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OK, so: the pendulum has swung (that was a swinging pendulum). The world - what issues
are we trying to deal with in the worl, particularly the world of work. It's the end of manual
work, or the decline of manual work, the rise of the office worker and more specifically
the knowledge worker - particularly software development. The real issue that I’ve struggled
with for the past 10 or 15 years at least has been engagement.
Ford had a real problem - when they started back in 1913 they were recruiting 52,000 workers
a year for 14,000 workers in the workforce. That’s because they had such a high turnover.
The issues we’re dealing with today are not only about the change from manual work
to knowledge work, but people are demanding more.
Society is changing, people are more educated, people have higher expectations in general
and they’re looking for meaning in their work - a sense of purpose, a sense of autonomy.
And one of the key things that I also struggle with in all of my engagements is: many organisations
don’t seem to understand their wetware. That is - the brains of the people working
for them, or the fact that they’ve even got brains, and that they need to factor that
into the equation.
Most often it seems to be that there’s a culture of heroism or the heroic individual,
and success is predicated on having some rockstar programmers, coding ninjas, or more generally
just people who know what they’re doing as individuals; and working together as teams
just doesn’t really seem to figure in the model.
This is unsane organisations. I question how many of our organisations are actually sane
in any kind of meaningful way. I’ve used 'unsane' rather than 'insane’ because 'insane'
seems to carry some connotations of - yes, something’s wrong with them - actually,
I think there is something wrong with them.
So that’s the world! What about the world of software? Here we see a chart of the software
industry and the attempts it’s made through dozens of different initiatives - up there
are structured programming and project management and loads of things, ending up with agile
- and it seems like for the last 50 years we haven’t really moved the needle. It’s
been wavering on or about the inefficient end of the spectrum. For a long time I kind
of unconsciously or subconsciously asked myself "Why is that? Why are things not getting better?"
To me, it’s because people are at the centre of the issue and until and unless we recognise
the role of people and start dealing with people as people with brains and taking into
account the whole psychology and sociology and anthropology aspects of the workplace,
we’re not really gonna make a lot of difference.
Are we grokking the agile manifesto yet? That bit says "Individuals and interactions over
processes and tools." Seems like all the solutions we’ve had on that list for the last 50 years
have been in the processes and tools space. So, you know, what’s going on, there?
Here’s the old frame: people can be happy at work, but basically methods, processes
and tools are the solution to the problem. It’s the mechanistic view of organisations.
If we just get it working like a nice tight machine, everything is going to be fine, isn’t
it? (Actually, he’s got a happy smile on his face there). So what is in our future?
What could we be doing differently - as an industry, as a world, in terms of the way
we approach work and knowledge work.
And I have some ideas that you’ve probably read about already around making things better
and more the the point, bringing some science because science has changed a lot in those
50 years - particularly neuroscience and the study of the brain, with brain scanners and
so on, but also psychology’s moved on a long way, sociology, anthropology, group dynamics
- all these fields have moved on greatly, in a way that perhaps processes haven’t.
This is a riff on Archimedes "If you give me a lever and a place to stand I can move
the world." Well what is the lever that we can move our world with? And where should
we stand to use it?
I have a thought experiment which we can look at later, but for me the lever that we’ve
got to use is a change of frame. We’ve got to look at the whole problem again and stop
trying to place our faith in mechanistic solutions - processes, methods - you may remember the
blog post I wrote recently saying 'The Tyranny of Method'. Instead, how about we look at
what actually motivates people? And for me, that lever that I was talking about just a
minute ago is joy. It’s the joy of helping our fellows. Particularly I described that
in some posts as mutual joy, helping each other find joy. One of the key ways of doing
that is mutual giving, so if you need something, I’ll try and make that happen. Not with
any kind of quid pro quo, and not even an expectation but maybe sometime in the future
if you see me needing something, you might like to give me something. That’s about
getting their needs met.
So this is the Antimatter Principle, and for those people who’ve read my blog you will
know it already. It’s "attending to folks’ needs." Now that’s the simplest I could
find of an expression of a new way forward - a new frame. And a lot of people seem to
have some problems understanding what attending to folks’ needs means in practice, and what
all the individual words mean, and the implication. Here’s one technique that I’ve found pretty
recently for myself, about 18 months ago, which we can use in organisations. There’s
a whole bunch of them. There’s like 400 different schools of psychotherapy for individual
psychotherapy, and non-violent communication is just one school of those 400.