The Digital Natives, and You

Courtesy of NASA/Sean Smith.

Sometimes an intellectual understanding of change is not the same as a visceral one. Managers all know that information sharing and collaboration are potent paths to innovation, but do they feel it? Especially as new generations of employees arrive, generations that were “born and raised with technology in their hands,” do managers really understand “the huge sea change in how the young work force is wired,” and what it means?

Jim Fister, a longtime strategy futurist at Intel Corp., doesn’t think so. “For most of us, looking down from the top, information sharing can be a complicated phenomenon. It used to be you didn’t share information with your classmates at school. I think the word for it back then was ‘cheating.’”

Fister argues that managers underestimate just how uncomplicated the “digital natives” find it to collaborate.

“I spend a lot of time with high school students, trying to encourage them to get into technology because I’m just afraid of the dearth of technology interest in the U.S.,” Fister says. “When I look at those high school students, I see everything done collaboratively, socially. They’re all working together in groups. Get a bunch of kids together for a robotics challenge and just watch the really cool things that happen. It’s astounding. I dare you to go out to a local high school and see the way kids operate. You’ll also see how their methods accomplish a global task.

“Inside corporate walls we all talk about teamwork, but realistically, when we came in, we were all given our individual projects, and then we would kind of roll them up into a team task and achieve success. But employees coming in now are naturals at sharing information and collaborating. They can’t picture another way. And they’re doing it in ways that those of us who were trained along individual lines just don’t understand. They naturally team up, and do handoffs in the middle of projects — process handoffs that would make normal corporate folks shudder but that are natural ways of doing business in a social network environment today, like a high school or even a university.

“And that’s the work force — the one coming in — that’s really going to change the way that IT innovates,” says Fister. “We don’t need to change their habits; we need to recognize that they’re doing the right thing, and we need to change our habits as a result.”