Managing the Blended Workplace

Rob — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 20:45:00 GMT

My friend, colleague and co-author Dan Rasmus has a new piece in Strategy + Business called "Keeping up with Workforce 2020." In it, Dan looks at some of the major themes of the coming decade that managers should keep in mind, including moves toward the punctuated workday (where more people choose when, how and where they engage with work and life), the rise of citizen regulators (a natural outgrowth of the type of scrutiny and conversations that Millennials engage in via technology) and the need for "just-in-time learning" to support connection-rich but knowledge- and experience-poor younger workers as they climb the organizational learning curve.

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Generational Battlelines: The KM/SM War

Rob — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 03:11:00 GMT

A few weeks ago, my pal Venkatesh Rao, who usually blogs at Ribbon Farm, wrote a terrific piece over at Enterprise 2.0 Blog discussing the growing disconnect between the traditional Knowledge Management (KM) approach and the insurgent Social Media (SM) strategy for sharing information and tacit knowledge in the enterprise. Venkat observed:

The uber-cause of this war is that Knowledge Management was conceived as a top-down Boomer (born 1946 - 62) management effort, created by this generation just as it was moving into leadership positions. Social Media, on the other hand, is a Millenial/Gen Y (born 1980 -) movement. This overall generational cultural divide has shaped the ongoing corporate cultural war.

He then went on to list five points of generational conflict and five technical dimensions of the issue, concluding that:

It takes no great genius to predict how the war will end. The Boomers will retire and the Millenials will win by default, in a bloodless end with no great drama. KM will quietly die, and SM will win the soul of Enterprise 2.0, with the Gen X leadership quietly slipping the best of the KM ideas into SM as they guide the bottom-up revolution.
And it won’t be just a victory of fashion. It will be a fundamental victory of the better idea. SM is an organic, protean, creative and energetic force.

The entire piece is worth your time. In any case, Venkat's observations drew a bunch of excellent commentary around the KM blogosphere, both supportive and skeptical. Here are some of the links:

He asked me to weigh in, which I did via private email. Here is the text of my response, for what it's worth:

Venkat, I emphatically agree with your analysis. I think you accurately locate the enthusiasms and skepticisms of each generation toward the different approaches. I also think there are other issues that may seem obvious, about how social media displaces authority and hierarchy, and is therefore inherently more threatening to the senior cohort in the workplace, regardless of their generational orientation. People who got to the top by hoarding info don't want to share; they want to manage access. People at the bottom looking to move up quickly want immediate opportunities to contribute and be recognized, rather than working through approved channels. I suspect Millennials will be much less enthusiastic about whatever succeeds SM in the enterprise if it is suddenly their knowledge and authority at stake.
However, I think it's necessary to back up a bit and look at the strategic objectives of the KM/SM initiative in the first place. The goal is to share knowledge to improve some aspect of performance, innovation, service, etc. Sharing knowledge has three components - capturing knowledge, locating knowledge, and consuming knowledge. Any knowledge transfer solution, from classroom training to wikis, has strengths and weaknesses in each of those respects.
I use the following slide in my presentations to talk about this issue:

Basically, knowledge transfer can be oriented on an grid whose axes are Structured vs. Unstructured (X axis) and Personal vs. Impersonal. Printed documentation is the quintessential structured, impersonal (and static) type of knowledge repository. Search is unstructured/dynamic, but impersonal. Real-time communication is unstructured and personal, etc.
If you have a multi-generational workplace and the goal is to get the knowledge-bearers to share, and the knowledge-needers to consume, you need to cover as much of the spectrum as possible to accommodate the whole range of learning and capturing styles, bearing in mind that it will be very difficult to get Millennials to appreciate or accept the highly-structured and linear modes of communication (but it will be just as essential to have these options available for "Boomerang Boomers" who join the organization in lower-level roles).
In the long run, the triumph of social/unstructured knowledge transfer is inevitable, but the "long run" is going to be longer than is convenient for many of us. Boomers won't be past the tipping point of organizational influence for 10-15 years. In the meantime, organizations will need to keep a parallel, legacy knowledge infrastructure in place to support the Boomerang Boomers and laggard X-ers who require static, authoritative references, as well as more dynamic social media for the Digital Natives. One of the goals of reciprocal mentoring, which Dan and I talk a lot about, is to engage younger workers to help capture the knowledge of their older peers in social media repositories and channels, with the hope that some of the domain expertise of the elder will rub off on the mentee, while the facility with social media tools and practices will adhere to the mentor. Once the Boomers internalize and "own" the social media channels, the top-down pressure for a managed, KM-oriented strategy will probably start to die a natural death.

Anyway, Venkat expressed the desire to continue the conversation here. You are welcome to do so!

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Emphasis Added : management, productivity

Managing the Blended Workplace

Generational Battlelines: The KM/SM War