CCK08: Two Conversations with Gen Millennium, and Some Questions on Learning and Knowledge Failures

More recently I had a conversation, in conjunction with my presentation From Content to Context and From Collection to Connection, with another group of Gen Millennials about how they were coping with the work world. I had once heard the potential battle for freedom (by Gen Millennium) against security (by restrictive IT departments) described as “nothing short of a war of wills”. Failure to accommodate the social tools that these young people had become accustomed to using was inviting them to either leave (to work for an organization that would) or find workarounds that would pose even greater information risks to the company, I had been told.

Not so, said this group. They weren’t concerned about having workplace access to information they might find useful. They didn’t want to access Facebook pages, blogs, or YouTube videos. They had no use whatever for the corporate portals, Intranets or groupware (SharePoint, QuickPlace etc.) They didn’t use e-mail unless they had no choice.

They told me that they share information through conversations: face to face, by telephone, IM, Skype, screen-sharing and other real-time tools. They share this information with their own social networks, which transcend organizational boundaries. They get better, faster answers this way than from looking at someone else’s “dead” content — any content. They could do most or all of this with their cell-phones, so they didn’t particularly care what restrictions the corporate security czars put on content access.

In some respects this is good news. The great energy and expense that most large organizations invest in content capture, collection, dissemination and security can, for the most part, be saved, and most of this infrastructure abandoned as irrelevant, useless.

But in other respects this is terrible news. Aside from the wasted content effort, this means that most young people will learn from peers, not from mentors. How much of what senior people know will never be learned by younger workers, simply because the networks of trust necessary for valuable conversations will not have been forged (and given that Gen Millennium workers are expected to change jobs on average every four years, might never be forged)? If, as JP Rangaswami said, “More and more, knowledge management is going to be about reducing the cost of, and simplifying the process for, letting someone watch what you do. Nonintrusively. Time-shifted. Place-shifted. Searchable. Archivable. Retrievable.”, then how are modern organizations going to enable this learning-by-observation to happen?

What’s more, the major incidents of the last decade, from Enron, 9/11 and the Katrina response, to climate change and the latest financial market meltdown, are all ultimately knowledge management failures — problems that arose because critical knowledge transfer never took place. The “cost of not knowing” is in the trillions, perhaps quadrillions of dollars. What is it going to take before we realize that this cost of not knowing, externalized to the taxpayer, struggling nations and future generations though it may be, is simply too high, and start to invest again in people and learning processes that will prevent the next colossal knowledge failure from damaging our weakened society further, maybe even irreparably?