For the clued, workplace literacy and what does with it is a no-brainer. Our course, you want people in your organization to share ideas, collaborate, take control of making customers happier, and so forth.

For the unclued, trying to sell the new culture is a waste of breath. Better to attack a few things piecemeal. Chop back on email with wikis. Use RSS to share news. Set up ways to collaborate with customers. Implement some self-service learning. Adopt new techniques that show a high payback compared to traditional means.

The unclued will not reap the benefits of the flexible, fast-moving, transparent, empowered corporation, but they will be better off than those who condemn everything internet as worthless.

Social media tools are empowering. As workers use them, they will see how the managerial workplace limits their use. A new work literacy is only half of the equation. We also need literacy-friendly workplaces.

I went back to the 2002 essay titled From Hierarchy to Wirearchy – the future of workplace dynamics, and pulled this out:

Yesterday’s success factors involved secrecy and control, size, role clarity, functional specialization and power. Today’s emerging factors are openness, speed, flexibility, integration and innovation.

It will take time and experience in this new era to know what “success” and “effectiveness” mean and look like. In a wired and wirearchical world, where there is literal meaning in the phrase, “everything is connected to everything else,” we will have to watch, learn and imagine how to lead and manage in ways that foster ongoing growth in human development.

The concerns about control and responsible behaviour in a workplace festooned with hyperlinks, social tools and flows of information will be (would be) largely mitigated by the work of leaders in developing a clear (and shared) vision, honest and tangible values, and an open culture .. imho.

This area has been the province of OD in the past .. as I imagine it will be in the future. The game is sharper and the stakes are higher than ever before, i think.

“It seems to me that Giving-a-Damn is an emergent effect of individuals having a strong, reciprocal Socio-Psychological valence connection to the organization. Smaller organizational units within the larger organization that have similarly strong and reciprocal SP-valences can equally Give-a-Damn. If you care about your organization, and your organization demonstrably cares about you, then you’re likely to Give-a-Damn”

A two-way flow of power & authority enables people to give-a-damn. A one-way flow turns that off. Work literacy, without a framework like Wirearchy, or Federman’s valence theory, may just wither away if workers don’t see their new-found literacy valued by the organisation. Just like Mark’s post about ‘Leslie’:

“Over the past number of months, both Leslie’s direct manager, and the organization as a whole have been sending signals that they don’t Give-a-Damn very much about Leslie, and others in Leslie’s organizational milieu. It’s not that they don’t like Leslie, or don’t appreciate what Leslie does (as demonstrated by the pretty good salary bump Leslie received at the last review). It’s more like organizational apathy towards the people, and maintaining a tight focus on bringing in those results for stockholders …”

The implication is that if there is a more democratic power structure, and there are no longer easily measured output benchmarks, than how can such a disparity in distribution of wages/salary be justified?

Yes, that’s the implication. The way(s) work is measured and ‘weighed” (in terms of what job gets what kind of wages/salary) are contained in methodologies that were invented in the early 1950’s. Computers and women working as equals in knowledge-work roles weren’t even conceived of then, let alone work being carried out in a networked environment wherein information and creativity are (theoretically) but a click, a search and a conversation or two away from creating a result.

It probably goes without saying that most white-collar output benchmarks and attendant performance management schemes are still using similar ancestry (as indeed are most competency analyses and profiles …. stemming from work by theorists in the 60’s and 70’s).

The language of what is being done and required as ‘work” is (perhaps) changing to reflect interconnectedness, but the assumptions about structures, while being deeply impacted by the activities, are not often being addressed at the fundamental level.

Does that mean that making substantive change when (potentially) everyone is (potentially) connected is about task literacy, not work literacy ?

Harold notes the “context of where “work” is going and how we can help shape it”. As often as not “work” is bifurcating .. either dumbed-down for the individual worker by highly structured systems where the worker is effectively a part of the input mechanism, or being “smartened up” wherein the worker is creating, usually together with others, pertinent and useful knowledge.

For the sake of this discussion let me focus on the second, and note that it is likely to become less and less effective for smart talent to work in systems or cultures that do not value the individual’s role in a web of exchanges, wherein she or he will need to gather information, interpret it, shape it, and continue to participate in flows of information and conversation. The tasks in that context often get both more generalized and at times more specific, but are almost always shaped by the flows and the circumstances they address or create.

There used to be (and no doubt still is in many organizations) the notion of delegated authority, from a given level on down. I think it is getting clearer that it’s the design of work and the structures in which work happens that must be changed to adapt to ongoing flows of information and connection, and I tend to think that doing things in “small, isolated ways” to realize slow incremental improvements one project at a time, while useful, won’t be enough to obtain the probable benefits, both for the organization and the individual knowledge worker.

As well, the limits to the effectiveness of industrial era command-and-control have been chronicled over and over again in countless management and org effectiveness books, but in many instances those limits are still in place.

I am fond of this quote by Gary Hamel in his recent book “The Future of management” …

While Management 2.0 won’t completely supplant Management 1.0, the two versions aren’t entirely compatible. There are going to be conflicts. Indeed, I think the most bruising contests in the new millenium won’t be fought along the lines that separate one competitor or business ecosystem from another, but will be fought along the lines that separate those who wish to preserve the privileges and power of the bureaucratic class from those who hope to build less structured and less tightly managed organizations. Richard Florida sees the same battle shaping up. In The Rise of the Creative Class, he puts it bluntly: “The biggest issue at stake in this emerging age is the ongoing tension between creativity and organization.” This is, perhaps, the most critical and intractable management trade-off of all, and therefore, the one most worthy of inspired innovation.

Right now, your company has 21st-century Internet-enabled business processes, mid-20th-century management processes, all built atop 19th-century management principles.