I was listening to someone on the radio talking about the attempted bombing  of the Detroit-bound aircraft. Commenting on the failure to integrate intelligence, the speaker said that the culture in the CIA prior to 9/11 was “need to know” and that the agency had not made the transition to “need to share”.

Have Wiki, Will Collaborate?

Some people at the CIA are already well aware of the changed cultural imperatives. Efforts to use Web 2.0 technologies to foster a ’21st century intelligence community from the bottom up’ are well known. Old habits, power structures and vested interests take time to change even, it would appear, within an intelligence community needing to mobilise urgently in the face of networks of determined adversaries.

What To Do?

The speaker on the radio said an additional layer of structure was being put in place to co-ordinate information across organisational boundaries. Now there is nothing inherently wrong with hierarchy. It does depend on whether this layer is being added as an unwarranted panic reaction, or if exiting systems have been diagnosed to understand what the weaknesses are and a decision made that this is one valid response from among a range of alternatives.

If you follow the link above, you will hear Sean Dennehy and Don Burke of the CIA talking about their efforts to encourage grass roots adoption of information sharing on the wiki. They also talk about tentatively experimenting with piloting a top down, mandated approach where contractors in the intelligence community would be contractually required to submit information via the wiki.

This set me off speculating about what this additional layer might usefully do if it is not just to become an empire building, turf-defending layer of bureacracy. A hypothetical possibility for further cementing bottom-up and top-down approach might be collaboration through job design, which could be co-ordinated at the new supra-level.

Job Design

Job design emerged in the 1970s from Hertzberg ’s theorising on motivation. He claimed that the environmental factors like pay and working conditions which he called hygene factors, while important, are not motivators. Motivators, he said, are job characteristics that are consistent with people’s psychological need for recognition, achievement, responsibility and growth. Hertzberg differentiates between job enlargement and enrichment. He thinks enlargement, for example through job rotation or multi-tasking, is problematic because such efforts do nothing more than expand “the meaninglessness of already meaningless work”.

Although management interest in Hertzberg’s ideas was enthusiastic, few examples of job enrichment programmes were found in practice and the literature was criticised for its “missionary zeal” in reporting only positive results.* Coming back the present in the UK, the CIPD report Smart Working: The impact of work organisation and job design found that:

“Despite a large body of academic and management literature, a survey of members indicated a lack of practitioner interest in deliberately designing job roles.”

Collaboration By Design

So why am I suggesting that designing job roles has value? Because it now has huge potential in integrating work across functional, professional and organisational boundaries. The CEO of a generic pharmaceutical company I met at a conference is typical. He told me that one of his biggest problems was that the scientists were unable to collaborate effectively with people outside of their specialisms.

It must be a decade ago now that I was project managing a 26 partner, EU funded project on new ways of working for the UK Work Organisation Network. This particular example from a Scandinavian company impressed me:

A manufacturer of mobile handsets designing a new model for the Japanese market had to produce a handset that was to be crammed full of new functionality. Over‐runs would not be tolerated. Elements of the design process were normally allocated to separate teams in different countries. Problems then arose at the joins, late in development, when fitting the bits together.

Applying inside‐out‐thinking, the company created new design teams around usual problem areas from the start of product development. Giving cross-functional and cross-country team members joint responsibility for overcoming problems and integrating functionality as the project developed was highly effective. The company delivered all that was required and on time.

A by‐product of this joint, cross‐boundary job design within very tight time‐scales was there was little opportunity for politics. Instead, the teams worked together to maximise learning opportunities.

The integration challenge is significant for knowledge workers. According to Dr Kjetil Kristensen collaboration is a dominant characteristic of work today. Specialists and subject matter experts now often spend up to 80 percent of their time on different types of interactions.

“The inherent multidisciplinarity of today’s complex products, services, projects and processes implies that collaboration is a cornerstone of knowledge work. Hence, collaboration should become an essential part of company strategies and policies.”

This includes designing workplaces with appropriate collaboration spaces, enabling technologies and supporting operating principles – including where necessary top-down job design and bottom-up responsibilities for negotiating the complex multi-disciplinary interactions to meet joint task completion.

A Final Observation

In a retrospective commentary in 1987 on an earlier article, Herzberg wrote**:

“The key to job enrichment is nurturing client relationships, rather than functional or hierarchical relationships.”

He explains what he means by giving the example of various trades supplying services to one another in aircraft maintenance. This new focus on process, relationships and service (absent in his earlier article) is crucial. This is exactly the philosophy of process integration in approaches like quality and lean, where participants interacting  across internal and external processes regard each other as customers expecting and receiving service. Herzberg talks about ‘who do I serve’ rather than ‘who do I report to?’.

If businesses have until now shown little interest in job design for motivation, they would be wise to develop competence in  applying job design principles for collaboration and integration in the knowledge economy. It turns out that what is good for people  is also good for business. Linking back to the US intelligence community, the new structural layer could see itself in a servant capacity to the community. Pigs flying anyone?

* Blackler, F.H.M. and Brown, C.A (1978). Job redsign and management control. Publisher Teakfield Ltd, Farnborough.

** Herzberg, F. (1987) One More Time: How do you motivate employees? Harvard Business Review, Sept – Oct 1987.