Every parent, educator, and manager knows that "Nintendo children"--those born after 1970 and raised on video and computer games, Walkmans, the Internet, etc.--are different. Unfortunately, the Gen-X discussion has focused mainly on the youths' supposedly short attention spans and attention-deficit disorders, ignoring or underemphasizing what is perhaps the most crucial factor--that this under-30 generation thinks, and sees the world, in ways entirely different from their parents.
An example: This generation grew up on video games ("twitch speed"), MTV (more than 100 images a minute), and the ultra-fast speed of action films. Their developing minds learned to adapt to speed and thrive on it. Yet when they join our companies, we typically begin by putting them in corporate classrooms, bringing in poor speakers to lecture at them, and making them sit through an endless series of corporate videos.
Speedwise, we effectively give them depressants. And then we wonder why they're bored.
I don't mean to suggest that Sega and Sony have created new intellectual faculties in under-30s but, rather, that technology has emphasized and reinforced certain cognitive aspects and de-emphasized others. Most of these changes in cognitive style are positive. But however one feels, it's important that managers (as well as educators and parents) recognize that these changes exist so that we can deal with the younger generation effectively.
Below are 10 of the main cognitive style changes, which raise a number of important and difficult challenges. We have already begun to see the development of new business structures, ideas, and products that take into account under-30 employees' cognitive changes and preferences. It is likely that the full impact of these changes will not be felt until the younger generation fully comes to power, just as the movies were impacted by the coming-of-age of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. That time is not far off.
Twitch Speed vs. Conventional Speed
The under-30 generation has had far more experience at processing information quickly than its predecessors, and is therefore better at it. Humans have always been capable of operating at faster-than-"normal" speeds (as airplane pilots, race-car drivers, and speed-reading guru Evelyn Wood can attest). The difference is that this ability has now moved into a generation at large, and at an early age. One problem this generation faces is that, after MTV and video games, they essentially hit a brick wall--short of piloting a jet, little in real life moves that fast. This generation's "need for speed" manifests itself in the workplace in a number of ways, including a demand for a faster pace of development, less "time-in-grade," and shorter lead times to success.
An important challenge for today's managers is how to reassess and speed up their assumptions around time, while still keeping sight of other key objectives, such as quality and customer relationships. They also need to create experiences that maintain the pace and exploit the facility of "twitch speed" while adding content that is important and useful. Several possible approaches include speeding things up via technology (such as by providing workers with the kinds of real-time data that financial traders use), installing faster infrastructures with fiber-optic cable and T-1 telephone lines, and creating new, MTV-style corporate videos. Re-engineering systems and activities so that things simply move faster is another.
Parallel Processing vs. Linear Processing
Much of the under-30 generation grew up doing homework while watching TV and doing almost everything while wearing a Walkman. Many of them feel much more comfortable than their predecessors doing more than one thing at once. While some argue that this limits attention to any one thing, this is not necessarily the case. The mind can actually process many tracks at once and often has quite a bit of "idle time" from its primary task that can be used to handle other things. Today you see young computer artists creating wonderful graphics while listening to music and chatting with co-workers, and young bankers having multiple conversations on the phone while reading their computer screens and e-mail.
This growth of parallel-processing ability appears to be acknowledged by Bloomberg TV News, in which the anchor person takes up only one-quarter of the TV screen, the remainder being filled with sports statistics, weather information, stock quotes, and headlines, all presented simultaneously. It is quite possible, and even fun, for a viewer to take in all of this information and receive much more "news" in the same amount of time.
Rather than admonishing their young workers to concentrate on only one thing at a time, managers should be thinking of additional ways to enhance parallel processing and take advantage of this increased human capability. This might take, for example, the form of multiple types of information hitting employees' computer screens at once--the objective of so-called "push" technology and Microsoft's new vision for the corporate desktop. With all the information needed to do the job--numbers, video feeds, links, simultaneous meetings, and the ability to move seamlessly between them--it's the Nintendo worker's nirvana.
This generation's enhanced parallel-processing ability may also help them slide easily into the new "boundaryless organizations," in which each worker is expected to wear multiple hats and be part of many constituencies. I remember when the requirement that consultants at firms such as BCG and McKinsey serve simultaneously on multiple-project teams was considered unusual and highly suspect. With the arrival of the new generation, such parallelism is being demanded.
Random Access vs. Linear Thinking
The under-30 generation is the first to experience hypertext and "clicking around," in children's computer applications, in CD-ROMs, and on the Web. This new information structure has increased their awareness and ability to make connections, has freed them from the constraint of a single path of thought, and is generally an extremely positive development. At the same time, it can be argued--with some justification--that unbridled hyperlinking may make it more difficult for these workers to follow a linear train of thought and to do some types of deep or logical thinking. "Why should I read something from beginning to end, or follow someone else's logic, when I can just 'explore the links' and create my own?" While following one's own path often leads to interesting results, understanding someone else's logic is also very important. A difficult challenge is how to create experiences that allow people to link anywhere and experience things in any order yet still communicat e s!
equential ideas and logical thinking.
One approach is to set up new information-delivery systems, such as corporate intranets, that let workers break out of the traditional boxes in which corporate information has been stored, and then to create tools to link this information to systems that provide logical and decision-making structure. The U.S. intelligence and military communities recently created Intelink, an intranet-based system in which information becomes universally available as quickly as it gets created, allowing users at all levels the freedom to create and explore random paths that lead to new ideas. The linking and browsing structures of the Internet and intranets have many positive benefits, and managers of Nintendo-generation employees should encourage, rather than discourage, their creation and use. Managers should also be exploring nonlinear electronic alternatives to today's reports, manuals, lectures, and lengthy narrational videos.
Graphics First vs. Text First
In previous generations, graphics were generally illustrations, accompanying the text and providing some kind of elucidation. For today's young people, the relationship is almost completely reversed: The role of text is to elucidate something that was first experienced as an image. Since childhood, the younger generation has been continuously exposed to television, videos, and computer games that put high-quality, highly expressive graphics in front of them with little or no accompanying text.
The result of this experience has been to considerably sharpen their visual sensitivity. They find it much more natural than their predecessors to begin with visuals, and to mix text and graphics in a richly meaningful way. An excellent example of this is Wired, whose intensive use of graphics makes it highly appealing to younger readers but difficult for many older folks to read--"Why can't they just give us the plain text?" is the complaint I hear from colleagues. This shift toward graphic primacy in the younger generation raises some extremely thorny issues, particularly with regard to textual literacy and depth of information.
The managerial challenge is to design ways to use this shift to enhance comprehension, while still maintaining the same or even greater richness of information in the new context. In the training area, creative groups such as Corporate Gameware, my unit of Bankers Trust, are presenting important but not especially "sexy" or exciting material in ways that conform with the preferences of younger employees by using the highly graphic style of video games. Another promising development is data visualization, in which large arrays of information are presented as colorful, ever-changing graphic images that visually accent different characteristics of the data. These tools are beginning to make serious headway in data-intensive business fields such as finance and marketing. However, they should be considered by managers in all industries as an approach that fits the new generational style.
Connected vs. Stand-alone
While the previous generation was linked by the telephone, that system is synchronous (i.e., both people have to be there). The under-30 generation has been raised with, and become accustomed to, the asynchronous worldwide communication of e-mail, broadcast messages, bulletin boards, usegroups, chat, and Internet searches. As a result of this "connected" experience, young people tend to think differently about how to get information and solve problems. For example, if I need a question answered I'll typically call the three or four people I think might know. It might take me time to get to them, and take them a while to get back to me. When my 22-year-old programmer wants to know something, he immediately posts his question to a bulletin board, where three or four thousand people might see it, and he'll probably have a much richer answer more quickly.
The challenge for managers is to invent ways of taking advantage of this connected mode in their interactions with the younger generation, as the younger people do among themselves. The more we help connect these employees to each other and to customers, the quicker they will invent positive ways to take advantage of it. The "connectedness" of the generation has also made young workers much less constrained by their physical location and more willing to work in the so-called "virtual teams" that are becoming more useful in a variety of businesses and industries.
Workers who have grown up online tend to be much more comfortable with seeking out and working with the best, most knowledgeable people, wherever they may be. Such virtual teams often recruit each other via messages on the Internet, operate smoothly from widely scattered parts of the world, and many never physically meet their clients or each other. As they finish their day, software developers around the globe often electronically forward their work to a colleague in another country who is just waking up. Managers must become more adept at managing these connected capabilities and directing the acquisition, enhancement, and appropriate deployment of intellectual capital around the world.
Active vs. Passive
One of the most striking cross-generational differences can be observed when people are given new software to learn. Older folks almost invariably want to read the manual first, afraid they won't understand how the software works or that they'll break something. Nintendo-generation workers rarely even think of reading a manual. "RTFM" ("read the [expletive] manual") is a term of derision. They'll just play with the software, hitting every key if necessary, until they figure it out. If they can't, they assume the problem is with the software, not with them. This attitude is almost certainly a direct result of growing up with Sega, Nintendo, and other video games where each level and monster had to be figured out by trial and error, and each trial click might lead to a hidden surprise or "Easter egg."
We now see much less tolerance in the workplace for passive situations such as lectures, corporate classrooms, and even traditional meetings. As the younger generation progresses up the managerial ranks, it is likely that such old-fashioned managerial standbys will be replaced by more active experiences such as chat, posting, surfing for information, and interactive learning. The process of "designing for doing," i.e., designing systems and experiences that employees can actively use, rather than things they need to listen to or be afraid of doing wrong, may become the new generational equivalent of the industrial "designing for manufacture." Nike's "Just do it" slogan hits this generational change squarely on the head. It also explains why Bob Dole's saying to Gen-Xers, "Just don
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