Will the future of the workplace in the knowledge economy see increased freedom from command and control, or even less freedom by putting that control in a different pair of “hands”?
In an earlier post entitled The Complex Workplace I discussed the difference between the most complex workplace of the industrial economy, and that of the knowledge economy.
During that discussion I quoted Edmondson, who discusses the industrial economy principle of command and control:
“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.”
Now, 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.”
This perspective, which is common amongst many management theorists, is that the “old ways” of hierarchical command and control are dying.
Outmoded and Entrenched
One of Japan’s most highly respected industrialists, the founder of Panasonic Konosuke Matsushita, believed as far back as 1990 that the Western techniques of command and control, a relic of Taylorism (also discussed in the Complex Workplace), were outmoded and entrenched:
“Your firms are built on the Taylor model. Even worse, so are your heads. With your bosses doing the thinking while workers wield the screwdrivers, you’re convinced deep down that is the right way to run a business… [however] Business, we know, is now so complex and difficult… that their continued existence depends on the day to day mobilisation of every ounce of intelligence.” (from Pascale, Managing on the Edge).
The New Workplace
The recent popular book Wikinomics noted in its chapter on the “Wiki Workplace” that “we are shifting from closed and hierarchical workplaces with rigid employment relationships to increasingly self organised, distributed and collaborative human capital networks that draw knowledge and resources from inside and outside the firm”. The authors argue that although freedom from command and control has been predicted for half a century and has rarely occurred, the new generation entering the workplace – the Net Generation – is fuelling this change via their use of more collaborative technology and a fundamental different expectation of values:
“Whereas previous generations value loyalty, seniority, security and authority, the N-Gen’s norms reflect a desire for creativity, social connectivity, fun, freedom, speed and diversity in their workplaces.”
This, therefore, encapsulates one perspective of the future workplace: freedom from command and control, increased democracy and a more empowered workforce, better connected with their market, with the authority to influence strategy. Perhaps this vision is best described by Semler’s book Maverick.
The Pendulum Swing Back to Taylor (and Beyond)
There is an alternative, however. Stephen Baker’s new book The Numerati considers the impact mathematicians will have on organising large organisations, such as IBM. Baker looks at how employees can increasingly be modelled in terms of their skills and experience, who their personal networks are at work via their email and calendar appointments, who they talk to via their mobile phones.
The purpose is to better mobilise and deploy your workforce. In the case of IBM, “the work force is too big, the world too vast and complicated for managers to get a grip on their workers the old-fashioned way… managers need the zip of automation… For this to work, the consultant must be represented as a series of numbers.”
He looks at this as a triumph of the new information age, where just as we moved past bartering to currency, now we can become symbols so we can “take our place in the new human markets”. By enabling this movement, by reducing “IBM’s work force into a coherent portfolio of skills – something a computer could understand – IBM could soon deploy its labor in much the way it manages its financial investments”.
This would happen by breaking down the working day into small periods of time into “hours, half-hours, eventually even minutes”. In parallel, jobs are also broken down into tasks and automatically divided amongst workers based on their knowledge and skills.
One of the interviewees, Dr Haren (a PhD from MIT), claims this to be the “equivalent of the industrial revolution for white-collar workers”. Of course, this is not strictly true, since the original industrial revolution created white collar workers, but his point is that instead of an assembly line processing parts via hand or even robots, this would create an assembly line of knowledge work, “labor defined by knowledge and ideas”.
Baker himself appears uncomfortable with his conclusions, undecided as to whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, though he tries hard to emphasise the positives. What he does not articulate, however, but assumes very heavily, is that this vision of the workplace is one where instead of freedom from command and control, the control is taken out of the hands of human managers and into the hands of the computer system, overseen by managers. In short, the aim is efficiency and productiveness, and the system should be clever enough to know if you are too stressed out to take a task on, how productive you are, and how well you work with others.
From a management point of view, I can see the appeal. However, I struggle to believe that such a system, structured in the very hierarchical way that Baker describes, is the future of work in the knowledge economy, because you are still highly reliant on that management pyramid to define and process the jobs, and as such are still creating a gap between strategists and workers.
More interesting will be when people can understand the pool of knowledge contained both internally within the organisation and externally, seeing who knows what and how they could help them with the job at hand. Support and guidance on self-organisation and collaboration, rather than a new form of rigid management. This will allow organisations to shift and change to instant demands, and workers to continue to see the big picture, rather than a series of small tasks in the assembly line of the collective mind.
This was republished from Tom Weaver’s original blog.
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