How we talk about work
FORWARD Development Partner Daniel Bluzer-Fry talks to Tracy Brown, author of ‘How We Talk About Work’, which looks at what ‘creative makers’ — the designers, developers, creatives and strategists who conceive of and build the digital products, services and experiences that we rely on today — think about work.
The book is based on three years of research with 85 participants across six continents and includes over 200 illustrations that bring their words to life.
Before, during and at the close of the pandemic, Tracy spoke to creative makers about what made them want to work with organisations, what would make them leave, how they felt about work and what they wanted for their future.
In this discussion, Daniel and Tracy discuss the book and also topics including neurodivergence, learning and skills and how organisations approach them.
I’ve been managing a combination of designers, sometimes developers, strategists and creative concepters and I constantly came up against having to explain why they were getting so frustrated with the way that they worked.
And it was very difficult for me to explain, for example, how creative cognition works to people who don’t tend to do that kind of work and why things had to be a very specific way. And if they weren’t very specific way people got super frustrated. That had been something that had really weighed on me for a long time, and it had just been bothering me how I was struggling to explain the voices of these, what I call creative makers, people whose main job is to come up with ideas to very difficult problems, and then actually solve them.
I started getting into looking at the concept of merit and realized there was a lot more to discover there. I was lucky enough to be invited by a college in based in Berlin to talk to their executive MBA team about what I discovered.
And through that process, I realized that there just really wasn’t a lot of research specific to this creative making cohort. There’s a lot of employee experience information, but it tends to be quite generic and it doesn’t take into consideration creative processes and creative problem solving, and how there are certain things that are quite specific to that group. So I thought I would just start the research myself, because that’s what I do is part of my job is to do research.
So I started the study in 2019, obviously not knowing what was going to happen to the world. I compiled those into a podcast and I shared them with with the partners at the Berlin-based College, and then everything kicked off. And I just carried on researching with people, because I realized that this was going to change everything.
And so I carried on interviewing people, one on one all over the world, people in Germany, the United States, Brazil, Nigeria, China, over over six continents, just so many people. And as a consequence of that, I ended up with this great information and started to be able to figure out the pillars of what people need in order to be happy, while being also a creative maker at the same time.
-Tracy Brown, author of ‘How We Think About Work’
3:02: The origins behind Tracy’s research along with reflections on creative makers.
6:30: Key takeouts from the research with a focus on neurodivergence in the workplace.
10:00: Learning and skills acquisition in organisational contexts.
12:45: Skills matrices, clear definitions and the barriers impeding clarity around roles and work.
18:50: On teaching and cultivating learning orientation in organisations.
23:40: Moving to learning cultures and accepting vulnerability.
25:15: Bias, Diversity and the impacts on workplaces.
You can access the full transcript here.
FORWARD is the RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation.
Our role is to build an innovative learning ecosystem at scale, create new collaborative applied research and invent next-generation skills solutions that will catalyse workforce development in the future-oriented industries crucial to Victoria’s economic renewal.
We lead collaborative applied research on future skills and workforce transformation from within RMIT’s College of Vocational Education, building and scaling the evidence and practice base to support Victorian workforce planning and delivery and acting as a test lab for future skills to develop and pilot new approaches to skills training and education through digital transformation and pedagogical innovation.
We leverage RMIT’s multi-sector advantage to translate research insights into identifying workforce requirements and the co-design of practice-based approaches with industry.
Contact us at forward@rmit.edu.au
