Richard Veryard

How Offices Make People Stupid

by

@benhammersley at #RSAwork talks about the future of office work, and identifies some of the ways that organizations make themselves stupid. The irony is that a lot of these mechanisms were supposed to make offices more productive and efficient, and to promote collaboration and creativity. As Ben puts it


“We have optimized being on top of things rather than getting to the bottom of things.”

Let’s start with open plan offices. As Ben tells the story, these were introduced in an ideological attempt (supposedly originating in North California) to flatten the office hierarchy, to remove barriers between people, and to encourage people and technology to work together in perfect harmony. There are various dysfunctional versions of this Californian Ideology – see my post All Chewed Over By Machines (May 2011).

In practice, various interesting forms of behaviour emerge in open plan offices. Ben notes the widespread practice of more powerful workers grabbing the desks near to the wall, leaving juniors huddled in the middle in a state of permanent anxiety, as if they were antelope anticipating the lion’s pounce.

Many offices are designed as semi-open plan, with people huddled in cubicles, but with the constant chance of someone popping a head over the partition.

In some offices, there is a deliberate policy to move people around – sometimes called hot-desking. One of the supposed benefits of this policy is that it encourages workers to constantly develop new relationships with their transient neighbours. For companies whose workers don’t spend all their time in the office, this policy also reduces the amount of office space required. However, the uncertainty and anxiety of getting any desk, let alone a decent desk near the wall and away from the more irritating co-workers, might be regarded as a negative factor.

Putting aside the economics and culture and psychological impact of open plan offices, the essential justification is that they promote communication and collaboration. These elements are necessary but not sufficient for productivity and innovation in a knowledge-based organization. Not sufficient because productivity and innovation also depend on concentrated hard work.

Read more »

Are we making progress?

by

In a great post, @JohnQShift explains how to build a culture of learning in your business. He calls this A Matter of Life or Death (Feb 2013)

In the post, John reports one of his clients observing that they had made some progress in their business over the year.  By progress, the client meant that

  • people were beginning to take up more responsibility and initiative without having to wait for the boss to tell them what to do

  • there was more discussion amongst the staff as to how to manage some of the day-to-day challenges they meet and less referring to the boss for the “answer”

  • mistakes were being used as entry points to examining business processes and working out how they could be improved

  • they had a clearer idea of their collective purpose and how important relationship is to achieving that purpose

  • the leaders were devoting more of their time to ensuring the conditions and structures of the business were optimised so that people could get on with their jobs (and less time micro-managing operational tasks).

Read more »

Are we making progress?

by

In a great post, @JohnQShift explains how to build a culture of learning in your business. He calls this A Matter of Life or Death (Feb 2013)

In the post, John reports one of his clients observing that they had made some progress in their business over the year.  By progress, the client meant that

  • people were beginning to take up more responsibility and initiative without having to wait for the boss to tell them what to do

  • there was more discussion amongst the staff as to how to manage some of the day-to-day challenges they meet and less referring to the boss for the “answer”

  • mistakes were being used as entry points to examining business processes and working out how they could be improved

  • they had a clearer idea of their collective purpose and how important relationship is to achieving that purpose

  • the leaders were devoting more of their time to ensuring the conditions and structures of the business were optimised so that people could get on with their jobs (and less time micro-managing operational tasks).

Read more »

From research to practice

by

@danlockton is doing a survey How do actual designers use academic literature?What are the barriers you’ve experienced?What service would you like to see?What would be useful to you?Could academics make their work more easily applicable?Here’s my ans…

From research to practice

by

@danlockton is doing a survey How do actual designers use academic literature?What are the barriers you’ve experienced?What service would you like to see?What would be useful to you?Could academics make their work more easily applicable?Here’s my ans…

Real Criticism, The Subject Supposed to Know

by

“Goodbye, Anecdotes“, says @Butterworthy, “The Age Of Big Data Demands Real Criticism” (AWL, January 2013). Thanks to @milouness, who comments “Important concepts here about what is knowable!”.  The article tries to link Big Data with Big Questions about the Big Picture, and what @Butterworthy calls The Big Criticism. From this perspective, Bill Franks’ advice, To Succeed with Big Data, Start Small (HBR Oct 2012), is downright paradoxical.

But why would we expect Big Data to help us answer the Big Questions? Big Data is rather a misnomer: it mostly comprises very large quantities of very small data and very weak signals. Retailers wade through Big Data in order to fine-tune their pricing strategies; pharma researchers wade through Big Data in order to find chemicals with a marginal advantage over some other chemicals; intelligence analysts wade through Big Data to detect terrorist plots. Doubtless these are useful and sometimes profitable exercises, but they are hardly giving us much of a Big Picture. Big Data may give us important clues about what the terrorists are up to, but it doesn’t tell us why.

Read more »

Expert Generalists and Innovative Organizations

by

What do the great innovators have in common? Looking at examples from Picasso to Kepler, Art Markman calls these men expert generalists. They seem to know a lot about a wide variety of topics, and their wide knowledge base supports their creativity.

Markman identifies two personality traits that are key for expert generalists: Openness to Experience and Need for Cognition. Can we also expect to find these traits in innovative organizations?

Openness to Experience entails a willingness to explore new ideas and opportunities. Obviously many organizations prefer to stick with familiar ideas and activities, and have built-in ways of maintaining the status quo.

Need for Cognition entails a joy of learning, and a willingness to devote the time and effort necessary to master new things. 

In his post on the origins of modern science, Tim Johnson compares the rival claims of magic and commerce. He points out that good science is open whereas magic is hidden and secretive; he traces the foundations of modern science to European financial practice, on the grounds that markets are social, collaborative, open, forums. But perhaps it makes more sense to see modern science as having two parents: from magic it inherits its Need for Cognition, a deep and passionate interest in explaining how things work; while from commerce it inherits its Openness to Experience, a broad fascination with the unknown. Obviously there have been individual scientists who have had more of one than the other, and some outstanding individual scientists who have excelled at both, but the collective project of science has relied on an effective combination of these two qualities.

Read more »

Expert Generalists and Innovative Organizations

by

What do the great innovators have in common? Looking at examples from Picasso to Kepler, Art Markman calls these men expert generalists. They seem to know a lot about a wide variety of topics, and their wide knowledge base supports their creativity.

Markman identifies two personality traits that are key for expert generalists: Openness to Experience and Need for Cognition. Can we also expect to find these traits in innovative organizations?

Openness to Experience entails a willingness to explore new ideas and opportunities. Obviously many organizations prefer to stick with familiar ideas and activities, and have built-in ways of maintaining the status quo.

Need for Cognition entails a joy of learning, and a willingness to devote the time and effort necessary to master new things. 

In his post on the origins of modern science, Tim Johnson compares the rival claims of magic and commerce. He points out that good science is open whereas magic is hidden and secretive; he traces the foundations of modern science to European financial practice, on the grounds that markets are social, collaborative, open, forums. But perhaps it makes more sense to see modern science as having two parents: from magic it inherits its Need for Cognition, a deep and passionate interest in explaining how things work; while from commerce it inherits its Openness to Experience, a broad fascination with the unknown. Obviously there have been individual scientists who have had more of one than the other, and some outstanding individual scientists who have excelled at both, but the collective project of science has relied on an effective combination of these two qualities.

Read more »

Information and Affirmation

by

@timrayner01 points out that so-called information-sharing is never neutral, disengaged – it is a positive act of communication.

“Don’t think of what you share as information. Even if what you share is information, by sharing it, you are telling the world that it is information that you affirm in some way. It is the affirmation that counts. We share what we love. Even when we share details about things we despise, they are things we love to hate. Love is the key to understanding how we contribute to social media commons. We populate the commons with expressions of love.”

So even scorn is a form of affirmation. The comedian who devotes his spleen to the latest reality show is thereby contributing (in a complex post-modern fashion) to the show’s success. Daniel Smith describes this as alternative consumption, and sees Charlie Brooker as a modern version of Baudelaire.

The Royal Television Society may pretend that Charlie Brooker represents the high-brow alternative to Simon Cowell.  But Brooker’s material is basically the same as Cowell’s, it just has a different sentiment. They obviously need each other.

Jonathan Harwood, Cowell and Morgan beaten by Brooker and Theroux (The Week March 2010)

Information and Affirmation

by

@timrayner01 points out that so-called information-sharing is never neutral, disengaged – it is a positive act of communication.

“Don’t think of what you share as information. Even if what you share is information, by sharing it, you are telling the world that it is information that you affirm in some way. It is the affirmation that counts. We share what we love. Even when we share details about things we despise, they are things we love to hate. Love is the key to understanding how we contribute to social media commons. We populate the commons with expressions of love.”

So even scorn is a form of affirmation. The comedian who devotes his spleen to the latest reality show is thereby contributing (in a complex post-modern fashion) to the show’s success. Daniel Smith describes this as alternative consumption, and sees Charlie Brooker as a modern version of Baudelaire.

The Royal Television Society may pretend that Charlie Brooker represents the high-brow alternative to Simon Cowell.  But Brooker’s material is basically the same as Cowell’s, it just has a different sentiment. They obviously need each other.

Jonathan Harwood, Cowell and Morgan beaten by Brooker and Theroux (The Week March 2010)

The Calculus of Cost 2

by

@remembermytweet and @tetradian explore the Types of Cost (Jan 2013).

Alex identifies a number of different types of cost, which as Tom points out are largely monetary costs. But what is a cost anyway?

An enterprise incurs a great deal of cost. and these can be broken down and classified in various ways. Accountants like to express all costs in monetary terms – so for example,  human effort is translated into labour cost.

But that only works if the enterprise is directly paying for the labour, in the form of wages or contractor bills. Wasting the customers’ time doesn’t count as a direct cost to the enterprise, although it may well have an indirect cost in terms of customer complaints and lost revenue.

We might also think of anxiety as a cost. As Seth Godin comments in relation to the airline industry, “By assuming that their customer base prefers to save money, not anxiety, they create an anxiety-filled system.” Eleven things organizations can learn from airports (Jan 2013). See also my post on Anxiety as a Cost (Jan 2013).

Even for direct labour, the human cost may not be fully reflected by the wages and monetary overheads associated with employment. Many employees do unpaid overtime and incur other personal costs, and this is only visible to the enterprise accountants when it results in high levels of sickness and staff turnover.

So we need to remember the difference between a real cost and its monetary measure.

Read more »