Introduction:
Goleman and others have written about "social intelligence" or "group intelligence." [cite] I want to look at a single more directly observable impact of this infrastructure on the nature of "one's own work" or what it means to be "a worker." That then has implications for how we should be socializing, training, and educating these people.
The new generation of people and their tools
Wikipedia:
Characteristics of the generation vary by region, depending on social and economic conditions. However, it is generally marked by an increased use and familiarity with communications, media, and digital technologies.With them they bring "social media" -- bi-directional web-2 initially, such as Facebook (tm), then PDA/"cell-phone" enabled technologies = Twitter (tw), "texting", real-time clients to web-2 applications (google maps, web log posts from a phone, etc.)
The trend is clear, and huge: faster communication (measured in seconds or less), more reliable infrastructure, more widely-deployed access ("wi-fi hot-spots"), higher bandwidth (youTube(tm) video or small-screen television live), far wider active user-base and user-literacy [close to 100% of this generation, cite Pew...], and a greater willingness to be a social-being, with documents, mail, photos, preferences, and details of one's life immediately visible and searchable over the web by anyone from anywhere.
Furthermore, the latest trend [cite?] is to "always-on" connection, where people simply live with their communications device 24/7, and may exchange several or even hundreds of messages per hour, often multiplexing and being actively involved in multiple simultaneous conversations in different compartmented windows.
This has profound implications for education and the nature of the workplace.
Goleman and others have written about "social intelligence" or "group intelligence." I want to look at a single more directly observable impact of this infrastructure on the nature of "one's own work" or what it means to be "a worker." That then has implications for how we should be socializing, training, and educating these people.
Pair-programming in computing
[ details about the nature and amazing effectiveness of pair-programming, personal experiences. cites]
Safety, reliability, quality, and economics of pair-programming
[ huge benefit, cites]
Theoretical basis for this situation
[ literature on team-based decision models; aperture-synthesis in astronomy, etc.]
The big question - chair-turning consultation
On the one hand, people can in many settings, from universities to hospitals to most service businesses, be always-connected to each other. Such connections provide a way for real-time, very short-term, immediate collaboration, equivalent to spinning in one's chair and asking one's office mate a question.
On the other hand, the quantity of information in any field is increasing faster than any human can keep up with, as well as changing and being updated too rapidly to track. There is no way to know everything, or even to be sure anything you "know" is still the current best-wisdom or current policy. We can be certain of only one thing -- our mental picture of things, in particular and general, has gaps, and has out-dated fragments that we haven't yet realized are outdated.
Many studies [ critical cites ] show that consultation while making decisions may appear, in the very short run to slow things down, but in terms of its astounding impact on the quality of the decisions, in the medium to long term dramatically speeds things up by reducing or eliminating rework caused by bad mental models, bad data, "guessing", or a "good-enough" attitude that would not be supportable if working along side a second person who was watching.All of this says that people SHOULD be working this way, openly, in constant contact and short-term consultation about anything they are uncertain about, and even (or especially) things they feel certain about.
As various wags including Donald Rumsfield have pointed out, what causes our defeats is "the things we don't know that we don't know, or things we know that aren't so."
I had the experience of managing a team of sophisticated programmers working on a mission-critical, life-safety medical system. It was still a challenge to get people to work with each other and to immediately seek consultation when they weren't sure about something, rather than "punting" or "guessing" or "covering up" the weak spots in their own work.
The reason for this was clear -- these people had been raised in an educational system that stressed that they should be "doing their own work." Despite clueless instructors assigning "group work" to equally clueless students, who hated it, when it got down to real grades, what mattered was "your own work." On an exam that really mattered, you were rewarded for "doing your own work" and failed in disgrace if you "cheated" by consulting with others about something you were unsure of.
Then, thrown into the workplace, after a decade or two of such competitive, fragmenting, corrosive, education, these people have trouble "working as a team" and seeking help when they need it, and not covering up in shame anything they are not certain about, so they "look better."
College and university faculty are given 6 years to achieve tenure, during which time the total emphasis is on doing their own work. Then, they are supposed to help teach ways to deal with "interdisciplinary teams."
The new models of work and education
A worker (and a person) should be seen as someone who is plugged into "the cloud", who has the experience, attitudes, and technological savvy and tools to be able to ask for and get advice about anything in a few seconds, or look up and evaluate web-based data about facts, policies, or status of projects in a few moments with sufficient ease that they do it when they should with no big deal about it.
When a worker, or programmer, or analyst, or nurse, or doctor, or nurses-aide runs into a situation they are unsure about, or feel they should consult on, it should be fast and easy for them to do so, it should be habitual for them to do so, and they should be encouraged to do so and rewarded to do so, in public.
It should be like washing hands -- you should be seen by the patient doing it, because it's the right thing to do. It should not be something done secretly, furtively, with some guilt or shame in the back room -- or worse, not done when it should have been because there was no standard way to do so, or because someone was watching.
This is a complete reversal of our culture and educational standards.
It is also a trend that appears, to me, to be unstoppable. There is little question that decisions made by constant consultation are better, safer, more-reliable and more cost-effective than other decisions. There are far fewer disasters caused by ignorance or isolated islands of mis-information.
Those who do so will have better results, better bottom lines, etc. than those who don't -- once we are past the white-water turbulence of work and educational infrastructures that punish people for acting this way.
Our educational experience, by this model and in this light, should be more one of socialization to work this way, and getting used to the tools and practices of instant consulting, evaluating and resolving conflicting viewpoints and data obtained over the web, etc.
Our exams should be much harder, to the point of realistic, in terms of the types of problems asked and the time-frame in which an answer is expected -- but should be open-book, open-notes, open cell-phone, open-pda, with unlimited options of calling friends or experts for advice.
What matters that the individual student be able to do is to swim in that ocean easily. It does not matter that they be a storehouse of facts, because facts become quickly stale. Things they use a lot will become familiar, and things they never use will have no time wasted on them.
The concept of "mentoring" or "parenting" or what a college-degree would focus more on pair-wise traveling into that ocean and helping the student become familiar with what to do and how to do it to become a functioning and valued member of "the cloud", both giving help and getting it on a daily, hourly, minute by minute basis.
Such "cloud-enabled" people, who knew how to know their own limits, would be vastly more employable and re-employable in different fields as times changed, because their skill-base is largely independent of the particular field they are working in.
Business owners and managers in general could care less whether an employee "does his own work" or consults with others or experts, so long as the work gets done, rapidly, correctly the first time.
Counter-forces
Aside from centuries of legacy momentum in the opposite direction, and all the problems of paradigm-shifts, an additional roadblock is evident in the area of power and redistribution of power.
In classic organizations, knowledge is power. Compartmentalization and fragmentation and competition between workers to "look good" is the classic Machiavellian method of keeping the lords balancing each other out, so none of them ever gets strong enough to challenge the Prince or King.
The new cloud-enabled group consciousness and comparing notes will, in fact, allow workers the ability to "get organized", with all that means to those who abuse, exploit, or lead-with-falsehood. Such groups may not even articulate or realize the reasons for their gut-based aversion to social media, but this doesn't stop the vengeance and venom with which this social-media is treated as a threat to their power.
Wrapped in language of "efficiency" and "not wasting company time with gossip" and "protecting corporate secrets", many consulting companies specialize, today, in helping management shut down, snuff out, and totally suppress the use of social media in the workplace.
Such is typical of any paradigm shift. This is by no means a "self-working" transition, and many small efforts to change will be shot down, shut down, with intense punitive action far beyond what would seem called for.
Anyone "pushing" these new technologies and social media should be prepared to be treated as a heretic, trouble-maker, labor-organizer, etc., and to trigger the most intense organizational "immune response" that can be delivered to cleanse the system of something it recognizes as "not me."
Employees who consult widely and regularly with a wide range of advisors will not just "think outside the box", they will simply have no "box" anymore. The social media gets rid of the "box" entirely.
They will not only question legacy policies, and management decisions, they will show up with an armful of supporting documentation and, worse (to management) supporters.
For this to work, management has to transition as well to an open-style, where it is not THEIR job to "be right" but their job to "ask the right questions". Literature abounds these days on such leadership styles. It should be used. [cites go here]
If the United States Army, one of the most hierarchical and mission-oriented organizations in the world, is going this direction, there must be no problem in it interfering with accomplishing the mission -- in fact, it must be viewed as helping accomplish the mission.
And, in my opinion, it is invaluable at getting out of the mess we're in and the boxed-in legacy mis-thinking and wrong mental-models that hold us back.
Three white-papers I wrote are directly related to this topic:
Spectacular teams through active strength, not more SOP's [ powerpoint ]
The Case of the Crash of Comair 5191 - Lexington Kentucky August 2006 [MS Word document]
Disaster Preparedness Tools for Public Health staff and Civilians [ MS Word Document, on use of social media for making dyadic-pairs for working in high-stress unstructured disaster situations.]
Wade
A different framework is that the problem is not that coordinated groups of people exist, but that such groups as they grow and age tend to become depressingly blind, inefficient, arrogant, ineffective, amoral, immoral, self-serving, and corrupt.
If you view that as a fact of life, smaller is better, fine. Discard the car and we'll all walk. If you view this as a design flaw, like a stuck gas pedal, and one that could be fixed, that changes everything. Fix the car so we can all go much farther than we can walk.
Humans are individually not very reliable, but these days much is known about how to build highly reliable systems out of unreliable components.
We have very sophisticated theory and tools in "control system engineering" about "checks and balances", regulatory feedback-loops, stability, responsiveness, etc. See for example "Feedback Control of Dynamic Systems" by Franklin, 5th edition. All kinds of cars, planes, and equipment is built using that stuff. It works.
"It has a demon, blow it up!" is a pretty primitive approach to problem solving. Why not use the technology we have to design and model large human organizations that might actually function correctly?
Or at least use it to simulate and model proposed changes and see whether, under broad assumptions, the changed model would perform any better than the current model.
The problem is almost certainly that it's not breaking on any given part, it's breaking "between the parts" on a system level. It's not the pieces that are wrong, but the way the pieces relate to each other that's broken.
It's like airplanes. A plane is a collection of parts, each one being too heavy to fly. The power of the plane is in how the parts work together, not in any one magic "flying" part that the others ride on.
It's not right to seek a leader who can fly, and it's not right to abandon the idea of large groups, corporations, governments, etc. in favor of us all learning how to jump higher as the best we'll ever do.
The structure CAN be made to fly. We HAVE the tools to do that. Now is the wrong time to quit.