The second key to survival as an employee in the world my children now own: collaboration.

More new ideas are being generated by more people more collectively than ever before.  This has probably been the biggest adjustment for me in thinking about what the next career will look like.  When I was growing up, great contributions appeared to be made by the breakthrough discoveries of a few brilliant individuals.

Now I suspect that probably wasn’t universally true.  The entire industrial age has been the product of collaboration.  Great ideas building upon each other over time, contributed by multiple individuals.  Yet the contributions were made very serially, with comparatively small groups adding their contributions over relatively long periods of time.

Then comes the internet, and what seems to be a largely sequential process of collaboration becomes first parallel (several teams working in tandem), then distributive (mass networks of collaborators working towards loosely constrained objectives, from which rapid self-organization emerges).  Networks of computers enabled networks of thinkers, which caused the collaborative unit of time to shift in a very fundamental way.  I think of movies, which are probably being made over roughly the same time period as they were twenty years ago.  Yet take a moment and think about how the volume of credits have changed as you wait for the latest Marvel easter-egg.

The point you ask?  Just this:  The would-be collaborator who was not steeped in this new environment as a child must learn two skills.  First, the ability to let go of complete understanding of the whole, while still grasping enough to get the details right on their part.  Second, the ever-valued sandbox skill of sharing.  Be it influence, credit, responsibility, or (perhaps most importantly) vision, bridging to the next career will require finding a good fit among others, in virtual communities as well as in-person.  As a child raised in world still enamored of individual achievement and recognition, this has been a tough one for me.

Next time:  Creative content generation, and finally the fun way I’ve decided to try and bring it all together.