"Organisations are generally the place we manifest our potential and action in the world. With roughly 80,000 hours spent in work and a critically challenged planet with 7.7 billion people, we have to re-think the way we think about work.
A new generation is rising up, looking for work that has meaning, purpose, flexibility and agency. An existing workforce is living and working amidst uncertainty and increasing levels of change. The future is de-centralised — and yet we need to stick together more than ever before.
In our technological and networked future, instead of fearing our fate, let’s ask ourselves: What are the things that make it worth being a human for the next 100 years? How can we design organisations that enable humans to thrive, and continue to attract the best talent to have a real and positive impact on the world?
We’re hearing about smart contracts, collective intelligence, self-driving cars and robotic warehouses. As we automate more of what we do, and gain access to tools that unlock new ways of organising, where does this leave the humans?"
This talk was given on the 26th March 2019 for the Project Connect Keynote (https://the-project.co.nz/home#about).
The WINTalk Project Connect Event Series is a collaboration between AUT (Auckland University of Technology), Wynyard Innovation Neighbourhood and the US Embassy of New Zealand, bringing together the respective successes of AUT’s Project Connect event programme and Wynyard Innovation Neighbourhood’s WINTalk events.
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You don’t have to wait for huge structural changes to started horizontal culture
Started journey, living the future of work
Running ventures that created learning labs for kids and then adults
Bringing everything I’ve learned back to organisations
What I hear my generation say:
Agency
Flexibility
Autonomy
Opportunities for learning
Space to step into leadership
Entrepreneurial opportunities
Purpose and mission
Meaningful projects across disciplines
But also: infrastructure being built - digital nomads, gig economy, tech enabling freelance and entrepreneur
How to attract and retain millennial talent?
The smart millenials are all working for somebody else... usually themselves.
I look out at the workplace and I see stress, layoffs, longer hours, work-family conflict, enormous amounts of economic insecurity. I see a workplace that has become shockingly inhumane.
Seven percent of people in one survey were hospitalized — hospitalized! — because of workplace stress
50% had missed time at work because of stress. People are quitting their jobs because of stress.
The business costs are enormous.
The major sources of psychological stress at work are connected to hierarchical culture: poor relationship with one’s superior, lack of recognition, low participation in decision-making and governance.
Organisations are struggling to attract and retain talent.
Talented individuals leave to seek out better learning and development opportunities.
We have grown up in a vertical culture and we can’t even see it.
You don’t have to wait for huge structural changes to started horizontal culture
It’s going to take practice, and it’s going to take all of us
Learning practices embedded in work - sense-making, action, reflection
Can we do these in a group?
Can we make time after projects to reflect on how they went? Can we introduce feedback practices, and spend the end of a weekly meeting giving feedback?
Can we get more intentional about our learning, and audit our own interest and skill level in different skills?
Haier group has been described as the poster child of the platform organization transformation for several years now.
It’s a networked model of self-managed Micro-Enterprises.
“Embarking in a great unbundling (and re-bundling) process: the transformation is based on acknowledging that units, teams and, employees, are asked to become entrepreneurial, develop an internal locus of control. A true employee actualization — according to these companies — can only come through the expression of the self, through responsibility and autonomy.”
Employees are entitled to organically create micro-enterprises to exploit opportunities that they see, how they can put their skin-in-the-game by investing, autonomously managing budgets and hiring processes, and team compensation.
Micro enterprises
Micro entrepreneurs
Teams handle own budgets and profits and losses
Also compensation system - employees get paid ‘by the customers’ - essentially in accordance with the value they create
80,000 employees
They created market forces inside the firm
Potential for Haier micro enterprises to become independent start ups, with a link to Haier
Open innovation principles keep everyone aligned
What if they became our training grounds to become more engaged, creative, collaborative and capable?