Gen x, Culture wars and the hyphenated movements
I read an incredible article today on the culture wars between “knowledge management” (km) and “social media” (sm) and I’m seeing signs of it everywhere. Venkatesh G. Rao writes a killer article, ,
Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: A Generational War
arguing that gen-xers (those born between 68 and 79) are choosing between ideological promotion (Boomers who invented km) and creative exploration (mellinials inventing sm).
This weekend in Atlanta will be the catalyst conference, run by Gen-Xers who are looking to get the baby boomer principles of the seeker church into the hands of open source, new media Millennials. There will also be a smaller conference of Progressive Christian Cooperative, geared, in part, at getting the wisdom and momentum of the Baby Boomer liberals to cooperate socially while maintaining their ideological distinctives. I’m going to be at both conferences for a bit because, as a good Xer, I like to synthesize these complex differences. But I’m struck that neither of these are yet led by Mellinnials and that they may not need to exist for Mellinnials… unless the church convences them of their need for it, and then they quit being Mellinialls. Let me say this a different way: Gen-x driven faith groups who are partnering with Boomer Knowledge Management underwriters face a challenge in that they will work to un-Melliniallize the Mellinials. Both Catalyst and PCC face the hard challenge of building a future market share by pulling folks out of incarnational living.
Let me add to that my own gen-x home in “the hyphens” that is the presby-mergent affiliation I have within Emergent Village. It seems that with the help of Phyllis Tickel’s Great Emergence, that groups like sub-mergent, presby-mergent, and anglo-mergent will meet up to discuss our similarities. It could be that we discover that we are trying to please Knowledge Management Religious Culture while exploring the benefits of social media. Hm.
To explore my point I’ll lift two quotes from Rao’s article:
“The Boomers liked the idea of world views, and tried to frame both what they were for, as well as what they were against (think Star Wars) in monolithic ways. Mental models of the world that a single person could get. James Michener’s The Drifters represents one articulation of such a world view. Here’s the thing: Millenials fundamentally cannot think this way because of the deeply collaborative nature of their cultural DNA. They seem happy understanding and working with their piece of the puzzle, trusting that the larger body politic will be manifesting and working according to a reasonable understanding of the world. Gen X, in this sense, manages a curious compromise. We like world-views, but as anti-visionaries, we don’t like to just make them up arbitrarily (and definitely not in the form of a novel or the lyrics to a song). Our world view is a pragmatic one that accommodates complexity by trying to make it a very rich, data-driven one. Wikipedia (founded by Gen X’ers, Jimmy Wales, b. 1966, and Larry Sanger, b. 1968) is a classic Gen X-led attempt to understand the world. It has none of the incomprehensible complexity of Facebook-as-implicit-model-of-the-world, but neither does it have the doctrinaire vacuity of typical Boomer manifestos that try to dictate how the world should be, with no real attempt to figure out how it is.”
“The tragedy of Gen X is that we will not be remembered as a big-idea generation. We will likely be remembered, via a footnote (much like the Silents), as the generation which made the fateful decision to trust the creativity of the generation following it over the values of the generation that came before.”
In the recent epic contemplating the death of emergent, I am struck by the need to ask if it follows the values of x,y,or z. I have a hunch, thought, that the future of emergent is not in selecting who’s values it carries forward but that future of emergent and so many church experiments is the creative way of learning and discovering meaning in what lies ahead.
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[...] The entire piece is worth your time. In any case, Venkat’s observations drew a bunch of excellent commentary around the KM blogosphere, both supportive and skeptical. Here are some of the links: http://aboveandbeyondkm.blogspot.com/2008/10/war-between-social-media-and-km.htmlhttp://www.reyes-chow.com/2008/10/its-not-just-us.htmlhttp://churchasart.com/blog/2008/10/09/gen-x-culture-wars-and-the-hyphenated-movements/http://www.whatralphknows.com/2008/10/social-media-vs-knowledge-management.htmlhttp://www.onstrategies.com/blog/?p=343http://amanwithaphd.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/a-generational-war/http://www.spreadingscience.com/2008/09/30/a-generational-war/http://cmsreport.com/blog/social-media-vs-knowledge-managementhttp://blog.tarn.org/2008/10/10/oh-good-grief/He asked me to weigh in, which I did via private email. Here is the text of my response, for what it’s worth: Venkat, I emphatically agree with your analysis. I think you accurately locate the enthusiasms and skepticisms of each generation toward the different approaches. I also think there are other issues that may seem obvious, about how social media displaces authority and hierarchy, and is therefore inherently more threatening to the senior cohort in the workplace, regardless of their generational orientation. People who got to the top by hoarding info don’t want to share; they want to manage access. People at the bottom looking to move up quickly want immediate opportunities to contribute and be recognized, rather than working through approved channels. I suspect Millennials will be much less enthusiastic about whatever succeeds SM in the enterprise if it is suddenly their knowledge and authority at stake.However, I think it’s necessary to back up a bit and look at the strategic objectives of the KM/SM initiative in the first place. The goal is to share knowledge to improve some aspect of performance, innovation, service, etc. Sharing knowledge has three components - capturing knowledge, locating knowledge, and consuming knowledge. Any knowledge transfer solution, from classroom training to wikis, has strengths and weaknesses in each of those respects. I use the following slide in my presentations to talk about this issue: Basically, knowledge transfer can be oriented on an grid whose axes are Structured vs. Unstructured (X axis) and Personal vs. Impersonal. Printed documentation is the quintessential structured, impersonal (and static) type of knowledge repository. Search is unstructured/dynamic, but impersonal. Real-time communication is unstructured and personal, etc. If you have a multi-generational workplace and the goal is to get the knowledge-bearers to share, and the knowledge-needers to consume, you need to cover as much of the spectrum as possible to accommodate the whole range of learning and capturing styles, bearing in mind that it will be very difficult to get Millennials to appreciate or accept the highly-structured and linear modes of communication (but it will be just as essential to have these options available for “Boomerang Boomers” who join the organization in lower-level roles). In the long run, the triumph of social/unstructured knowledge transfer is inevitable, but the “long run” is going to be longer than is convenient for many of us. Boomers won’t be past the tipping point of organizational influence for 10-15 years. In the meantime, organizations will need to keep a parallel, legacy knowledge infrastructure in place to support the Boomerang Boomers and laggard X-ers who require static, authoritative references, as well as more dynamic social media for the Digital Natives. One of the goals of reciprocal mentoring, which Dan and I talk a lot about, is to engage younger workers to help capture the knowledge of their older peers in social media repositories and channels, with the hope that some of the domain expertise of the elder will rub off on the mentee, while the facility with social media tools and practices will adhere to the mentor. Once the Boomers internalize and “own” the social media channels, the top-down pressure for a managed, KM-oriented strategy will probably start to die a natural death. [...]