Extending of working careers - for real

Finnish Ministry of Employment and the Economy (MEE) has established a important goal to have the best working life in Europe in 2020. Simultaneously there is a need to extend the working careers of Finnish citizens to bridge the sustainability deficit. A strong lobbying favors to raise the retirement age and sadly only little political support to seek alternative ways to solve the issue.

Raising of retirement age is like giving a medicine for headache, that is caused by a bullet in the head. I claim that there are two major problems among working age Finnish people that need to be solved anyway - and that those issues will solve a large part of the working career extension target.

The more urgent of these two problems is to improve the working life as MEE intends.

Already regulations and support cuts rush students to graduate and go to work earlier. Also it seems that the youngsters face symptoms of burn out already in elementary school.
Pressure works only into some extent and after that people start cracking. Finnish Student Health Service considers that 25% of university students have problems with their mental health. It is terrible to see how many people around me has experienced burn out or is on the way or recovering. Healthy, motivated and highly skilled workers experience periods of lowered capability work, sick leaves and even hospitalization. This is the reality - and this must have affect on the effective working careers.

Four principles should be the most important knowhow and goal for Everyone in Finnish labour market - both employees and employers:
1) Identifying continuous stress,
2) understanding its effect on health,
3) knowing how to relieve it and
4) adjusting the work to get rid of harmful stress.




The the other issue that is not so simple to change. Finnish education system.

Finnish elementary education system has been praised internationally and for good reason. It has kept kids as kids and taught them equally good basics to stay healthy and grow to be effective Finnish labour. It has even taught them the best way to relieve stress - outdoors and exercise.

After the elementary school something goes wrong. I have completed two degrees and I claim that half of the courses was unnecessary. Although I am generalist of my nature and want to know everything - the other half in both degrees was still totally useless (sorry teachers).
Finnish higher education targets to make age groups of Leonardo Da Vinci's year after year.
I wonder what Raimo Sailas would say, if we could extend the working lifes with two years in most of the professions?! And I bet 20 yo younsters make more work than most 67 yo elderlies..


There is a workaround for this, but it needs a cultural change. I figure that most of the professions do not require min 3 year education for the employee to be proficient in one's work.
I cannot remember that I would have shown my papers to anybody since I graduated. It seems that papers are not actually needed if you know what you are doing. In a way degrees and papers are just another form of industry that give authorizations. Maybe the time for universities as a education for masses starts decaying? This excellent article (in finnish) questions the need for universities if their original purpose of developing thinkers has shrunk to sharing diplomas to the masses.

Bureaucracy award for finnish Ministry of Social Affairs and Health

Finnish government should receive a bureaucracy award for its tremendous success on the area of ensuring equality on mental health issues.

Recently there has been two cases that underline these achievements:
Once again a man killed his family and after that himself. Nobody really knows why, but he tried to get in care just before the killings but didn't have one more paper to get approved in.
Another case happened just after that, a man who had wanted to get into care killed a random teenager by knife just to get the attention to get into care.


Neither of these cases really imply that these men would have enjoyed or wanted to end up to these dramatic conclusions. What is really peculiar in these cases is that they both seeked help, but were turned down. Stories of how difficult it is to get into care are already numerous and I assume these events will continue happening.

It is hard for me to understand why government does not add up the numbers and take a serious attention to the mental health issues. It is not just about suffering people, it's also about their victims, their families and money.
Yes I said money. Government is using huge amount of brainpower to figure how to lengthen the working years by restrictions to maintain the national economy and nobody is taking seriously proposals about improving the working conditions and mental health support.


People want to be productive and healthy. Enabling those is more effective than restricting the retiring and care.

What hit Nokia - Elop or mediocre Middle Managers?

I have been repeatedly asked that what killed Nokia. I thought I'd better do the analysis now, when I still remember something about it. Tomi Ahonen writes exhaustively how incompetent formal Microsoft executive ruined it all, but I have to disagree with Ahonen that much, that there were also other reasons than just Elop.

Accusations on the burning platform memo are valid, but Symbian had already been burning for years. It was like a fireplace that keeps the house warm, but must be watched. More or less the memo peaked the crisis both externally and internally. Despite the crisis, the issue of what was the pothole that caused the decline of the competitiveness and consumed majority of the R&D resources, has not been discussed. Here I name a factor that hasn't been accused before: middle management.


I have several posts where you can find me reflecting this very topic, but in very general level. Now to be more concrete, I'll list few major reasons why Nokia among other big organizations failed:

Culture of finding problems, risks and saying no.
Engineers are taught to find problems. Under pressure, stress can create impossible obstacles out of ordinary challenges. If company culture does not support positive approach of accepting both the challenges And the cruel facts which might follow, the Culture of No get's into speed and managers prefer to make anticipated setbacks easy for their teams and themselves.

Culture to support innovation.
Despite Elop accused his employees of failing to deliver innovation, good proposals never stopped flowing despite repeated setbacks. What explains these contradicting views could be explained by having a highly innovative employees and a middle management cutting the wings of the proposals. According to Johtopätkii, creativity consists of competence, motivation and commitment which were in order thanks to the good reputation of the company among earlier recruits.

Making good work.
Everybody wants to make a good work. It's a matter of what you measure. If project has multiple stakeholders, everyone of them wants to optimize their part of the project. Abstract example; if sourcing, project manager and finance do magnificent work, the result can be poor hardware, hasty design and lousy experience. The need to make good work is also connected to fear of mistakes and to the pressure of getting good results to keep your job.

Pressure and fear.
Before starting in Nokia I had experienced two lay offs and been part of terminating two contracts, but I still thought that it was a unusual situation. Lay off waves in Nokia came more often than once a year. Even a single wave has a huge effect to the motivation, self esteem and effectivity - and repeated more so. Also reorganizing, replanning and the mistakes along with the corrective actions consume a huge amount of time and resources. Further if management anticipates new waves, they try to do extra good work and to say often no, which leads paralyzing the other half of the company.

Lack of vision.
Before Nokia seemed to know what was it and where it was going. But during the great rush Nokia had around the time first iPhone launched, they had focused on money and productivity. When readjusting the organization and portfolio to face the new challenge, mission and vision was replaced by an internal disputes about whether to rely on it's true competences. (Competencies that had already producticed the first touch screen smartphone four years before Apple, but was cancelled due the lack of managerial trust.) Or to make fast correction move and glue the touch onto the existing platform and rely on the ridiculous services agenda.
After that the vision has been jumping from side to side, which enabled the next point.

Rise of the career opportunists.
The questionable character in humans is that when things seem hopeless, they face up and hope that some extraordinary force turns everything good again. In Nokia this meant getting new talent to lead things. Positions started to slide outside of Finland due to the appeal of London and Silicon Valley. What happened was that new people started repeating old stupid mistakes, but now their accent was sexy and their designs rocked - at least on paper. Unfortunately when the faith is strong and you made the hire, seeing the truth takes usually way too long.

Results reflect the working environment?

Sometimes it can be difficult to justify why nice functional environment is important for designers.

At those moments you can discuss whether a top musician would be expected to enjoy a karaoke bar or further - to do work in such.

How to benefit of a cross functional organization

If organization wants to learn from other domains, it first requires accepting that the other disciplines are not doing it Wrong - just differently.

Hannu Leimun veistos Auringon lapsi (2010)

Tacit or explicit communication for you organization? -Choose both!

I started to read legendary manual How to Adapt to the Mountain by Jimmy Odén. On first pages Oden reminds how mountaineering skills are divided to tangible and measurable knowhow and to abstract part that he calls mountain sense. According to Odén, mountain sense can be learned slowly through experience, evaluation and reflection.

Odéns duality reminded me not only about organization psychology, but also of my ancient post that compared challenges of free skiing and design process.
Also competences in the office have dual nature, divided similarly to explicit and tacit know how.
As organizations have their mountain tops as goals, the most tangible means are naturally seen the most obvious to get there. -The abstract and non measurable traits of competences can get overlooked although it might lead to compromising the innovation.


Then, how to nurture competences to promote innovation?

One example comes from the discussions we had while making the new sitting arrangements in our office.
It was acknowledged that two types of communication is needed to get creative organization working effectively. The first one being obviously the communication required to make progress in your tasks. Second being the communication that supports the values, learning and openness in the company.

The solution here is to support the primarily the latter - tacit - communication goal, although it might sound controversial. Rationale is that this effort is not on the cognitive level and should come effortlessly - almost unconsciously. Further, mutual learning, shared values and general openness enhances competences and creates good motivation to deliver the innovation - giving good base for the first - explicit - communication goal.

Introducing oneself

Sitting in a meeting - listening what people have done and how experienced they are. Does it feel waste of time for you?

Listening people introducing themselves as experienced and noteworthy in meetings or seminars feels more or less useless. Instead of retrospectives, it would be more interesting to hear what people have on their desks right now or what are they interested in. That information might tell more about the personality of the person. But the personality is unfortunately sometimes our best kept secret. That might be the reason to rely on list of experiences.
The fact is that a person might turn out to be incompetent despite the long list of experiences. Next time you introduce yourself, make a decision do you want to turn this into your advantage or play it safe ;)

GrapePeople held an training that I participated for facilitation of creative work and they had a nice idea to do the introduction by telling a short story or incident from that morning or from the way to work. Even that can tell more about the person and the way of thinking. -Try that next time you facilitate a meeting.

Complaining makes you fail?

Somebody starts complaining and hesitating in the middle of action. Wanting others to know that there lies a risk in the activity. And more the complaint is overlooked, the louder it gets.

I remember a trip to Chamonix, which ended up me wondering that do I really complain. I though I was just making notions on the circumstances.
Complaining and negativitity spread from people to others. Although the intention might be neutral, the effect might be that somebody else starts focusing on cold feet insteads of good skiing.


Hesitation and negativitity grow from fear. A fear that something is getting worse and not having control over it. -Withdrawing while still able might feel like the rational thing to do.

Working in organizational environment and extreme sports have much in common in this. Going to the mountain and making strategic decisions contain risks. In both cases the missunderstood fear can lead to not getting the run planned or failing in business. Sometimes even to fall of mighty organizations.
-Do we have the skills? What do other think if I can't?
-Are we strong enough? Can we make it in time?
-Do we have the right gear? Have we covered all the risks?
-Am I able to take care of myself? Is this getting worse?

Both in organizational environment as well as in extreme sports there are times that you to make leaps of fait. Have the confidence on yourself and on what you are doing.

There are three good anti-dozes for fear:
Experience creates confidence, that all the challenges can be tackled and all the needed skills and gear is with you.
Positivity makes you focus on the solutions - not the problems and make sure you don't spread the hesitation to others.
Finally, if there is a fear behind a complaint, treat it as such and discuss through to diminish it.
-Monsters are as frightening even if they are put under the bed.

In both environments, not keeping noise about real problems can be lethal too. Good question is that how to recognice the serious stuff? -Mutual trust maybe?

Meaningful feedback resulting as motivation?

Finland is a country of self service. Where this is most imminent, is cafes and restaurants. Mostly, you need to get your orders yourself and even clean the table afterwards. In a bit better places you might get service, but often it's poor or unmotivated.

Despite few exceptions it seems that service is clearly better in cultures where waiters salary consists mostly of tips. For long I considered tip based salary somewhat bad deal, but I have changed my mind.

Compared to fixed salary, tip based salary creates immediate feedback channel between customer satisfaction and waiters behavior. Furthermore, the feedback is truly meaningful to the waiter. Skilled waiters can even make a career and climb up the ladder to better places with better tips.

The experience of the profession becomes this way totally different than in Finland, where common understanding is that anybody can be a waiter resulting in that nobody actually wants to do it nor be proud of ones profession.

Enhancing creativity and innovatio by doing mistakes

Have you ever felt that the success is must and you cannot fail? Did you feel stressed?


Most (if not all) people do feel stressed if failure is not an option. What we know about stress is that it limits the our creativity and our capability to see possibilities instead of threats. If your resources are low and solution is needed instantly - isn't it quite obvious that you try something that has been tried before and works for sure?

In organizations where jobs are in danger, showing that projects run smoothly and mistakes do not happen can feel important. Unfortunately this kind of thinking leads into several problems.
Organization stops learning from each other, ability to create new innovations drops and information of ongoing crisis or failures of larger scale can be buried. -And we need to remember that this happens in ALL levels of organization. -We all have somebody to report ;)

Sam Swaminathan tells a story in www.managementexchange.com how one organization was changed by celebrating the Mistake of the Month.

How to lose leadership?

A friend of mine updated her status with wise words about not caring too much about the talk that goes on behind our back when we stand alone in the front line.

If you are few steps ahead of your peers or time, it might mean that you are leading. You usually have lot of people who are talking and shouting behind your back. All it takes at that point is to believe in what you are doing and enable people to follow you.

But what happens if you start listening the critics around, miss the focus or lose your belief? Sometimes it results in stress, pressure and hasty decisions in seizing funding or canceling projects.
-Decisions need to be made, but it is always good to analyze that what is my decisions really based on; peer pressure or analyzing the environment.


Following video is about gaining leadership, but to maintainit, leader needs the ability to trust your followers when they start to develop their own moves. -Unfortunately that is something what managers in big companies sometimes forget..

The third truth

The efforts to save Euro after the elderly bachelors along the Mediterranean have bankrupted the nearly whole EU is a hot topic. Hot topic also for the reason that anti EU discussion has raised it's head also in Finland.

In these discussions it's not our politicians who make the decisions, but abstract things like EU and Brussels, that have impersonated. People feel that they've lost their control and don't understand what is happening.


When doing decisions for other people it is natural to think how this law/system would be the best for the general audience and in theory. A lot of the decision making is not fixed into everyday situations, but instead in ideals and the Third Truth. -The truth we assume is the "right thing" for the general opinion, but might not be right for the creators of legislation nor for the people.


Similar  kind of behavior is visible in how culture is formed inside a group of people, nation or in religions. Even yellow press is a huge player on creating a third truth in their way of writing things in passive "A bank was robbed". -But in this case it has an active abstract actor; EU.

I don't blame people talking about EU like it was a person doing decisions. -In a way, EU is an impersonation of that Third Truth.

Against matrix organizations - Idealist Group

The anticipation what I had earlier about matrix organizations was that it helps in concentrating to the actual work. Having the full support from the other direction and you creating results to other direction. -Unfortunately it wasn't quite like that. As Jaakko Kievari below desrcibes, a lot of time goes into reporting to both ends, what you have been doing and selling your ideas to continue again your meetings interrupted effert to create something.
I hope all the good for Jaakko's new interesting company called IDEALIST GROUP.

Yritysten arjessa ideointi on usein heikoilla. "Ei ole niin vähäpätöistä asiaa, ettei se kiireessä ohita ideointia. Todella paljon energiasta jää kiinni rutiineihin. Matriiseissa iso osa ajasta menee sen hoitamiseen, että kerrot toisille, mitä teet", sanoo Jaakko Kievari, joka viisi viime vuotta työskenteli Nokia Software & Services yksikössä.

Jussi Jalkanen, Ajattele. Optio, 17.9.09.

Being an engineer

It must be hard to be an engineer..-To see all the unfairness in life, all the injustice, all the incompleteness, all the imperfection and at the same time to know what could be done, would need to be done, but remains undone.

The coffee pause of an engineer includes at least one topic of; which one is better, how things are wrong, how the systems is against you. -In a way it's wise. To be prepared, to know, to make good choices...
 I wonder if all the preparing and negativity is useful in the long run. How about seeing opportunities and possibilities?


I'm glad to be nowadays more of an artist than an engineer.