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by Elizabeth S. Pinchot
New models of the workplace include far more decision-making
at the level of the work, and far more freedom for the individual and teams to behave
entrepreneurially, failing their way to successes, learning as they go, continually
improving processes and responsiveness to customers. More freedom to initiate change
(and sometimes fail) requires a radical upgrade of our education and training. All
businesses, even service businesses, will increasingly demand greater technical skills˜almost
everyone will have to be computer literate, for instance. A new level of human and
business skills will be demanded of self-managing employees˜skills to quickly learn
and improve a particular assigned operation, as well as the widely applicable skills
of collaboration, teamwork and whole business judgment.
The freedom inherent in "knowledge work" which includes
most of the best jobs of the future˜brings with it the responsibility for continuous
learning to remain knowledgeable, including experience in acting on judgments that
correspond to reality. Despite the static nature of the term, "knowledge work"
is about changing knowledge, where speed of learning and application is the competitive
edge. We have some venerable models to inspire us: IBM kept its edge for many decades
with continuous employee learning, everyone changing themselves with training and
education all the time, so, they said, the challenges of changing systems and technology
almost seemed easy.
Japanese knowledge work has been called (by Ezra Vogel in Japan
as Number One: Lessons for America) a "group-directed quest of knowledge"
focused, I add, on the changing ways and means of serving customers. The common task
in all the specifics of knowledge work is using new knowledge to innovate. People
will be productively employed in our more democratic "knowledge-questing"
organizations of the future to the extent they can keep learning to learn, overcome
the anxiety inherent in change, continuously deepen their knowledge, and develop
a battery of flexible skills for collaboration over diverse and widening systems.
Only an educated and trained work force will be widely capable
of taking responsibility for the fate of one's customers, one's fellows, and the
workplace. To boost workplace productivity as well as create good new jobs, we are
facing the urgent need for increased investment in capital equipment, bringing us
to the issue of increased government role through incentives or more direct investment.
An equally critical issue to face is the need for "capital" investment
in our undereducated workers, suggesting funding and incentives for education and
training of our present and future workers, in new and traditional institutions,
in workplace groups, as well as support for on the job apprenticeships.
We will have to face our self-destructive elitism in our educational
investments in our people, in schools and workplaces. Much of the attention, support,
training and pay go to upper management in the US. Not surprisingly, we have created
a glut of managerial specialists; and their jobs, ironically, are threatened exactly
to the extent we have not focused attention, support, training and pay on the other
greater fraction of our workplaces. Unskilled employees and layers of managers are
increasingly unnecessary. The bulk of employees with good jobs will be skilled professionals
and paraprofessionals working effectively in teams. As we progress further beyond
hierarchy toward team work and self organization, we will eradicate the bias towards
investing in education largely for management, and pour on training for everyone.
Lester Thurow predicts in his recent book Head to Head
that high-tech, low-tech and service businesses will increasingly use high tech processes.
For example, many of the jobs in formerly low tech businesses such as banking or
railroads are now high tech jobs in computers and telecommunication. What we used
to call the "bottom" half of the organization will have in their hands
the high tech processes that can provide the competitive edge˜if they are well educated.
Without a base of workers who understand math, for instance, it matters little what
our PhD's in the R & D labs invent˜we will be unable to staff the high-tech processes
for continuous innovation to build, sell and distribute products cheaply and cleanly.
Only with education˜radically better education prior to and
concurrent with employment˜will we escape the conflict and economic decline resulting
from establishing a disenfranchised underclass, too poorly educated to be allowed
to work. We need better schools, especially schools where children learn to learn
and love to learn as individuals and in groups. Learning shuts down under too much
control, which maintains the status quo; learners need freedom to practice thinking
for themselves, to experience learning from an actual production process, to experience
team learning and production and learning from each other. Learners need the freedom
to make mistakes within secure limits. The quality of the important decisions and
choices made by employees will depend on the quality of education, both in school
and on the job.
We can learn from the growing number of conversions to worker
owned cooperative workplaces: the most successful have depended on extensive and
continuing education, geared specifically to prepare everyone for more democratic
and widely responsible behaviors. For example, 10% of the net profit of the successful
and trend-setting Mondragon cooperatives in Spain was put back into education. Continual
on the job training is the standard choice where workers-owners call the shots, and
the profitability of these companies tends to be high. The parallel transition in
our businesses to more widespread democracy and responsibility will depend on a stepped
up investment in cross-disciplinary education, so that self-managing employees will
understand their part in the whole.
Freer organizations require more responsible, versatile and
flexible employees, with wide understanding of the systems we are in and the long
term consequences of our actions. Fortunately, working within the freer systems of
distributed leadership and more democratic management enhances learning. The potential
of mutual support within democratic work groups can enormously energize our work.
When our colleagues are counting on our participation, we are motivated to learn
widely about the business we share and how to make it better for everyone. When we
share in making decisions and then live with the consequences, wisdom begins to grow
in us all. When we take risks and achieve things we never thought we could, we are
more willing to embrace and learn from the next challenge. Taking responsibility
for the quality of our mutual output enhances self-esteem, and positive self-esteem
facilitates learning. The more the system gives practice in empowered teamwork, with
wise guidance and feedback that corresponds to reality, the more worthy of further
empowerment its members become. The systems people call this a positive feedback
loop.
Taking the risk to invest in empowering education for all our
people assumes that we believe in our people, and the inherent value of freedom and
democracy. For instance, mastering rigorous math, science and technical skills, teaching
them widely, and understanding them in whole-system contexts that include the long-term
effects of our technology on people and the planet, is a lot of trouble, and could
be beyond our capability as a nation without radical shifts in values. The gap is
enormous between our current educational quality and productivity and our actual
needs. Yet the concept of an industrial machine as immense as ours, flying blind
and in disrepair, too weak to care about the families and communities aboard or the
surrounding ecosystem, mandates that shift in values. We need to begin a revolution
on behalf of our national education and training. It is time we once again prove
the power of the people, the real wealth of our nation, more so as our wealth in
natural resources has hit the limit.
The US achieved its economic leadership position in this century
not just by the abundant resources pressed into service by the settlers but also
by the leadership role our antecedents took in establishing compulsory education,
even for the new immigrants. The successes in innovation and technical entrepreneurship
grew from this platform, boosted by the GI bill educating millions and funding a
college boom. Although we seem less and less able to translate our creativity into
jobs, we still have many fine schools and colleges, and excel in advanced university
education and research. 	We are not alone in our fortunate history of widespread
education˜Japan was another forerunner in compulsory education, long before many
European countries, beginning in the 1870's. Their single-minded focus on education
reaped rapid development results before the war, and drove the economic growth again
in the half century after the war. Recently Japan has succeeded in graduating a higher
portion of its youth from high school than we do; and they are more widely competent
in at least certain technical areas, after attending about a third more school days
per year, the equivalent of four more years of college by the end of high school.
The Japanese continue to focus on education in the university years and beyond more
than we do. Germany, another industrial peer, has a superior technical education
track, while the US has reduced much of its technical education to backwater storage
for underachievers.
One the positive side, North Americans have unique contributions
on many measures of value, such as originating many new ways to educate people and
bring out their best among them. We continue to offer consumer innovations for the
world to imitate, perhaps at some risk to our own productive integrity. In fact,
we have been led to believe that our unparalleled consumption would alone drive our
economy. Sometimes it seems our kids have gotten the message that their job in school
is to learn to become better consumers of the good material life. But without skills
and habits of productivity there is no good life. 	
Sadly, our public educational institutions are crumbling into
bureaucratic inefficiency and deficient quality in imparting literacy, basic communication
skills, math and science skills, more essential than ever in the coming years. And
then there are the skills we are increasingly calling on employees to use that most
schools fail to promote, and often discourage, such as team-based innovation and
problem solving; democratic group decision making; wide-system interdependencies
and how to effect systemic change; and environmentally and socially responsible practices.
Lost are the incubators for the old fashioned virtues of hand-on ingenuity and productive
self-support, while our kids watch dozens of hours of television a week. Gone are
most of the small farms and tinker's backyards that trained the last generation of
managers in entrepreneurship, creative problem-solving, systems thinking, and the
distinctive American "can do" attitude.
We have been able to compensate for some of the skills needed
for business leadership with high-level executive training, that has typically included
everything from basic training in the humanities and sciences to an Outward-Bound
type expedition into team problem solving and shared risk. As organizations disperse
decision making along a more nearly horizontal grid, these same skills will be essential
throughout the organization. In fact, one CEO (a woman) says that her job, and to
an extent everyone else's in her organization, is that of an educator, and she is
right. Even those who hand widgets off a line work with process innovation "quality"
teams, mutually educating each other from diverse roles and functions to create together
the whole-systems intelligence that gets a continually better job done. Mentoring
and facilitating others, while going on working and learning oneself, is near the
core of every job description of the next century.
Leadership must trust the people far more than anyone has ever
experienced. It would be foolish to push autonomy on people without trust in their
capabilities, yet their capabilities can only be demonstrated by letting go of the
reins, and giving out challenges and continuous educational and collaborative support.
Education and training, backed up with principles such as fairness and mutual support,
are the surest routes to more trustworthy interdependencies.
We are in the middle of a national debate about the extent
to which our government has responsibility for helping our people have the skills
to participate in the market and helping our businesses maintain and expand a base
of good jobs. Our tradition of universal public education has this intent, but has
failed to evolve along with the changes in the workplace. Many years ago, reading
the Tofflers' book Future Shock, I was profoundly struck with their description
of the early role of public education: training a farm population in punctuality,
the ability to sit still all day, and the ability to do rote work obediently˜necessary
skills for early industrial production, and of inadequate value today.
In the current crisis of confidence in our economic future,
we agree we need a massive infusion of capital to improve pay and employment opportunities,
and such a substantial investment will take time. Investing directly in people, wherever
we can, could give quick results to build the possibility of more investment. Those
who remember the Second World War tell us of miraculous jumps in productivity unheard
of now, occurring after simple changes such as providing day care for women newly
employed as shipbuilders. Although supporting education is less popular than more
direct economic manipulation, as long-term issues such as children and the environment
always are, a quality revolution in our public education, that would include turning
schools over to enhancing the families and community as well, could infuse strong
values of productivity, education, initiative, responsibility, and innovation into
the majority of families, and spill over into the workplaces as these values are
affirmed. Revolution is not too strong a word, because the changes in power, responsibility
and decision making needed in the workplace must happen in parallel, and to some
extent first, in the schools.
For instance, creativity for continuous innovation, whether
at the "floors" of production and customer contact, or in any other process
in the organization, is facilitated by the amount of decision making available. We
are just beginning to widen the base of decision making in large organizations, and
have scarcely begun in the administration and classrooms of our schools. Without
the right to make decisions in collaboration with other team members and sponsors,
you can not bring your judgment to bear, make choices, and learn from the consequences.
Research has accumulated for many decades that those who directly
run the work processes are the best source of wisdom about changes needed in the
process˜and that people do the best quality work when they are empowered to make
the decisions at the level of their work. It is not just the local or detail decisions
that can only be made intelligently by those who do the work; the large business
changes work best when people from every function and level impacted are involved
in a democratic design process. Especially with limited resources, the process of
deciding when to pour on the resources you have, or when to pull back or fold altogether,
is best left to those who are in the business. Education has failed to prepare is
to make and live with our decisions.
In our traditional educational preparation for the workplace,
skills in teamwork, creativity, leadership and responsible decision making are often
ignored, both in the administration and with the young people, and compliance with
the accepted knowledge and wisdom˜students call it regurgitation˜is rewarded. Education
is often offered as something to consume; our challenge is to turn the whole framework
of learning around to that of productivity. Thousands of courageous educators are
breaking away from the old practices and conducting experiments in progressive high
quality education, where children learn to learn and think for themselves, and experience
a good part of their education in a productive and relevant context. They deserve
our nation's support, as the forefront of the next revolution in American democracy.
Most of our best organizations are getting the training bug,
and our future depends on that trend increasing and diving deeper into the organizations.
Bureaucracies divided the tasks into minute and unchanging chunks to make it possible
to put industrially unskilled people to work with a minimum of education. Now that
we want people to think for themselves, education will take more time, and continue
throughout life. The most rewarding career paths will allow us to develop flexible
skills in an organization or network in which we are learning collaborative control,
and let the control we exert reflect our best values. This sounds wonderful, and
we have all experienced moments of great collaborative innovation in some area of
our lives, but the organizations we work in, and the harried lives we lead, seem
to leave little time for learning and innovation. Nonetheless, we are coming to agree
that time has run out for the status quo. We must invest in high quality education,
focused on the future needs, for all, if we are to preserve our communities, their
job bases, and our democratic privileges. A free market is only free with education
and apprenticeships available to all.
Widespread higher quality education, geared as much to values
and citizenship as knowledge and skills, is the single most important factor in the
quality of life we will enjoy, as a nation and planet. Investing as well in infrastructure,
families, wellness, and a healthy planet for future generations, are essential for
the quality of the future for our offspring. Nevertheless, the core investment in
our future is the population engaged in lifetime learning with enough freedom, and
in a trustworthy principled system, to apply the lessons to the long term benefit
of our organizations, customers, and shared communities.
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