The Droids We Build

Don’t nurture robots; encourage your employees to become innovative juggernauts.

I challenge myself each day to hear something different. Sometimes this is about education, liberals, conservatives, tree-huggers, or many other opinions and topics that counter my perspective. For me, this develops new perspectives on problems and issues that service organizations face, even if the topic is distasteful and challenges my core values.

Scientific management theory has long driven our education, management thinking, and design of work. The plight of Call Center Cindy in a government agency still haunts me. Too many service organizations have killed innovation and destroyed hope for change (that is, improvement) because of the systems we have built.

Students are trained to do well on tests, and workers are trained to comply with scripts, audits, monitoring, entrapping technology, and procedures. Then the question is asked, “Why can’t we get workers to change?” Because the system has built droids that learn to comply and not think.

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Comments

A universal truth

To me this article is as important as Tom Paine's pamphlet The Rights of Man, such is the tyranny that it would overthrow and the freedom that it would enable.

At a time when the Western world's dominance is under threat by cost-cutting Eastern economies (with lower wages) this is the one change in thinking supported by a methodology that would protect and save the West.

Unfortunately the major economies appear to be in thrall to the financial consultancy mindset that would destroy the West by outsourcing it to the East (whilst making themselves a tidy profit as they destroy us from within). The thinking that would have Paine's bones (wherever they may be) turning in his grave.

Hurray for Tripp!!

OK - here's something different

Not sure I buy the whole argument. I agree that we have highly entrenched systems and people who are co-dependent with these systems and the intellectual and emotional inertia that results is stifling innovation. So I buy some of the argument.

But we need workers to comply. And we need them to think. And we need to get everyone to accept that it is OK to do both. If people could comply without letting themselves get sucked into believing that compliance means they are not supposed to think then they would be OK. Think about what empowerment really is. And why don’t we all understand that? How come somebody isn’t out there teaching workers that empowerment means thinking about how you can best comply?

And what is it that makes you think that executives need a new perspective? Like they don’t know how things function. And what makes one believe that organizations don’t understand the job and how the customers view the performance? I think most people and most organizations know these things.

Maybe the executives are the droids who are forced to comply. They are under the scrutiny of the wall street analysts who represent their shareholders, who in a very real sense are a mirror image of their employees. The executives are forced to act in line with the external pressures applied on them from the financial world, customers, the public and employees. So it seems like it might just be a big circle, everybody complying with everyone else. Maybe we can’t do without conformance and rules. The real innovators might be those that conform the best.