Unjobbing?

This December will be the 10th anniversary of my "Unjobbed" life. "Unjobbed"? I have been talking to Chris Corrigan about "Unschooling" what he means by that is not that children should not become educated but that school is not the best place or process.

I am beginning to see that the same is true about paid work. We all need it but to perform work within the structure of a "Job" is an experience that shrinks us just as school does and for the same reasons.

What is "bad" about schools is that their priority is control. What is bad about most work places that are conventionally structured is that they too are about control (see the extension for a snip) In this type of control organization, we as people get lost. It is not just the peons either. I am amazed at how little control any member has even CEO's. I only have one client that really can get things done and he owns the company.

I have noted a big trend. Most of my children's friends cannot stay in the conventional workforce. They try for a while but have to get out or are pushed out. They don't fit. Many middle aged men (hi guys!) that I have met in the last few years are the same. Many of us have ben successful in the old world but we cannot go back. The trouble is that there is not a good place for any of us to make the essential money.

Most of us are under employed and under compensated for what we do. So what can we do?

I tend to look back into history for guidance in the future. Not at single events but for patterns. This feels like the end of the Middle Ages to me when the "Job" system of liegedom based on land was broken for a new system based on talent and cash. If you think a bit, a feudal organization feels a lot like a modern organization. The binding issues are property and obedience. How will this change? Well in the Middle ages, there was a demographic earthquake in the Black Death that caused an extreme shortage of skills. Over 25% of Europe died in 5 years. Well folks we have our own version happening with our low birthrate and the boomers retiring.

The slides are thumbnails - please click for scale

This slide shows how the young and the old cross over in 2010. The next slide shows the impact on the labour force.

These are PEI figures but they are replicated throughout not only the rest of Canada but also the developed world. The power will shift decisively from capital to labour as it did in the Middle Ages. The immediate problem is what do we old farts and the young turks do as we wait for this event to become real? Frankly I don't know but suggest that if we talked more amongst each other along these lines we might find out.

Culture – the challenge

“Know thyself”

  Only revolutionaries, saints and fools operate easily outside their own self-interest. Our operational culture has a series of rules, incentives and punishments that reinforce the old metaphor. It is not easy for anyone inside a traditional organization to make the changes to the new metaphor as all these forces will come into play against them. It is helpful to look at the power of these forces with fresh eyes. Only when we can see them clearly, can we see the value of building new organizations outside the power of the old.

All the rules of the old culture are based on the assumptions that the most important activity is control. The extension of this assumption is that if only we tried hard enough, we could control everything. This illusion seemed to work when we did not operate in a global society. But when we began to operate in a global economy, the complexity of controlling everything has overwhelmed us. As we talk about being more responsive, more customer-focused and more flexible, let’s look at the real rules that govern most of our organizations. They work against these objectives.

The budget process is the most important process in the traditional organization. Budgets, not value, determine who has the power. Controlling large budgets, large numbers of people and large physical plant is what gives you power. At a time when the jargon is all about being close to the customer, the traditional reward system values being a bureaucrat. The further you are away from the customer, the more powerful you become. Career success is determined by obtaining and using good bureaucratic skills. The result is a managerial emphasis and a bias against creativity.

The management process is hierarchical with all the key decisions taking place at the centre. Important decisions therefore take a very long time and are based on a narrow slice of information that has been processed by the supporting staff. The feedback response is therefore very poor. This creates the risk that the organization will not see important issues until it is too late to cope without drastic measures.  Many of the costs and pain felt in organizations today are as a result of the endless silver bullets and reorganizations which are a sign of acting too late and with too big a response.

Executives, managers and workers are categorized in jobs that are defined by a set of tasks. The money we earn is mainly related to the job and not to the value that we create or the outcomes that we achieve. The risk to the organization is that its employees are not focused on the key outcomes. The risk to the employees is that they are not connected to their innate capability. Much of the internal alienation arises from the fact that employees are disconnected by the concept of the job from the true purpose of the enterprise and from their own needs and capabilities.

The external stakeholders, be they investors, bankers or governments, view the enterprise through only one aspect of a balance sheet, financial capital. As the bigger is better approach has taken hold, the financial balance sheet has grown geometrically thus driving up the hurdle rate for earning an economic return. The purpose of the organization tends to become obscured as the pressure to meet the investment hurdle increases. So schools and hospitals are increasingly evaluated in terms of their budgetary impact rather than on any criteria of whether they are educating our children well or not. Businesses cannot afford to miss an operational beat because they have to run their system at full tilt all the time to meet the returns on a large capital structure. Executives are being measured quarter by quarter rather than being given a more appropriate time horizon.

The purpose of executive management is to concentrate the wealth created by the organization at the centre. This wealth is largely seen as being financial. Poor management is often hidden by exploiting the true components of wealth creation the human, customer, social and natural capital on which the enterprise truly depends. This is not because the executives are bad people. It is because they are responding to the prevailing performance criterion, which is made up of a series of abstract financial ratios.

I believe that the power of the old culture makes it almost impossible to change our organizations from within. The reasons for this failure are not lack of effort or lack of vision but the nature of the cultural reaction to the new. The rules of the old culture operate like an immune system seeking out new and dangerous ideas that threaten the old way of doing things.

Comments

[Harold]

I'm sure that many of us who are reading this agree with your assessment of the situation. It will take a catastrophe to create lasting change. So what do we do until 2010? I guess that we keep the conversations going, and try to make small changes with the early adopters. Exciting at times, slow moving at times; but like you, going back to a "job" (is that a four letter word?) seems to be less of an option every day.

Thanks for your insights Rob.

[Peter Caputa]

Rob..This is an amazing piece! I see that you are reading or have read the Innovator's Dilemma. And from what you are writing, I am guessing that you are already reading the Innovator's Solution. I am adding the rest of your reading material in your sidebar that I haven't already read, to my Amazon wishlist.

You speak my mind!

The biggest impediment, I think, to people proactively leaving a J.O.B is the risk and the lack of savings or personal cash flow.

If power shifts to the labor force, based on a lack of workers, it may be more likely that companies figure out monetary rewards that keep 'employees' (eg, ownership, larger bonuses, higher salaries).

Also, the rate at which developing countries can absorb "labor" may exceed the loss of available labor in the US/Europe.

I'd love to see some ethnographic research regarding your thoughts about self employment and what factors could encourage more people to make the leap.

Disruptive Innovation occurrs in the world of the small business. That is not refutable. More small businesses, therefore, means more innovation, which means more new growth.

I am all for a catastrophy that causes people to go out on their own. Although, I wouldn't call it a catastrophy!

[Robert Paterson]

Hi Peter
Yes I have read both ID and IS - great books!

I also doubt that big business will reform. You may enjoy Howard Schell's great new book - The Unconquerable World. Here he sees that power has changed. In the 20th century it was a shift in values Gandhi, Mandela, Havel, Solidarity etc that built an alternative to the regime.

I am beginning to think that this may be the great work - to build the alternatives rather than to try and reform the existing system. Imagine trying to reform schools! But think how much fun it would be to offer an alternative? Would they be large? Would they be local? same with food etc

Thanks for visiting

[Seb]

"what do we old farts and the young turks do as we wait for this event to become real?"

I think you've done the right thing by moving to a place where the crash is going to happen earlier but where at least some people are attached enough to stay there nevertheless.

We could probably precipitate the shift by relying as little as possible on the control-based systems. This will cut their oxygen supply and make more people unjobbed faster. When the majority is unjobbed, things will start to get really fun.

Self-reliance is easier said than done, though. But it's a gratifying enterprise.

[LionKimbro]

You may want to read about: http://communitywiki.org/HiveAllocation

HiveAllocation would be one tool in the back of tricks that large groups of people can use to allocate resources amongst themselves.

[Robert Paterson]

There is a pony in there somewhere!

[Z]

unschooling links, info, resources, topics, contacts, discussions

http://geocities.com/moonwindstarsky/unschooling

http://geocities.com/moonwindstarsky/unschoolingbooks

http://geocities.com/moonwindstarsky/lifestyle

http://geocities.com/moonwindstarsky

unjobbing

http://geocities.com/moonwindstarsky/programs

http://geocities.com/moonwidnstarsky/purposebooks