Hack:
De-appliancize your Employees

This hack was inspired by the great book by Jonathan Zittrain "The future of the Internet" but is not limited to Internet businesses.

 

Zittrain describe the PC and the Internet as "generative" for their characteristic of having been designed to allow new uses, as opposed to appliances which have a very limited and specialized scope. Appliances are designed to give peace of mind to the user, whereas generative systems are designed to allow possibilities.

 

A key for adaptability and innovation in companies is the ability to be generative, and this can be achieved with a generative workforce.

 

But companies treat people as appliances at all levels when they recruit against a specific job description, and in doing so they dramatically limit the generaivitiy - i.e. the capacity to be innovative - of the company itself.

 

Even worse, generative people do not fit well in the "appliancized" job descriptions and are not interested in working for an appliancized company them selves.

 

Companies embracing adaptability and innovation must find ways to become attractive also for generative people, and to do so they must start speaking the generative language, which is made of uncertainty, trial-and-error, experimentation, rather than control and compliance.

 

A very quick list of possible hacks, along the 5 characteristics of a generative system:

 

Leverage - the company has to be able to recognize the employees resources and capabilities and help leverage them. "What extra-work competencies do you have that could be useful for our organization?"

Adaptability - employees can take short periods in different departments, to stimulate exchange and above all develop their ability to adapt to different challenges.

Accessibility make it easy for employees to think and propose experiments for innovation. "The innovation experiments letterbox and quarterly contest"

Ease of mastery - leave employees sufficient scope to leverage their assets and provide them the tools to implement innovation experiments "The corporate FabLab for the innovation experiments"

Transferability - create a knowledge base of lessons learned from failure and from the FabLab experiments that is shared across the organization. 

 

More on this in my post Appliancized Workforces No More.