Posts Tagged: work environment

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31
Jul 11

The Knowing Doing Gap

I recently started reading the book, The Knowing Doing Gap, How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action by Jeffrey Pfeffer (Professor of Organizational Behavior, Stanford) and Robert Sutton (Professor of Management science, Stanford).

I’ve been a long-time follower of Bob Sutton’s blog, and it was about time I picked up one of his books to read. To my way of thinking, Bob has some fairly sensible advice for working with people, and I’d suggest you take a moment to hear what he has to say.

From the Preface:

“But once something was clearly not working [while writing the book], we abandoned the path quickly, stopping just long enough to figure out what we should learn before trying something new. We never stopped to worry about how much time we had wasted and never spent one minute talking about which one of us was to blame for the last dead end. Rather we were inspired by the successful firms we studied, in which setbacks and mistakes were viewed as an inevitable, even desirable, part of being action oriented. We heeded their advice that the only true failure was to stop trying new things and to stop learning from the last effort to turn knowledge into action.”

 Great advice for being action oriented — from the preface, no less!

  1. Recognize that something isn’t working. (This is often easier said than done.)
  2. Abandon that path quickly.
  3. Figure out what to learn from the last effort, and try something new.
  4. Don’t worry about wasted time, nor assigning blame.
  5. View setbacks and mistakes as desirable.
  6. The worst thing you can do is to stop trying new things.

My questions to you are: When did you last fail in front of your whole team (maybe even your whole company)? What did you learn? What are you trying now?

Can’t wait to read the rest of the book!

- Peter

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3
Nov 10

The Undocumented TPS

Glyn Lumley on learning:

“For years, Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota Production System would not allow anything to be recorded about it. He argued that to do so would crystallize the process and stall the drive for never-ending improvement. I can see that copying others will work well in an organization that has a command and control management style where employees are told to follow a certain path as it will be good for the business and good for them. But if you want to develop a systems-thinking environment, copying will get in the way of deep-seated learning.”

Seems like simply making a procedure can prevent learning from happening. So why do we make procedures? To outsource the work? To be consistent in what we build?

But if we become consistent by using a procedure, we prevent learning.

If you had to choose between having employees learn, and have employees be consistent, which would you pick?

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16
Oct 10

Things take the time they take

In an interview with Jerry Weinberg:

“Things take the time they take, not the time you hope they will take. Pushing for half-time produces half-baked.”

I absolutely agree! When you push for a project to complete faster, something has to give. And more often than not, it is the quality that suffers because that’s the easiest cutback to hide in the short term.

Jerry is an author of more than 40 books, including “The Psychology of Computer Programming” and “Introduction to General Systems Thinking” and was the Manager of Operating Systems Development in the Project Mercury (1959–1963), which aimed to put a human in orbit around the Earth. (Thank you Wikipedia!)

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20
Sep 10

Turn your workers into machines

Seth Godin in Linchpin about the de-humanization of work:

“competitive pressures (and greed) have encouraged most organizations to turn their workers into machines.

  • If we can measure it, we can do it faster.
  • If we can put it in a manual, we can outsource it.
  • If we can outsource it, we can get it cheaper.

The end results are legions of frustrated workers, wasted geniuses each and every one of them, working the automations, racing against the clock to crank out another policy, get through another interaction, see another patient.”

I think there has been a long good run at “doing more with less”. It’s a good goal from the perspective of the employer, but needs to be tempered by the fact that you have people (not “resources”) working for you. People have their own needs and aspirations, and the best productivity will come from an arrangement that is good for both the employees AND the employers.

I’m optimistic that the next decade is going to bring more humanity and more rationality back into the work place.  I think this is in part from the adoption of agile, and in part, due to the new focus on social media. It looks a whole lot worse to be posing as a personable corporation instead of actually being personable, and people can tell the difference.

What do you think? Will there be more , less, or the same amount of humanity at work over the next decade? What do you think is influencing it?

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26
Jun 10

Motivate with Real Projects

Cliff Kuang:

“if you want to foster innovation, [let] people slip from under line management and strike out on their own, on projects they care about”

He’s talking about Dan Pink’s video, the surprising truth about what motivates us:

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