There has been a lot of activity on the Workplace Community LinkedIn page requesting the Challenging Perceived Wisdom Report. I got to sit down and read the report, and am sharing my reactions for discussion.
I was under-impressed. My hope was to find new knowledge on the approach to becoming wiser toward work and place. The title expressed the writer’s belief that their responsibility was to express the researches wisdom to inform us of a greater truth about people at work. What I got was that 25,000 data points exposed a generic reality of work akin with much of the past. But - their acknowledgement of the bias of the conventional literature was a heartfelt challenge - one this community MUST pick up. There is great opportunity to truly delve into what wisdom is - creating a questioning spirit of intuition for what tomorrow will be. Unfortunately this report made the mistakes of presenting knowledge based on conventional data - and their large diverse data set, impressive as it is, did not find the heart of the matter of work and place.
Additionally:
- I didn’t expect yet another generational argument. But the research does point to the reality that the generation analysis is not the point of discovering the future (and present) of work and place. Amen.
- The questions that generated the bar chart results were a concern. They were presented as requiring a polar response – yes or no. Psychometric investigation is never 'yes or no'. There is no identifiable meaning from peoples’ response to answering a question along the lines of “is the color BLUE important to you?” Leaves a “so what” result. That is what I kept coming to as I was reading the report. I am certain there are "so what" learning’s to be had. I hope to see more of this soon.
- The Workplace Design Considerations (pg. 19) findings ended up being generic and un-actionable. I wonder if there could be more for us to learn in a fuller report. Maybe the community could reach out to investigate if there is more of a blowout they have available here.
- Someone please help me understand why reviewing “women in the workforce” is still a valid topic. I’m not trying to be a typical ‘guy’ here, but are we not past this consideration and on to the bigger issues of team dynamics and creative work processes, etc. Do gender demographics still have a place in the nature of work discussion? World War 2 and the 1960/70s has been over for a while now…
- “Traditional values are still germane” – pg. 28. Wow. Where do I begin to express my dissapointment to this short text? “Where’s the beef?” Lets get to the deeper nature of "What's next". It is the question I am getting asked most often.