Collaboration and the Zombie Apocalypse

Tools are never enough for anything and never will be.  If I handed you a cyclotron, a spectrometer, or an atom smasher (yes, all physics tools) you would probably end up hurting yourself (as would I).  The same goes if gave you a bulldozer, some wood, bricks, and concrete and asked you to build me a house.  We aren’t idiots right?  I mean, when we raise our kids we spend a lot of time investing in their education, teaching them and showing them new things.  Why then when it comes to anything enterprise related do we assume that all of this goes out the window and that a “tool” is the only thing we need to be successful?

We’re getting lazy and we’re getting complacent.  We want to get more but want to do less.  We are focusing too much on ourselves and not others. We want to say “we tried” when we really didn’t and we want people to be able to figure things out on their own without helping them.  This isn’t good enough.  We should be better than that…we NEED to be better than that.

This just isn’t going to work.  If it didn’t work for you as a kid while growing up and learning about the world then why should it work for your employees in the workplace?  We all need help and we all need to learn all the time, it’s how we grow and it’s how we challenge ourselves.  When we stop growing, learning, and challenging ourselves we become zombies at work who use typing on a keyboard all day as a way to substitute our eating human flesh…ya, not good.

I remember when I was a young kid playing soccer.  I had practice 2-3 times a week, always working on and improving my game.  We had skirmishes, drills, and then some orange slices and cold water.  Now we’re  lucky to get the cold water!

The point is that we need to get to the basics of education and training; not because we want people to learn a new technology that benefits the company but because this is just the right human thing to do. We should always want our employees to learn and grow.  I absolutely hate hearing stories about companies who try deploying new tools expecting them to “viral” without even bothering to provide any type of education or training.  I don’t know why or how this “genius” idea came about but I can assure you, it’s a far cry from a strategy.

The thing is results take time and they take work.  If your company truly wants to succeed with collaboration then it will and that’s all there is to it.  No more lame excuses about how “we tried to deploy something and nobody used it so we killed it,” sorry but that’s bullshit; try harder.

Wait a minute, am I really saying that lack of education and training will breed workplace zombies?  YES!

If companies keep breeding zombies then one day they are going to wake up wondering why someone just took a big bite out of their arm.  And we all know what happens when a zombie bites a human, we get another zombie…