January 2001

Innovation Tips

…ideas to help you foster collaborative innovation

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The New Knowledge Workers

With innovation, what we unlearn is often as important as what we learn. The paradigms, the processes, the implicit rules that proved successful in the past must often be unlearned, and sometimes abandoned, to make way for a new and more successful way of operating.

As Peter Drucker points out in his book, Management Challenges for the 21^st Century, organizations also require new and innovative approaches to management. Individuals in a work force, whether in a for-profit or a non-profit organization, are increasingly becoming knowledge workers—people who come to the organization with their own unique set of core competencies, their own unique knowledge base.

Knowledge workers do not typically function well as subordinates; they often know more about their areas of expertise than those they may report to. It makes little sense for them to take orders from a boss in a command and control environment. More important is the need to integrate and share their knowledge and experience to enhance the viability of the organization.

And that is the emerging challenge: How do you manage independent individuals, all with core competencies and knowledge needed by others in the organization? Models are only just beginning to emerge to capture that increasingly complex task. For Margaret Wheatley (management consultant and author of A Simpler Way) and Arie De Geus, (former planner with Royal Dutch Shell and author of The Living Company) the metaphors are drawn from the life of the cell, of the organism. In each case, the flow of information is dynamic and evolving.

Drucker uses the metaphor of a conductor in a symphony; the manager of an organization only leads and provides focus, only orchestrates the various participants. On this, however, each of these models seems to agree: The nature of managing knowledge workers is one that tends to engage the individual in proactive work, rather than in serving a reactive or submissive role. The ideal environment is one that cultivates what Abraham Maslow called “self-actualization,” where people are passionately engaged in using their talents and doing work they consider important.

How do you manage that sort of passion? Better to be an orchestra conductor eliciting the passion than an autocrat suppressing it. Better to unlearn old forms of management that are no longer effective in our knowledge-based economy. The vitality of both the enterprise and the individuals involved depend upon it.

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