nothing to see here

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds. Last month’s post was called Welcome to Hell, with a photo of the smoke-filled sky over New York City. Last Friday night we were in the middle of a torrential rainstorm that dumped 250 mm of water on us. It’s one Hell of a climate catastrophe.

“We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.” —Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, via @c.justc

“hiding from Threads. can we stop finding new capitalist billionaire toys to be enthralled by? we are boiling ourselves like frogs, literally & figuratively” —@BonStewart

“We have the science to stop the climate crisis and end pandemics. Why are we failing? —‘Science is embraced when it serves the interests of capital, and is often ignored when it does not.’ —Jason Hickel.” —@LuckyTran

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new governance capabilities

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This is a follow-up from my post — diversity > learning > trust — where I said that these become the key elements in building better organizational structures that can help us differentiate between stark reality and blatant lies. These elements are how we should connect because it’s in the connections that we can make sense. The lack of diversity, the unwillingness to learn, and the lack of trust are what is dumbing so many people down.

I used the following model to show where we are in terms dominant organizational societal forms — based on Tribes, Institutions, Markets, or Networks — showing that we are currently in a phase-shift between a triform (T+I+M) and a quadriform (T+I+M+N) society, which accounts for much of the current political turmoil in our post-modern world.

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ITA Jay Cross Award 2023

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The Internet Time Alliance Award — in memory of Jay Cross — is presented to a workplace learning professional who has contributed in positive ways to the field of Informal Learning and is reflective of Jay’s lifetime of work.

Recipients champion workplace and social learning practices inside their organization and/or on the wider stage. They share their work in public and often challenge conventional wisdom. The Award is given to professionals who continuously welcome challenges at the cutting edge of their expertise and are convincing and effective advocates of a humanistic approach to workplace learning and performance.

We announce the award on 5 July, Jay’s birthday

Following his death in November 2015, the partners of the Internet Time Alliance — Jane Hart, Charles Jennings, Clark Quinn, and myself — resolved to continue Jay’s work. Jay Cross was a deep thinker and a man of many talents, never resting on his past accomplishments, and this award is one way to keep pushing our professional fields and industries to find new and better ways to learn and work.

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welcome to hell

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.” —Jonathan Swift, via @dyckron

“Ignoring warnings about submarines that billionaires assure you are « innovative » is a lot like ignoring warnings about climate change that people assure you will be fine, with green tech that doesn’t exist.” —@LALegault

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asleep at the wheel

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A hybrid model — working a combination of on-site and from anywhere — creates different classes of workers and maintains the wall between management and workers. Hybrid workplaces are an effort by management to hang on to power and privilege for as long as possible, I concluded in the worst of both worlds in May 2021. The next month, in not remotely working, I suggested that as — or if — this pandemic winds down, it may get difficult to attract and retain talented people unless they have a degree of control over where they spend their time, especially if competitors offer work from anywhere. This year, in 2023, I note in work is human that the taste of working from anywhere has accelerated the departure of older workers — “Dennis C. would rather retire than return to the office full time — and that’s exactly what he did.”

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keeping in front of change

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When the SARS-2 pandemic hit the global community, many organizations were able to quickly pivot to remote work, among other adaptations. This will likely not be the last pandemic and other crises will emerge that will require more adaptations to how work gets done. The AI tidal wave may even increase the pace of change. In these environments, learning and innovation have to be woven into the fabric of daily work.

“In a crisis, you should always deploy an innovation team alongside the business recovery teams … to capture the novel practices … put naive observers in alongside the incident team to capture the key learning points.” —Dave Snowden, Complexity Expert

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I write therefore I think

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I think this will become a major problem with embedded GPT & LLM appearing in almost every work productivity tool — “Skipping the writing process short-circuits reflection (‘Writing as Thinking’)” —Stephen P Anderson

While they may help to write summaries and presentations, tools like ChatGPT will likely short-circuit the creative writing process.

“For creative endeavors, I never want to have something else come up with my writing. The holistic labor of creative writing is struggling to succinctly translate your own experiences and ideas from your mental space to the physical realm. My ideas and the ways I express them in text are the most precious things I have, the ones that differentiate me from everyone else. Moreover, in the process of generating the written form of your ideas, you come up with different ways of thinking about them.” —Vicky Boykis 2023

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“it was 20 years ago today”

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Today marks the 20th anniversary of Jarche Consulting. There were several times when I thought that I would not make it this far. The roller coaster ride continues, having weathered the great recession and a pandemic. Who knows what the future will bring? For now, I am grateful to my friends, colleagues, and especially my repeat clients who continue to have confidence in my work. It has been a great pleasure.

Writing on this blog, after +19 years, continues to be a primary way that I make sense and connect with people around the globe. Here are some thoughts I shared along the way as I marked other anniversaries.

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work is human

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Is there a talent shortage today, or merely ineffective hiring practices?

While employers lament a talent shortage, they are scrambling to increase talent attraction and retention. They offer new incentives and promises of increased flexibility and an inclusive company culture. However, most of these efforts ignore one key factor that could make a significant difference–including talent across the age spectrum.

Instead, talent management processes such as recruiting, hiring, promoting and retaining tend to exclude individuals under 24 or over 40. The result is a 16-year criterion for talent. —Forbes 2023-03-12

Is ageism a primary factor influencing the retention of skilled and experienced workers?

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the button

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Ethan Mollick discusses the impact of ‘The Button’ on our writing. The Button is in Google Docs but similar GPT-LLM tools are or will soon be available in many other writing tools. They can immediately create a credible piece of writing, such as a letter of recommendation or a proposal, increasing anyone’s speed of writing and avoiding writer’s block. These tools are exceptionally convenient, so of course most people will use them. But at what cost?

“But then The Button starts to tempt everyone. Work that was boring to do, but meaningful when completed by humans (like performance reviews) becomes easy to outsource – and the apparent quality actually increases. We start to create documents mostly with AI that get sent to AI-powered inboxes where the recipients respond mostly with AI. Even worse, we still create the reports by hand, but realize that no human is actually reading them. This kind of meaningless task, what organizational theorists have called mere ceremony, has always been with us. But AI will make a lot of previously useful tasks meaningless. It it will also remove the facade that previously disguised meaningless tasks. We may not have always known if our work mattered in the bigger picture, but in most organizations, the people in your part of the organizational structure felt that it did. With AI-generated work sent to other AIs to assess, that sense of meaning disappears.” —Ethan Mollick

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