Full Circle Associates

Capturing the Value of "Generation Tech" Employees I have been spending some time thinking about the impact of full integration of "digital natives" into organizational dynamics. I have worked with lots of 40, 50 and 60 year olds struggling to be a successful distributed team member and collaborator. And struggle is the word. Not just in the skills, but having the new work processes fit into an old structure -- lots of tension. The few early adopters have not had enough clout in most cases to help their organizations evolve. Now will this generation bring enough weight to cause organizational change? Prensky suggests:

This generation is better than any before at absorbing information and making decisions quickly, as well as at multitasking and parallel processing. In contrast, people age 30 or older are “digital immigrants” because they can never be as fluent in technology as a native who was born into it. You can see it in the digital immigrants’ “accent” — whether it is printing out e-mails or typing with fingers rather than thumbs. Have you ever noticed that digital natives, unlike digital immigrants, don’t talk about “information overload”? Rather, they crave more information.

The youngest workers don’t need to adapt to fit into the agile, flat, team-based organizations older executives are striving to design. They just do it: They communicate, share, buy, sell, exchange, create, meet, collect, coordinate, play games, learn, evolve, search, analyze, report, program, socialize, explore, and even transgress using new digital methods and a new vocabulary most older managers don’t even understand. Blog? Wiki? RTS? Spawn? POS? Astroturf? How do these sound when juxtaposed with cross-functional cooperation, team-based management, and 360 feedback?