The Evolutionary, the Catastrophic, and the Transformational

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Great Transitions

Are you a technological evolutionist, catastrophist, or transformationist? This post will go over the meaning of these worldviews against the backdrop of technological advancement and globalization as considered by Great Transitions: The Promise and Lure of the Times Ahead (Rasin, P.; Banuri, T.; Gallopin, G.; Gutman, P.; Hammond, A.; Kates, R.; & Swart, R.; 2002).

In comparing the magnitude of the current technological transition to previous major transitions (e.g., stone age to early civilization and early civilization to the current modern era), Great Transitions, which is available here, introduces six worldviews with respect to technological advances, each describing a possible future. These worldviews encompass various philosophical and political thoughts including, “technological optimists and pessimists, market celebrants and Cassandras, social engineers and anarchists. Crudely, archetypal social philosophies can be placed in three broad streams – the evolutionary, the catastrophic, and the transformational…” (p. 9) and these are explained further below (pp. 9-10):

Evolutionists are optimistic that the dominant patterns we observe today can deliver prosperity, stability, and ecological health. Catastrophists fear that deepening social, economic and environmental tensions will not be resolved, with dire consequences for the world’s future. Transformationists share these fears, but believe that global transition can be seized as an opportunity to forge a better civilization. In a sense, these represent three different worlds – a world of incremental adjustment, a world of discontinuous cataclysm and a world of structural shift and renewal.

Unfortunately, Great Transition focuses in-depth discussion on the worldview Policy Reform while giving some treatment to Market Forces. I would’ve enjoyed more equal treatment across all six worldviews, however the authors provide a descriptive table of worldview categories which I’ve reconstructed (based on Table 2 Archetypal Worldviews, p. 17):

Archetypal Worldviews

…some see technology, rather than social agents, as the primary driver of change. Optimists celebrate the potential for information technology, biotechnology and artificial intelligence to entrain a broad web of favorable societal transformation. Pessimists warn of a dehumanized digital, robotic and bio-engineered society. But all scenarios – Market Forces, Policy Reform, Great Transitions and even Fortress World – are compatible with the continuing technological revolution (p.54).

Although aware of the possible downsides and dangers this technological revolution can bring (e.g., loss of privacy, etc.) as well as the challenges we are already experiencing (e.g., a world growing in complexity, work transition difficulties for many in the face of evolving and disappearing jobs, etc.) I see opportunities for a better work-life as well. Hence, I remain a cautious optimist. How about you?

Announcing the next Better Collaboration online Meetup, on Wednesday, May 22nd, 2:30-4:00 pm EST (11:30-1:00 pm PST): Innovating the way dispersed teams collaborate!
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Featured speaker in this event will be Paul Brody, CEO and Co-Founder of Sococo. Sococo is an innovative tool for fostering impromptu collaboration without having to physically be at the same place. Everyone can see who is around and, with one click, can immediately start a conversation or meeting (voice, video, chat, multiple screen shares).

These educational video conference series are geared towards organizational leaders wishing to learn more about improving collaboration and productivity through the use of online tools. Visit the Better Collaboration website or register here at on the Better Collaboration meetup page!

Being bored (and zoning out) at work can make us more creative?

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English: A bored person

English: A bored person (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Having written about the problem of boredom at work (where an individual’s skill level surpasses the challenge of the tasks), lets turn now to one of the possible benefits of boredom… creativity! The following article was very interesting indeed: Being bored at work can make us more creative. Some excerpts follow:

Most of us think of being bored at work as a negative experience, but a new study suggests it can have positive results including an increase in creativity because it gives us time to daydream.

I do find that daydreaming fuels my creativity, although I can imagine this generally being a tough sell to employers. Also, it turns out that zoning out can also help boost creative problem-solving (see More Than Just ‘Zoning Out’: Exploring the Cognitive Processes Behind Mind Wandering). Even better huh? Continuing on with the article:

…more passive boring activities, like reading or perhaps attending meetings, can lead to more creativity — whereas writing, by reducing the scope for daydreaming, reduces the creativity-enhancing effects of boredom.

This account of differences between activities that require less focus with those that require more for inducing boredom sounds right on target. Few things can be more boring than meeting overkill I say!

Dr Mann says: “Boredom at work has always been seen as something to be eliminated, but perhaps we should be embracing it in order to enhance our creativity. What we want to do next is to see what the practical implications of this finding are. Do people who are bored at work become more creative in other areas of their work — or do they go home and write novels?”

The question of whether or not bored workers generally become creative in such a way that benefits their employer is a good question. I believe there’s plenty of evidence that resultant creativity can also be expressed in a counterproductive manner (such as pretending to work perhaps?), and this is an issue that needs to be considered. For more details on this problem, see When the Bored Behave Badly: An Interest Enhancement Model of Counterproductive Work Behavior (Skoronski, 2008).

Finally, here is a video by Thriveworks which contrasts short-term boredom with long-term boredom (a significant distinction that needs to be made as the latter is the problem – consider Workplace Boredom: The Silent Killer of Employee Morale). The video also sums up the upside of boredom quite nicely:

So what do you say? Have you experienced a bout of creativity that you can attribute to a preceding period of boredom or zoning out? Please share!

See also

Coming soon: News about the upcoming Wednesday, May 22nd, 2013 video conference on enhancing collaboration of virtual teams!

These educational video conference series are geared towards organizational leaders wishing to learn more about improving collaboration and productivity through the use of online tools. Visit the Better Collaboration website or the Better Collaboration meetup page for more information! On LinkedIn? Join us at the Better Collaboration LinkedIn group, a group is for innovative managers, HR professionals, collaboration consultants and solution providers who are interested in sharing and learning about best practices and technologies that help dispersed teams collaborate better!

Interviewing, Selecting, and the Lying Game

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I know all there is to know about the lying game. I’ve had my share of the lying game!

That was cheesy, I know. Seriously though, from pretending to work, to pretending to like your job, to pretending to be interested in the job you’re interviewing for, appearances matter a lot within our current system. Like they say, appearances can be deceiving. As someone who’s been on both sides of the interviewing and selection process, I’ll share my thoughts on this issue and touch upon technological advances that may change the process of interviewing and candidate selection in the future.

Faking enthusiasm and interest in a job is an issue that spurs healthy debate. On the one hand people have learned that, with the job market being the way it is right now, you can’t be too picky. Many out there would agree that it’s important to “pull out all the stops” to get a job, any job, in order to put food on the table and keep a roof over your head. A friend told me that the “fake it until you make it” strategy sometimes works. He explained that an applicant might start off faking enthusiasm and interest when first interviewing for the job but then develop genuine enthusiasm and interest later down the road. “Alright,” I conceded, “However, what if you have two candidates: one is genuinely interested and the other is only acting interested. Wouldn’t you want a way to tell the the one who is genuine from the pretender?” His response was interesting. He stated that the one faking it is still attractive because people who are willing to bend and shape themselves in whatever manner to earn your approval are more easily molded.

Truth lies

Truth lies (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If you’re anything like me however, you tend to resist social pressure to be untrue to yourself. Moreover, your wish to maintain your identity overrides your desire to flex your acting skills in interview situations. This is challenging in the face of loved ones trying to coerce you into saying the prescribed, correct lines in order to land that interview for the job that you don’t really want and live a life of normalcy. Somehow I just can’t bring myself to fake, “I believe in the mission and values of your organization!” with enthusiasm. The pressure to do so and the hoops you must jump in order to make a living often reminds me of this classic Star Trek scene:

My friend has a point. Longtime friends and loved ones as well as certain members of the Unification Church (who tried to recruit me during my college days) would attest to the fact that I’ve been anything but malleable. Despite my general unwillingness to bend and “put on a good show” however, there are times when I’ve wondered if someone who had more of a passion for the job I had taken would’ve been selected if I had not applied. All else being equal (e.g., knowledge, abilities, and skill-set), I can’t help but wish that the candidate who has more passion for the work is selected.

At this time, the process of interviewing and selecting the right person for the job remains largely subjective as Wendell Williams, founder and managing director of Scientific Selection, notes (in The Science of Hiring):

Although many managers who conduct numerous interviews say they are apt judges of character and abilities, “the truth is that many of them are the weak links in the hiring chain because they do not know how to conduct the kind of interviews that reveal a candidate’s suitability for a specific job,” Williams said.

Too many hiring managers rely on gut instincts to determine if a candidate is right for the job, a practice that has no place in effective recruiting and hiring,” added Williams.

There is a push to develop more scientific means of selection however. Advances in technology are promising more objective, scientifically valid selection tools. Synthetic Validity is being developed for this very purpose. Job simulations are another example. Moreover, just think about the possible applications of the following technologies:

    • As mentioned in this previous post, we’ll see the emergence of technologies that can track fluctuating changes in brains and bodies with respect to emotional reactions.
    • Face-reading software being developed promise to outperform people (Face-reading software to judge the mood of the masses)

Technology is a double-edged sword of course. As a strong privacy advocate, the potential for abuse of technologies that can read internal reactions is quite apparent to me. As we march forward into the future, we will have to establish the manner in which they should be used. For example, under what conditions does use of such technologies violate our notions of good discretion and responsibility? These are issues that we need to be discussing today.

P.S. This is for those who are unfamiliar with the song referenced at the beginning of this post.

Also, stay tuned for news about the upcoming Wednesday, May 22nd, 2013 video conference on enhancing collaboration of virtual teams!

These educational video conference series are geared towards organizational leaders wishing to learn more about improving collaboration and productivity through the use of online tools. Visit the Better Collaboration website or the Better Collaboration meetup page for more information!

The Work From Home Disadvantage

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Reblogged from Ramblings of a Remote Worker:

Click to visit the original post

Internetprovider.org have created a new infographic on
The Work From Home Disadvantage. It takes a global look at the challenges of remote working: distractions, noise, equipment problems, bad internet connection, bad posture and so on.

Some of the issues rang true for me. Since our move almost 2 years ago we have suffered from 'temperamental broadband' - it's a little like a teenager and has its good days and bad days!

Read more… 48 more words

I just love this wonderful depiction of realities associated with working from home that has been displayed by Marieke Guy. I've heard a lot about these same distractions and concur that such problems are very real. Regardless of distractions at home vs. at a centralized office however, what puts working at home over working at an office for me is greater freedom to exercise control over distractions at home whereas making environmental changes at an office necessitates an approval process (involving a greater number of other people's needs and wants), the result of which might not go your way.

I'd also love for this graphical representation of work-at-home distractions to include distractions experienced by regular office workers for a visual, side-by-side comparison. I'd start that list off with frequently experienced distractions and time-wasters (cutting into time spent being productive for employee and employer alike I might add) from the beginning of the day due to the requirement to commute: (1) finding misplaced car keys, (2) getting out of car and running back to make sure front door is locked, (3) circling back around to make sure garage is closed, (4) circling back around to pick up a forgotten item you're supposed to bring to work... I better stop here or it'll be a long time before I get on with the rest of my life, haha! Plus, I'm sure the large numbers of office workers out there can mentally fill in the rest. :-P
 
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My Picks for Top, Informative “Future of Work” Videos

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Over the weekend, I went on a YouTube binge trying to identify the most informative videos on the future of work. This actually took quite a bit of time investment but guess I’m just obsessive like that! I selected the following videos on the basis of quality of content as well as diversity of opinions, hoping to cover the positive and negative aspects of work in the near future. These videos were also selected for conciseness as I know that not everyone can (or wants to) watch a bunch of hour-long videos (although there are some great lectures out there!). I’ve listed the videos in no particular order and have, instead, attempted categorization on the basis of what target audience might be most interested. They are all still worth watching regardless of who you are however! Enjoy!

Videos of interest to anyone thinking about larger workplace, economic, real estate, and job market trends

My favorite quote from the panel discussion below: One size misfits all.

Videos of interest to organizational leaders

Wonderful arguments, citing psychological reactions, made against the open office plan in the video below. Plus, the problem with optimizing for collaboration “way too much.” Recommendations on empowering employees for productivity.

Videos of interest to employees

Tom Malone, professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and author of the HBR article “The Age of Hyperspecialization,” explains why breaking jobs into tiny pieces yields better, faster, cheaper work — and greater flexibility for employees.

Drawn from observations and her own working life experiences — many and varied — Dr. Stanford will illustrate, through three ‘takes’- of an 11 year old, a 35 year old, and a 63 year old — what preparing for the continuously unfolding future of work means.

Video of interest to students thinking about their future career

Anders Sorman-Nilsson, founder and creative director of Thinque, discusses trends impacting industry today and how students can gain a competitive edge in the work place of the future.

Thinking about what tools will enhance collaboration of your organization’s virtual team?

There are still some spots available for Better Collaboration’s upcoming videoconference! These events are specifically geared towards organizational leaders and this next one, on April 24th 1:00-2:30PM EST (10:00-11:30AM PST), will feature Matt Boyd, Co-Founder at Sqwiggle. Sqwiggle is an always on online workplace for your remote team to work together throughout the day. Their slogan: Remote Working, Made Awesome.

Register at the Better Collaboration Meetup site and check out services offered through Better Collaboration.

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Virtual Teams and the Challenge of Cross-Cultural Differences

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Cover of "The Handbook of Culture and Psy...

Cover of The Handbook of Culture and Psychology

From David Matsumoto’s The Handbook of Culture and Psychology:

The next two decades promise to be even more exciting for research on culture and emotion. Interesting programs have sprung up all around the world and in all disciplines of psychology. New technologies for mapping culture as a psychological construct on the individual level are being developed, as well as ways to measure precisely moment-to-moment changes in our brains and bodies when we feel or judge emotion. Collectively, these endeavors will tell us more in the future about the relationship between culture and the physiology of emotion, the representation of display and decoding rules, emotion perception, and culture itself in the brain (p. 161)

Having written a couple of posts (here and here) on the difficulties of cross-cultural communication and misunderstanding, the quote above provides hope that advancing technology and emphasis on cross-cultural research may help promote improved cross-cultural understanding in the future. Indeed, at the time that The Handbook of Culture and Psychology was published (in 2001), academics acknowledged that, even though contact and communication via computer-mediated technologies across different cultures around the world would increase dramatically (especially for work-related reasons), we are a step behind as far as cross-cultural communication research in this realm goes. Up through this point in time, cross-cultural researchers had focused on cross-cultural face-to-face communication and had largely neglected cross-cultural communication via technology. Just as we don’t want to assume that our understanding of people from the standpoint of Western psychology applies to everyone around the world, it’s also vital that we don’t assume that communicating via technology is identical to communicating face-to-face.

However, what can organizational leaders and managers do at this point in time to assure that their virtual team members around the world collaborate effectively? As I mentioned in this post, expecting to become an expert on another person by picking up and reading a book about that person’s culture isn’t reasonable. It’s unlikely that a summary of a culture will describe all the components of that given culture. Additionally, people in any specific region will differ from each other culturally due to many other factors – e.g., socioeconomic status, education level, life experiences, gender, age, etc. Comparisons of culture on a large-scale can tell you something about group-level differences, but knowing these averages will not help when dealing with individuals from a given culture as they can fall anywhere along the group distribution representing the whole group’s characteristics.

When cross-cultural miscommunication occurs however, it would be helpful to understand the way in which the other person views the situation. To this end, some steps that organizational leaders and managers can take include employing the services of culturally knowledgeable mediators or arbitrators and using behaviorally-based culture learning programs (Matsumoto, D., p. 427). The latter includes the following programs:

  • Information giving
  • Cultural sensitization
  • Simulations
  • Critical incident techniques
  • Culture assimilators
  • Experiential learning

Finally, in this video, Geert Hofstede compares and contrasts the acquisition of culture within societies and organizations, explains the introduction and impact of people’s native (i.e., acquired within society) culture on relational dynamics within organizations, and much more!

Want to learn about other aspects of innovating and improving collaboration of dispersed teams?

Don’t miss Better Collaboration’s upcoming videoconference! These events are specifically geared towards organizational leaders and this next one, on April 24th 1:00-2:30PM EST (10:00-11:30AM PST), will feature Matt Boyd, Co-Founder at Sqwiggle. Sqwiggle is an always on online workplace for your remote team to work together throughout the day. Their slogan: Remote Working, Made Awesome.

Register at the Better Collaboration Meetup site and check out services offered through Better Collaboration.

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This one is for those who think that work environment doesn’t matter

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As a strong proponent of giving people more control over where they work, it was only a short matter of time before I ran up against those who erroneously insist that work environment doesn’t matter. Their claim is that the only thing that matters is that you’re doing what you’re good at and that it doesn’t matter where you are doing this at. They don’t get it. If work environment really doesn’t matter, then the following clip from the popular film Office Space would not register as anything significant. What’s the difference anyway if Milton works on the same floor as everyone else or in the basement if work environment doesn’t matter?

The truth is that, for ages, we’ve relied on environmental cues for information that signal situations in which we should be stressed, anxious, fearful, etc. It is common knowledge that a room in which the predominant color is red whets the appetite moreso than another color would. Why do various colors stir up different reactions? What about acoustic distractions? Odors?

We ARE affected by our work environment though, yes, there are elements of subjectivity and relativity. This reflects our natural individual differences. Some of us perform work in dangerous environments, however people who are able to do so tend to already be naturally predisposed to react to threats with more calm (the trait “neuroticism” on the Big 5 – a measure of emotional stability and tolerance for stress or aversive stimulation). Others may even be pumped up by threatening environments and experience more of a thrill. I have, in fact, performed some work that required workers to have fairly low susceptibility to fear and would happily entertain opportunities to work as an animal field researcher in some less comfortable, outdoor settings (though perhaps not everywhere). At least it’s not boring!

When it comes to work that requires very heavy reading, writing, analyzing, and researching however, nothing beats the home office for me. A number of us, though not all of us, would agree that we are more productive working in our home environment than in a boring, stale office environment. It wouldn’t be a huge leap to say that going from working at home to working at the office is a “step down” much like Milton’s move to the basement. So instead of smacking the whole issue down with a knee-jerk reaction and waving off the importance of work environment across the board, it’s time to take the educated approach. Let’s open up discussion and debate about the ways and extent to which it does and doesn’t. To what extent do boring (or stimulating) environments impact our brains for example?

And for those who still believe that work environment doesn’t matter or, more specifically, that you should be able to do whatever it is you’re good at doing no matter what the work environment…

Uh, we’re gonna need to move your desk downstairs into Storage B… Uh, we have some new people coming in and we need all the space we can get. And if you could go ahead and get a can of pesticide and take care of the roach problem we’ve been having that would be great. (Office Space, 1999)



Finally, more videoconferencing dates have been added for “Innovating the way dispersed teams collaborate!”


Register at the Better Collaboration Meetup page and email contact@BetterCollaboration.org if you have any questions. Better Collaboration is about helping organizations improve collaboration of dispersed teams.


    

  • Wednesday, April 24, 2013
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  • Wednesday, May 8, 2013
    • 

  • Wednesday, May 22, 2013
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  • Wednesday, June 5, 2013
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1:00 PM to 2:30 PM Eastern time (EST)/10:00 AM to 11:30 AM Pacific time (PST)


See details on the Events page.


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