Remember, Deming said that a system cannot understand itself. It’s not just true because Deming said it. It’s true because it’s true. It doesn’t matter how frustrating we find it, but the systems to which we belong will be exerting their influences on us. We struggle to know this. We struggle to know how much. We find ourselves at times frustrated with ourselves, as well as others. It takes an outside eye, a disinterested party, an objective mirror, to help us to see what we can’t. They’re called blind spots for a reason. Obvious to me, previously hidden to these three leaders, their system is screwy, not the people within it.
In Britain, Professor Richard Titmuss remarks that social ideas may well be as important in the next half-century as technical innovation. I believe that the social ideas of anarchism: autonomous groups, spontaneous order, workers control, the federative principle, add up to a coherent theory of social organisation which is a valid and realistic alternative to the authoritarian, hierarchical and institutional social philosophy which we see in application all around us. Man will be compelled, Kropotkin declared, “to find new forms of organisation for the social functions which the State fulfils through the bureaucracy” and he insisted that as long as this is not done nothing will be done.” I think we have discovered what these new forms of organisation should be. We have now to make the opportunities for putting them into practice.
The concept of reverse accountability is awesome. Why shouldn’t you be able to create Jiras/tickets with organisational bugs/problems as an employee and hold the management team accountable to fix them. After all, their job should be focused on enabling and improving the organization.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has found that the U.S. voluntary turnover rate is 23.4% annually. Its generally estimated that replacing an employee costs a business one-half to five times that employees annual salary. So, if 25% of a business workforce leaves and the average pay is $35,000, it could cost a 100-person firm between $438,000 and $4 million a year to replace employees.
One (mis)understanding of culture in the workplace that I have come across is that culture something you can’t change or impacted. This view, to me, is rather pessimistic and basically says that we are all just victims of the current cultural paradigm.
I am personally more inclined to subscribe to a different definition of culture.
Definition of culture:
“Specifically, the term “culture” in American anthropology had two meanings: (1) the evolved human capacity to classify and represent experiences with symbols, and to act imaginatively and creatively; and (2) the distinct ways that people living in different parts of the world classified and represented their experiences, and acted creatively.”
This definition opens up interesting opportunities. Here you can see an interplay between the daily behaviour in the work place and the current cultural paradigm. As noted in psychology, actions that are not consistent with currently held values leads to cognitive dissonance, something we as humans try to overcome by slightly shifting values and understanding of what happend. As such our culture is always moving and changing to some extent and new behaviours will impact the make up of the workplace culture.
So, by studying what actions gets rewarded and making sure there are positive reinforcements for constructive behaviour you can effectively change culture.
This is a very good and concrete example at FogCreek: http://blog.fogcreek.com/why-do-we-pay-sales-commissions/
Anyone familiar with the Agile Manifesto and the dominating ideas and concepts behind the current Lean and Agile movements will get a kick out of reading this transcript from the famous Foucault and Chomsky debate on Dutch television in 1971.
“Let me begin by referring to something that we have already discussed, that is, if it is correct, as I believe it is, that a fundamental element of human nature is the need for creative work, for creative inquiry, for free creation without the arbitrary limiting effect of coercive institutions, then, of course, it will follow that a decent society should maximise the possibilities for this fundamental human characteristic to be realised. That means trying to overcome the elements of repression and oppression and destruction and coercion that exist in any existing society, ours for example, as a historical residue.
Now any form of coercion or repression, any form of autocratic control of some domain of existence, let’s say, private ownership of capital or state control of some aspects of human life, any such autocratic restriction on some area of human endeavour, can be justified, if at all, only in terms of the need for subsistence, or the need for survival, or the need for defence against some horrible fate or something of that sort. It cannot be justified intrinsically. Rather it must be overcome and eliminated.
And I think that, at least in the technologically advanced societies of the West we are now certainly in a position where meaningless drudgery can very largely be eliminated, and to the marginal extent that it’s necessary, can be shared among the population; where centralised autocratic control of, in the first place, economic institutions, by which I mean either private capitalism or state totalitarianism or the various mixed forms of state capitalism that exist here and there, has become a destructive vestige of history.
They are all vestiges that have to be overthrown, eliminated in favour of direct participation in the form of workers’ councils or other free associations that individuals will constitute themselves for the purpose of their social existence and their productive labour.
Now a federated, decentralised system of free associations, incorporating economic as well as other social institutions, would be what I refer to as anarcho-syndicalism; and it seems to me that this is the appropriate form of social organisation for an advanced technological society, in which human beings do not have to be forced into the position of tools, of cogs in the machine. There is no longer any social necessity for human beings to be treated as mechanical elements in the productive process; that can be overcome and we must overcome it by a society of freedom and free association, in which the creative urge that I consider intrinsic to human nature, will in fact be able to realise itself in whatever way it will.”
Now, consider the fundamental differences in the Chomsky’s perspective on human nature in the light of for example Taylorism, the favourite bogeyman amongst Agilistas. You can also draw parallells between Chomsky’s points and ideas from contemporary voices in the debate such as Dan Pink.
Another interesting comparison to make is to look at McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y and how your definition of human nature impacts the organization of work and companies.
If anyone claims that Agile is a fad, point them to Chomsky, McGregor, Nonaka and ask that they do their homework. The ideas behind Agile are not revolutionary, rather a more accessible and commercialised evolution of academic endeavours.
“The Creeping Learning Curve: Every change made to the software, even those “trivial” little changes assimilated day by day by the design team, will be re-experienced, all at once, by each user upon first running the new revision. If your team of spends 6 months, and adds 1 feature each day, your users are going to be hit with 6 months worth of changes, all 180 of them, in the first 6 minutes. ”
Bits and pieces 