Reinventing hybrid collaborating organizations: The quest towards work - life harmonization
Posted on April 28, 2023, by Frank Lekanne Deprez
Today’s organizations need to be (re)imagined and (re)designed to be able to enhance their future readiness. Due to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, millions of people were forced to shift their lives and work into a ‘digital everything’-mode. Historically, pandemics have forced people to break with both the past and the present in order to refocus their view on the world. While the pandemic caused human tragedies and imposed severe restrictions on all aspects of organizations’ and people’s daily lives, it also provided a unique opportunity to conduct thousands of ‘forced’ experiments, innovate to some extent, develop new skills that could be applied to discover new – unforeseen and unknown – opportunities. The full impact of the shift to remote and hybrid work which the pandemic inspired may take years to understand. A crisis often lowers the resistance to transform and therefore forces people to act - and stimulate organizations to get rid of deeply entrenched, dysfunctional practices that would be difficult to shed in ‘normal times.’ It also helps to let old habits die easier.
Avoid Getting Hit By Sharobesitas: Know When To Share, and When Not To.
Posted on april 4 2014, by Frank Lekanne Deprez
How to deal with datastreams, infostorms, knowledge flows has become part of our daily work, our daily life’s. Today data, information and knowledge come to us twenty-four hours a day, from all over the world, over a variety of (social media) channels. Visiting New York for the first time in 1991 buying an edition of the New York Times reminded me of a famous quote from Richard Saul Wurman – an American architect and Infodesigner:
“A weekday edition of the New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth
Capturing, selecting, consuming and sharing the most valuable ideas and news from such a (hard copy) weekday edition is almost a routine task and takes only a few minutes of our time. Nowadays people increasingly want to have access to (digital) sources, without necessarily own them (Sharing Is Caring: Eggers, 2013). Offer something that can be shared, publish it and rely on word-of-mouth and social networks is seen as the new normal way of working and living. People who are in touch only through their keyboard or smartphones are out of touch with the vast world beyond it. They risk substituting breadth for depth. They have more connections, but fewer relationships. They experience the fakebook - effect: connecting to a lot of people they no longer talk with.
Do we become sharoholics within a ‘sharing economy’ compelled to maniacally checking out the massive presence of digital networks on which to overcollect, share and track data, information & knowledge? It is just too overwhelming. Being not optimally equipped to share data, information, knowledge and feelings (e.g. the Like button) across multiple social and business networks, a new dawn arrives on the horizon: sharobesitas (Lekanne Deprez, 2011).
