Inside Knowledge has a short, but interesting article by Dave Ulrich, who is a professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.

The article is mostly about what motivates people to work (Ulrich uses the equation ‘talent = competence + commitment + contribution’ to suggest that talent is no good without the other three components).

I talked about something similar last summer when I described work as an increasingly fractured narrative (although I’ll admit that maybe my undergraduate degree in literature makes me just think of everything as a narrative).

Professor Ulrich uses the word contribution to describe a situation where “employees feel their personal needs are being met”, and where the employee feels the investment of their is meaningful.

But what creates a meaningful experience in the workplace? Ulrich believes that if employees are offered “a vision that engages; an opportunity to learn or grow; a supportive social network; incentives; or flexible work conditions”, they will thrive and find meaning in their work.

Yet it would seem that these conditions alone are not enough to ensure that a worker finds meaning in their job. So what does guarantee that we’ll all find our work meaningful?

Well, nothing can guarantee meaningful work unfortunately. The obvious part of this question is that what may be meaningful to one person may seem irrelevant and uninteresting to another. But with that said, there is hope, however.

If we think of our work (or perhaps more appropriately, our ‘works’ as we go about the duties of our jobs) in terms of narrative structure, what we ultimately crave is a pattern. As human beings, we’re simply programmed to seek out consistency and patterns, since they help us to make sense of our world.

We like our projects to tell a good story, not only about the work itself, but about us as human beings. And what makes us like story? Samuel Taylor Coleridge suggested it wasn’t so much about belief, but rather suspension of disbelief.

We need to not only tie our work experiences into a cohesive narrative whole, we need to suspend our disbelief in order to be innovative in what we do — that is, we need to forget that something is impossible in order to envision how to make it a possibility.

Ulrich then goes on to suggest that:

“Talent is to knowledge like an actor to a script. The script (knowledge) defines what needs to be delivered; the actor (talent) determines how the script is interpreted and produced. Actors bring scripts to life just as talent turns knowledge into productivity.”

Already, Ulrich has teased out the narrative quality of work life by comparing it to a film or play put on by actors. We don’t want unscripted narrative or action — we want structure that ties in to an overall whole.