An article by my former colleague and TEDx Leeds speaker Norman Lewis reminds me of an ingenious device imagined by Douglas Adams in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Yes, I know you all like a good Douglas Adams quote.
First, though, listen to Norman, writing about ‘Millennials’ and Enterprise2.0 on his Futures Diagnosis blog:
The Millennial issue in the workplace has become symptomatic of the uncertainty of the ‘information age’ which exaggerates the novelty of the present at the expense of the past. This generational shift is regarded as unprecedented and a unique feature of our times. The workplace (and indeed, the world) is now divided into two periods: the past where everything remained the same with little change and the current moment with its constant change where change and disruption are incessant.
This rhetoric of unprecedented change is precisely that, rhetoric. What about the generational shift that occurred in the 1960s? The rise of the teenager in the post-War period was indeed unprecedented and had a huge impact on Western society. But did this result in the end of the enterprise as we know it? No, the exact opposite. It helped to forge the enterprise as we know it.
This is spot on. As I’ve argued before, what has changed in the last decade is the enterprise’s level awareness of stuff that has previously gone on behind its back.
Throughout the so-called “mass media” era, managers were encouraged to delude themselves that they had the attention of their employees and customers, who were in reality talking amongst themselves all along.
The web puts an end to the delusion. It acts like Douglas Adams’ Total Perspective Vortex:
… allegedly the most horrible torture device to which a sentient being can be subjected.
When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, “You are here.”
Why is the web like this? Because of the convergence of communications, entertainment and commerce into a single seamless mass.
Once upon a time, television appeared to be an uncontested safe harbour for entertainment and commerce, the corporate-networked desktop PC a clearly bounded productivity tool. Sociability and communication happened out of sight and out of mind.
Now those things are collapsing in on each other. When commercial messages have to compete with pictures of your kids, cute kittens and plans for nights out, there is no contest. When employees openly use the same tools to converse with their peers as to conduct business it becomes clear at once that bonds of friendship are stronger than those of salaried fealty. When even the biggest brand is reduced to a fraction of one percent of searches on the web, it becomes just another microscopic dot on a microscopic dot.
These truths are not new, but the tools to discover them are.
Executives stepping out of the Vortex for the first time are understandably mind-blown. Realising quite how insignificant their businesses and products are in the lives of their consumers, they become easy prey to social media’s snake-oil salesforce, who promise to swell the ranks of their Twitter followers and guarantee instant Google gratification.
Maybe they’d do better to remember that they were young once, and that, as Adams wrote: “In an infinite universe, the one thing sentient life cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.”
Matt Edgar writes here 