Those of us who are called “sir” by people we consider peers recognize sooner or later that the escalator has been moving up for a while now, that generations do come in dog years these days, and that the challenges of life at the forefront of our consciousness are linked to developmental stages.
The younger fellow in the coffee line this morning was mourning a mistake he had just made. He had accidentally erased a video tape of significant moments in the first ten months of his son’s life. It was little consolation to know that the medium like all media (including ourselves) is dead or dying, that the image would decay in a few years, and that soon his son would be bigger than he was. He mentioned that he spent more time with his son than he did working, and all I could do was encourage him not to stop. I don’t regret a single missed meeting or incomplete project, but I do regret whatever time was missed with any of my children as they grew.
Their adulthood is lived in a different matrix, framed as much by how they grew up as mine or that of my parents, whose depression-era prudence seemed so foolish in the abundance of the post war years that were all I knew.
Someone recently asked me to characterize the attributes of Generation X. The danger of being a speaker is that people take you at your words. What do I know about Generation X? I turned to a template in my brain that I often use: how had computer technology back-engineered that generation to think differently than I did?
Life and work in the networked world is interactive, modular, and fluid, so that’s what I said was true of Gen X. Authority in virtual and virtualized organizations resembles the mobiles that turned above my children’s cribs more than boxes arranged in permanent relationship in a hierarchical chart.
An IT guy speaking before me this week for a local organization tried to use a chart like that. He used a laptop computer and slides and – surprise! – something went wrong. The print in his hierarchical boxes was so faint that no one could read it. He gamely pointed to the empty boxes as he spoke and everyone in the audience pretended to see what he said was there.
Welcome to life in the digital world.
Welcome to life that is modular, i.e. more like a space station than a castle, in which leadership means naming the hubs at which people dock, creating links between them from nothing, and managing the flux. Welcome to life that demands mutuality because no one can know as much as they must so we have to work together, which means good communication and frequent feedback. Welcome to life in which real leadership is exercised less by virtue of structural authority than by virtue of knowing how to empower a group to do its job.
Older folks often live in castles in their heads, internalized blueprints that generate outdated behaviors. The tall walls and secure moats that were once called organizational structures offer an illusion of security and power, but the kaleidoscope has continued to turn, and alas! they simply don’t exist. Like the bank that a colleague said was the challenge to her leadership, not the bank “out there” but the bank in the heads of the VPs who hid out in the tall office tower.
Alan Kay said perspective is worth fifty points of IQ. Middle-agers are a long way from finished, we just have to know what we have of value. And know that the willingness to contribute what we can to enhance the real power of others, to nurture their ability to grow in wisdom and inner strength, to communicate our faith that it’s better to use ourselves up in the process of living than hold ourselves back … that is the gift we can give.
I recently congratulated a young producer at Jellyvision, the clever group that produced “You Don’t Know Jack,” on taking the interactive text of the old Infocom games to the next level. He was speaking about the simulated matrix they had created using sound effects, text, and imagination, which threw me back to the old days of playing Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. “Infocom?” he said. “What’s that?”
The history of the social and literary dimensions of computer programs had better be transferred to electronic documents or paper before it disappears from our heads. Yet the unknown future is as much a haze as the unknown past. Our small island of awareness is bounded by a mist of both forgetfulness and unknowing.
I mentioned to a young woman in her late twenties that our fastest airplanes would look like covered wagons when she was old. She laughed, “Not in my lifetime!” But what is her lifetime? If she lives seventy more years in a society that is stable and making medical advances daily, she’ll easily tack on enough years to live to 130. That’s a hundred years from now. One hundred years ago, it was trains and steam engines, not jet planes and rockets to Mars.
The web sites we surf keep turning in a kaleidoscope, interactive modular and fluid. So do the passing events of our lives and the people we cherish. The mobile turns in the chill wind. The English we speak may be dead in a few centuries, our names will have been forgotten, our civilization will have morphed into something unimaginable. The best we can hope to know is that we share a leaky boat for a short ride. We are woven in a singular matrix of meaning and possibility. The best of humanity happens when we forbear, love, and have compassion. Yes, tasks must be done, Y2K must be managed, and war must be aborted. But today, we are here and we have one another, companions along the digital way, and that is our consolation and strength.
