Hacking the World of Work
September 30, 2011
Hacking the World of Work
In March of 2010, I read an article in an airport about the all-hands hacking parties that Facebook does with all its employees with the intention of making Facebook better and better. Almost two years later, we launched a new class that all 70 to 80 graduate students in the Department of Industrial/Organizational Psychology at Seattle Pacific University would take and all 4 professors would teach. Last night was the start. It was amazing. Many of our alumni even came back to come to this event. I have to admit that after 17 years as a professor, something profound happened for me. I saw the power of letting go of my own desire to control how learning happens, and seeing the possibilities that emerge when you release the beast that is the leader and learner within each of us. It may have been the best classroom experience of my life, and all we did was create the “swimming pool” within which to swim, and then we jumped in. Our intention is to tackle the most interesting, challenging, and very real questions facing work, employers, employees, and real people in the coming years. We said we would measure our success by a few things:
- The amount of buzz in the room.
- The extent to which 2/3 of the people in the room loved it, and the other 1/3 hated it (hoping that the 1/3 changes each week).
- And by the number of outsiders who aren’t even enrolled who come (given that 15 alums showed up, I think it was a good start).
Here is just a small taste of the questions we addressed at the start…..
What is the psychology of the consumer of the future?
Is Social Networking changing everything?
What do we do when 80% of the workforce are contract employees?
What happens when China and India are the biggest world economies?
What does the world look like if 75% of all employees are overqualified and over-educated for the jobs they have?
Which is more important—character or competence?
What if doing the right thing doesn’t increase your ROI?
Should work be fun?
Can you speed up how fast a person learns?
What do faith, hope, and love have to do with ROI?
What does online gaming have to do with how I behavior at work?
How can I be effective when work is more complex than I can ever understand
What are you willing to sacrifice to make your organization succeed?
Been there, never done this. How does I/O Psychology make a difference in 2015?
Where will we go next? Come and join us and check it out. We will all learn something. You can decide if you fall into the 2/3 or 1/3J
Rob McKenna, Ph.D.
Chair, Dept. Of Industrial/Organizational Psychology
Seattle Pacific University
