The Happy Orca

Clay Shirky

The institutional response is “I can get 75% of the value for 10% of the hires! Great – that’s what I’ll do”.

The co-operative infrastructure model says… “Why do you want to give up a quarter of the value?. If your system is designed so you have to give up a quarter of the value reengineer the system – don’t take on the costs that prevent you from getting to the contributions of these people, build the system so that anybody can contribute at any amount.”

So the co-ordination response asks not “How are these people as employees?”, rather… “What is their contribution like?”

And the tension here is between Institution-As-Enabler and Institution-As-Obstacle…

Institutions hate being told that they are obstacles…

Malcolm Gladwell

The demands of every profession in the workplace have changed dramatically over the past few years and they are going to continue to change at an accelerated rate. We want profoundly different things from workers today than we wanted in the past. We want them to be flexible, we want people who can work in teams, we want people who can think abstractly…

The world has profoundly changed but the way we hire people hasn’t changed along with it. We want to cling to these incredibly outdated and simplistic measures of ability.

The great irony in this of course is that we have this sense that progress, broadly speaking, has the effect of reducing uncertainty. But the opposite is true. As the world changes we have to accept the idea that people cannot be understood and summed up easily and cleanly.

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