Different generations have different ideas about community
Jeffrey Cafaude posted something pretty interested on his blog:
Sometimes the simplest insights yield the greatest dividends. One of the things I’ve noticed consistently in my facilitation efforts this year is the following:
When Baby Boomers think of community, they tend to place a premium on networking and interacting with people like them: homogeneity.
When Generation Xers and Millennials talk about community, they seem to place a premium on spending time with people not like them: heterogeneity.
Similarity. Diversity.
This could have profound implications.
While I’m not sure I entirely agree with his observations, if true, that could cause some serious disconnections for meetings, especially those whose attendees come from different age groups, and those whose planners are of a different generation than the majority of the attendees. How do you provide for both seemingly divergent needs? I think just awareness of the differences helps, but practically speaking, how would this play out? I keep envisioning gray-haired cliques with younger clique-busters circulating at the social functions…
Update: According to this press release, it looks like the younger generation’s mix-it-up philosophy has some science behind it. The research concludes that successful teams are composed of diverse groups, and unsuccessful teams generally are composed of the same folks doing the same thing over and over. I may be a traitor to my generation (Boomer, just barely), but who hasn’t noticed the benefits of working with people who look at things differently than you do?
Related Topics: Adult learning
April 30th, 2005 at 12:06 pm
I certainly continue to be amused by the discussions regarding the blackberry and being connected. Unfortunate I am consistently reminded of how much fear people have of change and how few are passionate about their job or industry. For those who value the place we spend the most time a great pillow and mattress are essential. With the amount of time we spend working shouldn’t we find a job we enjoy? Or perhaps a radical thought , even make a commitment to improve the jobs and businesses we already work for? Tools can be a large part of the solution. I have found that although the Blackberry can be a distraction from time to time, the investment in our BES server through www.YourMeeting.com has provided for a greater professional accomplishment for the service levels we are able to provide. More importantly it has allowed for great personal freedom to be at all my children’s events and family functions. I also spend less time in line and in traffic because I can be on the road during non rush-hours, when others are handcuffed by fax, email, and the phone. For those who just like to find data that supports their complaining, here is the counter data.BlackBerry Users Reclaim Fourteen Days of Personal Time a Year “who hasn’t noticed the benefits of working with people who look at things differently than you do?”I think idea mono-cultures tend to happen because people don’t realize they are creating an intellectual mono-culture. In any group you’ll find some disagreements, those disagreements may be minor yet the people in the group might think they are huge, at least until someone comes along with a truly paradigm shifting idea. Also, some groups look similar from the outside and yet from the inside seem to be riven with internal dissent. To take a recent historical example, you might think white Christian evangelical ministers have a lot in common, yet the ministers themselves are aware of the differences that divide their community. I was recently researching the history of the ECT, the attempt in 1994 by some Protestant ministers to seek a reconciliation with the Roman Catholic Church (Evangelicals & Catholics Together: http://www.leaderu.com/ftissues/ft9405/articles/mission.html) . The Protestant ministers who signed that statement have been under fire ever since from those Protestant ministers who fear and resist any attempt to comprise with Rome. I read many historical documents, most of which are on the web, and some of the debate surprised me with the nastiness and intensity of the tone some participants took. So do white, Protestant, evangelical ministers represent a homogenous group? It’s also possible that age, not generation, plays a role in Jeffrey Cafaude’s observation. One’s youth, at least till age 30, is a time of exploration, and I think a lot of us during that time are hungry for experiences that take us beyond what we’ve known so far. One’s 50s, on the other hand, is a period of consolidation and conventional wisdom. It’s worth remembering that when John Kenneth Galbraith first coined the term “conventional wisdom” (in his 1958 book, The Affluent Society), he stressed that every society needed people who defended the conventional wisdom, and that the role of “defender of the conventional wisdom” was an important and worthwhile role to play. And it might be easier to play that role when you are surrounded by people who are similar to you. It’s possible, too, that the older generaton craves diversity every bit as much as the younger generation, but defines diversity differently. Imagine you have six white, middle age men sitting around a table, and one is a Socialist, another a Conservative, another a priest, another an athiest, another a homeless man and another a Wall Street banker, they might consider themselves a diverse group, though from the outside they look similar. Meanwhile you might have a bunch of Gen-Xers at the next table, one of them white, one of them Asian, one of them black, three of them female and three of them male, all of them middle class, all of them vote Democrat, all of them work in the tech industry and all of them love their iPods. They look outwardly diverse, but inwardly the group has a lot of things in common. Really, I’d have to know exactly how Jeffrey Cafaude meant the word “diversity” before I’d know how to apply his insight.
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