The Taylorist Stranglehold
The Global Mobility Network, a learning network I co-facilitate, discusses a range of topics around global workplace trends. Our most recent session Workplace To Zero? explored why we still need the expensive overhead of offices. Dr Frank Duffy, founder of DEGW, set the scene for the conversation.
Taylorist Buildings
He made the fascinating observation that Taylorist offices influenced by Scientific Management, with its unremitting focus on efficiency, have resulted in unsustainable workspaces that are under‐occupied and unsuitable for emerging business conditions. Dr Duffy calls office buildings ‘misleading and obsolescent units of analysis’ and wonders why self‐reliant people should be constrained by them. Knowledge nomads use their clout to choose how, where, when and with whom they work. They are certainly not constrained by walls and place.
Taylorist Management
It is not only building design that is having to escape the strangling dominance of Taylorist influence. Despite unstoppable and converging forces in the external business environment, management practices and attitudes, also significantly influenced by a century of Taylorist approaches to management, remain stubbornly resistant to change. The parallels between under‐utilised workspace and under‐utilised human intelligence and creativity, arising from the separation of thinking and doing, is striking.
Taylorist IT Deployment
Taylorist attitudes are also influencing IT deployment in the UK. Although take-up of information technologies in the UK is high, one of the publications from the Future of Work, a six-year research project involving twenty two universities, drew attention to the fact that business have the choice of using ICT as an enabling technology deployed in combination with high‐performance HRM measures or as monitoring tools to control workforces. At the time the research was being reported on five years ago, the authors of Managing to Change? commented that the trend toward control without workforce participation was “deeply disquieting”. In their view, there is a substantial risk that low cost, automatically generated monitoring and control information, not shared with those being monitored, would be likely to become damaging and divisive.
Something’s Got To Change
IT, HR and FM need to mobilise urgently. The functions need to be having conversations internally and across professional boundaries. Stepping back to think about how things might be done better is not easy. The drag of the status quo is a major obstacle and of course businesses tend to become more controlling in recessionary conditions such as we are currently experiencing. Nevertheless, concerted effort at dialogue and understanding is now urgent. We have communication and collaboration tools at our disposal like we have never had before, and highly effective techniques for visualisation and decision support. There are no excuses – only the will to recognise the pervasiveness of the Taylorist stranglehold and to overcome it.
As Darwin was reputed to have said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”
Just yesterday I was sitting in a large, shiny, half empty “Taylorist” building thinking how anachronistic they are becoming.
Euan, you might enjoy this article from Frank Duffy – Lumbering To Exctinction In The Digital Field:
http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/research/publications/hdm/back/29_Duffy.pdf
Great post. Your comment that “Taylorist offices influenced by Scientific Management, with its unremitting focus on efficiency, have resulted in unsustainable workspaces that are under‐occupied and unsuitable for emerging business conditions”, made me think.
It struck me what a paradox this is, really – that these large office ”mastodons”, designed for efficiency, have ended up being the exact opposite of what they were designed to be. Currently they are under-occupied, and significantly so. Hence, they are also wasteful, and I can’t help wondering what Frederick Winslow Taylor’s reaction to this would have been. While much of today’s typical tacit knowledge work differs from the work processes he studied (especially in terms of knowledge worker autonomy), how would he have reacted if he could observe the workplace consequences of his own management principles? I am quite sure he would have found the wasteful situation in today’s office complexes quite disturbing.
What would he have proposed as the remedy? This could probably be the subject of a dissertation, and I would be willing to read it
Thanks, Kjetil!
In the interests of clarity and proper attribution, the observation about Talylorist offices is Frank Duffy’s. My intention was to summarise Frank’s observation, which was a bit of a revelation to me. I had always thought of Taylorism in relation to management control practices. To hear it being identified as influencing architectural practice led me to consider its influence on IT as well.
I love your observation on the paradox of that which was intended to achieve efficiency ending up harming effectiveness. If only we could know what Taylor’s reaction would be to the waste in today’s office complexes, and what he would think of the waste of human potential – which is really what bothers me.
I have written elsewhere about Ralph Stacey’s concept of the shadow system. Treat people well and create enabling environments (physical, information and management ) and the shadow system is likely to be innovative. Treat people like they are not trusted and attempt to control their behaviour – the shadow system is highly likely to be destructive, from resistance to outright sabotage.
Oddly I spent most of the day yesterday reading this great expose on Taylor from the New Yorker http://twurl.nl/osc7j1 (did I get it from YOU on Twitter?) It was VERY insightful.
A related insight that I had today was that where many companies who have perhaps embraced some technology labeled “2.0″, often they are doing things like creating an internal Wikipedia. Instead, I realized they should be creating an internal Snopes to expose the many ‘truths’ that are part of the corporate lore (things that should be un-persisted).
As it relates to architecture/space I also thought back to two favorite artifacts from Tom DeMarco’s Peopleware book.
One is what he calls the ‘basement’ syndrome, where in order to be ‘fair’ to everyone, no one gets windows and might as well be working in a basement.
The other is more physical/cultural where one company had a clean desk policy that one worker detested. His coworkers decided to have some fun with him and swapped out his family photo (which was allowed) with a photo that comes inside of new frames and left a note from the “desk police” suggesting his family had been deemed not appropriate enough : )
No Paula, I didn’t know about this excellent article from the New Yorker. This is coincidental. As I was saying to Kjetil in my comment to his post, my thoughts on the ubiquity of Taylorism was triggered by Frank.
I really like your thoughts on unlearning. Seems to me that unlearning and challenging corporate lore and ‘we’ve always done it like that’ is a key tactic in beginning to chip away at engrained attitudes – ‘un-persisted’, as you say.
Just thinking about your story about the co-workers winding up their colleague. I love stories about the fun colleagues have with each other. I was watching a programme on TV recently about the Clyde shipyards in Scotland, of course largely gone. I know many, many funny stories from the yards. Billy Connelly, who used to work in the yards, was not unique. My sisters are nurses in Scotland and they have me crying with laughter at some of the things they tell me. I suppose it is how people survive tough jobs.
IT, HR and FM need to mobilise urgently. The functions need to be having conversations internally and across professional boundaries.
Ya think ?
Hi Jon
How are doing?
Futile, I realise. I live in hope though …