I’m back from a blogging hiatus, caused by a combination of less-than-positive thinking and cheating on my blog with Twitter. While I’ve been away, I’ve been thinking a lot about learning, people who learn and innovate, and how that relates to the holy grail known as the knowledge economy.

The knowledge economy appears to be the next desired stop on our way out of this recession. It’s a nice concept – transition from a world where we make widgets and produce things in a linear fashion to a world that is more open and flat, with a focus on people, how they think, how they learn, and what that means in terms of what and how they exchange.

But we’re in a mushy spot on the road to this shift, and that’s where my frustration has been over the past few months.

Why should you or I care? Because how we approach an emerging economy has huge implications for how we build our communities and who is included in that effort. How we adapt at the most local level will determine how we transition on the larger scale… I guess I believe the knowledge economy is inherently a grassroots change. (Your thoughts?)

I’m noodling through how to express this constructively, but for now, here’s what I’m chewing on – you could call these missed opportunities or manageable factors on the way to a new kind of working:

A lot of emphasis is on pathways – but what about practices?
Particularly in Michigan, new efforts have focused on increasing the number of college graduates, connecting students with internships, and other initiatives that build a knowledge workforce. What about internal culture, business models, and practices? My sense is that small businesses will be more nimble in this regard, but I wonder how large organizations are making visible shifts or assessing their readiness for new ways of working.

Some companies hire for innovation but manage for status quo.
If organizations want to embrace new ways of working and a new economy, one of the easiest things to do is hire innovators and learners and explore how they think. Sometimes cultural shifts require individual champions. But in my experience, there’s a disconnect between hiring innovators and welcoming the change they bring.

You know your company is struggling with this if they talk about new ideas and bold projects with public stakeholders but internally scoff ideas for improving process, require exhaustive rationale whenever suggesting a different approach, or fail to understand the value of learning if it can’t be directly quantified or monetized. (Maybe this is a regional issue?)

Some choose short-term production over long-term progress.
Maybe we just can’t help ourselves — maybe we’re so darned used to building cars and furniture and parts. If we can build a functional chair and cut some corners along the way, why not? A chair is still a chair, right? And any time you can make a process more efficient, you’re helping the bottom line, right?

It seems knowledge-driven work requires a new kind of logic and new definitions of what makes process and products successful. Efficiency isn’t enough anymore, and it doesn’t mean the same thing. I imagine the organizations that add value to their process and articulate this sense of savvy to customers will be the winners… even if at face value they are selling a similar “end product”: a chair, a car, a website, etc. (For example, would consumer demand for green products be the same if consumers were still only interested in end products like hand soap, detergent, and clothing? We can’t underestimate or ignore the fact that consumers are changing, too, and are already ahead of some companies in terms of this thinking.)

• Again, these are initial thoughts based on personal experiences, conversations, and reading. What has been your experience? What are the hiccups on the way to a new kind of economy, and what does this mean at the local or individual level?

I thought my urge to set aside creative time was completely related to the lack of writing I have produced over the last few years. Yet the more I try to commit to my plan for creativity in 2009, the more I struggle to make it work just the way I wanted and produce the writing I expected. My attempts to write fiction and poetry have been poor, and not just because I’m still working on a creative routine. It feels as though creative writing is actually boring me a little.

I know that I’m making excuses to some extent. Saying something is boring is a convenient way to practice avoidance… I know that if I churned out more crappy poetry, I would (or I trust I would?) eventually start digging up meaningful words again. I have yet to “walk off” the creative stinger I’ve been hit with over the past three or four years.

But coupled with these natural pains of starting again is an urge I did not expect at the beginning of this process. A lot of my creative energy seems to be bubbling up around potential business ideas. I spend more time thinking about business ideas than I do writing, and I find that thinking more interesting than I do the creative writing. I’ve also been taking on additional freelance work, pulling back to only a couple days a week working at the family business.

I’m starting to wonder if it’s time to be more intentional about this, create a business plan, and form a company. In addition to freelance consulting, I’d like to dabble in developing some of the web and knowledge sharing ideas I’ve had. It’s been established that an economy like this is good for entrepreneurial risk-taking… although I don’t view these potential directions as risks. I view them as natural extensions of opportunities I already have, a way to capitalize on relationships and strengths I’m already developing. If anything, I wonder what would happen if I didn’t get serious and formalize my work as a business now. Would I miss opportunities? Would I lose the chance to leverage connections or knowledge that could help me be more successful?

These are broad hypothetical questions, but I find myself asking them a lot. I’ve asked them ever since I was 14. I feel so fortunate to have had early, ample exposure to entrepreneurs. These included my dad, who started his business when I was 14. Since that time, I’ve watched him grow it carefully to the humble, strong company it is now. In some ways, the company was wildly ahead of its time. In other ways, we are a few years too late on some innovations, like our emerging green product line. My dad started using green cleaners for pest management in a local school district in the 1990s. Instead of innovating a company and a product line at that time (he had three little kids and was obviously more risk averse), he shared the idea with others. Now it feels like we are playing a bit of catch-up in that regard.

Given these experiences, and knowing that I am already semi-invested in a consulting career, I feel a strong pull to let myself dive in more intentionally. And that can be creative in its own right, I think. Maybe it’s actually the best way for me to express and merge my creative and analytical sides? I’m just not completely sure what it looks like yet. I’ve been browsing a lot of websites, comparing my skills to those of other communications consultants, thinking about a target audience of potential clients (presumably non-profits, but I don’t want to jump to conclusions), and drafting summaries of my strengths and capabilities.

I’d be interested to hear from others who have gone through a similar process, or those who care to speculate on what they might do in the same situation! If you are a full-time business owner now and were once a casual freelancer, how did you make that leap? What were the indicators that told you it was time to get more serious?

I have had a problem with productivity lately… and if you know me at all, you know this would typically threaten 99% of my identity. I’ve been sharing this problem with my dad regularly, going so far as to pound the keyboard once and demand why I couldn’t work like I used to (all the while apologizing for not living up to the expectations I’m sure he had of me when I was hired into the business).

He finally took a marker, approached the whiteboard in my office, and wrote “EVOLVED”. Beneath it, he wrote “Old Emily = Projects. New Emily = Relationships, Family, Love.” He looked at me. “You’re evolving, Emily. You are becoming who I always wanted you to be.”

It reminded me, oddly, of how my dad talked about my grandmother when she was dying. When he first spoke of it, he never said death. He told me she was decaying. Dad and I try to be observers of process—minimizing process could altogether undermine the nuances of an experience. In our minds, people don’t die, and they don’t change. They decay, and they evolve. Semantics to some, but it’s a kind of philosophy to us, I think.

So people like us tend to sense the thunderstorm when others just think the wind’s kicking up. For me, the wind started kicking up some time in 2007, although I know now that I was late in noticing what it meant… for too long, I have been a creature of creation, happily sacrificing most things (especially relationships) in the name of being productive. By 2007, that productivity had landed me in roles that only demanded more and more production. And while I hadn’t exactly woken up dramatically one morning wondering what happened, I expected it would only be a few more years before I did. Life was my personal pressure cooker—I had never been so uncomfortable in a situation I had so intentionally created.

When I decided to do something about that, it required uprooting myself in my own life as I knew it. It started with going to work for the family business, and once that happened, it unrolled from there. And by April of this year, I found myself in a life I had not planned but felt strangely like what I had always hoped for. A lot of formerly unproductive things—friends, family, and love—not only started making sense, but they started taking precedence.

And that’s when my work “suffered”. I went whole days without being able to produce a single scrap of what I would have formerly considered work. Even as I write this post I’m struggling to conclude it in a way that, in my mind, produces value. As if the process of writing it has not had meaning.

To help wrap my arms around the notion of evolution and the process that I am trying to let myself go through, I began thinking of all this as my “personal evolution project” (which I like because it leads to the acronym “PEP”). As part of my PEP (ha—sounds like a motivational speaking program), I guess I’m learning, or trying to understand, a couple things:

• Personal evolution is a not a productive process, in the way we (I) would normally view productivity. In fact, it sometimes demands less productivity. Personal evolution does not need to be justified with outputs.
• Personal evolution has nothing to do with success as we (I) know it. Some people would argue that this is just because society needs to rework its definition of success… I disagree. For me, success will always be somehow tied to the acknowledgement and perception of others. I believe personal evolution is actually about the pursuit of joy. Joy is a very personal thing, which no one else can acknowledge for you, and no one else can understand quite as you do (if or when you discover it).

I’ve been thinking about these things a lot for a long time, drafting them on paper, debating whether they belong in my journal or posted on this blog (now you know the lapse in posts was out of uncertainty and not out of laziness…).  I guess I decided in the end that it’s worth sharing here, in case others are thinking similarly and want to share