Opinion: Connectivity offsets America's office chaos

Hands shaking for no good medical reason?

Find it difficult to just sit and relax – without guilt – because you should be doing something?

If your answer was “yes” to any of those questions, you probably have become the latest victim of chaos.

In the words of Jeremy Rifkin, author of “The End of Work,” “Throughout the world there is a sense of momentous change taking place – change so vast in scale that we are barely able to fathom its ultimate impact. Life as we know it is being altered in fundamental ways.”

The nature of this change is not external; it is between our ears. Speed, miniaturization and globalization have conspired to fashion a workplace that does not even resemble the past rigid expectations of our predictable putty-colored workplace walls.

Chaos vs. Connectivity

If you have not noticed, chaos is the new organizing principle of the American workplace.

Nanoseconds have replaced months. Internet meetings have replaced face time.

Our just-in-time world measures success in megahertz and gigabits only to leave you beached on some dehumanized island throbbing with speed dating, Bluetooth conversations and boatloads of impatience.

There is an alternative to chaos: connectivity.

Connectivity is your ability to leverage chaos for your own advantage.

I am convinced there are two specific characteristics of people who possess connectivity.

The first hallmark of connectivity is “systemic literacy.”

Organizations run on unseen “systems.” Expressions like “Excuse me, but we do not work that way here,” or “Our company culture would not approve of that” are illustrations of systems that have profound effects, but often defy description.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology senior lecturer Peter Senge, author of “The Fifth Discipline,” talked about systems this way, “Business and other human endeavors are also systems.

They, too, are bound by invisible fabrics of interrelated actions, which often take years to fully play out their effects on each other. Since we are part of that lacework ourselves, it’s doubly hard to see the whole pattern of change. Instead, we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system, and wonder why our deepest problems never seem to get solved.”

Invisible systems

Someone who has the expertise of connectivity sees the workplace as a series of invisible systems that have been quietly stitched together with incessant and robotic clocking-in and clocking-out.

Connectivity will interrupt the staccato atmosphere of chaos with this question, “What are the systems, the unstated and unwritten rules around here, that are keeping us stuck right now?”

The second characteristic is directly related to systemic structures. This skill is the ability to become a “people connector.”

There are some people who can walk into a room and immediately have what psychologist Daniel Goleman calls “resonance.” Resonance is a musical term that means, “the prolongation of sound.”

Literally, someone with resonance is a person whose influence intellectually and emotionally “carries” with other people.

The ‘connector’

A “connector” is someone who knows a lot of people and then can recruit the right people in the right place at the right time.

OK, I am the first to confess that connectivity may not be the next best thing to sliced bandwidth, but are we satisfied with wrapping our trembling hands around chaos?

The truth is chaos creates childish whiners; connectivity creates adult achievers.

Those words may sound glib, but the emotional reality is unmistakable. If you are working in an organization that is up to its CRT screens in chaos, there will be more than enough “victims” to go around.

On the other hand, if you are working with someone who has decided, through connectivity, to leverage chaos … maybe we can all get a good night’s sleep!

Cal LeMon of Executive Enrichment Inc. solves organizational problems with customized training and consulting. He can be reached at execenrichment@aol.com.