1

Career 3.0

Co-evolving solutions to a complex problem

by John Pollock1 & Richard Tyrie2, Jayne Hilditch3, Chris Wild4 and Rob Wescott5

A time like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs.

It’s the best possible time to be alive,

when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

Tom Stoppard

Arcadia (1993)

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

Francis Bacon The New Organon or True Directions Concerning the Interpretation of Nature (1620)

,

1 Turquoise Frog http://turquoisefrog.com Terracotta Blog http://thevisionthing.net 2 GoodPeople http://www.goodpeople.co.uk Jobs Go Public http://www.jobsgopublic.com 3 GoodPeople http://www.goodpeople.co.uk Jobs Go Public http://www.jobsgopublic.com 4 Chris Wild & The Retroscope http://www.chriswildhq.com 5 Career Planner http://www.careerplayer.com

2

Summary

In the last decade, individual – and organisational – careers have changed

radically. In the next, such change will simply accelerate.

Technology is driving that change, and new activities at the cutting edge

– by us, our peers and others – give clear pointers to the future.

Technology is also the essential ingredient to successfully develop a

more agile, responsive and adaptable recipe, one that effectively ‘co-

evolves’ alongside other changes in a fast-moving, dynamic environment.

The new approaches we’re seeing, and developing, are generally quicker,

lighter – and considerably less expensive – than the late 20th century

systems they’re displacing.

This paper hopes to give readers a fresh perspective on a complex space

and bring them up to speed with some of the very latest developments in

the field. Finally we float some ideas as to where we might go – sooner

rather than later.

3

A Note to the Reader

This is not a minute, a policy paper, a brief or a backgrounder. It has elements of each, but is offered

more by way of starting a conversation...

It’s now ten years since the best-selling www.Cluetrain.com6 left the station. It addresses businesses

(still playing catch-up) but substitute ‘organisations’ (still reading about catch-up) if that helps.

Cluetrain begins:

People of Earth:

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing

new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting

smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.

These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest,

direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice

is unmistakably genuine. It can't be faked.

Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.

[Organisations] need to get out of the way so intranetworked employees can converse directly with internetworked markets.

Corporate firewalls have kept smart employees in and smart markets out. It's going to cause real pain to tear those walls down. But the result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in.

And in that spirit:

“Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin...”

6 See The Cluetrain Appendix for the first three dozen ‘theses’. Or go straight to http://www.cluetrain.com for the monument.

4

“When a new technology rolls over you,

if you’re not part of the steamroller,

you’re part of the road”

Stewart Brand7

Founder, Global Business Network, The Well, The Long Now Foundation, all that.

7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Brand

5

The Career Space – an evolutionary problem (with added complexity)

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives.

It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

Charles Darwin

The world of careers and career advice is now being disintermediated8 by the digital revolution at least as

fast as other sectors have been before.9 The nature of the shift is from a version that was one-to-many – top-

down, silo-based career advice – characteristic of the 20th century (and then mimicked in Web 1.0) to a peer-

to-peer, many-to-many, social network approach enabled by Web 2.0.

Career 3.0 sets out to give readers a fast take on the new careers advice ecosystem, showing how and where

solutions are already being delivered, and then ending with some thoughts on where the future is taking us –

and how best we should negotiate it.

Alan Kay, inventor of the laptop, famously remarked that “the best way to predict the future is to invent it”.

That future is currently being invented, as we speak, across huge numbers of non-traditional players using

technology in innovative, cost-effective and productive ways.

But first, we must go back in order to get to the future.

Appropriately in 2009, our overarching framework – chosen to help readers wrap their arms around a space

of great complexity – begins with Charles Darwin, born 200 years ago, and whose Origin of Species

celebrated 150 years last week.10

Evolution, which many regard as humanity’s greatest idea, offers a powerful toolset with which to analyse

complex systems.

Boiled down to its simplest level – and please forgive any grandmotherly egg-sucking pedagogy – in any

complex evolving system (i.e. all of them), there are three factors are at work:

8 From Wikipedia, another example of a disintermediated sector (encyclopedias):

“in economics, disintermediation is the removal of intermediaries in a supply chain: ‘cutting out the middleman’.

Instead of going through traditional distribution channels, which had some type of intermediate (such as a

distributor, wholesaler, broker, or agent), companies may now deal with every customer directly, for example via

the Internet. One important factor is a drop in the cost of servicing customers directly. Disintermediation initiated

by consumers is often the result of high market transparency.” 9 e.g. book-buying (Amazon, Abebooks), auctions (Ebay), couriers & transport (Ship.ly), photography (Flickr), business

cards (Moo), music (MySpace etc), events (Meetup) &c. 10 http://www.darwin150.com

6

Variation The creation of diverse ‘opportunities’ which in due course prove more (or less) ‘fit’

within the ecosystem.

Selection The process of operating on that variation. This involves killing off duffers (or

reproducing them less well), and the picking out of winners.

Amplification The scaling-up (through successful reproduction strategies) of that which works.

In raw terms, we might characterise IAG (Information, Advice and Guidance11) variation as the array of

different products, services, companies, organisations and other iterations in the marketplace of ideas;

selection pressure, meanwhile, was historically exerted by senior policy-making officials and Ministers –

although now, increasingly, individuals directly select themselves, by voting with their wallets, or at least

their attention; and amplification took the form, again historically, of government funding – but is

increasingly reflected as the market-success of major players. (Albeit, lest we forget, on the back of existing,

publicly-funded, infrastructure like the – er – Internet.12)

To take one more step backwards in order to see ahead more clearly, consider Eric Beinhocker’s highly

influential13 book The Origin of Wealth14, where he notes that although “the message of Traditional

Economics is that if humans can just behave rationally enough, and if we possess enough information, then

the economy will be revealed as a universe of clockwork predictability”, the truth is that the ‘clockwork

dream’ ended for science last century – and is ending for economics in this:

The economy is too complex, too nonlinear, too dynamic, and too sensitive to the twists and turns of

chance to be amenable to prediction over anything but the very shortest of terms... the computational

complexity of the economy is such that the future [happens before we] have time to predict it.15

We could simply replace ‘the economy’ above with ‘careers’ (‘career paths’ or IAG) – after all, the

energy underlying the economy – and the case obtains.

As Beinhocker says, “this is a sobering message”. But there is a way forward: to design our institutions

and societies to be better evolvers. This solution derives from Beinhocker’s core insight that

evolutionary theory combined with complexity theory actually informs our understanding of the

realities of the economy rather well.

That is, if we can become adept at adaptation, we can ‘co-evolve’ solutions as the problems evolve.

And the problem of providing advice and support to people as they progress (or otherwise) their careers

is certainly evolving. Dramatically.

11 Although see http://www.acronymfinder.com/IAG.html for a further 42 meanings of this acronym. (Unsurprisingly, Microsoft provide the first in the list). 12 See, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET 13 Beinhocker advised the Obama team and is a senior advisor to McKinsey. 14 The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics by Eric D. Beinhocker

(Harvard Business School Press, 2006) 15 Op. Cit. pp323

7

Punctuated Equilibrium – stasis doesn’t live here anymore

The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best –

and therefore never scrutinize or question.

Stephen Jay Gould

Before a landmark paper16 co-authored by Stephen Jay Gould, the general view of evolution was that of

gradual, iterative improvements. The theory of punctuated equilibrium17 punctured that particular

balloon. Instead, it’s argued, ecosystems go through long periods of stasis in which nothing much

happens at all, follow by brief bursts of punctuated equilibrium – rare, rapid events which lead to new

species branching off. (It’s a sufficiently powerful idea that it led, in turn, to a sub-species known as

‘punctuated equilibrium in social theory’,18 used to study the evolution of policy change.)

Take an oversimplified, Eddie Izzardish way to imagining this process: an island, free of predators, on

which ruminants graze happily, ruminating (“Hmmm, yes, perhaps we could...”) Punctuated

equilibrium might involve the introduction of a new predator, or slightly more active competitors. If the

grazers don’t adapt, they will die. Simples.

Think of the Digital Revolution as that predator.

Almost comic attempts to evolve can be seen in the world of careers. What the

geeks call brochureware has morphed into Government and other public sector

websites. Often with ‘youthful’ names, like Jobs4U – faux text usage being the

trendy vicar of youthspeak – this one has a whole section on its home page

excitingly titled ‘21st Century IAG!’

The National Audit Office’s 2004 report19 on the – ahem – success of

Connexions, reports its (then) £450 million budget. And to be fair, among its

other achievements, the Connexions funding has indeed helped create a website

that reaches 0.00156% of those on the net, making it the 4793rd most popular

website in the UK.20

But the net doesn’t work like that.

16 Eldredge, Niles and S. J. Gould (1972). Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism, In T.J.M. Schopf

(ed), Models in Paleobiology. San Francisco: Freeman Cooper. pp. 82-115 17 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium 18 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium_in_social_theory 19 Department for Education and Skills: Connexions Service - Advice and guidance for all young people, REPORT BY THE

COMPTROLLER AND AUDITOR GENERAL HC 484 Session 2003-2004: 31 March 2004

http://www.nao.org.uk/publications/0304/connexions_service.aspx 20 http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/http://www.connexions-direct.com

8

In fact, a case can be made that the net is the most ferocious, rapidly adapting ecosystem the world has

ever seen, with constant and huge levels of variation, user-driven selection (aided by peer-to-peer

recommendations) and the occasional massive amplification seen with some of the larger (not quite)

overnight sensations like Twitter, Facebook and Bebo.

Indeed, on serious websites, you will also see evolutionary pressures exerted internally, too, on the

valuable ‘real estate’ of, say, the home page. Such pressures – exerted in the case of Jobs4U not by

users-as-selectors but by a Minister-as-selector – accounts for the fond delusion that the launch of ‘21st

Century Acronym!’ is precisely what’s most likely to attract young people on ‘their’ homepage of

advice on careers.

The truth is, today’s young – and older – people in search of IAG are likely to get it from an

unpredictable pottage of sources.

The old ‘one stop shop’ model is, to use Stephen Jay Gould’s phrase, “an erroneous story”. Indeed it

always was. And given a choice, in a vigorous and dynamic marketplace of sources, that’s exactly what

people exercise. They choose whether, and where, to deploy the resource for which we all tout: their

attention.

The concept of the attention economy – human attention is a scarce and valuable commodity – helps

illuminate how people draw down ‘IAG’ in the real world, which is via sources as wide-ranging as:

parents, siblings, friends, peers, neighbours, friends of friends, Facebook.com, Twitter.com, TV, radio,

Information, leaflets, The Apprentice, The Dragon’s Den, Advice, YouTube.com, CareerPlayer.com,

books, Guidance, newspapers, gossip, magazines, rumours, serendipity, school, college, university,

volunteering, teachers, careers advice, lecturers, acquaintances, work experience, internships, holiday jobs,

summer jobs, temping, gap years, interests, hobbies, clubs, groups, school, visits, dreams, Take your

daughter to work day, McJobs, LinkedIn.com, online and offline psychometric testing , JobCentrePlus,

Careers Advice Centres, CVtips.com, RateMyFirm.co.uk, headhunters, EmployeeInsider.com,

CareersAdvice.direct.gov.uk, recruiters, Gumtree.com, &c. &c.

Yet the thrust of the 2004 Audit Office report is that by spending nigh on half a billion pounds a year:

The proportion [of young people aged 16-18 who are not in education, employment or training] fell by 8

per cent in established phase 1 and 2 partnership areas between November 2002 and November 2003, and

3 per cent overall taking the newer phase 3 partnerships into account

Unfortunately, herein lies another ‘erroneous story’ (one which, by the by, accounts for Google’s

enormous financial success). Traditionally, advertising spend led to sales increases. Principally this was

because of renewed attention and focus. So a TV campaign, say, would be accompanied by new

packaging, pricing, better product placement, ‘point of sale’ tie-ins and so forth: the result – increased

sales. The heartless precision of digital traffic measurement means Google Ads are much more

accurately calibrated in terms of real attention, which is where the value lies.

Put another way: spend billions over several years on some initiative or other and you will get some

movement. It just won’t necessarily be cost-efficient, or ultimately realistic.

Hence the problem that the old new solution, poorly considered ab initio, essentially became obese, as

the Audit Office notes:

9

If Connexions operated to the caseloads that were deemed to be manageable at the pilot stage, they would

require in excess of 15,000 Personal Advisers. However, Connexions does not have the financial resources

to employ this number of Personal Advisers.

Leaving aside the pleasingly medical sounding notion of ‘caseloads’, the entire approach – train lots of

advisors to pass on ‘bespoke’ meaningful inputs to the young – suffers from what academics call ‘the

deficit model’. This is the notion that if the (young person’s) deficit in information, advice and

guidance were simply remedied, by a top up of ‘personal advice’, the problem would go away.

Not so, for the problem is about the problem.

10

The Great Problem – the small solution

Don’t get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free

view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

To recap quickly: the great problem is that careers do not follow a path – they follow criss-crossing,

multifarious, dynamically changing pathways, which are being erased, created and constantly changed

in ‘real time’ by those just a few paces further up the hill.21 The top-down approach of collating vast

quantities of brochureware (neatly labelled, admittedly, in rather nice brown cardboard boxes), and

churning them out, with a dollop of sympathy, to those who wander into the centre – or onto a website

– by mistake (or compulsion) is, frankly, ludicrously mismatched to the reality on the ground. Because

there are barely any careers left.

Instead, we need a much looser definition of sectors and skills. A much more profound understanding

of the porous and fluid nature of the artificial reifications we assert. (Themselves in large measure a

consequence of bringing education and business into cahoots over careers, thereby creating a new set

of inappropriate ‘selector pressures’ – this time for the current jobs available that a business or sector

may wish to fill).

In the online world, where agile development is the nostrum du jour, the default, increasingly, is the

API – or Application Programming Interface. This allows third parties access to read (and write to)

particular sub-sets of a core database. This is why we have not only Twitter – but also about a twillion

other apps built by others to sit on the core Twitter architecture. We have, in effect, a dynamically co-

evolving ecosystem. Responsive, adaptive, agile – and more (and more cost-) effective.

A new philosophy of careers IAG would be: (Rule No. 1 in Fight Club) dump the acronym, and then

make the space much more open-ended, allowing that career reality is about much more incremental,

portable, organic entities, subject to vagaries (God, anyone?) way beyond the remit or reach of civil

servants and policy papers.

This philosophy would focus on generating an evolving solution, as advocated by Beinhocker, that was

literally designed properly for a complex system, with built in functionalities that could deliver

adaptation – fitness for purpose – without constant reinvention and tinkering by an administrative

machine last seriously reinvented over a century ago. The solution would have the character of Italo

Calvino’s Six Memos for the New Millennium: Lightness | Quickness | Exactitude | Visibility |

Multiplicity | Consistency22

In short, a solution more about the rest of this century – not one designed for the needs of the last.

21 Or think pinball. And Tommy. He’s a deaf, dumb and blind kid. How do you think he does? (I don’t know). What makes

him so good? Sure plays a mean pinball 22 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Memos_for_the_Next_Millennium

11

How Did I Get Here?

You may find yourself in another part of the world

You may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile

You may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife

You may ask yourself: well... how did I get here?

Brian Eno et al. Once In A Lifetime

Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life.

The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their

lives.

Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't.

Mary Schmich Wear Sunscreen

Time for a two minute break (because we can do this kind of thing really easily now):

“I didn’t know what I wanted to do” <-Click here

Or type in or cut-and-paste this URL into your browser bar -> http://bit.ly/Career3

A short video prepared for Career 3.0 by Rob Wescott of http://www.careerplayer.com

12

The Wealth of Networks – and the poverty of incumbents

How we make information, how we get it, how we speak to others, and how others speak to us

are core components of the shape of freedom in any society.

Yochai Benkler

The Wealth of Networks:

How Social Networks Transforms Markets and Freedom (2006)

Only connect! ...Live in fragments no longer.

E.M . Forster

Howards End (1910)

For a couple of centuries now, we’ve seen the DNA embedded at the start of the industrial revolution – and

the fervour of new thought that emerged in the late 18th and early 19th centuries – unfolding. Now a new

revolution has come along. And a new set of DNA is being laid down for the next century or so.

Ten years ago I prepared the following table, Two Centuries: Two Revolutions in Social Capitalism &

Human Diversity23 for the OECD’s Forum for the Future:

That future is now past, but past is prologue. Or, as pukka member of the digerati24 (the digital aristocracy)

Kevin Kelly25 recently noted, the web as we know it is only around 5000 days old.26

23 Social Capitalism & Human Diversity, David E Bloom and River Path Associates, March 2000. Organisation for Economic

Co-operation and Development (OECD), Forum for the Future. 24 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digerati

13

But already we’re seeing certain features which have profound implications for policy. Knowledge

production of all kinds has radically changed in the last 15 years. As Yokai Benkler remarks in the opening

of his magisterial book The Wealth of Networks:

The change brought about by the networked information environment is deep. It is structural. It goes to the

very foundations of how liberal markets and liberal democracies have coevolved for almost two

centuries.27

What Benkler calls the ‘social production’ of knowledge – a famous example being Wikipedia – is also, he

points out, a threat to incumbents. Benkler is a tad tedious as an academic writer, to be honest, but worth

quoting at some length. We’ve attached the opening chapter of The Wealth of Networks as The Benkler

Appendix (it’s all free, and commentable, online) – because this stuff is big and serious. And not only is it

not going away, it is, in fact, approaching all of us at warp speed:

Individuals can [now] reach and inform or edify millions around the world...The fact that every such effort

is available to anyone connected to the network, from anywhere, has led to the emergence of coordinate

effects, where the aggregate effect of individual action, even when it is not self-consciously cooperative,

produces the coordinate effect of a new and rich information environment...The networked information

economy improves the practical capacities of individuals along three dimensions:

1. It improves their capacity to do more for and by themselves;

2. It enhances their capacity to do more in loose commonality with others, without being

constrained to organize their relationship through a price system or in traditional hierarchical

models of social and economic organization; and

3. It improves the capacity of individuals to do more in formal organizations that operate outside

the market sphere.

Within the career space, our own network – admittedly privileged by being densely connected both online

and offline – provides ample demonstrations of this reinvention of the world as we know it.

This is where the past meets the future somewhat uncomfortably: we’d really prefer readers to simply

explore the websites we outline below: it’s what digital natives (those brought up with this stuff, roughly

under 30 years old) do. But instead we’re forced – because you’re almost certainly reading this as a printout

on ‘dead tree’ – to ‘write it up’.

Which is frankly a little tedious – not least because it forces the experience into a modality derived, literally,

from the way monks laid out the Bible on vellum. Yet as those of us producing digital experiences know all

too well, the online dynamic is dramatically different.

25 http://kk.org 26 http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/kevin_kelly_on_the_next_5_000_days_of_the_web.html 27 The Wealth of Networks – see Benkler Appendix

14

www.icould.com is an independent not-for- profit

organisation delivering insights into careers through

real people and their stories. At its core is a library of

one thousand broadcast-quality films where people

from all walks of life and backgrounds tell users

about their own career journeys.

The simple but big idea is to inspire and encourage

young people to make the most of their potential

and talent, by showing them how others who have

gone before them have used theirs. It i primarily

aimed at 14 to 19 year olds.

Horsesmouth (‘A Public Service, Delivered by the Public’) A public

website where people safely exchange advice and support based on

their shared life experiences, because ‘Someone knows what you need

- Someone needs what you know.’ The ultimate gift economy. A social

enterprise launched in Jan ’08. A hosted, managed and moderated

public (16+) website, with a robust technology infrastructure, a

growing and active community of 20,000 mentors and over 30,000

pieces of unique UGC (user-generated content) and significant IP

(intellectual property)

Rob Wescott’s www.careerplayer.com - you watched the

video he prepared for this ‘paper’ earlier... didn’t you? Go

on. You know you want to. www.careerplayer.com isn’t

even 6 months old, and it’s already scooping prizes – like

the International Academy of Visual Arts’ Best Educational

Website. It’s an online destination for students and job

seekers to get real insight into different careers and to

seek advice on how to break into them. It's about career

discovery and bringing it to life. The driving force is an

interactive video library, with a bespoke player letting

users quiz employees about their roles. This is supported

by a host of features and a unique suggestion engine, all

designed to make us the first port-of-call for career

exploration.

“We’re brand new but already have the largest independent career video library, the only psychometric tests that

match you to real people and one of the most comprehensive career event listings online. Development is ongoing

and exciting features are already in the pipeline to help connect users with the people, information and employers

they need to make the most of their career.”

15

www.thestudentroom.co.uk is the world’s largest

and fastest-growing student community, with over

250,000 members and over 16 million posts.

In essence, it’s a place where students provide

‘Information, Advice and Guidance’ for each other

and for free. It also offers a nexus for links with

educational institutions, recruiters, businesses and

so forth. At its core is a series of peer-to-peer

forums.

www.wikijob.co.uk uses the underlying

wiki principles – quick, light, multi-user

crowdsourced editing by volunteers –

to reinvent the job interview space,

capturing user-generated insights on

specific sectors and companies,

pooling experience and tips on

everything from techniques and tests

to internships and contracts.

www.annmarie.org.uk uses everyday

technology – phones and email – to

leverage and reinforce important offline

networks, across multiple and diverse

communities. As well as an emphasis on

mentoring, leadership and excellence, a

recruitment element helps place

tomorrow’s senior managers in post

everywhere from LOCOG, Channel 4

and Whitehall to The Economist & Time

Warner. Annmarie Dixon-Barrow OBE

also advises on evolving more

intelligent career solutions at very

senior levels, including as a special

advisor to www.green-park.co.uk

Interim & Executive Resourcing

16

GoodPeople are innovators and technology geeks, focusing on the talent space. Ten years ago they set up www.jobsgopublic.com which is now the UK’s biggest public sector-facing job board with 1.2 million unique visits each month. They’re the brains behind www.lgtalent.com - the shop window for Local Government to promote itself to job seekers.

In 2008 they developed www.kentconnection.com a regional recruitment portal with a difference. More than just job listings, there’s a full-featured e-recruitment system co-created and shared by all the public-sector project partners involved.

This year they’re working on bigger challenges. Last month we launched www.mytowerhamletsjob.com tackling worklessness with shared talent pools and skills passports. And now we’re creating www.ThisAbility.co.uk - a technology-driven eco-system to help disabled people and disability-confident employers to find each other.

(That’s enough cool new initiatives in the career world – Ed)

We could, as you might have guessed, go on. And on. And on.

There are a plethora of new, exciting, innovative and high impact developments happening at the leading –

and often bleeding – edge of the sector.

But you’ve almost certainly not heard of most of them.

For one simple reason: the incumbent ‘legacy system’ infrastructure of career IAG – more or less lavishly

publicly-funded – is squatting in the space. It takes up much of the light which might otherwise be

photosynthesizing more fresh green shoots of recovery.

(Although of course you will have heard of The Guardian, whose principle source of income derives from

public sector and non-profit advertising, all of which could be delivered via other platforms a lot more

inventively and inexpensively).

And – truly, madly, deeply – we’re not that bothered by this for ourselves: frankly we’re all having far too

much fun reinventing the world. But we are a bit concerned for the wider picture.

17

Yochai Benkler (lightly edited for digestibility) puts it all in a slightly more ‘grown up’ way:

Most state interventions are either captured legislation that caters to incumbents, or, at best, well-

intentioned but wrongheaded efforts to optimize the institutional ecology for outdated modes of

information and cultural production.

The state could be constructive, if only it stopped listening to the incumbents for long enough to realize

what’s going on – which is that there’s more freedom opening up institutional spaces for voluntary

individual and cooperative action than in intentional public action by the state.

The networked information economy [has yet to stabilize and is in a state of perturbation]. During periods

of perturbation, more of how society is organized is up for grabs; more can be renegotiated.

To borrow Stephen Jay Gould’s term from evolutionary theory, human societies exist in a series of

punctuated equilibria. Periods of disequilibrium are not necessarily long. A mere twenty-five years passed

between the invention of radio and its adaptation to the mass-media model. A similar period passed

between the introduction of telephony and its adoption of the monopoly utility form that enabled only one-

to-one limited communications.

During periods of stability, we can probably hope for little more than tinkering at the edges of the human

condition.

Right, enough academico-philosophical talk for now.

Let’s cut to the chase.

18

What to do? – (and what not to do)

The readiness is all

Shakespeare

Hamlet (c. 1599-1601)

A Diversion

There are several reasons to restrict one’s intake of science fiction (e.g. to avoid those who speak Klingon) but there

are some gems. And for those who read PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) at Oxford University, there is one

in particular: William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine.28 This re-imagines a Victorian England –

but with computers. The Duke of Wellington stages a coup d’etat, an Industrial Radical Party is led by Byron – and

Disraeli is a tabloid writer. (The book also spawned an entire movement, ‘steam punk’).

There are two points to this diversion: it’s fun to imagine things taking different paths and – considerably less

amusingly – the ‘mash-up’ of 19th century bureaucratic methods with 21st century technologies underscores the

inherent tension between the two.

Future Proofing

Anyone – and it’s usually well-established large technology-based firms with a lot of mouths to feed – who suggests

you can peer into the future, let alone plan it, over a five year period, Soviet-style, is, not to put too fine a point on it,

lying. The rate of change is simply too fast. However, some thinkers have a better track record than others, while some

of the trends are – apparently – beginning to settle down. But even a quick surf through http://www.ted.com provides

eye-popping proof of how fast – and unpredictably – things are moving.

This generation of politicians is the most important, historically, for a very long time. Precisely because you (yes, you)

will decide the definitive directions which this churning revolution can – and should – take.

Above all, what we need is an overview, an approach, that reflects reality, rather than wish lists.

This means a system that can adapt, not ossify. One sequenced to existing trends. That frees up the energy and

resources of all players, individuals and organisations – and not simply a poor refurbishment of an existing system

without the moral (or indeed any other kind of) authority to actually reach people in ways that matter – where they are

now.

Talk about it

That means recognising that this is an ongoing process. Not a ‘fire and forget’ kind of solution, like the mythical

golden bullet of cancer-treatment. Life is not that simple. So we need a space in which to evolve – rapidly – a better

approach. Not a talking shop – more a think-, talk-, imagine-, do-, test-, try-something-else-, test-, invent-, talk-, do-,

improve-, shop/tank/thingy. (TTIDTTSETITDISTTT) We’ll work on the acronym first.

28 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Difference_Engine | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_engine

19

Why it matters:

Source:

Quality, Choice and Aspiration: [Sic]

A strategy for young people’s information, advice and guidance [Sic]

HM Government:

‘Building Britain’s Future’ [Sic]

department for children, schools and families [Sic]

October 2009

Metaphors we live by29

In discussing this section, we kept reaching for metaphors. Two proved useful. First, imagining the career advice

space as a North-facing garden, in which the state-fed and -constructed system is a large – an enormous – shed (an

ugly one at that), which blocks out most of the light (we’ve done that one). Second, think of Government’s role here as

similar to that of transport: providing roads, bridges, agreed rules, reasonable speed limits, fewer cameras, more

coherent signage... It’s not the role of Government to tell people what cars to drive, or where they should drive them.

In short, think strategic infrastructure support, with occasional, clever, tactical interventions. Almost everything else is

no longer cool enough for school.

Everything is miscellaneous (the power of the new digital disorder)30

We no longer live in a world of ‘second order’ Dewey Decimal Classification – the digital allows a near infinite

variety of tags, labels, elements, media, material and other matter attached to one ‘thing’. Ergo, it is urgent that we re-

invent the existing, threadbare, frankly miserable taxonomies for career, skills and employment. More precisely, we

recognise a semantic folksonomy – a taxonomy generated by and for the people. This is the substrate by which

increasingly sophisticated matches can be made between people and posts. Think Tesco Cards, and clever offers fine-

tuned to your needs – based on a rich data array. Or Amazon’s clever suggestions based on the way it’s captured your

past behaviour. Starting this process, properly, technically, is a perfect job for TTIDTTSETITDISTTT to get on with.

Improve findability

There’s a lot of stuff out there on the net (and on dusty office shelves). Putting it together in ways in which people can

find it quickly and efficiently is important – and actually rather valuable. Kevin Kelly (again) is spot on, in his widely

regarded blog post Better than Free31, which argues that there are many reasons why people actually want to pay for

services – one of which is findability:

A work has no value unless it is seen...being found is valuable. The giant aggregators such as Amazon and Netflix

make their living in part by helping the audience find works they love...publishers, studios, and labels (PSL) will

never disappear. They are not needed for distribution of the copies (the internet machine does that) [but for]

distribution of the users' attention back to the works. There is little doubt that besides the mega-aggregators, in the

29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_metaphor 30 http://www.everythingismiscellaneous.com NB David Weinberger was one of the principal co-authors of www.cluetrain.com (see The Cluetrain Appendix) 31 http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/01/better_than_fre.php

20

world of the free many PSLs will make money selling findability... In short, the money in this networked economy

does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits.

Platform 3

Good, well-designed platforms help organise stuff. Think Apple’s App Store, or Google’s widgets. The

interoperability afforded by open-architecture, with agreed standards and protocols, add consistent value at all levels.

They are, in effect, eco-systems designed to foster variation and diversity, facilitate selection and amplify the good.

They help maintain standards – Apple is notoriously fussy – while also reducing the barriers to entry for all players

with something to bring to the party. Again, a job for TTIDTTSETITDISTTT.

Be nice

From Prisoner’s Dilemma to wiki trolls (and wiki fairies who ‘just like making pages look really nice’), the cultural

norms that enable co-operative, civilized behaviour are complex, and although operating in different ways digitally,

increasingly well-understood there too. Developing the right reputational and financial incentives to ‘play nice’ is

useful, important, and can be resource-heavy.

Call security

An overview alone of the many highly-complex and highly-contested issues around security, data privacy and trust

could – and no doubt does – take up a massive amount of headspace. We don’t, by and large, trust the Government

with our data. But often we need to. The route out of this impasse includes better ‘vendor relationship management’

(VRM) systems – think, sort of, Facebook’s recently-evolved range of privacy settings, whereby I control my content

and who it goes to – as well as multilateral initiatives like TAS, with which several partners in this paper are deeply

involved. See also The Technology Appendix.

It’s got algorithm

Algorithms already exist (think Tesco card and recommendation systems again) but are getting increasingly

sophisticated – and in some cases nudging into Artificial Intelligence-like behaviours. But at their core, the thinking is:

reward people, and they’ll be more inclined to share their data (I don’t mind being advertised stuff that’s cool and I

want: I loathe the blunderbuss approach).

How to waste £100, £150 or £180 million

Spend it through ‘normal channels’, on people that no-one would instinctively or naturally go to for anything, let alone

advice, least of all careers advice.

Rip it up

Rip up and reconstitute the entire set of current notions around ‘standards’, ‘sectors’, ‘skills’, ‘competences’ (insert

acronyms ad nauseam). They’re reductionist and claustral. They actually lock as many people – if not more – out as

in. (“Sorry, you just don’t have the right [insert acronym] we need for this role”. And above all, they’re drag-weights

on progress. However, some standards – e.g. coding standards for particular software languages – are important,

conferring a kind of hygiene as well as Lego-like interconnectivities. However, many (oh all right then: most)

‘standards’ around the career space are, beneath a veneer of otiose indigestible language, well, otiose indigestible

concepts, often derived from sociology – or ‘sludgy’ as it’s called on the streets.

Be conservative

We believe – and recognise – that there is, in fact, a great deal of expertise, nous, (meatspace) connectivity and so on

among the older school players in this field. We value that. We don’t believe in throwing out the baby with the digital

21

bathwater. But we do think a certain amount of transformational goodwill, energy and translation is needed on both

sides of this equation. Strategic and tactical fora where people get up to speed – and get excited at being able to do all

the things they may have spent decades dreaming about doing – could have real value. (If they’re ripped up and

reinvented with an emphasis on doing rather than ruminating). Again, who you gonna call? Perhaps it’s time to call

TTIDTTSETITDISTTT.

See big, think smaller, do even less

This approach is not something you buy off the shelf from massive suppliers like Capita. (Although, of course, they’ll

sell it to you like greased lightning). Clever Italo Calvino memo-style approaches are needed. Small pots of money,

deployed quickly, intelligently and multifariously. Preferably well outside the public sector. And, in particular, beyond

the grasp of anyone who wants to stay a “digital refugee” (i.e. those who are basically hostile to the new technology).

Unless you want complete failure, of course, in which case...

Own up to it

If you’re going here, take real, genuine ownership of the thing. Don’t leave it to any layer of officials once in power.

Create, and then give collective air support to, something like the think-and-do-et-cetera tank outlined above. Help it

reach across, and into, senior levels in different departments. Think of this stuff as the legacy-bit, and as near as you're

likely to get to the really cool enjoyable stuff about running things in a revolution. Without air cover, the officials will

kill it, with the smiling efficiency of Sir Humphrey on crack. Provide access to you, not a shield of officials – but in

return, demand whoever’s doing it to be quick, light, efficient, transparent and on it.

Don’t set up a Fund

Unless you want to end up supporting organisations better at getting funding than actually doing anything. Some of

the most interesting stuff happening out here is desperately short of money – but frankly no one can face filling in the

forms. We’d rather Tweet.

Do think micro-match-funding/top-ups

In a world of lots of competing ‘apps’ and possibilities, but limited resources, people will make responsible choices if

it’s their own money. (Think Milton Friedman, RIP). Top it up to extend its reach, perhaps, and it’s still their’s.

Few but impressive hubs

It would be possible (arguably) to morph some existing centres into innovative hubs where, for example, those without

the right kit could come and do some cool stuff (e.g. make a video CV). But if they can’t get on a bus or coach or train

and travel a bit to get there, they’re probably not likely to go anyway. So the lavish overprovision of the past isn’t

helping anyone, really, apart from those it directly employs.

HyperLinkedIn.com

LinkedIn provides an impressive organizing infrastructure for business and professional contacts as well as one’s

‘CV’. But it also has lots of flexibility, and room to generate one’s own way and approach. (And, literally a couple of

days ago, it finally opened its API, w00t32). Something similar around the career space, possibly in partnership with

LinkedIn, is one obvious initiative – but only if handled by people who get it, and are likely to be among the first

users. Another task for Super-TTIDTTSETITDISTTT

32 http://developer.linkedin.com/community/apis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W00t

22

Avoid the lean and hungry

Especially if they’re touting themselves in any shape or form as “creative”, “can-do” etc etc. Think of the Creative and

Cultural Skills’ multi-million car-crash that is http://www.creative-choices.co.uk. Now reaching, ooh, around two in a

million online – and ranking 63,920rd among UK websites. Pretty much take it as read that if someone has time to go

through the hoops to take money from Government officials, then that’s what their business is. The rest of us are

getting on with doing it.

Get your head in the cloud

This is where data either is – or more or less should be. It’s a rather different way of thinking about things than, say,

boxes (Ministerial red or otherwise) or even plastic boxes containing chips. See The Technical Appendix.

Crowd-source

The Wisdom of Crowds33 is, well, wise. Or at least, rather wiser than officials34 or a committee. (The official

responsible for abattoir regulations, it emerged in the BSE report, had never visited one). The crowd is also quicker

and more intelligent. (Google Search is basically little more than an aggregation of the crowd’s wisdom). The crowd

needs to be breathed into the career sector big-time. Well, it already is. But more would be good.

Do some knitting

What we think will really work, essentially, is a bit of knitting. (Think tumbrels. Oh all right then, don’t). Actually, the

sector really does need a kind of organic knitting machine. Perhaps by assembling a team of outsiders to get the thing

rolling, seeding key memes35 and approaches while knitting relationships together. And coming up with a cool

acronym, natch.

All designed to increase and improve what’s already going on out there in the wild i.e. stimulate more variety, better

selection – crowd-sourced and bottom-up – and considerable wariness about serious amplification of the large-sums-

of-government variety until a few big winners emerge (although even this may not even be the best model: it could

equally be a larger number of medium-sized beasts that provides the 'fittest' ecosystem).

So – as with most really complex things, while we instinctively would like to reach out for a really simple solution, if

we do, we would only be conning ourselves.

This stuff is complex. But that’s the nature of the beasts and the beasties – the nature of nature. So go with the path of

least resistance – which is the increasingly frictionless paths of the interwibwebwob world – and help let people work

out the solutions for themselves.

Meanwhile, a little help would not go amiss with:

-Infrastructure

-Network Standards/Protocols

-The Navigation Layer

33 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds 34 Although uncertain as to the correct collective noun -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_collective_nouns_by_subject_I-Z – we’re thinking of trying to Wiki in ‘a paperclip

of officials’ 35 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

23

-Fostering/Brokering Networks/Relationships

We may have appeared occasionally flippant during this paper – but we’re deadly serious.

So we’ll end with Yochai Benkler’s call to arms. Then you can dive into the exciting world of our Appendix. (No,

really, you’re going to enjoy Government, if you keep your head, while all around are losing theirs...)

We are in the midst of a technological, economic, and organizational

transformation that allows us to renegotiate the terms of freedom,

justice, and productivity in the information society...

As economic policy, allowing yesterday’s winners to dictate the terms of

tomorrow’s economic competition would be disastrous.

As social policy, missing an opportunity to enrich democracy, freedom,

and justice in our society while maintaining or even enhancing our

productivity would be unforgivable.