Stu Downes

I’ve had some time recently to catch up on a number of TED talks.  Rachel Bostman spoke in Sydney on 2010 on the subject of Collaborative Consumption.  The main themes of the talk were society moving to a point of utilising technology to highlight reputation, and trusting that reputation in transactions which are moving from ebay and swapsites through to lending money or sharing expensive resources such as land or cars.

One graphic that stood out during the talk was this visualization from Jason Tester proposing a reputation statement account, and he first created this back in 2004.

Image Rights Creative Commons (Jason Tester) (Source)

There are some interesting points of reflection in 2011 which make me believe we finally have the critical mass to start to see reputation based models moving into employment models.  Those are:

• We are increasingly trusting of reputations to allow us to make purchases, its only natural that this will progress to skills and services.
• LinkedIn is now over 100 million people strong, this means that we all find peers and opportunities from this community than we do from our much smaller social circle or enterprise communities.
• We increasingly are working as specialists in the long tail and the likelihood is that within the tail is where we will find peer support, opportunities and employment in the future.

The question is when?  Employment contracts today aren’t ready for the change, simple financial tools such as credit rating tools aren’t ready for the change.  It seems that we need to see the shift that society is making in trusting reputations to be repeated by institutions.

With that comes cautions too.  How easy would it be for our reputation to be damaged maliciously etc..  Its an exciting new world we are moving towards but its also just a little bit scary too.

 

In the UK we are getting older as a population, information overload is common, and we need to transfer knowledge.  Over the past few weeks I’ve read a few articles which discuss the shortfalls in both professional education and identify needs in workplace professional development.

Craig Roth discussed MBA courses and the use of simulations to help candidates understand the need to filter data with dashboards and KPI’s and extended the thought processes to take a view on information management:

I’m not just joking about how screwed up the average corporation is.  These difficulties exist in even the best of organizations, making attention management an essential discipline if one desires to be an effective information worker and good managerial decision maker.

I’d extend Craig’s concerns into schooling at secondary level and above.  My first point is we just don’t train our young people to filter and focus on priorities – I’m not saying its easy as I struggle with this every day.  However we aren’t even arming them with the mental skills to prioritise their schoolwork, study, research or plan effectively. 

When our young folk enter the enterprise and become knowledge workers we have excellent graduate schemes which offer training, but these may not be enough.  Dave Snowden recently blogged about the apprenticeship and the lack of a similar model for management:

Maybe its time we stopped treating management as something that can be taught and then practiced, and instead focus on creating a professional model of management education which is based on praxis. Of course that would mean HR giving up their cult like toys; competence models, assessment centers, psychometric tests and the like. It would mean KM people starting to create long term projects rather than information management with a candy coating of communities of practice. Physical presence can be augmented by virtual connectivity but it can never be fully replaced. Above all we should be authentic to humans as humans, and to the social ecology of their interaction. We are not cogs in machine, we cannot be engineered, but out evolution can be stifled by inauthentic attempts to make it so.

We can see that we have a problem over the horizon in many countries, including the UK.  We aren’t getting younger, we’re all getting older.  This will put increased pressure on organizations to transfer knowledge to fewer people.  Information overload will get worse, especially for the younger worker.  Prioritising will become more important.

The statistics from the UK Office of National Statistics show that as soon as 2018 we could see more people over 40 working than under 40, that assumes 300,000 people of pensionable age continue to work.  The column label is missing but that’s millions of people.

The beauty of demographics is they aren’t the same in all areas of the world, but the headlines for the UK are:

• population rising
• we are living longer
• there will be less workers under 40 compared to those over 40
• if people work beyond the pensionable age then everything changes (and they will, I probably will!)
• older knowledge workers are more likely to want to work part time – that then makes knowledge transfer and priority setting for those that remain more important

One thing I’ve not dealt with well here is whether globalization will solve the problem.  Will we truly get to the point that global teams drawing on skills from areas with younger populations will fill the demographic gap in the UK ….. that’s a bit heavy for an already long post so I’ll mull over that one with you over a virtual pint.