netploy blog

Such as every year, the G-8 summit  (from June 6th to 8th in Hieligendamn) will be a face to face meeting  between the heads of most industrilazed nations in the world: United States, Japan, Germany, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Canada and Russia. Together, these nations represent 66,5 % of the global economy. This year, on the top of the agenda we find Climate Change. However, the meeting participants do not think that their own meeting is also highly contributing to global warming. delegations transportation, journalists and police inflows, will make this summit highly polluting as shows the weekly magazine Der Spiegel. Consulting firm ClimatPartner has  estimated CO2 emissions to 30 000 tons eq. CO2. To give you an idea, it is equivalent to 12 000 personal yearly emissions for people living in G8 countries:

• planes, helicopters and cars transporting delegations represent 12 000 tons,
• police and logistics represent 3 300 tons,
• fence building as well as protesting people against globalization represent 13 600 tons,
• journalists coming from all parts of the world represent 1 000 tons.

A lot of solutions currently exist to conduct productive conferences without the need to travel but G-8 members resist to change in the way they share their views on Climate Change solutions. How can you be credible, when you do not apply to yourself what you expect people of the world to be doing. I am still optimistic about the growing awareness that face to face meetings are counterproductive, expensive and contributing to global warming. The example will not com from the top, a growing community of people in the US and UK are sharing the same view on different ways of meeting and working.

We can tell to G-8 members that communicate and take decisions on global warming does not require to send 30 000 tons within the atmosphere: Internet is a much more powerful tool and does not contribute to global warming.

Forrester Research, whose reputation does not need  to be proven, has performed a study "Is Europe Ready for the Millennials?". This Millenials generation corresponds to young people who were born between 1980 and 2000. The youngest of them were born with Internet access and at least a PC. Most of European managers who participated to the survey admit that this millenial generation does work differently and has a new approach of collaboration technologies compared to elder generations.

While collaboration technologies  (such as webcasts, blogs/wikis and web conference) are hardly experimented by current workforce, millenials do not have any issue using them effectively.  They are used to manage several communication channels in parallel, they can perform multi-task and can easily survive in a peer to peer organization while elder generations still require a hierarchy. They master instant messaging while most of CIOs  do not trust these tools.

Up to now, collaboration technology was facing a huge resistance as workers are not ready for the "working together" culture. Since it was introduced on the market, groupware technology has struggled and only traditional e-mail has been widely adopted as it corresponds to personal communication rather than true collaboration. Nowadays, everyone recognizes its limit.

We have with this coming "millenials" generation, a unique opportunity to change the way we work, as it becomes less and less relevant to our global economy and environmental concerns.

It would be an error trying to influence these younger generations in coming back to our old organizational model. We should for once accept to be coached by younger workers. It is certainly one of the key elements for a sustainable development of our economy: as a matter of fact, we cannot be considered as a model to follow after having squandered our resources left by our elder generations. If you are not yet convinced, I leave you give thought to this short video. Change the way you consume, innovate and work to leave a future to millenials and our children!