The Complex Workplace

In the July 2008 editorial of the Harvard Business Review, Thomas Stewart drew an interesting conclusion about where we draw our management theory from:

“The most complicated workplaces in the middle of the last century was the automobile assembly plant. Drawn to its complexity were Drucker, W Edwards Deming, and Taiichi Ohno, amongst others. The work they and their disciples did, applied in industry after industry, is the basis of the best we know about operations, managing people, innovation, organisational design, and much more.

“The most complex workplaces today are tertiary care hospitals. These vast enterprises employ tens of thousands of people who, under one roof, do everything from neurosurgery to laundry. Each patient – that is to say, each job – calls on a different set of people with a different constellation of skills. Even when two patients have the same diagnosis, success may be measured differently. This is complexity an order of magnitude greater than automobile assembly, and anyone who has been hospitalized knows that management has thus far been unequal to the scope of the task. The workers, managers, consultants and scholars who crack this nut will reshape industries and institutions just as profoundly as Drucker, Deming and Ohno did.”

The industrial economy management theorists drawn to the automobile assembly plant included those such as Frederick Taylor, who in the 1910s wrote the Principles of Scientific Management, proposing that employees’ tasks should be highly specialized and rudimentary, just like the workers on the production line in a Ford factory. Work under Taylorism is divided into small units and follows a mindless process line. This required a hierarchy of management to make it work, and a command and control culture.

This was highly successful in creating efficient systems, critical to the issues surrounding the work and the workplace at the beginning of the 20th Century. As Amy Edmondson notes:

“For a long while, management systems … [focussed thus] … worked brilliantly, transforming unpredictable and expensive customised work into uniform, economical modes of mass production. Underlying the notion of a simple, controllable production system was the notion of the simple, controllable employee. In the factory model of management, it was easy to monitor workers and measure their output. Because the work itself was not terribly interesting… supervisors used a combination of pay and threats of job loss to motivate employees.”

Taylorism – and other “assembly plant” theories – had a huge impact on the design of workplaces, of course, since the design of a workplace place needs most to support the processes and culture of an organisation, whatever they are. Centralising staff into easily observable locations, creating visible symbols of hierarchy and control in offices, designing single offices for individual work of supervisors, not collaborative work of staff… Much of this culture remains with us.

But the knowledge economy workplace, just like the tertiary care hospital, is increasingly about freedom from command and control – about a number of different staff working on different tasks with different measures of success, continually adapting to new situations and learning new skills.

Edmondson concludes:

“with the rise of knowledge-based organisations in the information age, the old model no longer works, for a number of reasons. In such organisations, it is difficult, if not impossible, to monitor employee productivity or measure individual performance in simple ways, such as by hours worked. Performance is increasingly determined by factors that can’t be overseen: intelligent experimentation, ingenuity, interpersonal skills, resilience in the face of adversity, for instance.”

Yet who are the knowledge economy management theorists, and are any of them focussing on the tertiary care hospital? Organisations like Semco, with its “industrial democracy” turning hierarchy on its head, empowering and authorising employees throughout the business to make strategic decisions, have shown the way, but the paradigm is so different that as inspiring a story of change as Semco is, it is undoubtedly also a daunting story of change.

Theorists like Peter Senge have proposed the concept of the learning organisation, “where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole (reality) together”. His lessons in systems thinking are really about building a mental model for dealing with complex work.

But the management of tertiary care hospitals seems to be failing, described as a “monolith that is unable to run efficiently”, so perhaps we can conclude the theories have not matured yet to be practically transferred to such a complex organisation.

Importantly, if we are in our infancy of thinking and theories about the management and operations of the complex knowledge economy workplace, we must also be at the infancy of thinking about the design of the knowledge economy workspace. Whilst workplaces are going undoubtedly going through significant change, supporting collaboration, creativity, and mobility, the real change is yet to come.

This post has been reposted from Tom Weaver’s original blog.