smart work?making it happenanne marie m

ewan

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This is an executive summary of

Smart Working: Creating the Next Wave,

aresearch-based book I recentlycompleted (to be published April 2011).

It condenses the book’s main

arguments and will hopefully encouragepeople to read the full version to findout more about the research andtheories that are briefly referenced,including how they can be of practicaluse in making the transition to newways of working.

SmartWorking

was written out of frustration at Enterprise 2.0 and SocialBusiness discussions online, and

irritation at proclamations of ‘smartworking’ as a new paradigm

. Of coursetechnological, demographic andeconomic developments are causingturmoil and opportunity in global andlocal business environments.Uncertainty and increasing complexityare the norm.The lack of reference in blog posts andonline articles to foundation knowledgeand principles, which link the design of social, technical, organisational andphysical performance environments tohigh-performance, innovation andadaptation, impoverishes thediscussions of how best to adapt workenvironments and working practices.A number of contentions underpin

Smart Working

, including:

why smart working?

•

Knowledge about smart working andmaking the transition to new ways of working, including practical tactics andtheoretical perspectives, is widelyavailable but overlooked in practice.

•

As a result, an abundance of potentialand capability in people is wasted.

•

People participate in shaping theirown realities. This is not easy but socialand networking technologies thatconnect us to each other, used withoutpermission and for our own ends, aretransformational. It is more possiblethan ever for us to influence and shapeour working environments, ourexperience of work and of each other.

•

Although people are not prisoners of organisational systems and processes,the pull towards the status quo isstrong. Existing knowledge is uselessuntil it is experimented with and

applied through ‘chaotic action

’

We need to act our way dynamicallyand continuously into the next wave of doing better or doing differently.The tools, technologies, methods,knowledge and systemic approachesare all there for the discovering andusing.There are no excuses.