Grown up digital: Fun, collaboration, innovation

By Don Tapscott
Author, Grown Up Digital.

The world of work, and its traditional resistance to sharing knowledge, is about to be challenged by a new generation of employees – young people who have grown up digital.

Don Tapscott is the world’s single most knowledgeable source on the impact of the digital revolution on the Net Generation and, in turn, on the changes it will bring to the way we work. The future is for smart people who have learned the power of sharing and collaborating online and in life.

As the first generation in history to be immersed in digital technology, they have a natural feel for digital tools that keep them connected with friends, sometimes hundreds of them, all day long. For the Net Generation, as I call them, sharing knowledge and collaborating with each other is as natural as breathing. Their way of sharing, so powerfully demonstrated in the way they propelled President Barack Obama to the White House, is now about to enter the workplace.

Work – and how we work together – may never be the same. Organizations should take a long look at how these Net Geners operate. Their new modus operandi could offer companies a huge competitive advantage in this digital age. Right now, the nature of work is changing. Work has become more cognitively complex, more team-based and collaborative, more dependent on social skills, more time-pressured, more reliant on technological competence, more mobile and less dependent on geography. This means knowledge must be shared effectively so that teams around the world can collaborate on tricky problems.

Yet for many organizations, sharing knowledge has been a challenge.

Now executives rate knowledge management
as one of the worst
management tools in business.

Corporate knowledge sharing — an expensive failure
Companies in North America have spent billions of dollars on knowledge management systems designed to capture and share knowledge embedded inside organizations with a view to making them more productive and profitable.

Knowledge management, according to a survey by Bain & Company, the Boston-based management consultancy, has been one of the top 10 management tools used by executives worldwide.

Yet most of the time, it’s been an expensive failure. Although knowledge management has been a popular tool, executives have usually been disappointed with the results. In fact, in Bain’s most recent survey, worldwide executives rated knowledge management as one of the worst management tools in business.

Knowledge management was bound to fail because it’s based on a faulty understanding of how knowledge should be handled. The traditional way is to contain knowledge, as if it were a finite resource captured in containers and then made available through depositories. This mental model drove many knowledge management efforts – such as directories, elaborate company intranets/portals, and reward systems for information.

Right away it was plagued by problems. As it turned out, lots of people didn’t feel like sharing the knowledge they knew, and the information that was gathered was fragmentary and dated.

The fundamental problem, though, was this: Treating knowledge like a rare bottle of wine, as a precious and finite resource, makes no sense in the 21st century digital world. These days information is not limited; it’s infinite and it’s amazingly quick to spread on the Internet.

Net Gen prefers sharing knowledge outside the control of hierarchies
New knowledge management has to operate under a new premise, that knowledge is endless and largely outside of the control of the authorities in business. Managing knowledge does not mean containing or restricting it, or handing it down, from top to bottom. Instead, organizations should think about sharing knowledge as the new mental infrastructure for the 21st century way to work. If knowledge is power, as Francis Bacon and so many others have said, this may well mean new knowledge systems will change organizations and the way we work. Hierarchies that are propped up by access to insider knowledge will be eroded. Sharing knowledge will encourage a new form of collaboration.

The Net Generation has been
profoundly influencedby their immersion
in digital technology.

The people primed to share knowledge in this new way are the youngest employees, the Net Generation that has grown up digital. This generation, children of the Baby Boomers, are turning 12 to 32 this year. I call them the Net Generation because they’ve been profoundly influenced by their immersion in digital technology.

Take a look at a teenager on any weeknight. While he’s doing his homework, he may be listening to music, taking calls on his mobile phone, checking in with friends on Facebook, writing blogs or Twitters and perhaps playing his favorite computer game.

If the TV’s on, it’s background noise, like Muzak. He doesn’t just watch, as his parents did. The media he consumes is, at its core, interactive. He’s a player, a writer, a talker, an active participant – not just a mute member of the audience. He’s rarely alone. Even the computer games he plays are collaborative affairs. You win, or lose, together.

This immersion in interactive technology has had a profound effect on everything the Net Generation does. When they do homework, they consult each other. When they think of buying a new music player, they check with friends about the brand and the price before going to the store, or ordering it online.

They’re accustomed to having hundreds of friends on Facebook – friends they keep up with on a regular basis. Boomers like me are astonished at the way Net Geners share private pictures and stories with hundreds of friends, but to the Net Generation, this kind of sharing is the new normal.

They share; they collaborate. This affects the way they like to work. Boomers grew up with hierarchies – at home, at school, at work. The goal in a hierarchy is to move up and have more people reporting to you. But as Tamara Erickson, a widely respected expert on organizations and the changing workforce, has observed, this generation is not turned on by status or hierarchy. They want to do challenging work, but they don’t necessarily want organizational responsibility.

Their dream job, she says, is something like this: A job with a goal no one knows how to solve and lots of great people to work with. How different that is from the workplace I entered after college, where the goal was to have a corner office (which I occupied at one point, which, I have to admit, felt good.)

That was power over the people. But collaboration, as Net Geners know it, is achieving something with other people, seeking power through other people, not by ordering a gaggle of followers to do your bidding. Collaboration is how Net Geners get things done. It’s in their gene pool.

The power of collaboration is easy to underestimate!

Look at how the Net Geners helped President Obama win his epic presidential race last year. At the outset, Sen. Hillary Clinton was the powerhouse. She had the money, the powerful backers, the numbers.

But even Clinton, a seasoned political professional, did not grasp the full power of Net Generation style collaboration. Obama did – and recruited the co-founder of Facebook, 23-year-old Chris Hughes, to run his online campaign.

The Obama campaign gave the power to its people – to supporters – to organize events, raise money and tell their friends. This was a major change from the traditional political campaign that was directed from the top, and it worked. This remarkable grassroots campaign changed the game of politics and made history.

Knowledge collaboration will accelerate
the creation of new ideas and
increase competitive advantage.

Now, as the first wave of Net Geners enter the world of business, they bring with them a new approach to sharing knowledge and collaborating. Powerful new collaboration tools such as wikis, blogs, social networks, search, tags, RSS feeds, jams, telepresence and content management enable a new form of real-time knowledge sharing, or what we call knowledge collaboration.

This approach is a key to unleashing and harnessing the knowledge contained not only within an enterprise, but outside its boundaries. This will accelerate the creation of new ideas and increase competitive advantage.

Look at CoreMedia, a 150-person German content-management software firm. It has not only embraced the latest digital tools for collaboration, but it has changed the way it works to be truly collaborative – so much so that CEO

Sören Stamer thinks his company operates like a giant brain.

CoreMedia employees are remarkably networked when it comes to sharing information, using tools from wikis to Twitter-style microblogging as part of their daily work. These tools, together with a unique organizational culture, have helped CoreMedia dispense with the traditional organizational hierarchy, my colleague Alan Majer reported in a paper for nGenera, the think tank I founded.

“In its place is a much more open and bottom-up set of operations and processes,” Majer reported. “CoreMedia has attempted a bold experiment: instead of fitting a collection of self-interested individuals into a rigid corporate structure, the company fosters a flexible and highly networked structure where individuals collectively steer the firm. It’s a transformational approach that promises to improve everything from the pace of innovation to the quality of decisions.”

The company uses a variety of collaborative tools. Every quarter the company holds workshops in which participants can choose a topic. Then there’s microblogging tool called Trillr which takes the emotional pulse of the enterprise.

CoreMedia has also created its own blogging platform called CoCo which includes the ability to evaluate postings with thumbs up or thumbs down, or to share related topics that have received similar votes. It helps CoreMedia’s teams stay in sync. Naturally, the company has a wiki – a good vehicle for employees to turn an idea they’ve discussed into a product.

This has produced positive results, according to Majer: “Today, the company is more agile, the dialogue is richer, and decisions are more effective.” What’s more, individual employees feel that they can fix a problem or propose a solution without waiting for instructions from a supervisor. “You just have to open your eyes and see what’s on the blog and the Trillr,” said Stamer, the CEO.

Net Gen wants continuous feedback, not the traditional annual review
CoreMedia is clearly on the cutting edge, but young people are introducing tools that could affect the way knowledge is spread in traditional businesses. Take the standard annual performance review, in which the boss is supposed to tell the underling how he or she rates against corporate objectives. It’s been criticized for years by experts in the Harvard Business Review as backwards and counterproductive. But it makes even less sense to the Net Gener.

It’s a one-way communication – boss to employee – that usually ignores the employee’s wishes and desires. It happens once a year – long after the performance took place. It rewards or punishes individual performance – not the collaboration that Net Geners treasure. It’s more about compensation and promotions than improving performance.

Annual performance review too little, too late.
New approach springs directly from the Net
Generation’s need for more timely feedback.

Now a new Toronto-based company called Rypple has proposed a new form of feedback. It’s a Web-based service that springs directly from the Net Generation need for continuous feedback.

Instead of waiting an entire year to find out what managers think of them, employees can send out a quick (50 words or less) question to people they trust – a manager, a co-worker sitting in the meeting, even a client or a supplier. They can chart their progress on issues and improve. Or look at the way Net Geners handle job training. Instead of waiting for the HR department to issue an invite to an off-campus weekend session, they gather together online to set up ‘camps’ to address an important professional issue.

Then they bill themselves as Case Camps – a “free communications and social media unconference,” that has the extra benefit of “fantastic networking and interactive art in the bar.” They set a date, choose a topic and pick a real-life location. Anyone can give a 15-minute talk at the camp – and several heavy hitters have volunteered. Camp takes place, sponsors pay for the costs, but participants go for free.

These are the early signs of a new way to work for a generation that finds knowledge sharing and collaboration to be perfectly natural. Yet older employees don’t get it.

Many still criticize the Net Generation as entitled, lazy, coddled by the parents, and “woefully ill prepared,” as a U.S. employers group put it. They suspect that these social networking tools are a big waste of time.

How to mitigate clashes between young and old
It is perhaps inevitable, then, that the new generation and the old should clash over how work works.

The Net Gener arrives at work, eager to use his social networking tools to collaborate and create and contribute to the company.

For starters, he’s shocked to find the company’s technological tools are more primitive than the ones he used in high school. The company he works for still thinks the Net is about Web sites, presenting information, rather than a Web 2.0 collaboration platform.

Sure, some info must be kept
within company boundaries.
But that doesn’t justify a ban on blogging.

The Net Gener is surprised, perhaps naively, to learn that corporations have antiquated ways of working. Then the company bans Facebook at the office because it suspects Net Geners are wasting time chatting with friends and throwing digital snowballs when they should be working – thus depriving Net Geners of their link to friends, to fun, to co-workers. Pretty soon, the talent heads for the exit.

To be sure, some information must be kept within company boundaries. But that shouldn’t give companies a reason to ban blogging.

Instead, employers should explain the rules to new Net Gen employees, says Danah Boyd, a fellow at The Annenberg Center for Communications, University of Southern California: “You have a guideline on it. You have to make it very, very clear that there is zero tolerance for [sharing company information] with the penalty of being fired for cause.”

There’s no question that sharing knowledge and learning to collaborate is a challenge, but it only begins with the adept use of tools like social networking. Companies have to change in a far deeper way to adapt to the Net Gen’s way of working in a collaborative way.

Companies will have to completely rethink the way they handle them, from the first contact until after they leave the company. Companies need to discard the old model of top-down employee development, which calls on managers to recruit, train and supervise employees, and replace it with a more appropriate employer-employee relationship for this generation.

New model is about collaboration, not old-fashioned supervision
The new model is about collaboration, not old-fashioned supervision – from the moment an employee is hired until long after he or she leaves.

I believe that companies that work in the Net Gen way will be the winners of the future. The new Web – which allows you to not only hunt for information, but contribute – offers the technology to help us harness human skill, ingenuity and intelligence more efficiently and effectively than anything we have witnessed previously.

By mobilizing the collective knowledge, capability, and resources embodied within broad networks of participants, smart firms can accomplish great things.

Future winners will unlock structures,
reach outside boundaries and
tap into vast pools of intellectual capital.

People throughout a firm, locked into traditional organizational structures, can be freed to share knowledge and ingenuity.

Further, companies can reach outside their boundaries to tap into vast pools of labor available in the global economy.

Whether designing an airplane, assembling a motorcycle, or analyzing the human genome, the ability to integrate the talents of dispersed individuals and organizations is becoming the defining competency for managers and firms.

This is a tremendously powerful way to do business, says Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson. It’s “unleashing the power of human capital.”