Skills for the Information Age

A bunch of different bits of info have presented themselves to me over the past 24 hours and they are working together in my brain to create a new perspective. I want to share and see what happens in your brain, if anything.

In The 8th Habit, Steven Covey talks about the fact that the Industrial Age is over in American business and the Information Age is here. One point he makes is that the single most important contribution management made during the Industrial Age was to increase the efficiency of the worker fifty times over, with automation and standardization and efficiencies of scale.

This reminds me that the ISO 9000 flurry was an effort to standardize decision-making to ensure the every person would make the exact same decision as every other person in the same circumstances. It removed the need for creative problem-solving and eliminated individual discretion, which is a huge advantage in an Industrial Age organization. It doesn’t work so well in an Information Age organization that relies on information-workers (better educated, highly skilled thinkers) for productivity.

If your standard processes do not allow the employee to be creative and exercise his own discretion and judgment, he’ll exercise his creativity to circumvent the process at his discretion because he trusts his own judgment more than the collective intelligence of the organization.

And he’s right to do so.

An Information Age employee has more free time, more inclination to develop his own abilities, and access to more information than an employee did fifty years ago, when the Industrial Age was at its peak. The Information Age employee has a greater sense of empowerment because he has had multiple jobs (not dependent on the employer for survival), has read at least one professional or personal development book (i.e. Covey, Carnegie, Buckingham) and is more likely to have advanced degrees. He takes responsibility for his own career development and training. Of course he trusts his own judgment more.

I’m not sure which is cause and which is effect, but this transformation of the employee into an independent, thinking entity plays perfectly into the new Collaborative Cooperation environment that is superseding traditional Command-and-Control management structures.

Here’s a speaker explaining the difference in a way that makes it easy to understand. (Also, I like his delivery style and would like to be able to present info like he does.)

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus_collaboration.html

My new favorite quote as the answer to many, many questions is “It doesn’t matter because that’s not the right question.” I plan to use it often.

Anyway, here’s the result of all that thinking. Our mission might be to equip people [with the soft skills needed] to work in the new Information Age - Collaborative Cooperation environment. In other words, the same skills that consultants have used for decades to get things done outside of a traditional employer-employee relationship are much more important now.