How are doing?

Futile, I realise. I live in hope though …

Ya think ?

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.

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 : )

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).

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.

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

http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/research/publications/hdm/back/29_Duffy.pdf