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March 26, 2010
Novelty, complexity and ambiguity at work: There are several quality answers and solutions. Find one.
There are no right answers, proven-out formulas, connect-the-dots kits.
The current winners--think Jobs, Murdoch, Eastwood, Drudge--are those who are custom-making solutions and brilliantly implementing them.
--Jane Genova
"E" at the Beach: Grateful to be a guy who could think on his own.
An acceptance of complexity, of subtlety, of unclear-ness. Do you hire people who have and embrace that with open eyes, excitement and vigor? And can think hard things through?
Or do you attract the "isn't-there-a-form-for-this?" crowd? You know, the Cookie Cutter People.
My problem: for more and more younger people in the workplace, novelty--which I view as gorgeous, sometimes elegant, and always beckoning--makes their heads explode.
It's what comes at you every day in any workplace with work worth doing. Complexity. Ambiguity. A messy problem. A "hard" thing.
More and more employees don't like it. They can't deal with it. They want a "form", a template, a program.
And that's the point: great work doesn't have "forms". Am terribly sorry about that. You will just have to think on your own.
We hired you--all of you--to solve problems.
So here's a true gem we love--written in late December 2008--by Jane Genova at Law and More (subtitled "Deconstructing What Happens in Law"): "Managing Partners: Are Your Millennial Gen Associates Not Dealing With Ambiguity".
The issue for WAC? is not just one about the care-and-feeding of often delicate Gen-Y, the new, complex, and astonishingly intricate "tea cups" in your shop.
How do your lawyers, other professionals and staff of any generation with undergraduate degrees in, say, engineering (no Aggie jokes, please) and accounting deal with the wonderful chaos of hard, complex, messy, unruly and--"worst" of all--novel problems?
To me, those are the fun ones--and often the only issues I want. But novelty makes lots of us fold.
For many projects, for a great client or for your firm, Western logic and/or "the usual procedures" cannot provide all the answers. You either have that awareness--or you don't. Most lawyers just don't.
And it's the reason even good clients perceive us as "half-there" technicians and mechanics who, somehow years ago, lost their common sense and any degree of creativity we once might have had.
(from a previous WAC post)
Posted by JD Hull at March 26, 2010 11:59 PM