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.”

And I thought, “Men and women did that” – designing, engineering and manufacturing the rocket, mobilising the science and making it all happen. All from the application of shared knowledge and experience.

I frequently despair of our apparent inability to run governments and businesses, to get to grips with poverty, and to provide effective health care and education for all. Don’t get me started on the current global financial fiasco.

But look at what we can do when we put our minds to it. My favourite bit in the documentary came from Mike Collins, the Apollo 11 astronaut who did not get to do a moon-walk. Summarising his version of President Kennedy’s vision, which he described as ‘beautiful in its simplicity’, Collins said:

“Do what? Moon. When? End of decade.”

Isn’t that great?

Leadership

I have to tell you that I have a probably abnormal antipathy to the concept of leadership. I have no desire to lead anyone, i.e. act in a boss-like manner, and will most certainly not be led in that way by anyone else. As I thought about the audacious moon-landing project, I realised that it provides demonstration of a model of leadership that I can live with.

(1) Creating the vision and intention

Kennedy voiced the thrilling vision and intention for political reasons and a desire for the United States to “occupy a position of pre-eminance” . The Apollo missions were ‘born out of hurt pride’ at the Soviet Union being ahead in the race for space. Whatever the source of the vision, people were inspired and enthused enough to imagine and then to take action.

(2) Commit to making the project a priority

Presumably he then made the project a priority, using his influence and position to make available the necessary funding and to engage the right people.

(3) The project takes on its own momentum

The speech was made in September 1962, Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963 and the Apollo 11 astronauts landed on the moon in July 1969. In between that time, the vice-president L.B. Johnson assumed the presidency, was elected in his own right in 1964. Nixon was elected in 1968, and was in the White House for the moon landing.

Johnson must have continued to give priority support to the Apollo missions. The scientists and engineers ran with it and made it happen for their own reasons; some driven by patriotic fervour and others driven by the tantalising excitement of the possible.

I imagine collaboration, understanding, shared achievement, shared excitement, friendships, conflicts, disappointments and power struggles. What is beyond doubt is that they did it, and I am willing to bet that all the negative stuff then became irrelevant.

(4) The people take the credit and the glory

The glory and credit went to everyone involved who made it happen; the astronauts, ground control, the scientists and engineers. In fact, what struck me was how self-effacing the astronauts and mission control people were and how lacking in swagger they sounded.

This is perhaps in contrast to the willingness of people all over the world, not directly involved, to claim credit. One of the Apollo 11 astronauts said that they were astonished to hear, as they visited different countries around the world, the cry of “We did it”. People were claiming the achievement as belonging to all of us, the human race.

What’s my conclusion?

I need to reconsider my viscerally negative reaction to leadership, especially if it is consistent with this:

‘A leader is best when people barely know he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worse when they despise him … but of a good leader who talks little when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say, “We did it ourselves”. ‘ attributed to Lao-Tzu