It's not just us getting hit by the shifts

Now many of you know that I believe that the cultural, social and technological shifts that are happening in the world are the most pressing issues facing the church.  We'll of course it is not just us.  Thanks to Troy Bronsik for pointing me to this great article, Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: A Generational War, on how the generations are finding tension in the technological world as the Millennials moves into places of power.

Venkat using the metaphor of "war" to express what is happening between the movements of Boomers, X'ers and Millennials in the technological communities of "Knowledge Management" folks and those engaged in "Social Media."  First, he posits the following traits from Generation Blend and then He then goes on to explain how these realities, if you buy them, may go on to effect the future.

1. Gen X is Currently Neutral: Crucially — and this is why I am a neutral — neither movement reflects or overtly conflicts with, the values of Gen X (born: 1963 - 1980). I was born in 1974, which should explain why I claim neutral status. This neutrality of Gen X is crucial: they were the foot-soldiers of the top-down KM movement, and are today the leaders and mentors of the bottom-up SM movement, as they move into middle and senior management. Neither set of ideas is due to X’ers in any significant degree. Due to its small size (in the US, there are 78 million Boomers, about 51 million Gen X’ers and about 80 million Millenials) and its fundamentally pragmatic, as opposed to visionary/world-changing mindset, Gen X is the crucial swing vote in this culture war — we don’t have either the personalities or the numbers to dictate how the world should be run, but we are smart enough and numerous enough to make a difference by picking a side. So far, we’ve been neutral. Which way we eventually swing will be the most important element of this war.
2. KM is about ideology, SM is about the fun of building: Salkowitz notes that the Millenials are the first generation since the “Greatest” (WW II veterans, born 1901 - 25) generation that likes to build (social institutions that is). Building for the sheer pleasure of building, and because the possibilities exist. Nothing describes the motivation behind the creation of Facebook better than “because it was possible.” KM on the other hand, arose from a generation that cut its teeth on disestablishmentarianism. The Boomers objected to the world built by the “Greatests” and their kids the “Silents,” (b. 1925 - 45) on moral grounds, and tried to reinvent the world. So they reluctantly “sold out,” went all establishment, and when they finally got those Vice-President titles and a chance to set the agenda, they revived the ideology of their counter-cultural youth and made it corporate policy. KM came from that ethos, and is still more idea than reality. SM, on the other hand, is mostly cool stuff without any grand ideological design behind it (which explains in part why it is so hard to define).
3. The Boomers don’t really get or like engineering and organizational complexity: This is a provocative statement, to be sure, but I stand by it. Yes, some of the most brilliant conceptual advances in information technology came from Boomers. They built the early prototypes behind most of the computing infrastructure of the world (the PARC personal computing pioneers were Boomers for instance). But it was Gen X that actually scaled-up and built-out the complex production-standard IT infrastructure of the world (and thereby learned about complexity by creating it). The Millenials learned to understand complexity even better than us X’ers, by being born into it. By contrast, not only do Boomers not get complexity, they are suspicious of it, thanks to their early cultural training which deifies simplicity. The result of this difference is that Boomer management models rely too much on simplistic ideological-vision-driven ideas. Consider, for instance, the classic Boomer idea of creating “communities of practice” with defined “Charters” and devoted to identifying “Best Practices.” No Gen X’er or Millenial would dare to reduce the complexity of real-world social engineering to a fixed “charter” or presume to nominate any work process as “best.” At best, X’ers and Millenials might create the first iteration target of a Scrum-style sprint and let the charter just evolve. I suspect, as Gen X’ers and Millennial take over, that the idea of vision and mission statements will be quietly retired in favor of more dynamic corporate navigation constructs.
4. The Millennials don’t really try to understand the world: If us X’ers share with the Millenials an appreciation for complexity that the Boomers lack, we share with the Boomers a taste for big-picture synthesis that simply doesn’t seem to attract the Millenials (perhaps they are just too young at the moment). This is a subtle point, so let me try to explain it. The Boomers liked the idea of world views, and tried to frame both what they were for, as well as what they were against (think Star Wars) in monolithic ways. Mental models of the world that a single person could get. James Michener’s The Drifters represents one articulation of such a world view.  Here’s the thing: Millenials fundamentally cannot think this way because of the deeply collaborative nature of their cultural DNA. They seem happy understanding and working with their piece of the puzzle, trusting that the larger body politic will be manifesting and working according to a reasonable understanding of the world. Gen X, in this sense, manages a curious compromise. We like world-views, but as anti-visionaries, we don’t like to just make them up arbitrarily (and definitely not in the form of a novel or the lyrics to a song). Our world view is a pragmatic one that accommodates complexity by trying to make it a very rich, data-driven one. Wikipedia (founded by Gen X’ers, Jimmy Wales, b. 1966, and Larry Sanger, b. 1968) is a classic Gen X-led attempt to understand the world. It has none of the incomprehensible complexity of Facebook-as-implicit-model-of-the-world, but neither does it have the doctrinaire vacuity of typical Boomer manifestos that try to dictate how the world should be, with no real attempt to figure out how it is.
5. Boomers speak with words, X’ers with numbers, Millennials with actions: If you are wondering how a significant corporate cultural war can be in progress without making headlines, it is because the three generations involved process the world with different primary cognitive stances. The Boomers attempt to understand the world with words, and the best they can do is talk to themselves. The Gen X’ers try to avoid conflict by seeking solace in data and a relentless focus on reality. The Millenials are blissfully unaware of larger dynamics and just go ahead and create.

Once you get behind the jargon, this is a fascinating article and one more bit of evidence that the shifts that are happening are not just a phase but a radical movement in the world that we all better begin to understand.

He ends the article with these words that to THIS X'er are potent, when talking about how the war will end.

And it won’t be just a victory of fashion. It will be a fundamental victory of the better idea. SM is an organic, protean, creative and energetic force. KM is a brittle, mechanical, anxiety and fear-ridden structure. It is telling that the biggest KM concern is the potential loss of Boomer knowledge, a backward-looking preservation/archival concern, while the biggest current SM concern is probably the heart-stopping excitement around the possibilities of mobile devices and the potential Web-top-enabling Google Chrome.

Let me end with a personal note that hints at how I was won over by the Millenial creation of Social Media. Back in 2002 or so, in a fit of enthusiasm, I created a virtual community for an organization I was part of, using the rather KM-style early SaaS offering, CommunityZero. When a young, Millenial colleague first enthusiastically told me about wikis, I actually resisted briefly, in a sort of passive-aggressive way, because I didn’t believe such a disorganized approach could work. I was wrong (obviously), and converted.

The tragedy of Gen X is that we will not be remembered as a big-idea generation. We will likely be remembered, via a footnote (much like the Silents), as the generation which made the fateful decision to trust the creativity of the generation following it over the values of the generation that came before.

Take a read of the entire article.  Good stuff.

Comments

[robert austell]

IMHO, this nails it, Bruce. Well-shared. :)

I definitely tracked with this and have used a language metaphor to understand my own X-er "in-between-ness" as bilingual between two generations and cultures really, that speak two different languages.

I found this article expressing many of the same ideas in more specific an non-analogical ways.

[Mark Baker-Wright]

Interesting analysis. Being Gen-X myself (born in 1974, in fact), I'm impressed to see how much of the descriptions of my generation depicted here DO reflect my way of thinking, especially as I've processed it over the past few years on my own blog.

That said, I can't quite bring myself to agree with some of the more negative comments about the previous generation. I certainly agree that they have often been too rigid and "fear-ridden," but think that there is something valuable about "knowledge management" that it would be a tragedy to lose.

Not that systems such as these are ever entirely lost, of course. Even if SM wins the day (if "winning a war" is even the appropriate metaphor--but since "Gen X'ers try to avoid conflict," I suppose I'm supposed to say that), the basic ideas KM represents will resurface in another generation.

[stushie]

I don't belive all of this generational hype, Bruce, because it pigeon-holes too many people. it's like saying that all people born in the forties are rocknrollers, whereas some of them love classical music or bluegrass.

I'm doing a weekly study of the book of Judges, Bruce where it talks about generation after generation not believing in the Lord. I think that is what we face in every generation of the chrurch. The culture, technology, and music may be different, but people are just the same: if they do not hear about Christ, they will have no faith.

[Mark]

A few thoughts - from a genX guy with a foot in the corporate IT world.

1. One problem with SM as a design-construct is that it is voluntary. You have to opt in. That's great for Facebook or LinkedIn, but you're never gonna run an order management system or a warehouse system where the employees have to be "friends" with other employees in other departments in order to process orders. There are some applications that require structure, control, and authority.

2. There's a point at which IT folks actually have to achieve definable goals. You have to get the system running. You have to create an application to take orders. At my most recent job we had a guy who is of genX age but Millenial ideas. He would work on his code, but keep tweaking it and adding features that were cool (sometimes only to him), and never finish. You had to give him a hard deadline, and when it got close he'd abandon his tweaking and hurry to finish the rest of the code. That part that he poured his soul into would work really well, and the rest would simply work.

3. The hit rate of success in SM software is very low. Facebook works. Digg works. LinkedIn works. Twitter works. But for each of those, there are dozens of sites/softwares that do the same thing that failed due to lack of acceptance. We're reinventing the wheel over and over, with a popularity contest for each wheel. At least the KM world acknowledges that person X is really good at Y, and you might want to talk to him/her about how to handle your latest problem. Open source helps with some of this, but even there you still have 15 Firefox plug-ins that do the same thing in slightly different ways.

Lest you think that I'm defending the Boomers, take heart. I'm not. I have big problems with authority as its own justification ('because I said so') and the enjoyment of personal power that comes with success. I much prefer the Millenial model that does something because its fun over the Boomer model that does something because it helps you climb the ladder of success/excess/greed.

[stushie]

Perhaps Jim Elliot, the martyred American missionary put it best in 1949 when he wrote in his journal: 'For my generation, I must have the oracles of God in fresh terms.'

[Martin Kelley]

Wow, some interesting stuff there though I'm not sure I'm quite buying Vidnic's exact divisions. He's arguing against himself by explicating this grand theory and trying to stuff data into it. Like: he uses birthdates to determine's one status in an over-reductionist way. Wikipedia might have been founded by people born in the Gen X years but that doesn't mean that it's not looking forward. I know Gen Xers who are culturally 60yo and some who are culturally 20yo. Generational talk can be useful when looking at big trends or leadership styles but becomes reductionistic when applied to specific people or situations: for most of us race, class, education, personal temperment, etc., are all more important than generational identity.

I spent eight years working in a denominational bureacracy--lots of mission statements; lots of insiders talking on and on in committees ignoring much in the way of actual work; an increasing tendency to measure success on donor contributions and staff size. I got kicked out two years ago when Development decided the most important web audience were the 3% of potential donors that came to the site vs the 97% of seekers--talk about culture war!--and I'm now doing a lot of on-my-own, no-budget SM community-building, which is less visible to the insiders but much much more visible to outsiders. I'm poor as a result, and I spend a lot of time in email with "nobodies," but it's work that needs to be done.

I've spent a lot of time delving into histories of social movements and you can almost always find a more-or-less invisible, more-or-less underground small tightknit cadre that was pioneering the techniques and culture of the new movement 15 years before it "began." Think about the 1950s Beats feeding into the Sixties. Heck, think about a dozen disciples feeding into the explosion of Christian faith.

There's definitely culture wars going on in the tech realm too. I've sat across the board table in interviews with IT guys who seemed blithely unconcerned that no one in their multi-million dollar company was checking the analytics or thinking about user interactivity. If the site worked that was all that mattered. But there again, the divide I've seen hasn't bee so much generational as it is a culture war between IT and Marketing (and sometimes Design) over who decides what happens on the website.

[Don]

Bruce, quite interesting. I was particularly interested when he said

"The Millennials don’t really try to understand the world: If us X’ers share with the Millenials an appreciation for complexity that the Boomers lack, we share with the Boomers a taste for big-picture synthesis that simply doesn’t seem to attract the Millenials"

The whole article is just that, an attempt to understand the world - one that (based on this premise) appeals to Boomers & Xer's but not Millenials - because they don't care to understand it (or at least not yet).

So, the 64,000 question would be - How does the gospel with it's message of synthesis (the redemption of all things) interact with a generation/culture that is unconcerned with such an idea?