Instead of pursuing scalable efficiency, institutions must learn how to pursue scalable peer learning.

On U.S. Labor Day, John Hagel calls for a unified movement of passionate creatives, in order to change human institutions, from the edge to the core.

John Hagel, excerpts:

“Why will more and more people evolve into passionate creatives? Because we live in a world that is shifting inexorably from an obsession with efficiency to an obsession with learning. We have come to call this the Big Shift. It is being driven by long-term changes in our technology and public policy infrastructures. These catalysts in turn generate richer and more prolific knowledge flows around the world. Eventually these knowledge flows get harnessed in creation spaces that offer the potential for increasing returns – the more participants that join these spaces, the richer the performance and learning improvement opportunities.

We initially experience this shift in terms of mounting pressure as competition intensifies on a global scale. But, for those of us already pursuing our passions, this world is enormously liberating because it challenges us to become even better. It also provides us with many of the resources required for this effort. It creates opportunities to unleash our passions, leverage them and scale them in ways never before possible. It gives us opportunities to create and make a difference in ways that we never could before.

Those of us pursuing our passions as our professions will move quickly to address the opportunities created by these new infrastructures, participating in richer and more diverse knowledge flows and challenging each other to new levels of performance. Our success and profound joy will become beacons for the others who have kept their passions bottled up, hidden from sight and far removed from their daily tasks. From another direction, the growing pressures on those who struggle to succeed in the absence of passion will become unbearable and ultimately create a crisis challenging their most basic beliefs.

But there is an even more profound factor driving the growth of this category. At a very basic level, to be human is to be a passionate creative. That is what all of us were meant to be, even though many religions and political movements over the centuries have sought to channel or even deny this basic human need. We live in societies that, often with the best of intentions (and unfortunately occasionally with the worst of intentions), sought to socialize us into a very different mold. But many of those societies have been disintegrating over the past several decades as technology and public policy infrastructures challenge and undermine the foundations of those societies. Our true nature as human beings will ultimately prevail, aided by the changes going on around us.

The journey to engage our existing institutions

But the journey will not be easy. This group of individuals today still faces enormous obstacles in pursuing its passions. While our infrastructures are transforming at a rapid pace, the institutions around us are increasingly at odds with these new infrastructures. Most of the institutions that we must deal with, whether they are schools, firms, non-profits or government bodies, emerged and were shaped in a previous era, driven by earlier technology infrastructures. These communication and transportation infrastructures rewarded scalable efficiency and we responded accordingly. The great institutional leaders of the twentieth century enjoyed enormous success and widespread impact as they mastered the practices and institutional architectures required to deliver scalable efficiency. But, in the process, we paid an enormous price. We discovered that scalable efficiency expected all of us to integrate into these new institutional homes by performing highly standardized tasks that were repeatable and highly predictable.

That integration led most of us to suppress our passions. We were taught to treat our work as a price to be paid to accumulate the material resources required to enjoy the rest of our lives. Passion in the workplace became highly suspect. Passionate people do not follow standardized scripts well, they are constantly seeking to improvise, challenge conventional wisdom and strike out on new and unexpected paths. Passionate people are not predictable and, as a result, undermine determined efforts to ensure predictability. These individuals also detest the organizational politics that pervade these institutions as many in the hierarchy begin to focus on hoarding and protecting limited resources.

As a result, we often tend to be deeply unhappy in our current institutions. We are profoundly frustrated by the daily obstacles that we encounter at every turn. We see all the possibilities, but experience firsthand the barriers that keep these possibilities far out on the horizon rather than within our grasp. Well-meaning mentors advise us to get with the program and embrace the institutional agenda even if it means leaving our passion at the door every morning as we report for work. We quickly learn that our passions are viewed as deeply subversive, rather than as treasured assets. As a consequence, many of us have fled these institutions and learned to build independent platforms that are more suitable for pursuing the work that we love. Others remain in our institutional homes, struggling to make a difference against enormous pressure.

While this battle can seem to be overwhelming in the short-term, we can draw hope and inspiration from one inescapable fact. Our current institutional homes will have to change. Performance pressures will continue to mount, driven by the broad deployment of new technology and public policy infrastructures. In this environment, our institutions will be forced to change or fall by the wayside as a new generation of institutions emerges, designed specifically to exploit the unprecedented opportunities created by new infrastructures. The recently released Shift Index provides compelling quantitative evidence that the current approaches to scalable efficiency in our institutions are no longer working – performance has been deteriorating at an alarming rate over decades. Institutions are experiencing unmet needs (for new ways to create value and drive performance to unprecedented levels) and passionate creatives will become powerful catalysts for institutional transformation, whether they remain within the institution itself or are now outside the institutional boundaries, operating on the periphery in various roles. Major organizational change initiatives rarely succeed without a clear and present threat. That threat is now very present for those who care to look.

True to form, passionate creatives will not sit still for long, complaining about the impediments that stand in their way. This manifesto is not directed at the barriers holding us back. It is a call to action – seeking to mobilize individuals within this group to address the opportunity ahead. Given the new infrastructures emerging around us, we have an unprecedented opportunity to engage in a new form of innovation. Product and process innovation are still valuable, but they are inevitably limited in scope and potential as long as they are pursued within existing institutional arrangements.

To thrive and to draw others into our camp, we need to find ways to re-think our institutional architectures – the roles and relationships that define how institutions function – in ways that amplify our efforts to get better faster. Rather than treating us as irritants to be neutralized, institutions must be redesigned from the ground up to address a totally different rationale. Instead of pursuing scalable efficiency, institutions must learn how to pursue scalable peer learning. Said differently, institutions must find ways to make talent development the core rationale for their existence. Everything about these institutions – strategy, operations and organization – will need to be reconceived through this talent development lens. As this rationale focuses our efforts to craft a new set of institutional arrangements, we will move from the edges of our institutions to their core.

We must make this long and difficult march through our institutions. Without it, we will be forever limited in terms of the scope of our learning and our impact. Properly configured, institutions can provide extraordinary platforms to amplify and accelerate our individual efforts. Without these institutional platforms we will surely still make a difference, but the difference will be far more contained.

This long march will begin at the edges of our existing institutions and on the edges of our world – those edges where unmet needs first encounter unexploited opportunities. We will find ways to catalyze new institutional arrangements first where the need is most pronounced. Our existing institutions are largely helpless to participate in the emerging growth opportunities spawned on the edges of our world. Yet, they must find ways to redeploy resources from their core to these edges if they are ever going to effectively respond to growing profit pressure in the core. We can find ways to help lead our institutions to these edges.

At these edges, we will find more receptivity to institutional innovations that help to effectively target the growth opportunities emerging there. We will also master new practices that can help make these institutional initiatives even more impactful. These pull techniques – accessing resources, attracting resources and achieving our full potential – are already used by many of us, but in a very limited and fragmented way. As we engage on the edge, we will find that we are applying these techniques in much more systematic and creative ways. The growing impact on the edge will position us to draw more and more resources out of the core and onto relevant edges. New institutional forms will evolve rapidly, enhanced by a new set of individual practices that make passionate creatives even more successful.