When you Catch a Millennial Cliché, Kill It.

Cliché - What a lovely french word to savour! It's hard to miss the irony of a beautiful sounding handmaiden, doomed to serve the windmills of the trite forever. 

It's a great bit of onomatopoeia - Close your eyes and spell it aloud.

C-L-I-C-H-E -

Can you hear the clicking sound of the printing plates ready to cast ready-made stick of letters?

It's unfair we've scorned clichés all this while when they are willing to teach us something profound about the times we live in. If only we observed them without scorning judgement. 

Every now and then, when we arrive at a moment of momentous change - what John Hagel calls a Big Shift- strange things happen in the world of language. You slowly realise that the frame of reference has changed and a whole slew of words used in everyday business life have turned into, well, yes, clichés.

Hoary Millennial clichés are aplenty. Take your pick.

Do you prefer the trending Simon Sinekian ones bandying about lazy, entitled brats who were rewarded medals for coming last? 

Why fancy that route when many have taken the trouble to separate his heavily monetised volumes of vacuous, pop-inspirational husk from the barely few grains of truth left in the sieve?

How about these mundane clichés about Millennials in the workplace?

1) Millennials need to be "handled"

Hands down, this takes the cake for the oldest (and thus the most enduring) cliche in the grapevine town. Its origin dates back to the pre-industrial craftsmen of the yore before scientific management came to the fore in the early twentieth century. Conceived in a time when employees were mostly children, this cliche has withstood the vicissitudes of time spanning three centuries.

Millennials are today leading the revolution we have labeled: Software is eating the world. Although several adults are participating in it, my generation is forking the future ahead without any adult supervision.

This has unprecedented implications.

As in most periods of history, older adults of previous generations have largely led movements and organisations by telling people what to think and what to do. This largely worked in a context when leadership was all about the magnetic charisma of the Pied Piper who inspired children to follow the leader and his mesmerisingly simple, but confident narrative tune he (sadly, mostly male) played.

I am sorry to break the news. The world has changed in ways more than we imagined.

As my friend Rachel once beautifully summed up, the world of telling people what to do and what to think is dying.

We, the restless millennials, are busy building fast-and-loose organisations by the hacker-ethos which runs in our veins. Our work is nothing but a playful way of approaching and solving problems in rapid trial-and-error mode with creative improvisation.

Naturally, older adults (especially the Boomer generation) are insecure, anxious if these entitled brats understand the repercussions of their actions. They are more than willing to dole out advice at the drop of a hat to provide us with clarity in a complex world they pretend to understand.

With all due respects, let me say this without mincing words.

We hear your complaint that we have the temerity to pursue our actions relentlessly, unfettered by the anchors of pastoral ethics and morals.

But, what to do?

Such are the times we live in, when societal norms haven't yet caught up to speed in which technology has helped us move fast and break things.

Let me get this straight.

We don't claim to understand the world better than you. We know this for sure - How can you know what future beholds without building stuff to see what emerges?

2) Millennials are addicted to "Social Media"

Reeking with judgement, this easily wins the award for the most annoying thing you could say to a Millennial when you don't understand how intimately we relate with technology.

Have you observed what happens when you soak dried apricots in water for few hours? Its texture slowly changes and the fruit starts looking plumped up.

Perhaps, that's the closest analogy I can think of, when it comes to understanding how much we've let our identities and actions soak up the immersive social technologies we grew up with.

When you start mindfully observing the subjective reality of the medium mirroring the fluid nature of human perceptions, each time you play with the medium, a new persona comes alive each time.

I have experienced this in my favourite Linkedin laboratory I inhabit to learn and play.

Here is the critical thing.

You cannot let yourself be transformed, unless you are willing to let go of the impulse to stay "in charge" of your medium.

If reading this scares you, conjuring doomsday scenarios of abuse and addiction in your mind, you have precisely found the reason why this cliché meme refuses to fade away.

Hungarian physician Gabor Mate once memorably wrote that all substances of abuse - be it cocaine, or Social Media, if it makes you feel good - are actually painkillers which attempt to soothe the physical pain and emotional pain we experience in our daily lives.

Sure, you can suffer by all means from your intimate relationships. Or, if you are daring, you can let them transform you.

3) Millennials need "Work-Life" balance

Ain't it thought-leaderly cute to talk about "Work-Life" balance?

What do you really mean when you toss around that wretched, industrial-age phrase? I want you to pay attention to this phrase closely.

Aren't you implying that you are less alive when you are working than doing anything else where your Life energies might find fuller expression?

Say, I ask you this simple question - Where do you live?

Aren't you wired to talk first about your house and neighbourhood, even though you might be spending more number of waking hours at your workplace?

By using this phrase, you've made it loud and clear. Work happens at one place, and life, elsewhere.

Let's be honest. It seems almost impossible to "live" at one's place of work - there is no pizzazz, no exuberance, no love, no music. This seems to be the sad truth in large corporations - You are either living, or, working.

By now you should know where I am going next. No surprises there!

The game of work and life have been unbundled by the digital technologies we've built. Here is a short recap of the story so far, as illustrated in the fascinating blog Ribbonfarm

Now picture this post-2010 work scenario of a millennial.

I work remotely from home and I stay connected with my work buddies through an Enterprise social network.

How can you broach the subject of "Work-Life" balance in such a scenario?

Long ago, when the discovery of quantum mechanics blew to smithereens the assumptions we held about objective reality, I remember reading somewhere someone capturing the excitement in one single sentence - "'I', is no longer a noun, but a verb".

If you ask me to sum up the exciting changes happening in the Future of work, I would say likewise,

"Work is no longer a noun, but a verb"   

How do we go there from here? 

If we want Work to be a part of Life, workplace needs to be a community, oriented with the pace and rhythms of work. 

Every time I set out to work, I relive the Frankenstein myth in which I am co-creating something which is far beyond me. As Steve Jobs famously said, you cannot connect the dots moving forward.

When I work in the network, the form and the contents of my work is shaped by the generativity of my network. Dusty old rule-books dictating what is allowed inside the firewall and what isn't allowed outside no longer make sense. When the work moves to the network, can there be any difference between what is inside and outside the firewall?

How does one proceed to build such a workplace community?

There are no silver bullets. No quick, seven dirty steps to succeed. Building a workplace community is complex, for you are building an organism - a complex adaptive system which holds contradictions within itself.

If we are serious about building for the future, the first thing we need to do is dismantle our ready-made ideas and put all the pieces in the blender of Evolution.

Conventional wisdom about the Future have always deserted us because they underestimated the power of clichés. They taught us only to avoid them like plague, and not kill them.

And so, they refuse to go away - for they are insidious, trapped inside our everyday beliefs and habit patterns. Even if we consciously avoid using them outside, we are already suffering from it, having internalised them deep inside the recesses of our minds.

You are left with only one choice: When You Catch a Cliché, Kill It.

I am deeply grateful to Venkatesh Rao and his Breaking Smart Newsletter for the fertile thinking and exploration which sowed the seeds of thinking behind this article.