization.
It is no surprise that
people at all levels in business feel a tinge of paranoia about the new
economy. There is a sense that unless you are a technology expert, you can have
no control over events. Can it really be true that the geeks shall inherit the
earth? Or are we simply looking at the emperor’s new clothes? We don’t really
know what we are looking at, but we are told that it is wonderful. We see
something that appears mundane and feel we have to admire it. We feel
uncomfortable admitting that we just don’t “get it”. Without basic confidence,
people either abdicate decisions to technologically more confident people, make
decisions based on what seems safest (“nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”),
or they procrastinate decisions altogether. The result can be costly mistakes
or misguided strategies, which in turn feed the paranoia. That’s not only true
of executives and managers, it’s true through the length and breadth of any
organization.
There are two factors in
particular that can contribute to e-paranoia: growing alienation from
technology, and the increasing irrelevance (or “disintermediation”) of just
about every hierarchical authority structure.
Let’s look at alienation
first. At the risk of being ageist, alienation may be a bigger problem in
people no longer in their twenties than in others. Unfortunately, many of those
are in middle management roles, carrying much of the burden of making the
e-changes in organizations work. If they don’t understand the technological
base of their culture, they can become alienated from their foundations. That
makes them less willing and less able to make the kinds of rapid decisions and
conceptual leaps that are increasingly called for in dynamic businesses. And as
the technological base changes more and more, the make-up gap gets too wide,
and alienation becomes isolation. In simple terms, if we don’t understand our
day-to-day technology early enough, we risk never being able to.
Typically, of course,
people do not realize that they are alienated. They may be openly defensive,
cynical, or resentful. Or they may just be quietly desperate internally. Some
will be looking for help, most will be denying that they need it. Advertise a
voluntary seminar to target some of the angst, and the wrong people show up
because those that most need it are reluctant to admit it. That is why it is
important to make any e-competence training both anonymous and mandatory for
all employees, irrespective of rank or function. Protecting the privacy of the
individual is vital—nobody will take such a training program if they think that
their course performance is to be reviewed by management. And to make the
program less of a burden for those who feel they are already Web-savvy, you
need to have some kind of pre-assessment system that steers people to relevant
subject matter. E-learning is clearly the best vehicle for accomplishing
this.
Disintermediation is a
different issue, but it has big implications. It is a term used primarily in
e-business to describe the removal of (or changed roles of) intermediaries in
the sales channel. Buy a laptop online directly from Toshiba.com, and CompUSA
gets disintermediated. What has happened is that the unique power of the
Internet—that ability to connect people directly—has made the purchasing
process so much more efficient for both buyer and seller, and the “middlemen”
are left looking for a role. But it is not only happening in the sales
pipeline—that ability to communicate directly is having profound impacts on all
communication chains that previously were characterized by sequential
gate-keepers of knowledge in various hierarchies of control. The foundations of
those hierarchies were already coming unglued—in an organized fashion—as a
result of the increasing dominance of project management. Now the wired world
is disintermediating the silo-like departmental towers of communication within
companies in a way that is often chaotic. It may start to disintermediate
groups of managers, whole hierarchies, even corporations themselves.
Instead of having to follow
channels of communication, wired workers now get answers to questions from
anyone at any level anywhere in the organization. Managers may see this as an
erosion of their authority—do they really want their level 15 marketing
employee exchanging communication ideas or document templates with a level 5
person in Legal? Most IT workers, if they have a coding problem that their immediate
cube neighbor cannot solve, go directly to the Web, seeking an answer from the
members of any of hundreds of special-interest bulletin boards, newsgroups, or
listserves. Those members can come from any country or any company, even a
competitor. The employing corporation is no longer the non-porous container of
expertise—its boundaries have disappeared. We are already in an era where some
workers feel more loyalty to a network of like-minded individuals who can help
them get their work done, than they do to their company or division. The more
members they have, the more vibrant and powerful those networks become. The
reverse tends to be true of internal hierarchies.
So vertical silos of
expertise and control are yielding to spheres of knowledge and influence. Such
spheres can bypass traditional concepts of seniority, job function, and
corporate allegiance. Being always-available sources of help, advice,
experience and inspiration, they are very useful environments to the individual
members—and consequently to their employers. But membership of relevant online
networks is patchy. It is limited to those ‘wired’ individuals who know their
way around the Web and have the confidence and competence to use its endless
resources. There is a growing digital divide in companies, measured not in
access to hardware but in attitude to the Web and in competence in using it.
Much of the attitude
problem springs from a fundamental misunderstanding about the Internet. To so
many, the Internet is a network of computers and databases. But it is not, it
is a network of people. The most-used applications on the Internet are e-mail,
chat, and Instant Messaging. The Internet helps people find each other and
communicate in a way that no other technology has ever done, and it is that
property that has made its adoption grow at almost viral rates. The age of networked
communication is just beginning. There is a school of thought which compares
the Internet to a human brain, except that instead of individual neurons
connected to each other to form a single mind, you now have individual minds
connected to each other. The formation of special-interest communities is
likened to the formation of synapses, and collectively we are seeing the
evolution of meta-minds. It sounds like sci-fi, but in reality the creativity
and spontaneity that has been unleashed by the collective minds on the Internet
is unprecedented.
While Marshall McLuhan’s
“global village” has not happened as he envisioned it forty years ago, the past
couple of years has seen an explosion of tens of thousands of world-wide
specific interest “villages” or communities. Those groups crystallize because
their potential members can at last find each other, and can communicate
quickly and easily. The knowledge and experience of any individual member may
not be significant, but collectively these groups become vital, powerful
resources for all of their members.
The technology to set up
and access such “villages” is intuitive and inexpensive, often even free. As
your employees become more Web-savvy, they will seek out and join communities
of interest. They will look to the Web to find such communities, completely
bypassing the boundaries of your organization. But if relevant communities
exist internally, and the policies exist to nurture and develop such
communities, you may find that your company can benefit hugely from the
resulting synergies. There are no obstacles, other than motivation and the
e-competence of your workforce, to establishing informal corporate villages
within your own organization, even if people are geographically dispersed. The
electronically connected world gives you an opportunity to rewire your
corporate mind, to focus the communication inwards, and to change the way your
organization thinks and behaves. To me, that is the real promise of e-learning.
E-learning should facilitate the sharing of experience, not simply collect and
re-broadcast information.
You can’t compel people to
participate in learning communities, but you can encourage them. You can’t even
create the communities—they need to spontaneously evolve from the collective
needs and interests of individuals. But you can plant the seeds by establishing
basic environments which in turn can spin off special interest groups. And, if
you provide the base e-competence, the infrastructure, and the freedom to use
them creatively, people will exploit them.
Why does it matter?
Simple mathematics. Unlike a hierarchy, the power of a network increases
exponentially with the number of nodes on it. Think of it this way: the value
of a network can be defined as the number of unique one-to-one and one-to-many
connections that it facilitates. The number of possible connections is 2 n-1
where n is the number of people on that network. In a classroom, say, of one
trainer and 20 learners, the network value is about 20. Maybe a little more if
people talk to each other occasionally. But in a networked e-learning community
of the same group, the value of the network is more than one million. Add a few
more people, and the value explodes upwards. Now think what it means if you add
a few hundred, or a few thousand, or a whole corporation.
While a workforce
that is floundering in their changing environment is a liability, an e-competent
workforce is an asset. But you may be able to build on that asset,
dramatically, if you can energize just a proportion of them to connect, think
and communicate internally like those few wired workers are currently doing
externally.
The real value of an
e-competent workforce lies in what happens when they start to freely network
their experience. That is why it is essential that you leave no employee behind
in the pursuit of basic e-competence. The more people who enthusiastically
embrace the tools and potential of the new economy, the more powerfully you can
generate and apply corporate knowledge, and the more exponentially you can
leverage your human capital.
Getting there is
surprisingly simple. You can use the tools and techniques that you want
employees to be comfortable with to teach them that comfort. E-learning that
leads people to use informal e-communication tools can in weeks start an
enterprise-wide transformation process and get it snowballing. Not only is
e-learning the fastest, most efficient way to do this, it is the most direct
way to get large groups of people comfortable in the “e-” environment. If you
structure the program as an experience-sharing communication-rich excursion,
you can generate huge amounts of positive “buzz”.
You can then capitalize on
that buzz and make it self-sustaining by pro-actively establishing and
promoting online threaded discussion groups and bulletin boards in multiple
areas of interest, and by providing and encouraging the use of other
communication tools such as chat rooms, blogging (semi-private online
journals), and Instant Messaging. Naturally, you should overtly respect
privacy, avoid central control, and empower individuals to establish their own
discussion groups. It is worth restating that the technology required to do
this is really inexpensive and already exists in most companies. Any employee
who knows how to find a Website and how to send e-mail already has the
technical expertise needed to participate. All that is lacking is the context and
the motivation.
Such an e-learning program
can follow a simple low-tech high-touch model. It’s the type of thing that
MindRise has been doing for years. A learner communicates online with course content,
in a self paced mode—that is pretty much where most people’s concept of
e-learning begins and ends. But you can add tremendously to the learning
experience by building people-communication into the course requirements. For
example, you can require learners to participate in moderated chat sessions, or
to post comments to a threaded discussion, or to collaborate with other
learners using simple tools like e-mail, chat, or Instant Messaging. If the
course is mentored, even simply using e-mail, the level of one-on-one
communication between learner and Subject Matter Expert is more intense than it
could ever be in a classroom. And if you provide a dynamic library to the
community of learners where they or their mentors can post useful documents,
templates, examples, case studies, or links to relevant material, your
community has begun.
Being e-competent is not
the same as being a skilled technician. E-competent employees are both
comfortable in using the everyday online tools, and understand the basic
technological foundations of the new economy. They are not alienated from the
changes that take place around them, can understand the relevance of new
developments, and embrace their role in a more communication-rich organization.
Building e-competence is more than simply teaching people to use a Web browser,
it is about creating a profound understanding in each employee of their
significance and potential in their increasingly wired world, and encouraging
them to contribute to the way the company innovates, solves problems, makes
decisions, and manages.
We have a right to
be paranoid. Our more Web-savvy employees are not only thinking and
communicating out of the box, they are no longer even aware of the box. The
less Web-savvy employees are increasingly alienated from the changes going on
around them, and are seeing the digital divide grow daily. Our managers and
hierarchical structures are being bypassed. New alliances and spheres of
influence are growing. Our very concept of human capital is in flux. We see
potential to massively upgrade our organization’s ability to thrive, not
through leveraging technology but through leveraging people’s thinking. But the
fear of getting it wrong can become a reason for doing nothing.
In building an e-competent
workforce, you have to be pragmatic. Do not wait for things to stabilize,
because they won’t. Your corporate strategy will change continuously, as will
your technology base, your policies, and your operational priorities. Don’t
wait for people to “catch up” on their own, because many will not. Don’t expect
technology to do it for you, because it’s not about technology—it’s about
context, confidence and motivation. Aim to permeate all levels of the
organization with the basic knowledge and understanding that they need to find
their feet. Then build on that foundation. Don’t make a huge project out of it
either—start with a prototype, learn from it then roll out a larger project.
Start now.
The processes and systems
around us change rapidly. Our values and principles do not, and they, not
technology, should be the drivers of our vision. To many, a corporation’s only
unique competitive advantage is its knowledge. To others, it is the
corporation’s internal processes. But it is in the conjunction of knowledge and
process where a corporation will find the fulcrum around which to massively
leverage its human capital. And that competitive advantage is not only unique
and sustainable, it is infinitely scalable.
Godfrey Parkin is the President of MindRise, a consulting firm in
