The Orange Chair

I finished reading Generation Blend (Rob Salkowitz, 2008) during the holidays. The book covered generational issues and implications for management and technology, and is definitely worth a read if you’re interested in the demographic changes sweeping our society or Web 2.0 adoption (and the difficulties thereof).

The book crystallized some nagging doubts I’d had for a while. Many companies – mine included – often optimistically count on a generation of digital natives–Generation Y–to power the organizational changes that required to fully take advantage of the collaborative technologies lumped together under Enterprise 2.0. After all, we grew up connecting, collaborating, and sharing on the Internet. We demand intranet technologies at par with the powerful and easy-to-use consumer tools we can’t imagine living without. We ignore organizational and geographic boundaries. We’ve been helping people figure out VCRs and laptops since we were kids. We’re going to help your company get the hang of blogs and wikis, too. Right? Right?

Sure, I’ve seen a bit of that in practice. My Gen Y Guide to Web 2.0 at Work has been viewed more than 25,000 times. I’ve set up numerous wikis for groups who were curious about the technology but who needed a little extra help getting started. I’ve coached many Baby Boomers and Generation Xers on how to start a blog and use it for professional success. I’ve facilitated workshops helping our clients figure out Web 2.0, Generation Y as consumers and as employees, and how they can evolve their business strategies to take these new realities into account. I hear plenty of stories–both inside and outside IBM–of how younger employees are trying to help their teams or organizations learn about and adopt the tools.

But it’s not easy.

Generation Blend has excellent analyses of how adoption of a new tool and its corresponding process can stall due to technology anxiety. When unfamiliar technologies are coupled with generational gaps and authority issues, the politics can outweigh the benefits. If you’re an experienced Baby Boomer struggling with the needs of the changing business environment on top of your heavy workload, you don’t need a young upstart with little experience telling you to try out this unfamiliar tool.

Enterprise 2.0 transformation might even be more difficult if it seems to be associated with youth. Generation Blend points out that advertising campaigns typically link technology with youth, which contributes to the anxiety older generations feel about technology. And in most cases, young employees have neither the credibility nor the authority to lead change. (According to True Change (Janice Klein, 2004), experienced hires are much more likely to influence change.)

So don’t count on us to change your culture. Baby Boomers and Gen Xers need to do most of the heavy lifting.

I’ve known this for a while. I do a lot of internal technology evangelism at IBM, and I’m often asked to speak to groups because my enthusiasm is infectious. I can handle people’s concerns while encouraging them to explore the possibilities. But whenever I can, I try to refer the organizers of the talk to evangelists or budding evangelists who share many things in common with the target audience. Instead of evangelizing directly, I focus on providing evangelists with tools and resources. Yes, people will appreciate my enthusiasm, but true change happens when they take those ideas into their everyday lives. As Crossing the Chasm (Geoffrey Moore) and other books about innovation diffusion have noted, modeling someone whose day-to-day work is similar to theirs will be much more effective, in the long run. By organizing and documenting our collective knowledge, exploring new opportunities, and inspiring people through what I share and what I do, I make full use of my strengths as a Gen Yer who’s learned so much about Enterprise 2.0 in the last three years that I’ve been researching or using it.

So if Generation Y can’t be your primary evangelists for Enterprise 2.0, how can we help your organization transform? Here’s what we can be good at:

• Bringing in new ideas – We’re exposed to a lot of different ideas, and we haven’t (usually) settled on the One Way To Do Things. Tap us for creative thinking in combination with people who bring more depth and experience to the table. My team members ask me to help during our clients’ strategic planning workshops because they know I’ll come up with tons of ideas.
• Challenging assumptions – We do things differently, and that gives everyone opportunities to re-examine what people take for granted. Many people have told me that the way I share what I’m learning has caused them to reevaluate their assumption that knowledge is power and that you should keep it secret. I show that knowledge shared is power, too. One of the most valuable ways I contribute to IBM and to our clients is to show what’s possible, simply by acting as if the Enterprise 2.0 organization already existed.
• Learning – Everything’s new to us, and we’re learning so much. We also recognize the need to build our reputation and our network, and sharing knowledge is the best way we know – but it should be associated with us, not just archived in a knowledge repository. If you can capture some of that energy with wikis, blogs, or a peer-to-peer learning solution, you’ll probably get far more growth and knowledge-sharing than you would if you bombarded your subject-matter experts with directives to share what they know through wikis and blogs.

If you want to help people in your organization connect and collaborate more effectively using Enterprise 2.0 tools, don’t leave it to Gen Y. Involve us, engage us, and support us. Connect us with opportunities to make a difference. But don’t make Enterprise 2.0 a generational issue, because the contributions of the Baby Boomers and the Gen Xers in your organization are probably going to make a much bigger difference and you won’t be able to engage them if you draw those generational lines. If you’d like to learn more about this topic, leave a comment or e-mail me your questions, or check out these other interesting resources:

Interesting reading:

• Generation Blend, book and blog
• Crossing the Chasm, book
• True Change, book
• Grown Up Digital, book
• Can Millennials Really Change the Work Place, blog entry, Tom Davenport
• The millennial organisation, blog entry, Mark Gould
• Net Gen Nonsense, blog

An IBM colleague asked me to put together a few tips for Web 2.0 at Work. Here’s something I had fun putting together, sketching it on my Nintendo DS:

| View | Upload your own

If you’ve seen any presentations in the last 5 years talking about the multiple generations composing today’s workforce, chances are that you’ve already seen the following table, or one of its multiple variations, all somehow influenced by the book "When Generations Collide: Who They Are. Why They Clash. How to Solve the Generational Puzzle at Work", by Lancaster and Stillman:

If you are wondering where you fall in this division, here are the boundaries:

• Traditionalists, born between 1900 and 1945;
• Baby Boomers, born 1946 to 1964;
• Gen-Xers, 1965-1980;
• Millennials, or NetGens, born after 1980

I liked the way the table above summarized the generational differences the first time I saw it, to the point I asked a colleague to re-use it in my current engagement. But when I proposed to add this table to the material I’m developing – part of a collaboration strategy for a very large government agency – I had an enlightening conversation with the folks I’m working with, both of them boomers and brilliant.

I don’t buy this. When I was 18, I was very much like the NetGen described in this table. The behaviours described here have a lot to do with personal traits and lifecycle. Today’s NetGens, once they get married, start a family and get a mortgage, may become more settled and act pretty much like a boomer. Besides, there are young folks today that are uncomfortable with change, thrive under hierarchical structures and prefer things to be run the "conventional" way.

Disclaimer: The above is my recollection of what 2 people said, which can be very different from what they actually said, so take it with a grain of salt.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I’m inclined now to think that the table above is VERY ageist, and it’s not helping us to actually understand the differences between people.

Our brain likes generalizations. It helps us to create a simple model of how life works and simplifies our decision making. But generalizations are typically based on perceived averages. And there is no such a thing as the average person, the average Asian, or the average woman. You probably have seen one of the multiple incarnations of "if the world were a village of 100 people" (see here & here for more details). The hypothetical average human being would be Asian, adult, heterosexual, Christian, always hungry and with no TV at home. I would bet that the vast majority of the human population does not fit that full profile, even though those are the dominant attributes in each category. Those attributes are independent variables, they don’t come in bundles.

There’s a Brazilian song that says something along the lines of "looking from a close range, nobody is normal" ("de perto ninguém é normal", Vaca Profana, Caetano Veloso, if you need to know). That’s so much true! Just imagine the table above trying to do the same with gender, race, or sexual preferences. You would probably think that to be very inappropriate or stereotypical. One of the things that make humanity fascinating is exactly how complex and different we are. Nobody is "one in a million". There was never a person like you, and there will never be. We are all truly unique, each one of us a long tail of our own. So please don’t tell me that you are too old to blog or that you "get" technology just because you are supposed to be a NetGen. There’s nothing like living in exponential times: the only thing you are supposed to be is yourself.