It Takes A Long Time For Change To Happen Quickly

May 3, 2008 at 2:26 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Distributed Work, Economic Development, Enterprise 2.0, KM, Web 2.0

Taylorism changed a lot about the nature of work in North American and western Europe pretty quickly, all things told … but it still took thirty or forty years to emerge into its relatively full-blown effects.  At its heyday, the manufacturing might and effectiveness of the United States that Taylorism helped create enabled it (along with important agricultural and resources capabilities and growing financial clout) to become the world power economically over several decades at most. 

In an important sense, it was useful to his theories that 1) they helped respond to the massive spread of the Industrial Era’s requirements for growth in the first half of the 20th century, and 2) World Wars I and II came along in the late 1910’s and in the late 1930’s to provide a massive need for manufacturing.

30+ years elapsed from the publication of Principles of Scientific Management in 1911 to the codification of those principles into work design methodologies in the 1940’s and early 1950’s.  He and his theories get a bad rap today, but it seems clear that they were highly useful to the process of creating wealth by improving manufacturing processes and capabilities.

It seems banal to say that those theories are less effective today, but I am not sure that’s the case.  There have been no comprehensive theories and principles come along (yet) to replace them, notwithstanding a plethora of management books published since the mid-1980’s promising enhance organizational effectiveness … more often than not by combining Taylorist principles with developmental workarounds and adaptations.

The recent emergence of the field called Enterprise 2.0, and clarion calls for management innovation that have followed (see Gary Hamel, Andrew McAfee, Tom Davenport, Don Tapscott, Dave Snowden and many, many others) promises much potential disruption.  It also portends significant struggle as the forces of buttoned-and-battened-down efficiency derived from a manufacturing-focused era vie with the forces arising from networked flows of information in an era where economic value is derived from the construction and application of knowledge to product and service design and delivery (manufacturing happens in China now).

Via Wikipedia:

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Taylor published his Principles of Scientific Management in 1911, which elucidated four core principles:

1. Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks.

2. Scientifically select, train, and develop each employee rather than passively leaving them to train themselves.

3. Provide "Detailed instruction and supervision of each worker in the performance of that worker’s discrete task".

4. Divide work nearly equally between managers and workers, so that the managers apply scientific management principles to planning the work and the workers actually perform the tasks

Management theory

Taylor thought that by analysing work, the "One Best Way" to do it would be found. He is most remembered for developing the time and motion study. He would break a job into its component parts and measure each to the hundredth of a minute.

[ Snip … ]

He was generally unsuccessful in getting his concepts applied and was dismissed from Bethlehem Steel. It was largely through the efforts of his disciples (most notably H.L. Gantt) that industry came to implement his ideas.

Managers and workers

Taylor had very precise ideas about how to introduce his system:

"It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone." (Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management, cited by Montgomery 1989:229, italics with Taylor)

Workers were supposed to be incapable of understanding what they were doing. According to Taylor this was true even for rather simple tasks.

"’I can say, without the slightest hesitation,’ Taylor told a congressional committee, ‘that the science of handling pig-iron is so great that the man who is … physically able to handle pig-iron and is sufficiently phlegmatic and stupid to choose this for his occupation is rarely able to comprehend

[The scope of] Taylor’s Influence - United States

• Carl Barth helped Taylor to develop speed-and-feed-calculating slide rules to a previously unknown level of usefulness. Similar aids are still used in machine shops today. Barth became an early consultant on scientific management and later taught at Harvard.
• H. L. Gantt developed the Gantt chart, a visual aid for scheduling tasks and displaying the flow of work.
• Harrington Emerson introduced scientific management to the railroad industry, and proposed the dichotomy of staff versus line employees, with the former advising the latter.
• Morris Cooke adapted scientific management to educational and municipal organizations.
• Hugo Münsterberg created industrial psychology.
• Lillian Gilbreth introduced psychology to management studies.
• Frank Gilbreth (husband of Lillian) discovered scientific management while working in the construction industry, eventually developing motion studies independently of Taylor. These logically complemented Taylor’s time studies, as time and motion are two sides of the efficiency improvement coin. The two fields eventually became time and motion study.
• Harvard University, one of the first American universities to offer a graduate degree in business management in 1908, based its first-year curriculum on Taylor’s scientific management.
• Harlow S. Person, as dean of Dartmouth’s Amos Tuck School of Administration and Finance, promoted the teaching of scientific management.
• James O. McKinsey, professor of accounting at the University of Chicago and founder of the consulting firm bearing his name, advocated budgets as a means of assuring accountability and of measuring performance.

I’ve long appreciated the aphorism that is the title of this post, and I think of it regularly when surfing and reading the latest insight from the many pundits and critics of the Web.  And today I am thinking about "the future of work".

It’s my assertion that the changes social computing will bring to knowledge work and knowledge-based workplaces may be even greater than the generally immature experiments that have taken hold today as early adopters play with tools that allow them to connect, create, converse, convulse, coopt, and carry on about all manner of things … including work issues, challenges and opportunities.

David Weinberger is a well-known expert on knowledge management and the hyperlinked web / organization.  He has from time to time written about how the digital infrastructure and the dynamics it fosters "cuts the slack out of interactions" (The Need For Leeway, October 2002) .  We need "slack" to reflect, to think, to imagine, to support the filling in and filling up of the connections we have made between people, information, task and problems.  And we need analysis and measurement, specialized skills, budgets, accountability and best practices to optimize work and eliminate what is clearly unnecessary, not useful and / or wasteful.

But efficiency is not and will not be the hallmark of human interaction, and human sociology in the modern workplace cannot forever take its architectural design principles for Taylorism.  As we watch Enterprise 2.0 emerge, I watch what seem to be regular waves of dots (widgets, applications, platforms, services and people in equal measure) joining together, using the Web, to meld efficiency and slack … the "both / and" so often cited as characteristic of this new environment.  A flow of questions, responses and pertinent information soldered together to provide a design, or a service, is not the same as carrying out efficient repeatable supervisable step-by-step tasks the result of which are combined with other sets of efficient repeatable supervisable step-by-step tasks to produce repeatable products or services (You can have any Model T you want, as long as it is black).

There’s an enormous amount of resistance, both intellectual and cultural, to acknowledging that maybe work cannot be designed and structured based on the principles that have been in place for more than three-quarters of a century now.  A lot of that has to do with what "management" still means to us (especially the incumbents of managerial roles).  It’s hard to give up power and control, especially when you are charged with making stuff happen and the budgets and performance management and compensation bonus schemes reinforce that charge. So, while it appears that the Internet, and thus the difficult-if-not-impossible-to-control flows of information, are here to stay, it also seems that about every 6 months or so there’s another wave of "this newfangled hyperlink stuff, personal publishing, connecting social-this-and-that is now officially over and it hasn’t yet changed the world".

Generally, I agree but with reservations.  Those reservations are that "we tend to overestimate the impacts in the short term because we overlook all the details of how things are done and the tenacious stickiness of peoples’ habits, and tend to underestimate the impacts in the longer term because we overlook or ignore the scope and depth of accumulated change" (not verbatim).

Today I found this snippet from Clay Shirky’s now-well-known Web 2.0 Expo keynote.

In my opinion he puts none too fine a point on the fact that the Internet seems to be with us to stay, and that it’s impacts will continue to accumulate.  Tomorrow’s workers won’t understand meetings, collaboration, supervision or accountability in the same way we do … all because of gin and that damned mouse.

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Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

… a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders–a lot of things we like–didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom.

[ Snip … ] 

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment.

Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?”

And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.

Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change.

Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

[ Snip … }

I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?

Well, the TV producer did not think this was going to be a big deal; she was not digging this line of thought. And her final question to me was essentially, "Isn’t this all just a fad?" You know, sort of the flagpole-sitting of the early early 21st century? It’s fun to go out and produce and share a little bit, but then people are going to eventually realize, "This isn’t as good as doing what I was doing before," and settle down.

And I made a spirited argument that no, this wasn’t the case, that this was in fact a big one-time shift, more analogous to the industrial revolution than to flagpole-sitting.

I was arguing that this isn’t the sort of thing society grows out of. It’s the sort of thing that society grows into.

But I’m not sure she believed me, in part because she didn’t want to believe me, but also in part because I didn’t have the right story yet. And now I do.

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Another Early (Not-So) Weak Signal That Work Structures Are Likely To Change Drastically

March 6, 2008 at 2:18 pm · Filed under Artisan Economy, Collaboration, Communities, Distributed Work, Economic Development, Enterprise 2.0, KM, Web 2.0, Web Apps

Every week or two it seems that another example of ways that software, network dynamics, bidding and negotiation between sets of skills, collaboration, cooperation and similar activities are leading to an emerging synthesis of social networking, brainstorming, collaborative work, predictive markets, and peer-to-peer negotiations (see Michel Bauwen’s work on Peer-to-Peer Economies)

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“Knowledge workers own the means of production in a Knowledge Economy” - P. Drucker

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Kluster is a platform for crowdsourcing and then organizing and putting to use skills, energy and availability on projects and initiatives. It presented (unveiled itself ?) at the recent TED conference in Monterey, California.

Here’s an excerpt of the early review from ReadWriteWeb.

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Kluster Launches at TED: A New Product in 72 Hours

Crowdsourcing firm Kluster officially launched yesterday at the TED conference, which is underway this week in Monterey, California. Founder Ben Kaufman, who bankrolled the company in part with money from the sale of his last company Mophie, has organized a gimmick over the course of the TED conference he hopes will prove Kluster’s worth. Kaufman intends to let TED attendees — and users from around the world — design a completely new product over the course of 72 hours.

The idea behind Kluster is that a group of passionate people working together can come up with better solutions for any decision-making problem than a single person. Whether that is planning an event, designing a new logo, or creating a new product, Kluster believes their system can.

[ Snip … ]

The Kluster system works by breaking down products into manageable chunks. For each chunk (or “phase”), people submit what are called “sparks.” Sparks are proposed solutions for that phase. For each spark, other participants can submit “amps” — which are improvements to that idea. Users also assign “watts” to sparks and amps they like. Watts work kind of like investments. You accrue points based on participation and other factors, and can invest those points (watts) in ideas you like.

Then an algorithm that takes into account “each user’s successes, failures, reputation, areas of expertise, and overall history” goes to work to determine which sparks are the best. Companies interested in using the Kluster system, put up cash prizes that are doled out along the way (at the completion of each phase).

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Do you think that the Wisdom Of Crowds can take shape as the Collective Intelligence of the Organizational Crowd ?
Robin Williams on Kluster

Is this an early not-so-weak signal of how knowledge work will be put to use in the not-so-distant future ? Interconnected loose confederations of skunkworks, circa 2009 ?

It seems more like wirearchy than hierarchy as an organizing principle to me .. though I am sure that pertinent elements of hierarchy based on direction (setting up of initiatives), ranking and filtering will come into play.

It will be very interesting to see how much organized work will resemble this form of organization in another ten years. I hope I am around to see and comment.

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Understanding the Hidden Economy

January 22, 2008 at 8:38 pm · Filed under Communities, Distributed Work, Economic Development, Talent Management, Web Commuting

This note is adapted from an article I co-authored a while back with my business partner Charlie Grantham.

By way of introduction, the two of us co-founded the Work Design Collaborative in 2001. WDC in turn formed and still manages the Future of Work network - a consortium of firms dedicated to understanding and creating workplaces and work environments that are productive and personally satisfying - all in the context of the changing nature of work, the workforce, and all those technologies that are both driving and enabling change.

Lately we’ve become very focused on the communities in which people live and work (partly because we’ve discovered that in order to attract and retain talent organizations have to “go” where the talent is - at least virtually). And because so much work can be conducted just about anywhere, anytime, our clients are having to learn how to manage distributed teams, remote workers, and mobility. That’s got huge implications for corporations, but it also creates new challenges and new opportunities for local communities as well.

Enough with the preface. Here’s our analysis of why the “hidden economy” has become so important to the future of both organizations and communities.

Lately we’ve been paying a lot of attention to how local communities are coping with the new information-based global economy. The “new rules” for success are creating significant opportunities (and threats) not only for business organizations but for local communities and the governing bodies that run them.

We’ve written about many of these shifts fairly frequently over the past couple of years (see “Business Community Centers as Third Places,” “The Future of Work and Economic Development,” and “We Need a Department of Social Capital,” for example), but recently we’ve become much more aware of the impact of the so-called “new economy” on these local communities.

Think about the following hypothetical scenario: Anytown USA has suffered significantly over the past decade as several mid-sized manufacturing operations closed their doors (either for good, or to relocate south of the border). The population is shrinking, and the folks who are left are having a tough time making ends meet. To make matters worse, the reduced tax base means the schools have had to make severe budget cuts, and even the “big box” retailers on the outskirts of town are hurting. There doesn’t seem to be much reason for optimism.

Anytown is located in a wonderful valley, with nearby summer hiking, swimming, and fishing as well as winter skiing, and it has always been a popular place to live, but now its future feels pretty bleak.

Then something strange and unexpected happens. Without any planning on the town fathers’ part, the population begins to grow again. There are more young families in the neighborhoods and more kids in the schools. The grocery stores and the local shopping centers are experiencing sales growth again. Yet there are virtually no new businesses in town. While retail tax revenues are rising, property taxes haven’t grown much at all.

What’s going on? In a word (or two), Anytown is benefiting from what our friend and colleague Amy Zuckerman calls the “hidden economy” (see her Hidden-Tech website for details).

Those young families moving into Anytown are predominantly Internet-savvy professionals who have set up home offices and are fully employed as software engineers, call-center specialists, marketing consultants, technical writers, lawyers, accountants, and virtual assistants. But their employers aren’t located in Anytown; they are based all over the country (and even outside the United States).

Anytown is a perfect example of what an information-based economy is like. You can’t really see the work that’s being done every day; and it doesn’t take a freight train or a UPS truck to export the finished “product.” The “hidden economy” is generating work and wealth without any visible impact on the community – no traffic congestion, no air pollution, no ugly industrial buildings along the railroad tracks. Unfortunately, however, this “new economy” usually doesn’t bring much in the way of additional property taxes for the local government, since the “invisible” work being done in all those home offices is also pretty well-hidden from the tax rolls. Sure, these good citizens and breadwinners are paying all their federal and state taxes, but the local folks hardly know they’re there.

What makes all this interesting – and important – is that these “free agents,” entrepreneurs, and remote employees of large organizations based elsewhere are essentially “exporting” their services outside the local economy – thereby importing income that they then spend locally on food, clothing, toys for their kids, home improvements, recreation, restaurants, and all the other necessities of life.

It’s powerful operating model that is beginning to turn our economy upside down. As we’ve written elsewhere, much of the population growth in the United States these days is occurring in what the census bureau now calls “micropolises”: smaller cities and regional areas with populations between 50,000 and 100,000. High-speed broadband Internet access puts those smaller communities right on a par with the New Yorks, Chicagos, LAs, Dublins, and Bangalores of the world.

And for many professionals (not all, but a growing number of them), these micropolises are much more attractive places to live and work and raise their families than the big, older cities that have dominated our economy for the last century (there are rebirths going on in many urban neighborhoods as well, but our focus here is on the smaller towns and cities).

Our little story of Anytown describes a community that simply “lucked out” because of some attractive living conditions (recreation, decent schools, low housing costs). But the real message here is that local officials and economic development specialists can actually drive this kind of rebirth with some thoughtful planning and appropriate decisions that make their community more attractive to knowledge workers.

When we work with folks in communities like Anytown we encourage them to look at a number of critical factors that increase their attractiveness to the creative class:

• high-quality local schools, including a local community college or a branch of a state university;
• the existence of a true “downtown” area that’s easy to walk to and includes a good mix of restaurants, business services (accountants, office supplies, computer stores, print shops, mailing services, and so on), and retail stores;
• support for the arts and cultural activities;
• good recreational opportunities; and
• the willingness of local public officials and business leaders to collaborate in creating and maintaining a desirable place to live and work.

Our work often involves conducting market research studies to estimate the size of the “hidden economy” along feasibility studies to explore the possibility of forming a Business Community Center^tm to support the small businesses and remote workers whose success is so critical to the local economy .

Insanity has often been defined as doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results. We think it’s time for local officials to stop chasing the old industrial model of offering incentives to bring blue collar jobs to town. That’s crazy in today’s economy; it’s time to recognize that there’s a new path to economic viability.

That path is called the Information Economy, and it’s a marvelous opportunity for local economic development. But it clearly requires you to rethink just about all of your assumptions about what drives economic growth. It’s not jobs per se, it’s creating a community that is so attractive to well-educated knowledge workers that they’ll come, settle down, and bring their work with them. They’ll then begin exporting their services while they import their income to your town. This is truly a case of “If you build it, they will come.”

When you really think about it, it’s a pretty simple equation. But it’s a new kind of math.

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