Xyleme Learning Blog

In a comment about Clay Shirky’s cognitive surplus concept by Heresiarch (appended to a Making Light post, via FastForwardBlog, via Harold Jarche*), we read:

… 1) Shirky’s claim isn’t that everyone will suddenly devote every leisure hour to writing a novel/inventing cold fusion–only that, all of a sudden, it will be much easier to do so. People might still only choose to use 1% more of their leisure time in a productive fashion, but that’s still 1% improvement, and small percentages add up to a lot of productivity when you’re talking millions of people.

2) Productive activities are really fun. Really. They aren’t necessarily more fun than passive activities, I admit: a balance is necessary. But the idea that people, minus the prod of economic incentive, will sit around like blobs is itself the product of a culture where leisure activity is already coded as passive. If given an equal choice, a substantial number of people will choose to devote a fair amount of their leisure time to productive endeavors. …

There are many businesses that began as someone’s hobby, the passion that they devoted their excess time to because they found solving some particular set of problems so interesting that they just couldn’t stop themselves. Businesses like that have a distinctive energy, and sometimes their founders are even lucky enough to be able to surround themselves with others who share their enthusiasm.

Similarly, there are career paths that tend to favor extremes of talent because in combination with employing relatively few people, they have a pool of people to draw from who were so interested in that field that they spend large excesses of personal time practicing the necessary skills and participating in peer-to-peer learning networks. The computer science field operates very much like this, where in addition to the academic track, individuals who excel often engage in voluntary practice, group projects and self-teaching for its own sake, beyond the level of study that would be necessary to be merely competent at their work.

This raises the bar of what’s considered competent, and highly favors individuals who are not just talented, but those who are passionate about what they do. Yet there’s an essential component to this sort of aspiration to excellence, and that is the time in which to engage in it. Even a very bright and willing individual whose days are completely packed with structured activities might have a hard time letting their creativity shine or fully developing any skills but those they’re forced to use.

And here, it’s useful to point out something said about the organizational use of cognitive surpluses at the FastForwardBlog, as linked here and above:

… Organizational theorists, not being as clever or market oriented as Shirky, did not think up a notion as attractive as “cognitive surplus.” Instead, they talk about the notion of “organizational slack.” In hindsight, a very poor choice of words. For the last two decades, or more, organizations have been rooting out “slack” wherever they could find it. When the goal is efficiency, this is an appropriate strategy. However, it leaves no capacity for innovation and adaptation. Those few organizations that explicitly provide this capacity, such as Google’s 20% rule, are deemed notable and newsworthy. …

Google has employees devote 20 percent of their time, one day a week, to projects that aren’t in their job descriptions. I don’t think I’ll find much argument with the assertion that Google never seems to lack for innovation and breakout ideas; staying at the forefront of a highly creative industry for the length of time that they have absolutely requires such an idea surplus, and such a bonus would be hard to come by if so many of their employees weren’t given the space to tinker.

We’ve discussed here previously how important it is to be able to innovate when economic times become difficult, though I’m sure that if you’re reading these pages, this isn’t news to you. Yet times are sure to become not only harder, the same with less, but to bring fundamental and irreversible shifts in the business operating environment.

Consider what’s happening in China, a country whose industrial and business capacity affects the entire world market. The May, 2008 issue of National Geographic is a special issue devoted to conditions in China, and the following passage is from an article entitled “Bitter Waters,” which discusses China’s oncoming water shortage due to climate change-induced droughts, desertification and as the article relates here, pollution:

… Nothing, however, has precipitated the water crisis more than three decades of breakneck industrial growth. China’s economic boom has, in a ruthless symmetry, fueled an equal and opposite environmental collapse. In its race to become the world’s next superpower, China is not only draining its rivers and aquifers with abandon; it is also polluting what’s left so irreversibly that the World Bank warns of “catastrophic consequences for future generations.”

If that sounds like hyperbole, consider what is happening already in the Yellow River Basin. The spread of deserts is creating a dust bowl that may dwarf that of the American West in the 1930s, driving down grain production and pushing millions of “environmental refugees” off the land. The poisonous toxins choking the waterways — 50 percent of the Yellow River is considered biologically dead — have led to a spike in cases of cancer, birth defects, and waterborne disease along their banks. Pollution-related protests have jumped — there were 51,00 across China in 2005 alone — and could metastasize into social unrest. Any one of these symptoms, if unchecked, could hinder China’s growth and reverberate across world markets. Taken together, the long-term impact could be even more devastating. As Premier Wen Jiabao has put it, the shortage of clean water threatens “the survival of the Chinese nation.” …

If we want very challenging questions in our roles as educators and lifelong learners, one might be how to deal with a world in which one of the fundamental business assumptions of recent decades, the ready availability of cheaply manufactured Chinese goods, becomes a thing of the past. Should their production capacity shrink, or become unreliable, it will affect supply chains and business models all over the globe. While other nations will doubtless try to step in to take their place, disruption would really be unavoidable.

It isn’t in my job description to contemplate a world where China produces a lot less, or produces much more expensively, and it probably isn’t in yours. Still, it’s quite possible that we and our companies will have to find ways to make a living anyway should that come to pass.

Those who are going to do well in that case are probably not the ones whose every productive minute stays tied up in the tasks and problems of today.

* Mmmm, long chains of attribution

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