Yep, agree with all of that. Why ask the workers who actually do the job when it's easier to write a new policy or SOP on your own? And if teams can manage themselves, why would we need managers?
Exactly. In the UK back in the 90s I was part of an Investors in People implementation.
We had to go over each process and ask everyone involved if it still made sense and if it could be done faster. To get the 'tick' we had to do a lot more training too, which didn't go down well with the senior team.
I don't think the program lasted very long. By that time, I'd emigrated to NZ. Shortly after the company was taken over and the whole thing scrapped.
Absolutely nailed it my friend. It’s not rocket science but allowing the innate human capacity to co-create continuous new value challenges the self-perception of those who consider themselves very important. There are three categories of this: 1) those who consider themselves “experts” (and therefore believe they should dominate sense making); 2) those who consider themselves “in charge” (and therefore believe they should dominate decision making), and those who consider themselves “gatekeepers” (and therefore believe they should make action taking as difficult as possible in case “wrong” action is taken and they get blamed). In a nutshell that’s why sense making, decision making, and action taking never become tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded and widely distributed throughout the organisation.
Yep, agree with all of that. Why ask the workers who actually do the job when it's easier to write a new policy or SOP on your own? And if teams can manage themselves, why would we need managers?
Why the workers when they might come up with an answer you don’t like?
Exactly. In the UK back in the 90s I was part of an Investors in People implementation.
We had to go over each process and ask everyone involved if it still made sense and if it could be done faster. To get the 'tick' we had to do a lot more training too, which didn't go down well with the senior team.
I don't think the program lasted very long. By that time, I'd emigrated to NZ. Shortly after the company was taken over and the whole thing scrapped.
Absolutely nailed it my friend. It’s not rocket science but allowing the innate human capacity to co-create continuous new value challenges the self-perception of those who consider themselves very important. There are three categories of this: 1) those who consider themselves “experts” (and therefore believe they should dominate sense making); 2) those who consider themselves “in charge” (and therefore believe they should dominate decision making), and those who consider themselves “gatekeepers” (and therefore believe they should make action taking as difficult as possible in case “wrong” action is taken and they get blamed). In a nutshell that’s why sense making, decision making, and action taking never become tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded and widely distributed throughout the organisation.
Great post Colin. The old ways are damn sticky …