I could give you a million reasons why Laurie Reuttimann is a gamechanger, I’ll give you one. She understands the difference between business objectives and business outcomes. So often, we muddle the two, and think they are the same thing. They are not.

Laurie’s objective with ‘The Cynical Girl game’ is to,”build a portfolio career. You should build one, too,” she writes in her last Punk Rock HR post.

The outcomes will be things like people changing their own games, finding work, passing her links around, friending and following her online, sharing an occasional smile, and using our newfound cynical outlooks to not automatically buy into the bullshit, especially our own.

Objectives are singular. Outcomes are infinite. Focus on objectives to realize outcomes.

Or don’t. The Cynical Girl doesn’t give a damn. She’s too busy babysitting cats to babysit you.

We earn our money by learning from the Past and by being correct more often than not about the Future.  But we do our living in the Now, and nothing says Now like a pat on the back.

Yet, there’s a problem with this, at least where the rules of today’s workplace are concerned.   Touching is a vital element of communication, but between the computer culture and the corporate playbook, it is being systematically eliminated from the game.

To get the complete picture, I phone Martin Ett, an HR consultant with ObsessiCom Outsourcing Services, and ask him to interpret a pat on the back like the one I witnessed in the hardware store.

“It depends,”  says Ett.

“On?”

“A lot.  Was it a display of affection?  If so, was it sexual in nature?  What was the duration of the gesture?  We recommend a three-second limit on casual contact, including handshakes, conversational touching, hair or clothing adjustments, and lint-plucking.  Back-patting falls under the three-second rule.

“There’s also the nature of the contact itself to consider,” Ett went on.  “Was there rubbing involved or was the contact static?   Was it hand contact only, or was it of a hugging nature so that bodies were touching?  This is an important distinction, because hugs are becoming increasingly problematic in the workplace.  Many employers prohibit what we call ‘full frontal clutching’ while still allowing what we call ‘casual side-to-side linkage.’   We’re seeing strong anti-clutching trends across the corporate landscape.

“I’d want to talk to each of the employees separately,” Ett continues, “to determine both intention and interpretation, an ‘I-to-I Analysis,’ we call it.”

“Eye-to-Eye? I ask.  Misinterpreting.  “Is that like a 360?”

“You mean a 720?  Uh, no.  It means was there alignment between the patter’s Intention and the pattee’s Interpretation of the incident?

(Incident?)

I get where this is going but there’s no stopping him now.  I put the phone on speaker and tend to my Farmville on Facebook as Ett continues: “Did the pat make the pattee defensive or uncomfortable, or imply some kind of future obligation?  Also, what was the proximity of the parties? Was one of the parties backed into a corner, or was there space for the pattee to avoid the pat if it was unwelcome or unwarranted?”

“It happened in the hose aisle,” I say.  “It’s cramped in that store.  Space is tight.”

“Hose aisle,” repeats Ett, gravely.  “That could be an issue.  Context is key.  I’d need to know more about what exactly goes on in the hose aisle.  Is one of the parties the hose manager, or is that aisle considered neutral space?  Was there actual hose involved?  Because that’s a whole new kettle of worms…

Kettle of worms? When did a pat on the back turn into a scene from a Wes Craven movie?

“Also what, specifically, was ‘the back’ being patted? I’d want to know that.  Was it in the region of the upper, or Cervical, vertebrae?  If it was on the upper back it was probably okay, assuming of course, it didn’t last for longer than three seconds and no rubbing was involved.  Middle, or Thoracic vertebrae, are a gray area, especially numbers T-One through T-Four.  You find HR people very divided about this, and there are no clear guidelines, so my advice is to steer clear of the Thoracic region entirely, just to be safe.  The lower, or Lumbar region, is a definite no-no.  And a pat on the Sacrum will get you a visit from Security, no question.

“Was one of the employees the other one’s superior?” continues Ett.  “If so, the gesture could be taken as intimidation or harassment.  Was the patting public or did it happen in private?  Was this an isolated incident, or was it part of a pattern?”

“I don’t know,” I say, feeling a bit harassed myself now, for even bringing it up.  “They just seemed like a couple of guys enjoying a moment.”

“Couple of guys, eh?  We’re seeing a big increase in same-sex sexual harassment these days.”  Ett says it with the ominous satisfaction of an exterminator describing a cockroach invasion in the building where you live.

“What about giving myself a pat on the back?” I ask.  “Do you have a rule against that?”

“Are you making fun of me?” Ett replies.  “If you are, you’re barking down the wrong well, buddy.  There are rules about that.”

Next time I see them, I’ll warn the guys over at the hardware store they’re skating on some very thin skin.

The problem with rules of the game like those cited by (the fictional) HR exec Martin Ett (get it?) is that they suppress rather than expand our ability to communicate in a meaningful way.  In this kind of sanitized environment, we may be making our money and limiting our liability, but it has very little to do with how we’re living our lives.

Heather Champ and her team at Flickr improvise for a living. A big part of their job, according to the article is deciding whether certain photos belong in Flickr or not. The guidelines are not etched in stone. In fact, aside from a few Flickresque sayings like ‘Don’t forget the children,’ guidelines hardly exist at all. Rulings by Champ and her team arise more from the dialogue they have about an issue than from strict black-and-white policies. Policies are riffs on a theme; the rules of the game can change from scene to scene.

This is a monster distinction between business processes of the Industrial Age, and those suited to business in the Networked World.

Industrial age organizations wrote strict policies designed to codify employee behavior, limit the company’s liability from lawsuits, and ensure fair play between management and labor and between the company and its customers. The policies were written by lawyers to cover every conceivable scenario. When anomalies occurred, policies were amended or new policies written by those same lawyers. Conflicts with policy required interpretation by the lawyers. In other words, when it came to policy you couldn’t make a new move without an opinion from a lawyer.

Rigid policies worked for rigid organizations, but the fluid organizations of the Networked World like Flickr, which hosts billions of images posted by millions of users, call for more fluid processes. Context must be taken into account. Entrepreneurial employees have to make quick and frequent decisions outside the bottleneck and without the added overhead of Legal. This means acting within themed concepts instead of abiding by literal rules. This means improvisation.

“Don’t be creepy,” goes one of Flickr’s guiding concepts. ”You know the guy. Don’t be that guy.”

For some networked organizations, technical infrastructure—what the technology itself will or won’t allow—has become a new kind of policy for rewarding conformity and punishing edge behaviors. Confining interactions to ‘what the software allows’ is just as bad if not worse than ye olde employee handbook. It’s a kind of control that can hinder the continual innovation called for by a networked brand.

The valuable interactions, those that bring new life and wealth to your brand, are human ones. And because they are human ones, they are unpredictable. The improviser welcomes the unpredictable situation as an opportunity to further define reality. An improviser like Champ understands that every interaction holds the potential for transformation. To interact mechanically or by rote is to disregard this potential.

A sense of ‘Flickr, performing’ guides Champ and her team as they discuss and then take action on barrages of unpredictables like barterers in Brazil, vengeful boyfriends from the Bronx and R-rated artists from Belgrade.

“Imprecision is an art here,” writes Colin of Flickr. (An improviser sees it another way: Art resolves imprecision.) Colin writes of the artfulness required for Champ and her team to impose a sense of order on what could otherwise be chaotic, polarized communities.

“I can’t think of any successful online community where the nice, quiet, reasonable voices defeat the loud, angry ones on their own,” Champ says. “The job always comes down to finding the fulcrum in the teeter-totter, the balance that benefits both the individual and the community.”

In other words, not only does Champ’s job call for improvisation, it calls on her and her team to guide and ‘coach’ the ongoing improvisation by the Flickr community.

As I read the article on SFGate, I realized that I know Heather Champ. Her husband, Derek Powazek, founded the pioneering digital storytelling site, Fray in the late 1990s, and he and Heather went on to co-found JPG Magazine. They are among the savviest community builders I’ve met in the young history of the internet. I think the best thing about Heather and Derek is how their work is an expression of what and whom they love, especially each other. Out on the turbulent edge where innovators, explorers and artists play, love is the constant. If you act on love, love will act on you. And that is all the music a human being needs to dance with her destiny.

This is the most photographed generation in the history of the world. Practically from birth, ‘Gen-Why?’ has been MySpaced, FaceBooked, Flickred and YouTubed. We are talking about people who know how they look and what they sound like, and are well on their way to developing a personal brand. They possess more knowledge and are more flexible in their thinking than their parents. Improvisation provides the ideal platform for helping them put their look, their sound, their knowledge, their brand, to productive use.

And…

As employees raised (educated?) on video games enter the workforce in increasing numbers, the improvisational skills inherent in the gaming world will naturally become part of the ‘Gen-Why?’ business culture.

Samantha Maxwell is the founder and owner of CYA Human Resouces, an HR consulting company based in Los Angeles. In helping her clients deal with issues unique to Gen-Why and to the networked workplace, she’s on the fault line of a tectonic shift in business culture. In ten years, she says, 80% of the workforce will consist of Gen-Whyers.

“They don’t live to work, they work to live,” observes Maxwell. “They are more interested in what they’re going to be doing tonight or on the weekend than in what they’ll be doing five or ten years from now.” She further describes this generation as having been coddled and comforted throughout their lives by what the HR blogosphere calls ‘helicopter parenting’. “I would never in a million years think of bringing a parent to a job interview, nobody in my generation would. But we see this happening. We have situations where mom and dad call us to complain when their kid gets written up for something at work. This generation wants people telling them how wonderful they are. I tell them, ‘Buck up. This is work. You know what tells you you’re wonderful? The paycheck you get every two weeks.’”

(”I hope that phrase about the paycheck being their praise isn’t too harsh,” Ms. Maxwell emails me after reading this post. “What i really mean is that if it was FUN, we wouldn’t call it work.”)

On the flip side, Maxwell points out that to stay productive in the Networked World, employers have to acknowledge and meet this change halfway.

“Praise is more important than anything else,” she says. “They want to be told they wrote a nice memo, or that they did a good job on a project. And it’s so easy as a manager to do that. It has not traditionally been management’s style. They’ll tell me, ‘Oh, I’ll address it at the review’ you know, on an annual basis, and I’m like ‘You can’t do that. You have to tell them right now. And make sure not only that you tell them, you bring it up in a public scenario if you can, and hey, while you’re at it, shoot them an email.’”

“It’s more difficult to criticize, and there’s a lot more push-back,” she continues, getting to the crux of why I gave them the Gen-Why? moniker. “This is the first generation that got time outs instead of spankings. You have to criticize and praise at the same time. And what you say has to be honest. This generation sees through the B.S. in ways that previous generations could not.

“If you’re only a disciplinarian, they’re going to check out. You’re going to lose the connections you need to drive your business forward. You need everyone on board and everyone to have the desire to perform.”

I inform her that in the improvisational business model, management’s primary job is to identify productive games and incentivize employees to play along,

“Yes, definitely,” says Samantha Maxwell. “We need to be more Human Resourceful.”