Thinking About Discovery
GOING ON AND ON
In my last post, I said that I would explore in this one why I think looking back at the first wave of smart working helps us to see how we can respond to current workplace trends.
I also quoted Gary Hamel’s pressing challenges for the future of management, two of which are:
- the need to make innovation everyone’s job
- creating highly engaging work environments.
It just so happens that these are core attributes of lean manufacturing. Effective lean manufacturing systems make innovation everyone’s job through continuous improvement (CI) and problem-solving. They also incorporate physical layouts of machines, uncluttered working environments, and management systems that support CI and collaboration across sub-process and organisational boundaries.
There is an abundance of research telling us what works and doesn’t work in building engaging physical and organisational work environments that enable learning cultures where making innovation is everyone’s business.
DISCOVERY
At this point, I had intended to take two specific examples of the implications of current workplace trends – distributed work implying workforce autonomy, self-determination and self-organisation plus enterprise fragmentation implying cross boundary collaboration and integration – and show how principles from lean process management show us how to do this.
Then I realised something. I was boring myself writing this post. I felt like I was going on and on. Yak, yak, yak. So what? And if I was bored writing it, the chances would be very high of your being bored reading it.
I have a friend who said to me recently, when I was regurgitating some piece of research, that he didn’t care what anyone else has said and done. He values discovery and finding things out for himself. My response was ‘But that means re-inventing wheels and not learning from experience’. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that he is right. Which of us learns from other people’s experience, without trying things out for ourselves? I mean really learn and understand?
ABUNDANCE AND SCARCITY
I enjoyed reading Confused of Calcutta’s reflections on abundance and scarcity. In this context, it seems to me that the scarcity is experience of taking other people’s insights, trying them out and either rejecting them or adapting them to make them work personally and uniquely. Other people’s insights are abundant.
This blog post really has been emergent. I did not mean for it to lead so neatly to the next post but it does. Although I have spent a long time, at least the past three years, monitoring workplace trends and creating a sort of curriculum (a series of short modules I am calling Smart Basics), I am not in the content development industry. I am in the service industry, helping top teams and senior executives to discover what works for them in making the transition to new ways of working and strategising.
So more about that next time.
Without meaning to sound all new age and spiritual (but probably failing!), there is a saying attributable to Buddha which may, at a stretch, be applicable here.
“What you are is what you have been. What you will be is what you do now.” (Leo Babauta quotes this on his Zen Habits blog).
Well, I like it. And I think it covers the idea that not only can we make a break with the past but that it’s really our own experiences that shape how we bring about results. We need to make our own mistakes in order to learn.
Thanks, Graham. I like it too.
You said:
“it’s really our own experiences that shape how we bring about results”.
Exactly. ‘Experts’ telling us what is good for us, or what has worked / not worked for others might just be very annoying.
Then again, others’ experiences can be useful if we are able to assess, interpret, adjust and apply them for our own unique purposes.
Very coincidentally, Mark Gould tweeted a post this morning:
http://blog.tarn.org/2009/07/22/learning-from-experience/
He comments on a presentation where one of the slides suggest that “there is no such thing as experiential learning … we don’t learn from experience; we learn from interpreting experience.”
That elegantly captures what I think I was trying to say.
I’ve been trying to google a quote about ‘teaching offering the effluent of our learning’ and all I got was advice on sanitation.
Your post has added perspective to a seminar series I have been running which included complexity thinking – and my frustration at thinking the participants perhaps ‘didn’t get it’.
Today, I realise that they probably do ‘get it’ but that their path to this knowledge has been different to my own and that trying to help them by offering short cuts was counter productive. They needed to experience and reflect for themselves…
So…squaring content production and action learning…? How much can we helpfully ‘tell’ people? Less than we probably imagine. AND… I look forward to your next posts!
“All I got was advice on sanitation” –
Don’t knock it, Steve. Might be just the thing you need to know some day (winky eye emoticon).
Different paths to knowledge, different perspectives, cultures, ways of thinking and seeing etc – it is a wonder any of us manages to communicate and function within such diversity. But of course diversity is rich in potential for learning from differences.
How much can we helpfully tell people? Good question. We might carefully phrase and construct a ‘message’ (that word is like a red rag to me) but intended recipients can:
deliberately not listen
hear what they want to hear
not be ready to listen
filter, interpret and respond according to cultural norms, personal experience, life history, biases, etc,
P.S. I used to teach in secondary schools. Telling still does have a very important role for children in enthusing, inspiring and igniting curiosity. So am not writing off ‘telling’ – just trying to think when it is appropriate or not. More food for thought, Steve. Thank you!