Psychologists @ Work 2011
What do psychologists do, exactly?
In a source long since forgotten, I found a wonderful description of psychology.
People come to us for help when they have to make a big decision, and we earn our fee in three ways.
- We’ve helped people who have faced the same decisions.
- We write up our experience and have a pool of knowledge shared between psychologists (and taught at uni).
- We stand by our clients until it they’ve made their decision and tested it out.
I am a work psychologist and it won’t surprise anyone in the work world to know that during the last ten years, the issues that people bring to psychologists are changing fast.
This is how what I see happening, at work and in the uni's. Have a look. The changes at work are definitely relevant to you. The changes to psychology may be important when you want to hire one one day!
Work psychology yesterday
In years gone by, we simply picked a job that seemed to match our ability and personality, we learned to do it, and we worked our way up the ladder of an organization, fitting in as best we could.
We psychologists got good helping people at all three stages.
- We developed nifty techniques to select people and help them choose careers.
- We knew how to design complicated work settings like airplane cockpits and how to train you as fast as possible.
- We knew the adjustments you had to make working in a team, who would listen to whom, and what made you influential at work.
Work psychology today
Now work is changing fast and my profession is at a wonderful point where every day brings new issues.
During the autumn of 2010, I worked with a London Uni and I had a great chance to streamline my thoughts about the work we work psychologists are going to be asked to do in the next ten years. These are the changes I see.
Selection to Opportunity
It is no longer an employers’ market. It doesn’t matter that unemployment is high. Putting blocks in square holes and spheres in circles is no longer the big issue facing businesses.
We need strategic thinkers who can come into a meeting and ask questions about
- The needs of our end users
- Our resources and abilities
- What we could do quickly if we put our heads together
We need people who sense opportunities and get to the bottom of things quickly. The scientific literature talks about Sensing. An older word might be Careers. A better term might be Strategic Thinking. Or even, Opportunity.
More and more, what people will ask their psychologists:
- How can we get a more fruitful conversation going more quickly?
- What’s blinkering us?
- How can we bring people into these conversations when they aren’t used to having them?
Team Building to SenseMaking
Fitting in to the team was the job of yesterday. We would ask “What kind of a team player are you?” “Do you trust your team?”, “Will the team accept you as a leader?”
In today’s organizations, everyone is a leader. Ideas come from anyone in a meeting. The very valuable skills are
- Meshing ideas together and
- Building our sense that we can get things done
We need people who lead and follow, moving between one and the other seamlessly and gracefully, inspiring everyone else to be as thoughtful about group wellbeing and as flexible in their participation. The scientific literature talks about Sense Making.
Universities are already teaching personal leadership to 18 and 19 year olds. Advanced students can analyze Obama’s speech in Tucson and might well get jobs as speech writers for world leaders. Students graduate knowing that we need them to positive and proactive now and not in twenty or thirty years’ time. In larger and larger settings, people are going to ask us:
- How can we get people talking about what works for them?
- How can we build a keen interest in each other’s solutions?
- How can we have faith in each other long enough to begin?
Performance Management to Rapid Protovation
The sine qua non of old work was a boss who told you what to do. Oh, to have a boss who knows what to do! Should we be so lucky!
We no longer believe that any one knows what to do. We are all in an endless cycle of experimentation. We make a prototype; we test it in the market. Hence, rapid protovation.
Like sense-making, rapid protovation began with social psychologist, Karl Weick, who based his career studying the toughest environments – forest fires, nuclear disasters, flight carriers. While the rest of us were thinking ‘Ready, Aim, Fire’, he was already talking about ‘Ready, Fire, Aim’. Try it, get feedback, and think again.
Creatives use this process all the time. They keep focused by working in short sharp bursts and testing each burst in the market. The team’s goal is to test really often, usually weekly. Everyone has to be out there gathering market feedback that often.
Psychologists are playing catch-up in this domain. We can contribute bits and pieces but it is games designers and creatives who are using psychology to engage our mutual frontiers. We will be asked, at least in the near term:
- To help people think through work systems based on rapid protovation
- To help design dashboards and social media to help teams communicate
- And to start working on specialist issues like teams including noobes and experts
Employment to Virtue
And not least, we aren’t going to be employees any more with an employee’s attitudes. No more selling our souls from 9-5 and trying to live our real lives from 5-9.
The emblem of the second decade of this century will be strident demands to examine closely what makes a life living. What makes the good life? Can we do work that makes us proud?
Psychologists are ahead on this task. Positive psychologists and positive organizational psychologists have been studying what it means to live ‘generatively’ – to be able to open up situations rather than close them down, to flourish rather than languish, and to ‘do well by doing good.’
Clients are already asking us:
- How to find meaning in work and work with meaning?
- To facilitate large scale interventions in which we find what is ‘good and true’ and do more of it
- To help languishing groups reconnect with each other and flourish as people and as a business unit
Opportunity, Sense-making, Rapid Protovation, Virtue
In short, these are my picks for the most popular requests from clients during the next ten years.Opportunity
- How do I read the business landscape to detect opportunity?
- How do I engage other people in my vision?
- How can I chair good business meetings so that we build confidence in each other and build on each other’s ideas?
Sense Making
- What does it mean to keep my head when everyone around me is losing theirs?
- How can I bring disparate ideas together when they are still rough and unfinished?
- How can I use my confidence in the group to help other people feel the same way about each other?
Rapid Protovation
- What is rapid protovation?
- How can I change around my work to get fast feedback from the market?
- How can I underpin my new way of working with accountability (e.g. managing privacy & confidentiality, keeping financial records, having sufficiently qualified people working on a task like surgery, say)?
Virtue
- How can I develop the confidence to follow my own calling and what can I right now?
- How can I provide a climate within my business that lets people to discuss what is ‘virtuous’?
- What matters in work teams and why do some languish and some flourish?
Lucky me to be in a profession that is changing and centrally relevant to the issues in the world right now!
