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.”

The headline is from Gary Hamel and Bill Breen’s book, The Future of Management, which I have been critiquing and reflecting on in my past few posts.

My overwhelming impression of the book is that while there is much to agree with, it is far too long on overstatement and short on substance. Specifically, it suffers from a lack of recognition of the plethora of research that exists on management innovation.

There is a wealth of EU and UK nationally funded research into new ways of working and managing. For example, I was involved in both of these EU funded research projects into new ways of working and new organisational forms: here and here. I would thoroughly recommend anyone who is interested in sourcing some actual research on management innovation to read Andrew Pettigrew and Evelyn Fenton’s The Innovating Organisation (international survey data collected at two time points and eight longitudinal case studies). If anyone is a glutton for any more punishment, they could have a look at a major research programme funded by the ESRC some years ago into The Future Of Work. The research involved twenty two universities in the UK and was conducted over six years.

Overstatement

Well, of course overstatement for effect  can make a point. It can also distort and be counter-productive.  As just one among many examples, on p.136, Gary Hamel and Bill Breen say:

“In most organisations, control is exercised via standard operating procedures, tight supervision, detailed role definitions, a minimum of self-directed time, and frequent reviews by higher ups”.

No, approaches to control and co-ordination are much more varied than this caricature and I will come back to this in a later post. And again on p.151, their ‘principles of modern management’ are offered with no evidence that these principles, culled from the earliest theorists, actually represent what is happening in organisations today.

By the way, Professor Hamel says on p.241, “In the end, isolated initiatives and one-time projects are no substitute for a sustained, company-wide campaign of breakthrough management innovation. Today, I know of no company that has mounted such a crusade”.

Well, I do. Try this small manufacturing company, Dutton Engineering. When I did some interviews there in 1998, the teams on the shopfloor were autonomous, self-organising and had significant responsibilities for management tasks. Or how about BT, who appear ad nauseam as an example of a company that used property rationalisation to change its management culture. This is a brief account of an interview I did with a senior BT executive.

Edvard Munch’s The Scream

This is what I feel like sometimes. We already know so much but this has been largely overlooked. Of course management needs urgently to change. But what’s the point of reinvention (which Professor Hamel urges) when we already know how to put in place management systems, working environments and governance principles that are associated with effective business performance, including workforce autonomy and self-determination? We already know how to design systems and high-performance working practices that are based on using and developing people’s skills, knowledge and creativity, which fulfills their desire for learning and meaningful work.

Democratising Possibilities Of Social Computing

The emergence of social networking and collaboration technologies really do present wonderful new oportunities to ignite collective intelligence and to power the sort of self-management we already know how to support.

One of my favourite quotes on the potential of social computing comes from Rex Lee, Director of Collaboration Services Group, Bell Laboratories. This is what he has to say:

“Many of us who push the concepts of social computing and Enterprise 2.0 are often referred to as evangelists … what we are evangelising about isn’t a bunch of technology. It never has been. It’s about human potential. About a more efficient and effective way to collaborate. Collaboration in the ENTIRE reason a company exists”.

That’s why the future of management will mean mobilising all that we already know about how to enable autonomous, self-organising collaboration and social learning. By all means, invent and innovate management approaches if what curretly exists does not fit. The task ahead of us in changing management habits is challenging enough. Why make it any more difficult by ignoring the wealth of research knowledge available to us?