Knowledge work, knowledge workers, industrial structures.

The weak ties world often appears more as a threat than an opportunity for unions and our members. The problems we confront can be so challenging that it is easier to ignore them than acknowledge and face them. Part of the problem is that many union members, along with the sectors and the organizations where they work, do not recognize themselves as knowledge workers and knowledge industries. Health care is a prime example: usually run on an industrial model with a mixed population of professionals and non-professionals, employees and contractors, there is little to differentiate much of day-to-day  management and working conditions from old-fashioned factory work. As a consequence, union representation often looks much like old-fashioned factory floor representation.  These obsolete organizational structures have to go, but how?

Union members have to ask themselves how much of their work is thinking for a living. How many of the important tools they bring to their work reside in their heads? How much of their hands-on work requires the use of sophisticated technologies and high-level skills? Next, they need to look around and ask how much their work place reflects their abilities? How different is the language in their collective agreement from that of a mill worker or an auto worker? Because the reality is that fewer and fewer of us work in those industrial jobs, yet we continue to inhabit the conceptual as well as the physical models of the past. How to imagine a different, richer reality, one that for many of us has not yet arrived?

Steven Johnson (Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation ) cites an imagining tool he has dubbed the adjacent possible which nicely describes the problem we face – something near at hand but out of view.

The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.

The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore those boundaries. Each new combination ushers new combinations into the adjacent possible. Think of it as a house that magically expands with each door you open. You begin in a room with four doors, each leading to a new room that you haven’t visited yet. Those four rooms are the adjacent possible. But once you open one of those doors and stroll into that room, three new doors appear, each leading to a brand-new room that you couldn’t have reached from your original starting point. Keep opening new doors and eventually you’ll have built a palace.

The adjacent possible is a place of opportunities. It's the status quo that represents the threat.