The new world of work

I broke away from research work the other week to contribute some thinking for this FT project on The New World of Work.

Problem solving brilliance on the net

Writing about officer selection in the Army I was struck by the lasting influence of problem solving exercises that have not changed very much in fifty years. Now I have found similar exercises on the web.

This one, Splitter, is brand new and brilliant. It's one of thousands of cheaply made flash games that are fascinating me just now through the work of my son, Robert Donkin, featured on the web site here and discussed in this blog here.

One of the great things about Splitter is that there is no single solution to the problems. The game, or exercise, could hardly be simpler but there's a time sensitive element too so you need to move quickly.

Companies are spending small fortunes on creativity training and consultants to try and stimulate so called "out of the box" thinking. Yet it's all here - for free. Catch staff playing this in office time, however, and you will probably conclude they are wasting their time. You might be right, but what's the difference between this kind of informal problem solving and creativity training? Nothing but the cost.

Workplace bullying

I was in London yesterday speaking at an annual gathering called the Battle of Ideas at the Royal College of Art.

We didn't get too many at our session debating bullying in the workplace, a great pity as there were some interesting opinions. What makes these sessions much more stimulating than most seminars is the sharp, often challenging contributions from the audience so that you have a real debate, not just a platform presentation.

Another surprise was the way that audience responses led me to think and say things and head down intellectual avenues, even to the point of defending uncomfortable ideas, that I could not have anticipated beforehand.

Free from the kind of restraints I impose on myself when writing for a corporate audience in the FT, I found myself attacking many of the HR ideas that I have taken for granted over the past few years such as performance management, talent management and employee appraisals.

A distaste of what in an FT column I called the "Vote off society," led me to speculate that perhaps we are all capable of bullying behaviour in certain contexts. As an example I quoted the Stanley Milgram obedience experiment, using electric shocks, discussed here.

There are links here with the kind of dominance and mob behaviour explored by William Golding in "The Lord of the Flies." Bullying in the workplace was discussed by Robert Sutton in his book, The No Asshole Rule, mentioned here. But not enough work has been done to highlight the workplace environments that promote an atmosphere of bullying.

Perhaps there will always be "assholes" in the workplace. But when I started work, when trade unions still had some power, you really could say "you don't get me, I'm part of the union" - the lyrics of the old Strawbs song. I'm not sure we can say that anymore.