The Work-Place (Culture)

This section explores the organizational culture of vitality. It investigates workplace drivers of enchantment and disenchantment, including the respect for human diversity, the safe space criteria for autonomy and creativity, leadership and trust issues, anxiety containment, power distribution, information flow and collaboration. This will include the role of the grammar of conduct, ethical pluralism, morals and values in an association of constitutionally grounded citizenry. This constitutional project enables employees and stakeholders to participate in an association based upon communicative action.

The nature of work and of the 'job' has changed as well. The Post-Industrial worker, given the increased dependence on information, on data, on learned skills, on collaboration and on continuous learning and improvements, is increasingly a Knowledge Worker. The three primary aspects of knowledge or nonphysical work are: (1) the collaborative and communicative nature of labor in industrial production linked together by information technology; (2) the problem solving interactive nature of work relying on what Robert Reich called symbolic analysts, those who manipulate the signs and symbols on the computer screen that represent production processes; and (3) the production and manipulation of desire, affect, and emotion such that in today's world "everything is firing message modules, straight for your taste buds, your vanities, your fears. A second of your attention is all they ask"¹.

Knowledge work represents labor and private life co-mingling in a postmodern dance, a dialectic between the ontology (the nature of being, movement, growth, evolution) of the human subject and economic production. This dance involves knowledge, communication and specialized languages (discourses such as IT languages). The person, with his or her multiple identities, is increasingly responding to a plethora of stimuli, on the job and off, leading him/her to demand greater control, certainty, freedom and power over their lives: at work and at home. A business, with its modular structure, must be flexible and have its finger on the pulse of people's desires, identities, and fantasies (as customers, as knowledge workers, as shareholders). All of this is the postmodern work of diversity. It is part of our contribution to the post-industrial business.

Most economists believe that an intensification of the trends from the late 1990's to the present is likely. For example, an article entitled The Diehard Economy argues that after the wrenching changes of the past 20-30 years, the post-industrial flexible economy has "paved the way to a new prosperity". "The individual job was made less secure", yet, this flexible, responsive, modular economy was starting to deliver the goods" when September-11 hit. September 11 merely reminded us of "how dangerous a place it is out there" and that a "lot of bad stuff could still happen" . The national and economic response to terror has not signaled that all the investment in changing businesses will be reversed. It merely underscored the need to continue developing greater flexibility, adaptability and ultimately, vitality. The challenge, though, is that vitality involves diversity while the fear of terror and change can lead to its opposite, to conformity. To avoid this, we must help people to question and to learn how to navigate these changes. This must not be done by denial and fear, but by balancing a person's need for security with their desire for exploration, meaning and excitement in life. We must learn how to balance what we call enchantment, with its darker cousin, disenchantment. We must stay vigilant to disenchantment's most virulent element, that of reducing organizational life to the cost-benefit calculus involved in instrumental reason and rationality. That is the crux of organizational nihilism and it is HR's greatest challenge.

Workplaces are rushing and often stumbling in an effort to catch up with these trends in order to attract the best talent and to create spaces for that talent to be their most creative. They want a balanced environment to meet the needs of creative talent, but without the chaos of the frat house. For example, an office in London has introduced a Zen Zone where telephones are forbidden and a Chaos Area where rave music plays in the background. This fearful time makes people flee back to the "nest", where romancing becomes the "still point" in an out of control and crazy world. Whether it is romancing the brand, our homes, our relationships or our work and workplaces, we want enchantment in our lives.

We want intimacy in this world of virtuality. And intimacy comes in as many flavors as do people themselves. It is a customer driven and a service driven economy built on difference, information, knowledge, and creativity. The context, from the post-modern, post-industrial age to the trends that are affecting our lives at the social, business and individual level is driven by the diversity of people with their fluid identities and reactive fears. And globalization exacerbates both our fears and our fluidity.

¹ Thomas de Zengotita, The Numbing of the American Mind, Harper's Magazine April 2002 pp33-40.

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