Far Wise in Knowledge Management

Staying motivated when there is no clear goal

Although the level of lockdown when the Corona pandemic started varied for different countries (and still varies), in most cases people stayed home as much as they could. In the Netherlands, we are still in lockdown: allowed to go out for a walk, bike ride, run, but not in groups, keeping 1.5 meters distance and staying at home after 9PM (when curfew starts). Staying healthy is important, and especially now most of us are working from home and sit for too many hours, so it is great we can go out and do something. No organized forms of sports are allowed though, so no races, no club training. Running is easy, I can do it from home and I can easily do it on my own.

However, I’m running much less than before and I hear the same from my training mates. Last year, I was training for a trail race in France in March and when that got canceled, I didn’t have a goal any longer. Plus nobody knew how long we would be in this lockdown. So at that time, it felt better to slow down, give the body rest and pick it up later when races are allowed again. That sounded reasonable, but I forgot about the mental part. My motivation to run dropped to a low point. Why would I go out anyway? My reason to go out seemed gone. I had nothing to work towards, as there were no races! It took a while to realize that I had to change my reason for running to a more internal reason: feeling good. I go out for a run because it feels good to move, it makes me happy and makes me feel fit. That’s reason in itself to go, which I had almost forgotten.

I started writing this posting during summer 2020, I think. Almost a year later, even though there seems light at the end of the tunnel, it’s still the same ‘stay at home as much as you can’ situation. I came across this article in the New York Times, titled “Why I stopped running during the pandemic (and how I started again)”, by Lindsay Crouse. She was running a lot when the orders to stay at home came. She stopped running at all, she just shut down and could only sit on her couch. It wasn’t rest, it didn’t make her feel better. Her question “What can we do to feel better in the midst of a crisis that seems like it won’t end?”, sounds familiar to me and probably to many others (runners or non-runners). She heard that when you’re in a rut, you need a nudge to take action. Waiting to feel better doesn’t work. The author found that for her to deal with the pandemic burnout isn’t going easy, it’s trying something hard.

What helped me is creating a new routine. Some of my running friends participate in online challenges. As we don’t know when everything is back to “normal” (whatever that looks like), we need to find different motivations and give ourselves a nudge (or just a kick in the but!, however hard it is to kick yourself). Go out, do something, don’t stay on that couch.

Note: the picture is me in my first 50 kilometer trail run, in 2019. I was super motivated for this run, to run long distances. It reminds me of a state of mind that I haven't had since (and I hope will be back soon)

Passion is overrated

Samuel's post about following one's passion caught my attention. I fully agree that sometimes work needs to get done, which has nothing to do with passion. I once heard someone saying that if everybody followed their passion, there would be no garbage men (or women). We can't all be musician, athlete, painter, however passionate we are. Maybe one's passion is not in the daily job, but this job provides the money to do something you like to do (but in which  you're just not good enough to make it a living).

If I may quote Scott Adams, "Passion at work is overrated". I like Ben Horowitz' advice much better: Don't follow your passion, follow your contribution. I think that's what we all can do (and what Samuel did with his documents).

 

 

 

 

 

Would you hire yourself?

Do you know these tv-programs in which people decide to leave their home country, sell everything they own to start a new life in a foreign country? Usually a bed & breakfast or a campsite. Job applicants are often like the participants at such tv program (in the Netherlands "Ik vertrek"), thinks Freek van Kraaikamp. They hardly prepare, don't understand the culture and rules - hardly know what they have started.

Worse, participants at "Ik vertrek" don't know themselves at all. No wonder these emigrants have problems succeeding in a foreign country. When recruiters look as painfully to our resumes as we look at participants at "Ik vertrek", it is not strange that we won't get this fantastic job?

Time to look in the mirror. The book "Zou jij jezelf aannemen?", or "Would you hire yourself?" can help you. Freek van Kraaikamp provokes in a lively manner, combines his questions with stores and anekdotes. He tells how he gained insight by trial and error and how he learned to present himself. Those insights he shares as a career coach and in this book. No shortages of ideas for Van Kraaikamp: wouldn't it be nice if hundred thousands of young people looking for their first jobs, would get this book from Minister Asscher (Minister of Social Affairs and Employment)?

The job market is not like it was before. Sending your resume to as many job adds as possible, in the hope one will hit target, is no longer working. Recruiters receive tons of resumes in their inbox. Try to stand out among all other applicants! Preparations start with finding an answer to the questions: who am I?, what can I do?, what do I want? You need to spend some time to reflect on yourself. What is your story? If you don't know the answer to this question, how should the recruiter at the other side of the table know the answer? The mirror exercises in the book help. "How to describe yourself and your search in one sentence", is an example. Another exercise is to create a catchy title that includes both your knowledge and experience, as well as what you're looking for. Van Kraaikamp gives many examples. Some of these self-descriptions will be to generic, others are too specific. Van Kraaikamp teaches you to find the middle. A crisp and clear message.

Van Kraaikamp often uses himself as example. He wants to tell that, although your career swings all directions, although you've failed in many ways, you can find patterns and learn about yourself. The book (only in Dutch) "Zou jij jezelf aannemen?" has much to offer for anyone looking for a new job. If there is something I have missed, it would be networking tips. 

What do you think: would you hire yourself?

Back from a (too long) break

I've been switching a few times, external blog - internal blog (at BlackBerry) and now back to my external blog again. I found it hard to put energy in my internal blog posts and keep up this blog at the same time. I also learned that when I left the company all my internal postings are gone. At least this one is still there and I can look back at what my thoughts and interests were in the past. Not much has changed. While I've started with Twitter in the meantime, I felt that Twitter doesn't satisfy my needs to explore a topic.

So yes, I neglected this "history of my thinking" terribly! But I'm going to give it a new try, even knowing that I lost any reader from the last 5 years. Forgive me.

I will still post about knowledge management and related topics. I also realized that although I read a lot of books (for review), I hardly take any learning points from them. It's like: I read, write the review and move on, next book. I want to use this blog to write down a few take-aways from those books. So that when I look back, I'm reminded of these lessons and maybe (but that's almost wishful thinking) learn something.

 

Doing meaningful work

I read somewhere that Generation Y wants to do meaningful work and then I wondered: Who doesn’t? Don’t we all want to contribute to something bigger, know why we do the work we do? Dan Ariely confirms my feelings in his book “The Upside of Irrationality”. It is his second book about our irrational behavior - his first book was titled “Predictably Irrational”, which I highly recommend to read. Ariely is a behavioral economist who carries out a lot of experiments, usually among MIT students. In this book many experiments are related to work, which is a topic I’m interested in (in case you haven’t noticed). He carries out a few experiments about being motivated to do meaningful work or the opposite, losing motivation when the work is not meaningful. If the work of the students is destroyed in the experiment, they work less hard and are less motivated. This sounds obvious because it is so clear, but there are in the workplace less obvious examples that still can be very demotivating.

I had to think about a “Jurisdictional scan” that I had to write in my former job at one of the Ontario Ministries. It’s one of those documents that take a lot of time and I was very sure that it was useless and would only end up in a drawer (or as file in the document management system). Senior staff refuses to write jurisdictional scans and that’s why a contractor, like me, had to do it. I asked questions, but nobody knew the answer. The goal was not clear, the topic too broad, the target group unknown, the reason for the selected jurisdictions arbitrary. Besides, all content would be timely, so a year later someone (not me!) would have to do it all over again. So from the beginning on it was clear this was a waste of time, or better: meaningless work. Because I was sure that nobody would read it, I added a comment in the document that “who reads this, can claim a chocolate bar”. Not one chocolate bar was claimed. I don’t need to add how motivated I was to work on this document.

Sometimes the work becomes meaningless because of circumstances. In another job (not at the government), I worked as consultant/researcher and I knew that sometimes a recommendation would never lead to a change. It didn’t discourage me, maybe because I had already started a new challenging project. One time we were investigating how to solve the (future) loss of knowledge for a company with many people close to the age of retirement. Halfway the project however, the company had to “let go” many people, which was another type of knowledge loss. It didn’t help us, people were hesitant to collaborate – if we’re assessing their knowledge, they could be next. The initial question became less urgent for the company management. To say that the project became meaningless is a big statement, but there were clearly other priorities and I wonder how much of what we developed is implemented.

Contributing to the bigger picture is not always so obvious. I don’t build a Blackberry or design the newest applications. Still I have the feeling that I contribute, that my work is a small piece in the big puzzle. Ariely agrees that people are motivated if they have the feeling that what they do is useful, has a meaning. “If you’re a manager who really wants to demotivate your employees, destroy their work in front of their eyes. Or, if you want to be a little subtler about it, just ignore them and their efforts. On the other hand, if you want to motivate people working with you and for you, it would be useful to pay attention to them, their effort, and the fruits of their labor.” Show or say that you value the work. You may earn a chocolate bar if you do.

A-social because of achievements rewarding

In Intermediair I read a short article that says that individual rewarding of achievements works negatively in teamwork. It is a research done at Technical University of Eindhoven by Ham van Vijfeijken.

The research was done in a gas and oil company (I wonder which). A team of seismologists and geografists had to cooperate intensively to make analyses of available gas resources. After the introduction of individual incentives, team members were less prepared to help each other and hold back information.

Van Vijfeijkens advice is that giving bonuses for teams that need to work very closely, like in a cockpit, shouldn't be given individual bonuses. It is almost impossible to isolate indivual performance from team performance. Indivual rewardings make team members compatitors instead of collaborators.

I'm very much interested in the relation of motivation for knowledge sharing and incentives. It seems very complicated, why do people share knowledge and why (sometimes) not? In this case it seems much influenced by the rewarding. I think that this type of (hard) reward does only work to get things started, during a short time. For the longer time, another type of motivation is needed, which comes from the person himself instead of the outside (company) world. I can see that this is a theoretical reasoning and difficult to accomplish in practice, so I'm still looking for ways how to get people intrinsically motivated.