I was recently asked about why I’m working on Work Literacy. My response is always that I want to do work that matters. And, I strongly, passionately believe that working on this matters. And people and companies who do this work and who get it, will be able to take advantage. People and companies who don’t will be struggling and left behind.

Part of the explanation can be found through an article by Andrew McAfee - Technology Beats a Full House. He points to the decrease in variation in batting averages over the years. He points out that the last time anyone hit over .400 in baseball was Ted Williams in 1941. No one has been over .400 for an entire season since. Yet there were several of them prior to Ted Williams and even seven of them in the 1920s.

The theory is that as a system becomes optimized, variation in performance decreases. Thus, if you look at batting averages over many years, the variation in averages has become smaller and smaller.

He then shows that the spreads in profit and market cap in high IT vs. low IT companies has greater variation over the past decade with the greater variability in IT systems.

His conclusion is that with greater variability:

… winners were increasingly separated from losers.

Today, I believe that there is something similar thing going on in knowledge worker performance. Systems were relatively more stagnant a few years ago and thus education and ad hoc learning of knowledge work skills was sufficient to achieve relatively more consistent performance. However, with greater volatility of technology, access to information, access to people, all of the things we talk about here at Work Literacy - my belief is that:

Today, there is significantly greater variability in performance between knowledge workers.

This is certainly something we’ve been discussing here. In Value from Social Media we point to a specific performance finding particular kinds of information through alternative sources:

Who’s going to produce better at the end of the day: A person who knows how to use Google only or a person who can use Google and also can reach out via social media to help find and answer?

The answer is obvious and individuals and organizations need to wake up to this!

In Network Key Skill - More than Knowledge-able, we point out that a lot of the variability right now has to do with social aspects - reaching out to people for expertise, working collaboratively, taking advantage of wisdom of crowds, etc.

Again, my claim is that the Work Literacy Gap has the characteristic right now that there’s greater variation in performance in this time of great volatility in the methods and tools for knowledge work.

I’m not sure there’s any way that we can prove this except through anecdotal examples such as the one cited above (using outside expertise). Still, I believe that I’m getting to do work that matters.