In my other article about the Idea Economy that is coming there was an important part missing: What is the difference between a knowledge economy professional and an idea economy professional.
@wealthyeasily picked up on that " I don't really see the difference between an adaptable knowledge worker and an "idea economy" worker. Or is it just that nowadays everyone already talks about adaptability and that being the most important thing and that people just didn't talk about that earlier. "
And that is a fair remark, the lines are blurred.
Depending on what you are doing, and which industry you are in, already the tendencies are transforming jobs and pushing people more and more towards becoming Idea Economy professionals.
With this article I'd like to explore some of the differences.
Is your job about following formulas or having new ideas?
As a first pass (I expect I will need other articles to explore this) I think it is useful to make the distinction if your job is about following the same formula or is it about thinking up new ways to solve problems.
Formulas: Scientific management and compliance
Much of education and working in big corporations is about compliance. Why is that?
Most of this started with a guy called Frederick Winslow Taylor who came up with the idea of scientific management.
Although much admired, this theory has a lot of holes in it.
Regardless, it became the bedrock of how most companies are managed! It is difficult to underestimate how much this theory has influenced our concept of how businesses are supposed to be run.
In essence, it treated the organisation and the people in it as one big machine.
To make it work, you make sure you design the components for their function and you make sure that they meet "specifications". If they don't you replace components (humans) with others that do meet the "specification".
The logical conclusion from this kind of worldview is that if everyone follows "the formula" or process, things will work fine.
It presupposes though that all conditions remain the same, and that the "designer" of all this is clever enough to make the perfect organisation and production process.
It also completely disregards human psychology in just about all aspects that matters and tries to brute force people into compliance with the formula. It also kind of treats people as machines and pays little attention to people who do the actual work.
If the formula did not work and there is a problem with production, then probably peoples behaviour was not controlled enough, so more rules and regulations were created to make sure "people do what they are supposed to do"
When removed from the factory floor, this translates to bureaucracy
bureaucracy ˌbjʊ(ə)ˈrɒkrəsi/ noun
- excessively complicated administrative procedure.
"the unnecessary bureaucracy in local government"
synonyms: red tape, rules and regulations, etiquette, protocol, officialdom, (unnecessary) paperwork; humorous bumbledom
"the unnecessary bureaucracy in local government"
There is an inherent arrogance in this approach of course. It assumes you can from a top down level design the perfect system and then make everyone conform to that.
Of course this works for a while, but these kinds of organisations simply refuse to accept the possibility that the formula is outdated and the basic assumptions need to be looked at.
Most people's job today is about following a formula, sure that formula is tweaked once in a while but few organisations are willing to look at the basic assumptions of their business process and business model and aren't willing to change their business model. The classic example is Kodak, which invented the very thing that eventually put them out of business.
Education: About producing compliant workers mostly
Check out Pink Floyd's Another brick in the wall, says it all really:
Education, despite all the lofty aspirations, was mostly designed to meet the demands of the economy, what we got was:
- A system that applied mass production principles to people: bringing everybody up to "standard" as if they are widgets turned out by a factory.
- A system that inherently was organised to prepare people to work on factory floors, teaching obedience and indirectly the norms and regulations that go with factory life: Everything is timed, the bell rules everyone. you should obey your teachers or you get "punished".
- The teacher "i.e. management" knows best, challenging their doctrine is not welcome (or you get invited to talk to the principal"
- Quality control, you must meet specifications through tests or you are "rejected" as being without value.
- topics and subjects taught in school are still about what is deemed to be "useful" to function in the industrial economy. Maths and science, some language skills,
School actually teaches you surprising little about what you need to function as a human in society: Personal finance, dangers of "investing", how to handle money, food knowledge and its impact on health, basic psychology and philosophy, human relationships and knowledge about your own cognitive processes and biases, creative problem-solving, how to deal with technology, how to think about learning and unlearning, how to learn much faster.
As a result most high school graduates leave school dangerously naive about life. Studies have shown actually 95% percent of "knowledge" taught in school is forgotten (maybe that's for the best, it is mostly obsolete anyway)
The underlying thinking here is that "everything will be all right if workers just do what they are told": that is what compliance is about.
Who tells them ? "Management".
This implies that "management" knows best how to design the process and if something goes wrong, it is because people did not do what they are told.
It assumes that it is possible to design the "ideal process" in advance and it treats people a s interchangeable Workforce. Programmable machines that you tell what to do. No original thought or input is either required or even wanted from the "worker".
I'm sure you see some problems with this attitude.
Things have moved on:
Here is James Altucher's take on it:
Tony Wagner is a guy who has been looking into this from the education side:
From this post http://www.tonywagner.com/244he relates an interview where he asks someone from a big company what they are looking for today when hiring new people
“First and foremost, I look for someone who asks good questions,” Parker responded. “We can teach them the technical stuff, but we can’t teach them how to ask good questions—how to think.”
“What other skills are you looking for?” I asked, expecting that he’d jump quickly to content expertise.
“I want people who can engage in good discussion—who can look me in the eye and have a give and take. All of our work is done in teams. You have to know how to work well with others. But you also have to know how to engage customers—to find out what their needs are. If you can’t engage others, then you won’t learn what you need to know.”
Does that sound like a person coming from the current education system? It would probably not have been on purpose...
Here are skills Tony Wagner has Identified that are currently in demand:
http://www.tonywagner.com/7-survival-skills
How are you doing with these survival skills?
Does your current job require you to apply these skills? Or are you forced to follow formulas and be obedient?
This post is part of my JULY EXPERIMENT: I share ALL SBD's earned from this post with:
1 quality commenter
1 Re-steemer (that gives me a good reason why they are re-steeming)
What else am I missing with this article, agree? Don’t agree?
I would love to have your comment, maybe you can win some decent money. Anything thought provoking is great.
Disagree, fantastic! Let me know! Have a question? Even better, a great question is sometimes better than a page long comment!
I like to think I'm an idea person that creates formulas :)
Good point, I think many people will still have job to some extent that follows formulas, but the formulas will keep changing. The old ones probably stop working.
I am more of an idea person. But as a mom, I have had to work into the formula role. That is SO hard! It is teaching me the need for both. At the same time. Ideas need a formula. Ideas are a big picture. Formula means down in the weeds. The trenches. The doer, not the thinker. Doing work, the formula, is HARD work. But what would we DO or whose ideas would even get to blueprinting unless there were IDEAS?!
I think there is a spectrum, this article was a first attempt of course. I think the main thing from this formula/idea distinction is that the Tayloristic view of the world where people are just cogs in a big machine and need to do what they are told is not working anymore.
Any company which does not allow their workers to contribute and redesign their work processes and environment to the new realities of the economy is at a higher risk to go extinct.
Of course not all workers will have great ideas, but as the Toyota production system and its enormous success made clear, if you allow the people to do the work to come up with improvements you can make your entire company work a lot better.
Nice article. 🙃
Thanks! How do you see your own job?
The issue with the formula/process-based mindset that is prevalent in many traditional companies is that it places a high value on 'experience from seniors'...
In many cases, the seniors, while more experienced, are not all-knowing and it is simply impossible for them to come up with the best solution when they are not constantly on the ground. They tend to resort to a general list of tried-and-tested practices that often can be greatly improved upon (just ask the minions on the ground level for advice lol). The arrogance which comes with their position may also hamper their desire to explore shifts in different factions and lead the team to react accordingly..
In the few cases that experience is enough to ensure a high-performing team below, there is always the danger (and increasingly so) that this experience will become obsolete as new societal, industrial, technological advances arise.
So I would think, for a company to thrive in the idea economy, as flat a hierarchical structure as possible is best, and employees must be empowered. But if you are only a small or medium-sized business, how do you draw the line between empowerment and controlling potentially negative impacts of rash-decision-making or decisions made with the wrong motive or end goal in mind (i.e. empowered employees who abuse or play the system)?
I have been thinking about this, I think in a big part the reliance on tried-and-true formulas is about risk management. The assumption being that what worked before must work again right?
But in a rapidly changing world, if you don't check your basic assumptions of your formulas, you might face some nasty surprises.
The game has changed, what is perceived as low risk actually has a higher and higher risk of failure. And inversely things that seemed very risky before might pay off.
When talking about experience and seniority, I like the definition of experience as being the sum of the mistakes you made.
One assumes that a senior person in the company has made or seen most mistakes made and that makes him/her less likely to repeat it. So that seems like a person worth contracting because they represent a perceived lesser risk of screwing up (of course other factors play too)
In this day and age, with increased complexity, there are ever more ways of screwing up...
What is needed is constant experimentation, which is just as much about learning what doesn't work as finding out what does work. The point of the experiments is that you do it in a way that if it goes wrong, the losses are acceptable.
Companies that are too risk averse however don't allow this experimentation, hence the experience pool remains static.
By not experimenting they are massively increasing risk of screwing up something important because they haven't learned enough quickly enough.
This means that the biggest organisations which are the most rigid actually are the most vulnerable. The average time a company stays in the S&P500 for instance has gone down to 14 years, in company lifetimes that is a blink of an eye.
I love how your article articulates the importance of having an idea. However, a major flaw of the idea economy lies with execution. Everybody can have an idea: the real difficulty comes when you are implementing the idea and face funding, technical, and regulation issues. By the time, you resolve all the small issues, you are already burned out and lose focus on your idea. I would even go further and argue that not everybody can thrive in the idea economy since it requires a certain personality type (ie. entrepreneurial) to drive changes in the status quo.
Now, I'm going to resteem this article simply because I feel that there tons of people who find themselves unable to fit in the "knowledge" based economy.
There's nothing with not knowing anything. All you need is an idea!
James Altucher explains this @1:04 in the second video.
He views ideas as a subset of execution. If you are executing something new, by definition there are no formulas yet, so you have to create your own solutions. Sure there are many services, software etc., suppliers. And you are absolutely right, there are many obstacles to execute the idea.
A list of 10 ideas on a piece of paper indeed has little value until it is executed.
But I agree this needs further exploration!
I probably need to read this again:
https://sivers.org/multiply Derek Sivers on how ideas are a multiplier of execution.
Great point @dali.soh!
Aside from just doing it, there are quite a few books that can help with execution too.
Poke The Box (Seth Godin), Do The Work/War of Art and Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield, and Action! by Robert Ringer are all good reads.
Another excellent article!
I can't remember if I asked you this before or not...
Have you read End Of Jobs by Taylor Pearson, and/or Deep Work by Cal Newport?
Those 2 books also fit nicely with the idea economy concept too.
Deep Work to a lesser extent, but some of the concepts there could be put to use in an idea economy also.
P.S. I started writing a response to your 4HWW post and end up with an absolute monster, so I'll be fleshing that out and turning it into a seperate post sometime soon.
End of jobs has been referenced in other stuff I read, need to read it thoroughly though. Deep work really need to read. I find that I have lost somewhat the ability to do deep work.
Many factors of course, but digital attention robbing technology definitely has an impact...
I'd suggest giving it a read for sure, was a pretty quick book to get through if I remember rightly.
Deep Work had one really great concept in it which I remember well, the "eudaimonia machine" which was having a room that is almost completely isolated, sound proofed etc and only contained what you need to work with inside. Far more "extreme" then just having a seperate office.
Hehe I wish. I find noise canceling headsets do help a lot!
great to hear I sparked a post for you! Please put a link here so we don't miss it!
Will do! It's getting pretty long, so might be posted for a while yet haha.
I'd say don't get too much in your own way. At some point good enough is good enough and you should publish! Too much polishing can lead to not publishing sometimes...
I think it just needs trimming a little bit.
I want to make sure my point comes across well without it sounding like a rant or rambling haha.
That's true, check out this free course, it has been an eye opener for me for editing:
https://www.udemy.com/secret-sauce-of-great-writing/
Cool! Will have a look at that for sure.
The more of your posts I read the more I think the Finnish education system is superior :D
"School actually teaches you surprising little about what you need to function as a human in society: Personal finance, dangers of "investing", how to handle money, food knowledge and its impact on health, basic psychology and philosophy, human relationships and knowledge about your own cognitive processes and biases, creative problem-solving, how to deal with technology, how to think about learning and unlearning, how to learn much faster."
The Finnish upper-secondary has health education, psychology (involving cognitive psychology and biases) and philosophy. Unfortunately personal finance is not taught or is taught very poorly. Also not everyone goes to upper-secondary, it is for those who want to learn to learn in higher education. Additionally you learn general knowledge on just about everything you need.
I'm sure I wrote an published a better comment before, but somehow steemit never registered it. I'm not going to write everything again, but thought this would be interesting for you to know, since I'm all the time for education, so you might better understand from where I'm coming from with my view.
The education wonks do seem to hold up the Finnish system as an example. I am not so sure, not that it is not good. The whole concept of school as we understand it needs to be thoroughly rebuilt from the ground up. The basic assumptions that create its very structure are still way too industrialistic. Merely tweaking the curriculum is not going to "solve" education. Ricardo Semler is great at examining fundamental assumptions:
In my earlier comment (which did not go through) I noted that I think there is a lot to better in the system, but I think many countries could learn from some of the things in the Finnish system if these things are special.
Also, the thing I hate most about the school system is grades. Grades are the ultimate motivation killer. They lead your attention to something useless, instead of the learning itself. In Finland they luckily only start that non-sense on the fourth grade, and then eventually increase it. Before that there are no grades you need to worry about.
If you think about it, the concept of grades is specifically insidious: It is a very unidimensional measurement of the value of students, as if you are doing quality control on products. The insidious part is that if you don't meet "the standard" you are discarded as if you have no value... Many people that have wonderful talents are discarded by this system because it is inept to develop anything but the standard curriculum, anybody that does not fit is simply shunted aside.
Ironically many creative people who don't do well in standardized schooling are the ones who will be better placed in the idea economy than the obedient A+ students...
I think this sums it up:
I can follow formulas well enough, but because I always have this ADD-like personality, I usually find myself wondering away into bigger dreams, therefore I usually end up having to create my own formulas.
I think if you can harness your ADD and build systems around it that make use of your strong points instead of forcing yourself to do routine stuff you can do well.
I think the whole concept of ADHD ADD is blown out of proportion, first of all, kids in school who aren't fascinated with the curriculum and fidget a bit (go figure they are kids) are quickly labelled as "difficult" and are almost forced to take methamphetamines (that is basically what ADHD medication is). Sounds pretty ironic to me given the whole war on drugs thing...
Second, there is definitely a attention problem that is starting to grow with everybody, not in a small part due to abuse of technology. I think this is going to be the next big health crisis, on par with tobacco.
Young children's brains who are abusing technology (or rather whose parents are technology to keep them quiet), literally have different brain development.
Adults, more and more have difficulty focussing on tasks, and are routinely distracted at a very high cognitive cost.
Day dreaming etc I think is not a problem, the big problem is if you only daydream and never take steps to realize any of your dreams...
You are right. My personal take on ADD is that it's not exactly a bad thing. I believe it is an actual asset that if nurtured and tutored correctly, can lead to create another Einstein type.
Thanks! Well appreciated! How do you find does this relate to your own experiences?