

What's your true profession?

A persons profession might actually be what the person Want's to be good at.

During my time in Nokia I witnessed how experience and competence were repeatedly ignored when organizations were reshaped according to new strategies. Further, when this was understood, there was a strict guidance to ensure that recruits had proper education, which led to overlook the experience.

People really can make up their experience or credibility and talk themselves into almost any job and learn while doing, like the fake doctors also have shown. Fact is that a person might turn out to be incompetent despite the long list of experiences, but on the other hand person can be extremely skilled, but totally lack the motivation for the job.

Despite the idea of crafting ones career might sound awkward for Finnish ears it should be considered. It is proven to be a clear weakness in the competition between Finnish and foreign applicants e.g. in Nokia and has lead to less competent people doing the work with better accent.

Developing a new career without years of training sounds unorthodox for some, but it can be seen also as a huge possibility. This thinking does not corner people into their slots, but opens new possibilities, keeps the motivation up and creates cross discipline innovations.

What really matters, is whether a person wants to learn and grow to a new profession and from employer point of view, is the person interested in the right aspects of the role with potential to learn.

Time, management and how to optimize those two?

Difference of managerial and creative work is
that the first is done in meetings and the latter in between.

Tacit or explicit communication for you organization? -Choose both!

I started to read legendary manual How to Adapt to the Mountain by Jimmy Odén. On first pages Oden reminds how mountaineering skills are divided to tangible and measurable knowhow and to abstract part that he calls mountain sense. According to Odén, mountain sense can be learned slowly through experience, evaluation and reflection.

Odéns duality reminded me not only about organization psychology, but also of my ancient post that compared challenges of free skiing and design process.
Also competences in the office have dual nature, divided similarly to explicit and tacit know how.
As organizations have their mountain tops as goals, the most tangible means are naturally seen the most obvious to get there. -The abstract and non measurable traits of competences can get overlooked although it might lead to compromising the innovation.

Then, how to nurture competences to promote innovation?

One example comes from the discussions we had while making the new sitting arrangements in our office.
It was acknowledged that two types of communication is needed to get creative organization working effectively. The first one being obviously the communication required to make progress in your tasks. Second being the communication that supports the values, learning and openness in the company.

The solution here is to support the primarily the latter - tacit - communication goal, although it might sound controversial. Rationale is that this effort is not on the cognitive level and should come effortlessly - almost unconsciously. Further, mutual learning, shared values and general openness enhances competences and creates good motivation to deliver the innovation - giving good base for the first - explicit - communication goal.