Full Circle Associates

Live blog caveats apply. I do my best to capture as much as possible.

Generational Shifts: Brain Drain and Youth Culture

Stowe Boyd, /message, moderator
John Beck, Author, Got Game
Jim Ware, Executive Producer, Work Design Collaborative, futureofwork.net

Stowe: (Missed the front end, data from Pew Internet Project)

75-85% of American's online
Texting huge thing with kids
61% texting
More than half teen internet users go online daily
80 play video games, 50% jump from last year
12-18 embrace - communication, creativity, social interaction
The 12-19 year old age bracket, 30%of those have created or written blogs. The social media revolution that has been adults is now pervading the life of teenagers.
These are the people who are going to be in the workforce. The enterprises represented here.

It is going to be interesting. What are those people going to expect. How are they going to want to work, interact, and communicate. The world of business in 5 years is going to be profoundly different due to the expectations of this new generation.

Jim Ware:
Managing Generational Diversity: A quick look at the changing nature of the workforce

Less about technology, more about people. The work design collaborative is about 5 ;years old, have long held belief that orgs are only effective when we coordinate people, place and technology. Wrestle with questions of changing nature of work, workforce. Take a few minutes to set context.

I'm one of the oldest people in the room. Talk about the other end of the workforce. The aging of America - 1990 to 2025 projection. The age distribution fundamentally shifts older. Baby boomer bulge. There are very different cultures at the top and the bottom (age) of the workforce. Think of Linda's (Stone, previous speaker) comments about CPA. The experience of boomers very different than the younger generation. At the same time there are some interesting commonalities in interests, values and work lifestyles.

Linda's reminder about the ability to hold two contradictory ideas. Fundamental differences and similarities.

Projected percentage change in age groups. 20-29 will grow 10, over 60 will grow by over 30%. Growth in the workforce is in the older age. 30-49 will decline. Over and over again prediction by 2010 we will have a 10 million person talent shortage. The baby boomers are exiting the full time workforce and not enough are coming in to fill the gap. Dave Delong, the Knowledge Drain, about the fact that a lot of people are leaving workforce with knowledge and wisdom. Not literally 10 million jobs gone wanting. Outsourcing, baby boomers are not going to play golf 7 days a work. Working part time. Productivity. But the message is a significant portion of the workforce are not gen x and gen y-ers and won’t be for some time.

Workforce Values and Expectations
Traditional worker and emergent worker profiles. These are to some extent stereotyped

Traditional - tenure, paternalistic management, security, admire, fear
Emergent workers - merit, opportunity, change, promotion based on merit, don't pay attention to org charts and peer management

Spherion's data shows that the number of emergent workers is growing across all age groups. Over 90% of workforce. So -alled youth culture is infiltrating all ages. Semi retired or near retirement that is what they are thinking. The baby boomers have redefined work and life every decade. Retirement is not the right word anymore. The kinds of technologies are exactly what enabled the boomers to work part time and live anywhere. Be world citizens. To not have to commute. Just as important to gray hairs.

The boomers are not going gently into the night. Some retire early and they move beyond golf. They work. Some consult and contract. Some are getting involved in volunteer and charity work. Busier and complex life. Challenge for corporations. As values change, people are in a position to move away from corps and brain drain.

GSA pointed out in 2006 over 50% of fed employees are eligible to retire today. Valuable services they provide. How to retain or support their moving to the community of their choice and continue to work for the agency and tap their knowledge.

What this mean for mgmt. Be prepared for major talent shortages. How to attract and retain old and young people. Lean to manage generational diversity - still are differences. Become a Next-Generation company - accommodate part timers, teleworkers, remote workers, subcontractors. A fluid, flexible ever changing workforce. Use tech to get beyond one size fits all, particularly in HR. More complex set of employment relationships

John Beck
Capturing the Hearts and Minds of the Gamer Generation
www.gotamebook.com www.nslg.net
"The Kids are Alright"

Results of a study Mitchell Wade and I did. Co-author on book. Coming out again - this was a book published by Harvard Biz press, but bringing it out again with a parental focus in the fall called "The Kids are Alright."

We did a 2500 member survey. Did you grow up playing video games? We wanted to understand business correlation to video games. An unsurprising split. Under 35, under 25 nearly 100%. Over 35, 34% said they grew up playing video games. Arcades, pong. Some folks in their 50's said they did. Correlated to all the other questions in the survey. Trained as sociologist, I have never seen a variable that explained so many attitude differences in a survey as the variable "did you grow up playing video games."

We got reams of data that looked like this -- we had basically the older folks, in blue, under 35 in yellow and the three bars are non/mod/frequent gamers. ON some question, the older answered higher percentage than younger. Trend of frequency of playing games is still going up. When you control for age, their answers to the basic biz attitude questions were the same older and younger. The main variable was growing up playing video games.

Some of the difference here, all statistically significant - 5-25% differences. You see things that suggest possibly in a democratic society and one where attitudes shift over time, as you get a 5-20% shift, you may reach a tipping point where the organizations change. That's the caveat.

Why do these shifts happen. Why is the variable important. Book the "Attention Economy" - sites with video games in them got a lot more attention and kept attention than those that did not. Games are really attention getting. Any kid you have seen play games, who has been diagnosed with ADD can play those games for 3-4 hours straight without looking up. IN a game there is no such thing as CPA. There is rapt attention. My son with Down's can play these games for hours, and good, and beats me. Attention is a big part of this.

The second part is learning. 10% of things we retain of things we see. 30% of what we hear. 70.1% of what we do. Games are interactive. We are doing them.

Finally, the last piece that makes sense is that there is something going on physiologically or neurologically. According to people who study this; our neural pathways in our brain form until our young teens. That's how you can learn a language naturally. That's all about the neural pathways. After you have to relate new knowledge to existing.

When are these games played the most? by kids up to early teens. We found now gender differences in the data. Up to the age 12-13 boys and girls play almost the same games and amount of times. After 13 girls play less and boys like to kill more in games.

Are gamers more competitive? Oh yeah. Almost twice as many say "winning is everything."

Are gamers global in their thinking? Much more global on their thinking, particularly around business issues. Much less likely to favor buying American products. They grew up in Nintendoland. Games and consoles for young kids are Japanese.

I taught a class on online communities at USC. I asked the students, half of whom were Chinese. What was the most important media input in their lives? Music, TV. 60-70 of the Americans cited something Japanese. Chinese students - 100% said something Japanese. Huge, pervasive, global influence.

Are gamers less connected to their companies? They care more than non gamers. Not a huge difference, but it breaks the stereotype.

Are gamers more sociable? Yes, they have a greater percentage than non gamers

I expected a lot of negatives coming into the research. Games are their social play dates. The sibling group of all ages will be in the room and only one kid will have the controller in hand. The controller gets handed from kid to kid. There is this collaboration/competition mix that is really interesting. It is boring to play against someone who is really bad. Kids encourage siblings to get better at the game. Gamers share decision making, connect with the right people to get the right things done quickly. Discuss prior to decisions. Gamers were textbook MBA's, just what Harvard would teach on decision making.

Do gamers come across as self important? Yes, of course they do. They think they are the best in the world. At 20-something they think they are 9% more expert than the 50-somethings. They think if needs to done right, do it myself. Prefer performance based compensation. High self concepts.

Gamers believe more in luck. This is important. A lot more in luck. When I fail, it is because I am unlucky. I can hit the reset button. I can fail, learn and get better. IN every game there is a random generator where you do the fight the same way and sometimes you win and sometimes you loose. They learn to play around that. Figuring out the algorithm behind every game. Main skill they are learning. What's the algorithm and how do I beat it. As you are designing software, performance systems, think about that. They will get it two days after you announce it. If the algorithm leads to stupid results, you will get stupid results. Consider these attitudes are coming and other migrating to them.

Q&A
Linda- asks John - a game like DOOM was a CPP game and WoW is make meaningful game. Console games are total attention games, but once inside they use their attention inside differently. Marty Seligman, positive psychologists, flow and engagement. There is a kind of resilience that kids develop in these games, no other way we know that resilience and persistence learn to success more than IQ but we did not know how to teach it. But games do it.

A: Simulated world game - striking was the engagement in the course. Spending 2-3 much times in 2 credit course as 4 credit course. A piece of this is the active learning part of it. Largely are multiplayer games? Not necessarily. So much more engaging than traditional education. Tragic we still have people listen to a lecture.

I have taught strategy courses to MBAs. Used to do cases. Now entire course was a war game. Played different roles each week, competitors, customers, and they had to come up with a strategy. Most fulfilling and scariest teaching. No way to predict. Used teaching moments for 10 minutes Engaged. At the end I got personal emails from over 60 of 70 in the class. Usually get 5-6. Completely different learning experience.

Q: what strikes me is you two are at opposite ends of the spectrum. How do you deal with a person who can figure out any device and the other side who can’t turn on their radio. How do you build systems that engage both sides?

I think what Linda said earlier - ease of use and simple, focused devises. Something for designers to pay attention to. There is something about design the technology people have to pay attention to.

Design for quality of life. They figured out how to remove the extraneous Not about checking off features and making them easy to use. Remove features to provide the best experience. Different standard.

Web 2.0 - smaller, more focused apps in response to bloated, over-engineered tools.

Q: There is a conflict here. When I see the controllers - the kids pick them up and naturally learn different games. Is anything contradictory to the comment about simplicity. They manage complexity without manuals and training. We spend half of our time planning training.

A: New Nintendo controller. It looks like a remote control for the TV. Depending on how you move it the character turns. Much more intuitive. Even games are moving that direction.

It goes back to learning abilities in kids. Technology is anything that was invented after you were born. Rest is just part of your life.

People have been saying the next generation is going to change the business culture. The world changes a lot more slowly than we might think it does. Kids will adjust to the realities then enter into. Connectivity is an order of magnitude difference.

When boomers REALLY move out, then there will be a larger change. It takes longer than we think it might.

Q: Concerned we might be paying too much attention to engagement. Engagement might not mean learning. Not sure what the word learning means. If we teach kids about moving around obstacles, does that teach critical thinking. We are finding our science majors are not learning how to critically think. Not sure we are testing true learning.

A: I think that some critical learning can be built into games. Seeing that in training games. With education, younger education. Some much of the ed systems have gone to teaching to a computer read test. If the outcome is computerized, why should not the teaching of those skills be home, game based and save the classroom time spend more time on critical thinking and teaching to the test.

Linda - I spent the first 10 years as an educator. The bottom line is in teaching, at the beginning of those years, I taught k-6 then university. When I teach scientist I would cut up fruits, do experiments during lunch. Increasingly as the all-knowing forces of government decided they knew how to improve education, we had to do 2 minutes of safety, 90 minutes of math, 20 of social studies. TO make sure everything was bullet proof we were given exactly what to do. So boring. They audited us by having people come in. One of the reasons I left teaching. Loved when it was about curiosity, creativity to engage with passion. What was the most profound part of your education, most memorable, thing that mattered most, I had this teacher who was passionate about X, or saw an adult passionate about Z who encouraged me. We don't have that anymore. We are scheduled, minimum learner objectives we tech to. Our values shifted over what a successful product coming out of a school was. We need to reexamine what success is. It is not about games at all, but the values. In an attempt to standardized we have destroyed the passion.

Tags: ctc2006, generationalshifts