PUBLIC RELATIONS
The Era Of Learned
Helplessness
By Irene Mbonge
Digital platforms have
fundamentally changed the
way we buy, make decisions
and interact with one another besides
becoming an essential element of any
organizational strategy; particularly
in light of the Covid-19 crisis. This
environment of constant change has led to
a huge skills challenge for individuals and
organizations.
Skills often move along a path from the
arcane to the useful to the universal. Long
division, for example, was largely the
province of mathematicians and scientists
until the 19th century. Now it is taught
in elementary schools. More recently, we
have seen a similar pattern with coding,
data science, soft skills, and other on-thejob
competencies.
Digital Skills: A must have
for 2020
With the unprecedented quick pace of
change, the age-old model of ‘one-off ’
training is no longer fit for purpose. The
inability to engage with a digital problem
in the workplace where an intelligent, and
otherwise competent employee proves
strangely unable to use digital tools to
address workplace need is, in my view, a
form of learned helplessness. The worker
has learned, through many interactions
with digital tools and technologies; that
these tools are only to be used in particular
ways to solve particular problems.
Experimenting with different ways of
using them often leads to unfortunate
consequences: confusion, failure, or
even a “bricked” device. This reinforces
the natural tendency to stick to known,
habitual, “safe” tools and methods. After
encountering many such experiences,
a worker may come to view themselves
as being incapable of navigating the
complexities of a new digital tool, or even
the digital workplace in general, without
being explicitly taught how to do so - and,
consequently, give up even trying.
Learned helplessness in the digital
workplace is an increasingly serious
problem not only for frustrated workers,
but also for the organizations for which
they work. Today’s workplaces are
saturated with and defined by digital
technology. Much, if not most, of an
individual’s work requires interacting
with digital tools, and these tools are
becoming ever more prevalent and ever
more sophisticated. The thoughtful use of
digital tools can often not only make work
easier, but also yield a superior result. But
the more complex the digital environment
becomes, the greater the danger that it
will evoke learned helplessness - even
as technology becomes more and more
crucial to organizational success.
For many of us, across a range of work
and personal situations, “googling” can
indeed be a productive strategy for
finding information we don’t know or
can’t remember. Most of us think that we
know how to use internet search engines,
given they’re some of the first things we
encountered when we ‘discovered’ the
internet. If someone doesn’t yet know
how to use a search engine, it is easy to
teach them how to take a question and
transform it into a search query.
Failure to recognize the when and why
of the various digital tools characterizes
learned helplessness. What the worker
with learned helplessness lacks is the
capacity, as an individual, to act independently
and to make their own free
choices in the digital workplace.
However, what we don’t and perhaps
cannot teach so easily is what questions
to ask, for what purpose, and when it’s
appropriate to ask them. This is just a basic
example of what could constitute trouble
spots for employees. It is this failure to
recognize the when and why of the various
digital tools that characterizes learned
helplessness. What the worker with
learned helplessness lacks is the capacity,
as an individual, to act independently
and to make their own free choices in the
digital workplace.
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MAL37/20 ISSUE