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Young people, especially children, implicitly understand digital technology in a way that the rest of us can only watch and admire. John Perry Barlow calls them the "natives" of cyberspace. MIT's Andy Lippman makes the point even more poignantly. Speaking to a large European industrial company struggling to understand how it could turn itself into a digital-ready company, and fast, Lippman said there was only one way: "Hire the children."
Tomorrow's customers, competitors, and business partners, born and raised on digital technology in their homes, schools, and toys, will not only expect but demand commercial relationships that are technology enabled. Children who grow up playing with 64-bit networked video games won't simply reject text-based interfaces and suboptimal communication speeds, they will find them incomprehensible, like some form of hieroglyphics. And their attention spans for new goods and services are themselves expressed in Internet yearsthat is, they are about one-seventh as patient as adults.
The good news, however, is that today's children will be the product designers, customer service providers, and business managers of tomorrow. One way to understand the needs of the next generation is by talking to them and creating an environment where they can build the structures that will take today's organization forward. You can succeed at digital strategy, quite simply, by putting them in charge.
Organizations need not wait for tomorrow's managers to grow up before they can begin to learn from them. A recent Business Week article on the potential benefits to child development of extensive video game play told the story of a demonstration by network game company Total Entertainment Network to senior computer simulation experts from the U.S. Department of Defense. The company's CEO was trying to demonstrate how to play Quake, the hugely popular game that has taken over the Internet gaming world, and failing miserably. As it happened, the thirteen-year-old son of one of the meeting's organizers was in the room. He took over the keyboard and blew away all of the CEO's opponents.
MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle has made a formal study of the changing way in which children respond to technology. Following on the classic work of child development expert Jean Piaget in the 1920s and 1930s, Turkle has been watching children use technology to form order and structure in their universe, creating theories about space, time, causality, and life. She began this work in the early 1980s, but in the 1990s, Turkle writes, she found that children's response to computers, in particular, had changed significantly. "[C]hildren still talk about computers as 'just machines' but describe them as sentient and intentional. The very notion of a machine has been reconfigured to include an object with a psychology."
Turkle tells the remarkable story of a thirteen year old playing SimLife, a sophisticated game that simulates the life of an ecosystem the player designs. The child is clearly unaware of much of what was going on in the game. After Turkle asked repeatedly if the game's confusing messages bothered him, the child sought to reassure the adult: "Don't let it bother you if you don't understand. I just say to myself that I probably won't be able to understand the whole game any time soon. So I just play."
It isn't just children who are different, but young adults as well. We recently took a group of twenty executives from different European postal agencies on a technology tour of Silicon Valley and stopped in for a day at Rocket Science, a game company headquartered in San Francisco's growing multimedia neighborhood. The oldest employee we could find was well under forty, and the environment clearly reflected a generational difference in attitudes toward work. The executives were amazed at the work styles they saw-people everywhere, running in and out of each other's offices, holding impromptu meetings and resolving problems as they came up. There was no sign of bureaucracy or authority and little structure to the work or the work space. Yet it was clear that Rocket Science's game developers were working with tremendous energy and productivity.
Most remarkable of all, as an I/S officer from the British Post Office observed, was the attitude of Rocket Science's employees. "Everyone is smiling," she said. "They actually seem to be enjoying themselves." She thought about that for a moment and added, "They're not working, they're having fun."
Creating work environments like Rocket Science-environments suitable for childrenisn't easy. As the CEO of a major banking organization told us recently, "How do you change a culture from one of hierarchy with the normal pyramid to an open, flat culture where the 25-year-old kid can say to me, 'You're crazy. That won't work. Where did you get that dumb idea? We have to do it this way.' And I willingly sit there and listen to him?"
Hiring the children-or including them in the process of product development, strategy formation, and workplace designis the easy part. What is more difficult is learning to see through their eyes and trying, as best we can, to live in their world. But that is the only way, in the end, to develop a process that sustains the discovery, formation, and unleashing of killer apps.
At a recent workshop on digital strategy we conducted for an international management consulting firm, we began by giving two ten year olds (the children of some of the participants) each an unopened box containing a Sony PlayStation. The PlayStation is a powerful game computer with more raw processing power than most high-end desktop computers that cost thirty times as much. We asked them to put it together, connect it to a television and start playing with it, which they were able to do in less than ten minutes. Along the way they described what they were doing. "Now, this is the CD. I don't really know how this works, but you need it to play different games."
While we started our speech about the power and unpredictable nature of killer apps, the children drove three-dimensional race cars across the Golden Gate bridge, projected on screens behind us. The children were so absorbed by the game that they soon forgot they were standing in front of an audience of adults, and one of the parents tried to quiet the children lest they interrupt the presentation. No, we said, don't stop them. Their joy in playing the game was precisely the point we were trying to make.
This last design principle brings us full circle, since we began by talking about the need to think more about our dealings with business partners, including those business partnersour employeeswith whom we transact the most business. The next generation of managers, laborers, and CEOs are the children of Moore and Metcalfe, born under the sign of the Law of Disruption and uttering Ronald Coase's name, figuratively, as their first word. This group already controls a sizable chunk of the economy, and that chunk is growing exponentially along with Moore's Law. So now is the time to introduce yourself to these mutated creatures, otherwise known as your own children. The sooner you can incorporate their values and their energy into your organization, the more likely you'll be remembered by them with some emotion other than nostalgia. They might even admire you.
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