 Graham Westwood of ProCarta gave me a copy of Bill Jensen's Simplicity, a book that claims most business problems are a result of unnecessarily complex decision-making processes. I recently wrote
that if Knowledge Management were relabeled Work Effectiveness
Improvement, both the requirements of the job and the customers'
expectations would be much clearer, and we might finally get the job
done. Jensen's book offers a prescription for WEI.
Jensen's thesis is that poor decision-making is the root cause of
business error and ineffectiveness, and his diagnosis of the four
causes for it is shown at right. Most employees, he says, want to do
good work, but are impeded by these four causes, which produce
unnecessary complexity in each of our jobs. I concur with this
diagnosis, though I'm not sure large organization have either the
capacity or the will to fix these four problems.
At the individual and team level, Jensen suggests* five behaviour or learning changes that could alleviate these problems:
- Better time management - We need to learn to prioritize and
provide better context of why tasks are important, clarify and simplify
goals, improve our personal work organization skills, provide better
definition of expected outcomes and of 'success', develop and provide
better, simpler tools and resources to get the job done, and eliminate
unnecessary tasks and bureaucracy.
- Improvisational project stewardship - We must learn to
focus people's attention on what's really important, communicate
priorities and success measures, and learn from failures. Today's
organization is more like a jazz combo than an army, and needs a very
different kind of team facilitation and 'leadership'.
- Quality conversations - We must learn to communicate a
vision that co-workers can understand in concrete terms, and can buy
into, to selectively tell people precisely what to do (but only when
it's needed, and when you know), and to communicate the measurements of
success and the resources available to help.
- Effective listening - We need to learn, in the mass of
messages, to filter out what's irrelevant, unimportant, and
unactionable, and to focus on messages that clarify expectations and
identify unmet needs and critical problems that we can personally help
solve. That entails knowing when to intervene, and when not to, and learning how to say 'no' gracefully.
- Engaging people - We need to learn to use stories and other
techniques to clarify what is important, what needs to be done, and the
consequences of success and failure.
Both as an individual 'knowledge worker' and as a team/project member,
then, we can be more effective if we learn, and practice, managing our
own time and helping others manage theirs (by eliminating unnecessary
tasks and simplifying others), more effectively; selectively intervene
in work processes and project activities only when we can add real
value or eliminate obstacles; communicate what's really important to
bring clarity; listen to identify and resolve critical needs and
problems; and filter out messages and information that burdens rather than
alleviating work effectiveness.
These are useful suggestions for improving work effectiveness and hence
decision-making in organizations, but none of them is new. Those that
would take up WEI (or KM) as a career need to understand why these techniques have not worked in the past,
before they attempt to implement them in their organizations. In many
companies, both employees and managers raise their eyebrows at 'soft
skills' courses like time management, effective communication and
story-telling. We know how to do that, they will say, the problem is more systemic, more entrenched than merely teaching common-sense skills can hope to solve.
These critics are half-right. Many problems in business are structural,
strategic, or systemic, and raising people's hopes by suggesting that
these basic work management techniques are suddenly going to work
bottom-up when they didn't work before, will merely create
disappointment. Excessive size and hierarchy, poor managers, and
inappropriate success measures (that reward executives more for cutting
staff than for making staff more effective, for example) are at the
heart of much work ineffectiveness, and need very different solutions.
But these critics are also half-wrong. Each of us today is increasingly
in charge of our own careers, our own jobs, and hence our own work
effectiveness. The five skills listed above are critical skills for
every entrepreneur and every front-line worker, and we should each
ensure we have these 'core competencies'. If the big, cumbersome
organizations we work for do not allow these skills proper exercise,
then the answer is either to leave them or reform them, not to revel in
our ineffectiveness and just blame management (even when they are to
blame).
The remainder of Jensen's book prescribes some higher-level
organizational 'disciplines' that can enable improvements in work
effectiveness:
- Better understanding of what different stakeholders need, and why
- Building trust, through openness, fairness, respect, attention, consistency, and clarity
- Designing the content of databases for effective (re-)use
- Designing project tools to focus on, and inform, the
critical decisions and choices that must be made, and to surface
potential landmines and potential innovations
- Designing tools to make it easier to connect with the right people and find the right information
- Making the objective of all infrastructure to make workers' jobs simpler
I am less excited about these latter ideas, because as desirable as
they are, I just don't see them happening in most organizations.
Enlightened businesses already have a culture that embraces these
concepts, but the vast majority of unenlightened businesses simply lack
the adaptability needed to embrace them, so I think they're just so
much wishful thinking. Despite the claims of the zealots of
acquisition, growth, integration, globalization and 'economies of
scale', I am increasingly convinced that large organizations are inherently incapable
of being efficient, responsible, agile, or places where effective work
can occur. They need more radical surgery than Jensen's treatment.
Nevertheless, this book provides some of the much-needed definition for
WEI, which I believe will be the next wave of organizational change,
and will accomplish much of what reengineering and knowledge management
failed to do. The #1 purpose of management must become empowering
people to know and do what's important to achieve the organization's
goals, and enabling them to stop doing the other stuff that, today,
takes up most of their time.
* Jensen uses different words for these, and for many of
the key ideas in this book. As much as I liked his messages, I found
sometimes his choice of labels for his key concepts confusing.
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