Destruction of Trust in the Workplace and How Managed Creativity Can Restore It

There's a word we see more often today than ever before in the pages of the journals of psychology and business – the word is "Trans-generational." Today the word carries with it, substantially more meaning than simply the idea of the chronological movement from one generation to the next. While many have been sleepwalking, the Western World has been experiencing a profound shift from a modern culture to a post-modern culture that began in earnest several decades ago and is ongoing.

The implications of this phenomenon are seen and felt in most areas of our current cultural milieu from education to religion and, of course, the workplace. Generation X, children of the Boomers, born between 1961 and 1981 and the Millennials – Generation Y, born in 1982 and onward, are demonstrating values and behaviors that challenge their Boomer parents, similar to the way they, with their idealism and narcissism challenged the older silent generation from the early-seventies onward.

The silent generation, those born between 1925 and 1945 – are now effectively out of the workforce and the Boomers are managing the store. Although they clashed with the authority structures of the silent generation, they valued teamwork, total involvement and a commitment to the task at hand to deliver the personal gratification that has always been high on their scale of values.

The X-ers value informality, and see bosses as colleagues, not superiors. They will focus on a job but don’t care about little things like being punctual. They are skeptical of organizational structures and are saddled with unrealistic attitudes of entitlement, having been told for their entire young lives that they are special and can be anything they want to be. Frequently, these attitudes conflict with the universal requirement in business for accountability and cooperation. These disconnects are generating distrust and administrative chaos in Boomer led business settings today.

These challenges are exacerbated by the demographic reality that there was a 14% decline in the number of young workers in the late 1990s and the growth rate of the labor force declined from 2.5% per year to 0 percent. Now 11,000 citizens are turning 50 years of age daily in the U.S. and from 2010 forward, there will be a growing shortfall of young workers to a high point of 30 percent that will persist for 40 years.

There is, however, a way forward that can not only bridge the modern/post modern cultural divide, it literally changes the way organizations do business and helps to address the labor shortfall by thinking and working innovatively. It is the beginning of new corporate wisdom when organizations recognize that the way they manage or fail to manage change is all important.

The ability to accurately identify, quantify and qualify strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities within a comprehensive progressive problem solving process that incorporates idea finding, a structure for evaluation and selection and finally a plan, with intentional stages to gain acceptance and manage implementation is a process that rises above generation or culture. You have probably recognized these elements as our SIMPLEX problem solving process, one of the three elements of the SIMPLEX Applied Creativity System.

Recently, in a blog hosted by Alexander Kjerulf entitled, "Chief Happiness Officer," he reviews five top reasons why most team building events are a waste of time. The article attracted multiple responses, some of which reviewed various team building experiences of their own. Once person wrote, "…best, best, best offsite ever (and frankly, I hate most of them – complete wastes of time) was by a fellow here in Canada named Min Basadur. We had 60 of the most cynical under 25 year old, "Why are you wasting my timers," who got hooked by minute two and all came out saying not only did they love his workshop but learned something about themselves and their co-workers along the way.

Underpinning SIMPLEX^® is an amazingly simple, yet unbelievably profound way of thinking. Western thinkers traditionally excel in the area of analytical or convergent thinking. The converse is also true, We consistently demonstrate our inability to think creatively, or divergently – in fact, whenever we do so in a group, we usually manage to stifle creative thought before it can see the light of day. The fatal coup-de- grace is that we invariably do both at the same time. It’s like driving with one foot on the accelerator and the other one on the brake – putting unnecessary stress on the engine. Dr. Min Basadur identified this thinking deficit and reconfigured the process by separating the two opposing modes in time and adding a magic bullet – the ability to defer judgment during the diverging stage of thinking.

When a sequential divergent/deferral of judgment/convergent thinking process is applied within a comprehensive creative problem solving process, by a team of people that have been identified and assembled for their specific approaches to problem solving using the Basadur Applied Creativity Profile Assessment an entirely new micro-culture is created that is as objectively appropriate for a Boomer manager as it is for a Gen X-er. When employees embrace this new way of thinking and are trained to use it, cultural clashes can be addressed and moderated in an objective manner with third party facilitation if necessary. The SIMPLEX^© creative problem solving system can be, in fact, the oil to lubricate and perhaps eliminate some of the trans-generational challenges of today’s business environment while simultaneously addressing inevitable demands for change with new innovation skills.