Here’s a quick response to today’s New York Times article by Emily Weinstein, All That Authenticity May Be Getting Old, about the flood of ‘authentic’, handmade and one-of-a-kind-ish items on the home decor marketplace. The article dances on the line between criticizing mass marketers for faking authenticity, and reminding readers that our desire for ‘authentic’ will never go away.

The article is interesting, for sure, and worth a read. But it is also worth some reflection.

What’s missing from this article, and from so many critiques of the explosion in the marketplace for handmade home decor, jewelry, cards, clothing, and more, is a deep understanding of what is actually going on between the artisans who make and sell these products, and the customers who covet, buy, and use them.

This dynamic is the genius that propels businesses like Etsy and the larger crafting movement.

When we make and buy handmade, hand-selected, and artisanal items, we are exchanging:

Recognition, Affirmation, and Connection

Recognition

Recognition comes from both the buyer and the seller having their aesthetic– their taste, their values — expressed in a visible place. For some of us, the first time we saw someone else design their own decal for their laptop was on Etsy. The first time we saw someone else make a bike basket out of a lunchbox was on Etsy. The first time we saw someone else make an apron out of their great aunts’ embroidered handkerchiefs was on Etsy.

All of a sudden, it seemed, one could actually see other people who shared your unique tastes. And, instead of that being disappointing (e.g., I’m no longer unique)  it was heartening — Somebody else gets it! Somebody else recognizes this! Your taste can be discovered, and enjoyed.

Affirmation

Affirmation comes from being told “I see you“. “I see you.”

Affirmation comes when you see a cool tech-dude with a wool iPad sleeve, and you say “Etsy?” and he grins. Somebody else has seen your aesthetic– whether a buyer or a seller– and said “I like that. I agree with that. I think that’s beautiful. I’ll pay money for that.”

Because what that all says is — “Your aesthetic is valuable to me, mine is valuable to you”.

You know that feeling when you find a blog written about exactly that topic that bugs you, with great and useful perspective? That’s what Etsy is like… Blogging is for people to share words, Etsy is for people to share beauty.

Connection

Connection. With these aesthetic exchanges, we create communities of shared beauty, shared vision, and shared self-expression.

Hey, I know I’m not the only Etsy buyer who sends little notes to the sellers I buy from saying “I just put that wreath up in my office. I totally love it. I might not ever give it to my sister as planned. Will you make some bigger ones in the future?” I also know I’m not the only person who feels connected looking at other people’s Pinterest pages.

Not only do we connect through the purchase, and through feedback , but we connect through vendor/artist communities. Group after group after group of people with shared aesthetic interests support each other — Yes, there is indeed a Steampunk Catlovers Quilting Group. You can join it. You can be part of that community.

Recognition, Affirmation, and Connection

In a consumerist culture, we are well-trained to seek out opportunities for recognition, affirmation and connection through purchases. Much of the time, though, we have a hard time imagining that there is another person on the other end of the purchase — a creator who is making something not (only) because it is commercial, but (also) because it expresses who they are.

On Etsy, at the Bust Holiday Craftacular, at any Maker Faire, and at the farmer’s market, we get to experience something closer to a social exchange, something closer to a human exchange, something more than a commercial exchange.

Our sense of beauty, our style, and our sense of self can be seen and celebrated, and we can gather with our own kind.

That’s not a fad. That’s a timeless social exchange that we value.  And that’s what’s going on in this commerce of Authenticity.

Images: Fall Wreath from ItzFitz
iPad sleeve, wool herringbone tweed
Steampunk Hat for Cats

What value is all this talk about gamification?

It’s one thing to deploy game-design tactics to turn your for-profit services (like Foursquare or Hashable) into games. By playing games, folks actually will train themselves to use these products.

More troubling to me is the idea of using gamification to redesign work tasks.

Gamification and Work

It’s true that, when gamification is done well (as in, with a deep understanding of what motivates people), gamification becomes a set of tools and techniques for sustaining intrinsic motivation.

Unfortunately, it’s more likely that businesses will use gamification techniques to turn work into tightly controlled play. Controlled, fake play diminishes both the worker and the work.

With that concern, I didn’t see much reason for promoting gamification at work, until some research on entitlement caught my attention.

Psychologists O’Brien, Anastasio, and Bushman have been studying the way a sense of entitlement influences how people perceive the value of their time. Entitled people feel like their time is very valuable, and they resent having to waste their time.

Entitlement makes us resent mundane tasks

Take this observation into the world of work, where we have many dull tasks that are absolutely necessary. For everyone, the duller the task the longer that task seems to take, and the more quickly we want to scoot away when it’s over.

Now thing about people with a strong sense of entitlement. For them, this link between dull tasks, time dragging, and time wasting is even worse. For dull tasks that took the same finite amount of time, participants who were primed to feel entitled rated them as taking longer. And, they were more likely to characterize that time as being ‘wasted‘ versus having been a necessary cost of getting the job done.

While the authors don’t make this next link in their study, it’s just a short walk from feeling like you are wasting your time to feeling resentful of the organization or manager who is making you waste it. Workers with a sense of entitlement can easily come to resent an organization that “wastes” their time. That’s understandable if the work is fetching coffee, but not as understandable when it’s routine, dull, but necessary work.

We can’t resent necessary work, we just need to get it done.

If entitlement makes people feel more negatively about mundane but necessary work, we’ve got some problems ahead. If it’s true that new entrants to the workforce, a group otherwise known as Millennials, feel more sense of entitlement than previous generations, we might see resentment growing within organizations, especially among entry-level or routine jobs with lots of necessary but dull work.

Oh, so no wonder people are into gamification…. the whole problem of dull work is getting worse!

Entitlement ramps up the problem of boring work

Organizationally, we used to address this kind of challenge with programs for redesigning work systems to enrich jobs. (Old-school job enrichment is the same thing as well-done gamification, just without the leaderboard stuff.) Individually, we worked on ‘job crafting’ to reshape the job to fit our own personal preferences.

Gamification gives us an additional way to make work less dull.

But, maybe a new tactic is not what we need. Maybe we just need to do the old stuff– better.

As far as making work into games…. Using gamification to ‘gussy up’ routine and necessary tasks might make them more palatable to workers with a heightened sense of entitlement. But, at the same time, the motivational power of many games wears off after time, so any positive effect is hard to sustain. So, while gamification candy-coats necessary work,  the fun flavor quickly wears off.

Worse, efforts to gamify might just serve to distract us from redesigning the work itself, and from creating a more salient, more purpose-oriented context.

There is so much more that we can do to improve how we organize and structure work. We might not be able to make all work less dull, but we can make it more meaningful.

Is gamification itself a waste of time?

It doesn’t need to be.    Gamification could be a way into a discussion about how to make work tasks meaningful.

However, gamification will only be effective if and when it supports a larger conversation about why we’re here, what we aim to do, and how we each can contribute.

Gamification must be designed to create meaning, not ‘flair‘, and to pursue purpose, not leader board points.

Addressing entitlement at its root 

As it happens, gamification that links dull work to contributions and to collective meaning will also address the root issue of entitlement.

Entitlement, at its root, is self-centeredness. The best way to counter any tendency to locate all importance and all meaning in oneself is to connect the self to others, and to a collective purpose that exists…wait for it… outside the self.

Sure, I’ll take a few cute badges, become the mayor of the conference room, and win a t-shirt by scaling the leader board. But truly, I’d just rather have my work contribute to a greater purpose.

Wouldn’t everyone?

O’Brien, E. H., Anastasio, P. A., & Bushman, B. J. (2011). Time crawls when you’re not having fun: Feeling entitled makes dull tasks drag on. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37, 1287-1296.

See also:

How Job Crafting Can Get You Closer to Authentic Work
How to Design Social Business Systems For Engaged, Social Organizations
How Social Media Create Organizational Meaning

Images: Gamification of Life Some rights reserved by VFS Digital Design, Gamification at its best All rights reserved by LenKendal

What’s up with the word “new” in the phrase “meaning is the new motivator”?

From all corners of the interwebz conversation about ‘business’, I see mention of this idea that meaning at work is something new, something that we have just begun to desire.

Seriously. It seems to come as a surprise, or as a new development, that maximizing shareholder value isn’t motivating to most employees. Wow. Where have these people been since, oh, the dawn of the industrial revolution?

Folks have been talking about meaning at work, and looking for meaning at work, long before this recent ‘crisis of meaning’.  

True, we’ve used different terms over time.

• We’ve talked about alienation and estrangement to describe being cut off from meaningful work.

• We’ve talked about commitment and engagement, as attitudes towards organizations that ought to have meaning but usually don’t.

• We’ve talked about “leadership” as the process of creating meaning, even if only through charisma, from the top of the organization’s food chain.

• And, we’ve talked about vision and mission, knowing that meaning was in there, somewhere, among all the BHAGs.

There is nothing ‘new’ about the desire for meaning at work.

Just yesterday, Luis Suarez wrote a great post about meaning, in which he shared a vlog from Roger Martin, Dean at Rotman School, about “The Crisis of Meaning in the Millennial Workforce“. Luis unpacks why any of us, knowledge workers especially, might feel a lack of meaning. He clarifies that meaning is an issue for every generation of workers, and that each of us needs to do something about refocusing business so that it meets human, social needs. (Read his whole post, it’s great.)

So my question is not whether we need meaning. The question is:

Why is our desire for meaning positioned this way?

Why do so many (like Dan Pink) position “meaning” as something “new”?

• Are we trying to avoid recognizing that meaning is something we’ve always wanted, but perhaps never felt permitted to ask for in polite business company?

Why do so many (like Roger Martin) position “meaning” as something others desire, but not us? Or that we desire for others, but not for ourselves?

• Are we talking about “Millenials” and “their” needs for meaning so that we can take care of ‘them’ while avoiding taking responsibility for ourselves?

• Are we trying to look ‘objective’ so that we don’t look demanding, or ungrateful? Do we have to make meaning a ‘business problem’ so that we can take meaning seriously?

I recognize that for many, it’s become a “crisis of meaning” because there is so little left to promise workers, in terms of job security, career development, gain-sharing, and ownership rights. Maybe after all these other kinds of ‘motivations’ have been eroded by the twin beasts of corporate profit-taking and work intensification, there is nothing left that we can truly count on to take our minds of the paycheck, and so we turn to meaning.

In good times and bad times, people have always wanted meaningful work. People have always wanted – and still want–to work in organizations that serve a larger purpose, where individual and collective efforts create meaningful products, meaningful services, and meaningful experiences.

Why do we treat this as a surprising truth?

See also:
The Pursuit of (Organizational) Purpose by Deb Lavoy

Social Media for Social Change — Inside the Organization?
Is your organization flourishing or withering?
How Social Media Create Organizational Meaning

Technology has a way of sucking the humanity right out of us.

Consider how we describe, design and deploy ‘enterprise 2.0′ and work system technologies in our organizations:

– When we talk about technology systems, we talk about machines, platforms, inputs and outputs.  We forget about values, emotion, flourishing, meaning and purpose.

– When we design technology systems, we think about control, architecture, scripts, modularity, and proxies. We forget about comfort, warmth, touch, and beauty.

– When we use technology, we automate, codify, record and retrieve. We forget about expressing, feeling, creating, and giving.

Too many work technologies are systems of extraction.

We keep upgrading to technology systems that extract more work from us, while giving back less and less to us.

So who can blame us if we’re not all enthusiastic about Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business initiatives? Once the shine wears off the new tools, we’re left wondering — What’s in this for me? What’s in this for you? What’s in this for us?

You’ve heard me say before that the Enterprise 2.0- digital- social- business- system- industry-complex seems to be running on the wrong rails. Too many technology products are designed, positioned, and ‘sold’ to us as ways to streamline and enhance collective tasks so that we improve bottom line business results.

There’s nothing wrong with that goal, except that it’s so narrow, so limiting, and so shareholder-centered. It’s just not about being human.

We need to talk about how digital social media enterprise business systems can help us, the users, be more of who we are individually and together.

We need to figure out how to transform these systems of extraction these digital-social-media-enterprise-business systems into systems of engagement. We need to build technology systems that help us to be more fully social human as we work together.

5 Needs for Full, Social, Human-ness

When we human people work with other human people, there are five human needs that have to be met in order for us to be our full social selves.

These are our needs for:

1. Identity
2. Voice
3. Agency
4. Community
5. Purpose

Currently, in too many organizations, we are controlled, constrained, muted, forbidden, or discouraged from being fully human, because the work systems  make it hard for us to meet these 5 needs.

However, as work systems for enterprise coordination, knowledge management, work process flow, and customer relationship management become more social, they are also creating new opportunities for us to be more human while we work together.

5 Ways That Systems of Engagement Bring Out Our Full Social Selves

1. Systems of Engagement Enable Identity

We humans want to be who we are. We want to bring our full selves to work and into our interactions with colleagues, while we are are making and doing things. When we are able to be who we are in specific, descriptive, textured, multiple ways, we can be ‘more fully there’ at work.

Systems of engagement let us define who we are, help us be seen for who we are, and help us be known for who we are allow us to contribute our full selves. They help us connect who we are, what we have to offer, and what needs to be done, helping us find and create personal meaning.

2. Systems of Engagement Foster Voice

Voice is our ability to say in our own way what we think needs to be said and to be heard when we say it. Voice is the full expression of who we are, what we think, and how we feel. When we have voice, we are able to offer ideas, share insights, and offer feedback.

Systems of engagement create ways for us to speak, to spread our words, to be heard by others, and to be listened to by others. They allow us to use our voice to collaborate and to contribute.

3. Systems of Engagement Activate Agency

Agency is our ability to act, to get things done, and to cause things to happen. Agency is our ability to make choices and to enact those choices. When we have agency we are makers, doers, creators, innovators. We get stuff done.

Systems of engagement create opportunities for agency because they give us more places in which we can act. Systems of engagement also give us the autonomy, responsibility and accountability that agency requires. We are able to decide, to engage, and to act.

4. Systems of Engagement Cohere Communities

Communities are our connections with other people — not just dyadic connections, but also networked connections. We yearn to be connected with people who know us, who like us, and who need us. When we have  a community, we have a slew of direct and indirect relationships in which we can be supportive, helpful, and influential. We matter to others.

Systems of engagement help us find the people we need and who need us. These systems help us create and sustain connections through which we and others form collectives, collectives that have capability beyond the sum of members’ individual ability.

5. Systems of Engagement Catalyze Purpose

Purpose is our reason for being. Purpose is the cause outside ourselves that focuses our contributions to our community. When we have a purpose we can have commitment, vision, motivation, collaboration, and accomplishment. Our (work) lives have meaning.

Systems of engagement help us channel our attention and our efforts towards our purpose. They link us and our work to important tasks, and link our individual work to the work of others. They accumulate, organize, synthesize, and amplify our individual and collective efforts to help us achieve our purpose.

Identity, Voice, Agency, Community, and Purpose are not focus of social media technologies in organizations, but they should be.

Systems of engagement can certainly help us meet business needs. And they can do so much more. Systems of engagement can help us transform how we work together, by enabling identity, fostering voice, activating agency, cohering communities and catalyzing purpose so that we meet our human needs as much if not more than business needs.

We don’t need “social business” technology to suck less of the humanity out of us.

We need technology-enabled social systems that invite us to engage our full selves in our work together.

We need systems of engagement.

How do we create systems of engagement that bring out our full selves?
See my related post: How to Design Social Business Systems For Engaged, Social Organizations

See also:

Social Organizations Care About Personal Development by Jamie Notter, SocialFish

How Social Media Create Organizational Meaning
Your Authentic Social Network: The Identity Graph
Make Distinctiveness Matter by Linking It To Organizational Purpose
Images from Flickr:
Blue from bartb_pt
Machine à répandre la chimie… from ‘ m x b c h r
Blue Network from ringwell

Does it really matter if an organization is “distinctive”?

When an organization’s distinctiveness (identity) is linked with the organization’s purpose (greater social goal), the organization’s unique qualities provide the unique resources needed to achieve that purpose.

Organizational Distinctiveness is more than Positioning

Managers often dismiss the concept of organizational “distinctiveness”, thinking that distinctiveness is only relevant to “positioning” in the marketplace. Valuing distinctiveness in the marketplace isn’t wrong, but it is incomplete.

Distinctiveness is important inside the organization, because distinctiveness is half of what makes collective work meaningful.

Distinctiveness: How does “who we are” really matter?

Collectively, we are who we are. We have enduring, distinctive characteristics that create our collective organizational self-definition. That self-definition can resolve a generic existential crisis about “who we are”, but it doesn’t necessarily give ‘who we are’ a greater meaning.

What can give ‘who we are’ a greater meaning is the organization’s purpose. When the organizations’ distinctive features, talents, skills, positions, history, and members are linked to a collective purpose, the organization’s distinctiveness becomes meaningful.

Defining Organizational Purpose

Every organization was created to achieve some purpose. Some organizations define their purpose in narrow, rather generic ways, seeing their purpose as “making a profit” or “producing a service efficiently”.

But purpose is really something beyond the organization’s generic goals — a purpose is how the organization aims to contribute to the larger world, in a qualitative way.

For example, while all financial institutions want to make money, the purpose of CFCU Community Credit Union is to encourage thrift, savings and the wise use of credit, so that members can establish financial well-being. The purpose of Etsy, beyond making money for itself and for its member vendors, is to help reconnect makers with buyers, so that artisans and users can affirm and share each other’s creativity.

Purpose is how the organization’s collective activity can add qualitative value to members and to society.

The Problem with Purpose: Why “us”?

The problem with purpose, though, is often that there is no well-articulated reason why a particular organization ought to take on that purpose.

Why should CFCU, and not some other organization, help people establish financial well being? Why should Etsy help artists and customers affirm each others’ creativity? Can’t artists enter competitions to get affirmation? Can’t customers buy branded products to affirm their good taste?

Distinctiveness answers the question of “Why us?”

Distinctiveness explains why we, and not some other organization, should pursue this purpose — because “who we are” makes us better qualified than any other organization to pursue this purpose.

Because we are who we are, we as an organization have the talent, the ability, the qualities necessary, to pursue this purpose. We can do it better than others, achieve what others cannot, because of who we are.

Distinctive qualities are innate strengths waiting to be used. So, while any other organization might have the time, the money, and the determination to pursue this purpose, only our organization can contribute the skills, talents, values, and members who can contribute what this purpose really needs.

Why did Etsy set its purpose to support creativity? Because Etsy is an artful, creative company, full of crafters, artisans, artists, creatives, aesthetes. They can create this kind of support because they know (themselves) what is needed by their community.

Purpose makes distinctiveness useful; distinctiveness makes purpose achievable.

Linking our organizational distinctiveness to our organizational purpose helps us broaden, deepen and amplify our contributions to that purpose.

Organizational distinctiveness can lead to competitive advantage for the same reason that distinctiveness can help organizations achieve their larger purpose – the advantage comes from a link between what the organization has to offer (its unique qualities) and what is needed to achieve the purpose.

For both organizations and individuals, when “who you are” is linked to “what you’re trying to contribute to this world”, your work is meaningful. Work is meaningful because it draws on something you uniquely have to offer, and contributes to something that uniquely needs what you have to offer.

–  By itself, your organization’s defining features are interesting but not necessarily relevant.

— By itself, your organization’s purpose may be noble but not necessarily achievable.

Linked together, your organization’s distinctiveness and purpose serve each other, making your work and your organization more meaningful

See also:

Beyond Positioning: Establishing Authentic Optimal Distinctiveness
Their Need or Your Ability: Why does your organization exist?
Can an organization be too different?: The Strategic Value of Optimal Distinctiveness
B Corporation Identity: An Opportunity for Organizational Authenticity

Images from Naccarato on Flickr

You’ve heard about the Social Graph and the Interest Graph. Now meet the Identity Graph– the online network of the authentic, social, interpersonal you.

Different kinds of relationships create different graphs.

Each of us has our own social network that’s comprised of a hodgepodge of different kinds of connections. We have social connections between neighbors, college friends, and second cousins, which we capture online on sites like Facebook. This portion of our digital network is our social graph¹.

We have connections among coworkers from other jobs, folks we’ve met at conferences, and ‘business friends of business friends’ organized on LinkedIn, collected inside our organization’s enterprise communication platform, and managed by our professional work communities. This portion of our digital network we call our professional network or career graph.²

And, out there on Twitter, Tumblr, Quora, IfWeRanTheWorld, and so on, we’ve got our connections among folks who care about LOLcats, The Weepies, #SHEtalkTED, and an array of personal causes and individual interests. This is our interest graph.

Our Identity Graph

The Identity Graph is a shimmering vibrant web of online relationships and shared energies that exists on top of and is embedded within other graphs. Composing this graph are the people and the connections across which we act in ways that express “what it means” to be who we are.

The Identity Graph shows us the online relationships where we enact, demonstrate and experience who we really are. We share valued parts of our selves and continually create personal meaning, in interactions where we bring our authentic selves to the fore.

Different Graphs <= Different Use

We create these different graphs because we use online tools for different purposes. Our social graphs come from sharing real-world social connections with people we know, our professional graphs are created as we get work done, and our interest graphs come from pursuing ideas, situations, places, and activities that interest us. These  graphs are not independent… you probably have ‘real life’ friends who share your interests and folks you know from work who have become Facebook friends.

Different Graph => Different “Us”

Over the course of any given online day, we skip from one digital platform to another, listening, sharing and responding to communications with people across our network. Some of these interactions occur in our social graph, some in our professional graph, and some in our interest graph. In an ideal world, many of these interactions would overlap with your identity graph, indicating that across your online social world, you felt authentic some of the time.

We feel different, we are different, across these interactions.

As we interact across these graphs, our “selves” shift. We adjust how we present ourselves, and the ways that others receive and respond to our selves also shifts.

In some interactions, ‘who we are’ is completely visible and apparent. In other interactions, our individual personhood is shrouded or subsumed by a persona relevant to that situation but not necessarily expressive of our authentic selves. We are recognized or ignored, understood or misheard, and ‘there’ or ‘not quite fully there’. Some interactions move a task ahead, while others bring out the best in us and challenge us to grow. Still other interactions do both.

You’d think that ‘who you are’ and what it feels like in each of these interactions would depend on which graph you’re working in– you might assume you’d be more ‘real’ in your social graph than in your professional graph, or more real in your interest graph than in your social graph.

But that’s not necessarily so – you’re more ‘real’ in your ‘identity graph’ — when you are engaging in relationships where the person/ality you are called upon to be is the person most like how you actually see yourself. Your identity graph is the relationships where, online, you get to be “you”.

What it’s like in the Identity Graph

Interacting within your identity graph is personally engaging, rewarding, and growth-challenging. At the most basic level, when we are able to interact authentically, we are able to be more resilient, more flexible, more creative, and more growth-oriented. We are operating from our core identities, so our actions are rooted in our indigenous personal characteristics. Our actions flow smoothly, because we don’t have to filter them or crimp them to fit.

You can feel that you’re in your identity graph when a tweet pings your heart, a subject line makes you drool, and the very name on the email makes you look forward to reading it. I bet I’m not the only person who, when my energy flags, turns to scan her feeds and timelines looking for connection opportunities that, once engaged, will help me get my authentic mojo back.

(This is one of the reasons we’re so hooked on email and Twitter– we keep hoping, just hoping, that we can have an authentic interaction or two to keep our days meaningful.)

But you also love working within your identity graph because it’s meaningful to you. The people you are interacting with, whatever it is you are communicating, and the “who that you” all matter. You are contributing the authentic you to the other person(s) in the relationship, to the project you’re working on, or to the interest that you share. The more you are able to be who you are in an interaction, the more you are able to create meaning for yourself as well as for others.

Try this little experiment:

Over the next few days, take note of the online interactions where you feel particularly alive and authentic.

1. Find 4 or 5 people from your work, interest or social graphs who, when you interact with them, call forth your authentic self.
2. Put these people in their own special (secret) Facebook group, Twitter list or column.
3. Then, invite yourself to step up your interaction with these people.
4. Take note of how it feels when you make just a small adjustment to engage in your identity graph more often.

My bet is that you’ll find yourself being drawn to that set of people. And, you’ll find yourself shifting how you present yourself in other interactions too, adding a bit more ‘you’ to these, too. You might also notice that you can expand your identity graph by developing new relationships through and around the people in your identity graph (for example, by interacting directly with friends of friends on Twitter).

When you have a sense of your identity graph, you can use this new awareness to

– Be more you, more often, by spending more time in your identity graph

– Grow the spaces where you get to be authentic. Take advantage of serendipity (like when new people follow you on Twitter). And, apply the same techniques recommended for ‘networking’ to extend your identity graph more deliberately.

– Diagnose your online life –by looking to see where you should or could be more authentic, and developing your identity graph there.

Right now, the social networks and interactions you inhabit may or may not call out the most authentic versions of who you are. But, you can change that by changing your identity graph, to invite your authentic self to flourish.

See also:
Tweet Yourself Like The Person You Want To Be
Is your organization flourishing or withering?

Why the Interest Graph Will Reshape Social Networks (and the Next Generation of Internet Business) by Nathaniel Wittemore on Assetmap

The Future is a graph, by Chris Dixon on MEDIAite
Explaining what the “Social Graph” is to your Executives, by Jeremiah Owyang

Notes:
¹Technically speaking, your ‘social graph’ is all of your social relationships that are captured online. Above, I’m using the term more metaphorically, and more generally, as its use has evolved outside the Technical & empirical community.
² That I know of, no one has defined the professional network as a career graph (or similar) but it makes sense to distinguish this from other graphs.

Images:  The web outside, Advanced Topics in Scrum, Network Weaving Blog

As I was gearing up this morning to look over the past year’s blog posts, I found myself being pulled down by that feeling that I was “late again”.

It seems as though I missed another key seasonal window … while other bloggers spent the time between Cristmas and New Year’s crafting recaps of the past year and making plans for 2011, I was putting snowsuits and mittens in the dryer. Over and over.

As working moms go, I know I’m not alone in this feeling that I’m often behind. But I am starting to see that it’s not the management of work, but rather the management of family, that explains my experience of being behind schedule.

When you are the primary child-caring, working parent (as I am) your first responsibility is to make sure that things flow smoothly for your children. When holidays and ‘breaks’ arrive, these are almost never down time.

Sure, I had my ‘out of office’ auto-reply set so that colleagues wouldn’t expect prompt email replies from me, but it wasn’t because I was vacationing. Instead of being “at work” doing work work, I was at home doing family work — hosting relatives, wrapping gifts, cooking, packing, unpacking, driving, shoveling, and doing all that extra stuff that needs to be done when kids are off school and families are celebrating. I was the person working to make the holidays happen for the rest of my family.

And while I genuinely loved the holidays for the family time that they are, the holidays just aren’t a time off. They aren’t time to catch up on work. They aren’t time to step back. The holidays are a time for me to be fully there, in the family, so that there is a family.

For me, the holiday break actually began yesterday, with my kids’ first day back at school, and my own first day back at work work. What I’ll have is not really a break in my work so much as a comparative reduction in work-life chaos.

I will go to my office, and it will be quiet. I will spread papers out on my desk, and they will not get mixed up with receipts from Amazon. I will organize ideas on my notepads without the second running column of a grocery list. I will look at my computer screen, and it will not show me my progress on Pokemon Platinum.

There will be reflection, there will be a consulting proposal, there will be a fun conference. And there will be peace. Briefly.

I will aim to nurture that peace by hushing the nagging voice in my head that says I’m late, that tells me I’ve missed the window, that suggests that by the second week of January no one will care to look back on 2010.

I aim to nurture that peace by embracing (okay, maybe just adjusting to) the fact that my own work schedule is lagged two weeks behind most everyone else’s for a reason that has nothing to do with my desire to get my work work done. When my break arrives two weeks after most other peoples’, it won’t be because I am late, but rather because I have been there, the whole time, with and for my family.

As I read this over, it sounds a little like an apology, or some kind of over-emotive ratiocination of a variant of procrastination. But it isn’t.

It’s just work and life, and finding ways to understand how they fit me.

See also:
Why Walking The Talk Can Be Harder Than We Plan, by Chrysula Winegar at Work. Life. Balance.
Another World From Which We Came, by Julie Daley at unabashedly female

Images: The ‘Let It Snowman’ recording snowfall in our yard, the Joy-Peace-Love banner my girls made for me this year.

[One of the special joys of blogging and tweeting about progressive movements in organizations and leadership is the relationships we make as we find kindred souls. These kindred souls are often tucked into niches other than our own, but because their approaches share the our fundamental values and because they are working with a shared purpose, we discover them as allies and friends.

Fran Melmed, who writes the blog free-range [communication], is one of those kindred souls. In one of our econversations about work+life+meaning, striving to be authentic to our full selves, and making a difference in the world, Fran offered to put pen to paper to try and capture that acute set of contradictions. I’m delighted to share it with you all as a guest post from Fran.]

The Stress of Not Having It All

Welcome to my confessional: I’m feeling the stress of not having it all.

What should be amusing about this is that I don’t even believe in the notion of having it all. But let me tell you, I’m not amused. I know that I don’t have it. And I want it.

A little background

About two years ago, my kids hit their tweens and were no longer the suction cups they once were. At the same time, I began hitting my stride in my chosen line of work: helping companies better engage their employees and their families in healthier living. Should be cause for celebration, right? Wahoo! My kids are growing up; they don’t need me. Away I go, soaring ever higher into the never-never land of wondrous, satisfying work.

Not so fast. Many moons ago, I made the personal decision to contain my career while I had kids in the house. (It’s based on my emotional baggage, to be sure, so don’t take this as my way of saying my choice is the choice.) When I became a mother while working at Hewitt, I worked part-time and then full-time, but flextime. When I left Hewitt, I started my own company to maintain, if not expand, the work-life balance Hewitt so generously supported.

I’m ready. Depression.*

And it’s wonderful. I have all that I want…except. Except for the ambitious, competitive and adventurous career side of me that aspires to growing my independent consulting firm tenfold. To implanting myself on the speaker circuit. Or taking that tantalizing mega-job at a start-up that’s nailing health engagement. Of my own choosing, these exciting paths beckon but are barred. I can’t have it all.

And so I feel like a part of me is untended and underdeveloped. I feel torn and stressed. And sometimes angry. After speaking with several friends, I realized I’m not alone. Our backgrounds and our choices may differ, as does what we’re missing or pining for. But to a person, we all felt the frustration of not having it all.

A false choice

Generally speaking, the notion of having it all is something women have embraced because for too long we couldn’t even have what we wanted, let alone it all. Perhaps, initially, having it all meant having the right to choose, as would have benefited my mother, who was told by her father that he’d financially support only nursing or education studies—studies suitable for a woman destined for marriage. With time, having it all became the Holy Grail, and just as elusive and mystical.

I think it’s time women recognize that we’re never going to have it all. We’re not going to have it all if we do fewer dishes. We’re not going to have it all when men wipe more babies’ bottoms than we do. And we’re not going to have it all when we storm the C-suite, like they stormed the Bastille, and rout the place.

I think it’s time men recognize that they, too, are never going to have it all. Not when a man pushing a baby in a swing at the neighborhood playground gathers no accolades. Not when more companies “man up” and supply paternity leave, either.

None of us—men or women—are going to have it all. Because we can’t. The entire concept is a farce—a snow job.

Is it the terminology or the elusiveness?

Every one of us has to make decisions that deny us elsewhere. Sometimes we’re forced to. Sometimes we choose to. Every one of us longs to have it all. Most of us know that it’s an impossibility. So, why does having it all have such a stranglehold on our consciousness?

Since communication is what I do, I can’t help but examine whether it’s the terminology. Are we stressed by the choice of words: “have it all”? Does our continued use of the phrase lead us to believe it is, in fact, possible and we’re the only ones who haven’t cracked the code? Or is the allure of having it all so strong that it blinds our reasoning?

And because employee health is what I encourage, I have to ask how not having it all plays into our work performance, our feelings of engagement and our health?

I’m left with more questions than answers.

Notes:
* If you saw The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, this phrase needs no explanation. If not, watch this.
You might also enjoy this post by Fran: no predictions, no resolutions. only courage.
See also: Work-Life Initiatives Are the Foundation of Authentic Organizations

Images: Blue + green from dichohecho , photo11_7A – Green + Blue from dichohecho, Green and blue from Raoul Pop

Isn’t Corporate Work-Life policy great? Here we have a progressive set of programs and strategies that:

• Acknowledge that every employee is more than a worker,
• Recognize that she or he is also a ‘whole person’ with a life that extends outside the workplace, and
• Demonstrate that employees’ full lives should be respected and maybe even facilitated by the organization.

Organizations that promote work-life policies get lots of reputational good will. For potential employees, work-life policies make some organizations ‘better places to work”. Organizations find work-life policies and programs are often correlated with higher employee performance, higher voluntary effort, and stronger financial returns.

Organizational work-life policies seem like a win-win. Organizations demonstrate respect for their employees’ full lives, and employees in turn respond positively towards the organization that is allowing them to manage the full breadth of their life’s activities.

But what if this view of Work-Life policy is more spin than reality? What if corporate work-life policies also work against employees and against employees’ best interests?

Organizations and employees/members are not equal partners in the work-life conversation.

In reality, organizations wield virtually all the power in the relationship. Organizations set the priorities and parameters that control work-life policy. Organizations offer (and take away) programs that are designed more to benefit the organization than to benefit any individual.

Even the way that we talk about work-life policies and initiatives is controlled by work organizations. Work-Life advocates appeal to corporate leaders’ and their profit motives to sell corporations on the idea of work-life policies. Seldom do corporations seek out leaders who are advocating for the importance of whole and meaningful lives, of which work is only a part.

In the conversation about Work-Life, there are three unchallenged assumptions:

1. “Work” always comes first.

Think it’s a coincidence that the phrase is Work-Life? That “work” is something separate from “life”, and that “Life” comes as the afterthought and not the focus?

With corporate work-life policies, the priority is always making sure that work happens.

Here’s a case in point: The recent article on HBR’s blog: Why Companies Should Insist Employees Take Naps.

If encouraging employees to take a half hour nap means they can be two or three times as productive over the subsequent three hours late in the day — and far more emotionally resilient — the value is crystal clear. It’s a win-win and a great investment.

Why are employees so tired that they need naps? What happens with the extra energy recovered by a nap? Better work. At work. For the business. And the health, sanity and life balance of the employee who napped? A nice afterthought.

2. Work-Life problems are the employees’ fault, and it’s the employees’ responsibility to fix them.

When an employee needs a day off to attend to a sick child, or can’t make a last minute weekend work session because she’s signed up for a triathlon, whose fault is it that these ‘life’ issues conflict with work demands?

Not only are these conflicts the individual’s fault, but they are also the individual’s problem to deal with. The individual (not the organization) has to find a way to “manage” these competing demands.

But if you think about it, it’s the organizations that created these issues in the first place. It’s organizations that design their work systems, workplaces, and work expectations that make it next-to-impossible for most new mothers to breast-feed their infants. It’s organizations that set their demands so high that people work 12 hour days without time for some physical exercise.

3. Work-life programs are controlled by the organization.

When it comes to managing the relationship between the demands of the organization and the demands of engaged full human lives, the organization holds all the power. Sure, you can ask for a reduced schedule while your partner goes through chemo, or to schedule your dinner break immediately after sundown during Ramadan, but if you lose you managers good opinion of your job commitment as a result, tough. And, if you lose your job over it, too bad.

Even the most forward thinking companies, work-life pioneers like SAS, can be fairly described as designing work-life policies with the ultimate goal of making work, and not “life” easier.

Let’s Take Charge of the Work-Life Policy Conversation

Once we recognize these three dangerous assumptions built into work-life policy, how can we change the conversation?

Work-Life advocates inside corporations, in academia, and in consulting, need to recognize these three assumptions and resist letting them influence the conversation.

Obviously, I’m not going to recommend that we do away with work-life policy. We need to continue to pressure and persuade organizations to expand their work-life policies and build-in more work-life flexibility. We also want to continue to press for the understanding that work-life flexibility approaches are part of an organization’s overall competitive strategy.

Let’s make sure we don’t fall over backwards thanking organizations for fixing problems that they actually caused. Let’s not be overly grateful when they take small steps forward. Let’s not thank them for being altruistic when so many organizations are really just being instrumental. If their goal really is to make sure that more and better work gets done, fine. Let’s just be clear about that.

And, let’s not treat corporations that introduce work-life policy as though they are ‘the good guys’ for being socially progressive, when they are also the bad guys who have really just begun making appropriate amends.

We need to keep corporate work-life initiatives in perspective– too many are intended and executed to make things “better” and not to make the relationship between employees and organizations profoundly different.

Organizations may control work-life programs & policies, but we all should take charge of the work life/life work conversation.

Our goal should not be to “alleviate” work-life conflict for employees and members so that “everybody can be more productive”. Our goals should go beyond creating the flexibility that allows an employee to take time out to pray or to attend a child’s school play. Our goal should be to redesign organizations that respect and accommodate employees full loves. Only when employees can flourish both inside and outside of work can organizations finally flourish.

Image:
The Humans Must Be Controlled, Some rights reserved by jarl Lyng on Flicr

See Also:
Tyson Foods lacks faith in its own identity.
Work-Life Fit is an Enterprise 2.0 Solution
Work-Life Initiatives Are the Foundation of Authentic Organizations

Working The Good Life: SAS Provides Employees With Generous Work Incentives: CBSnews

Organizations are organic things — they are born, they die, they suffer and they thrive. But very few organizations flourish.

Organizations that flourish are rare creatures.

We find them where business goals are tied to larger purpose, where larger purpose is linked to community needs, and where individuals’ authentic selves are nourished by and engaged in the collective enterprise.

The opposite of a flourishing organization is a withering organization.

Many organizations that we assume are doing well are, in fact, withering.

A majority of organizations are just getting by. They hit their profit or service targets, they hire and retire members, they serve customers, and they do this all adequately. But, in the service of short term goals and/or selfish missions, these organizations are sapping themselves and their stakeholders dry.

These organizations are a net energy drain on their stakeholders. They take rather than contribute to the net value of the systems they are part of.

These organizations are withering.

We fight organizational withering, but we don’t promote organizational flourishing.

Organization leaders, advocates and members spend a lot of energy trying to prevent withering. We try to make organizations ‘better’ by addressing specific dimensions of improvement. We advocate and work towards everything from employee engagement to diversity to sustainability to enterprise 2.0.

The problems addressed by each one of these initiatives are root causes of organizational withering. Fixing, improving, changing and even transforming the organization on any one of these dimensions does make an organization genuinely better.

But ‘better’ isn’t the same as flourishing.

These single-issue change initiatives, and those of us who advocate for them, work as though “better” is our goal, and not as though organizational flourishing is our goal. I’m not sure whether this is because flourishing is just something we don’t let ourselves consider, or whether it’s because we’re so focused and so invested in the one particular issue that calls to us and feels like “our” work.

What Flourishing Requires

To be sure, getting an organization to flourish requires that we work on each of these important change dimensions:

Flourishing requires engagement.
Flourishing requires sustainability.
Flourishing requires leadership.
Flourishing requires diversity.
Flourishing requires employees with full, balanced lives.
Flourishing requires connections to causes that matter.
Flourishing requires products and services that meet real community needs.

Flourishing requires coordination and connection.

Most of all, flourishing requires coordinated, other-aware participation, from all of us who are advocates and agents of organizational change.

The success of the initiatives we each care about depends on us recognizing how that one dimension is connected to and depends on all these other initiatives. And, organizational flourishing requires that we deal with each of these initiatives in their relationships with other initiatives.

Each of us who advocates some dimension of organizational change needs to recognize, acknowledge, support and link to the organizational change efforts on other dimensions. We need to be aware of other initiatives, and coordinate our change efforts to include the initiatives important to others.

Flourishing requires a multi-pronged, networked change strategy.

To get to flourishing, we don’t have to abandon our commitment to a particular change initiative– we simply need to adjust how we approach our own initiative.

Oh, and think bigger too.

I realize that this is what some might call a tall order — too complicated, too complex, too ambitious. You’re right, it is complicated, complex and ambitious.

But I don’t really see a sensible alternative. I don’t want to rearrange deckchairs on a sinking ship, or tie up the weakening branches of a withering vine.

More specifically,

• I don’t want to contribute my energy to improving the environmental sustainability of an organization that is exploiting its workforce.
• I don’t want to improve the work-life strategy of any corporation that is taking advantage of the American financial system.
• I don’t want to improve the social learning at an organization that makes fun of LGBTx consumers.
• I don’t want to develop leaders in organizations that are fundamentally selfish.

Do you?

I didn’t think so.

What I do want to do, and what I want you to do with me, is to focus on flourishing.

Our goal should be helping organizations to flourish.

Our strategy should embrace every progressive organizational initiative and work to leverage the connections between them.

Our tactics should center on the initiatives that are dearest to us and where we can make a unique contribution, but always moving to connect with other advocates and ally our initiatives with theirs.

Are we together on this?

Images from Flicker:

Vine on blue from tanakawho
Funny from tanakawho

HT to Akhila Kolisetti (@akhilak, blog: Justice For All) for recommending Paul Rogat Loeb’s book “Soul of a Citizen: Living with conviction in challenging times.” page 283.

See Also:
A Benevolent Perfect Storm for Progressive Organizational Movements
Socialism, Capitalism, 5 Points of Ignorance, and Progressive Organizational Movements