In the midst of thinking about life I have been reflecting on what I do for a living. What have I learned, how can I understand this for myself and share it in a meaningful way with others.
My
work has been a personal study of work. The observance of how people work, how people accomplish goals as individuals, groups, and organizations. For over 20 years I have tried to understand what 'work' is. What makes it drudgery and a battle for some and joy for others?
20
years is a long time to spend on one question. My experiences span from clerical administrator to designing and implementing multi-national business processes. It has been a long and interesting journey. I have learned a tremendous amount about the nature of work, with many insights that fit together into a form that I believe can help people and organizations achieve goals and find joy in their own work experience.
It
may be useful to share some of my journey over the last 20 years. It begins in 1968, my first real job as a sales clerk. I found great satisfaction in helping customers understand our products and services, and the sharing with co-workers the challenges of the day to day routine including the occasional challenging customer interactions. This first adventure of the work place was balanced by the oppression of a very aggressive junior manager trying to achieve sales and administrative measures set by more senior management. The work was not measured on what I found meaningful in the work, it was measured on what I found least meaningful (counting money, inventory, and time). I was not happy and my management (as they understood their job) was not happy with me. Thus my quest for finding joy in my work began.
I
decided to study work, in other words go to business school. At that time the principles driving the study of business were in transition. The transition was from a mechanistic view of workers to a more sociological, holistic view of the worker and workplace. The mechanistic view is best characterized by Fredrick Taylor's study of coal workers. The worker was a gear in a machine. How could the gear be optimized, then in context how could the machine be optimized. This view reflects the mechanistic view of the industrial revolution. Unfortunately this viewpoint is still deeply held by many. It is simple and 'scientific'. It is on the surface manageable. In the early 1970's and alternative view of work was developing. This view sees the workplace more as a social organism than machine. The social/psychological view of work was given the name of Organizational Development (OD) and offered as a formal course of study in business schools. This is what I got my undergraduate degree in, only to find that the job market was not quite ready for me. Businesses were more interested in 'systems', the mechanical design and function of complex business processes. My business degree was seen as a certification of mechanical skills, not social psychology. I found myself playing the role of mechanic.
The
next several years were spent understanding and improving the processes of running a manufacturing plant for a major computer manufacturer. Doing that job well, I got the opportunity of improving the processes of running multiple manufacturing plants all interdependent on each others resources and production. I was such a good mechanic at this point, that I was assigned the task of evaluating how well other mechanics did their jobs. This was the role of Corporate Audit Manager. And so after 18 years of reviewing the design, implementation, and controls of corporate multi-national business processes I came to the full understanding of what I knew in the beginning. That the mechanistic view of managing a business is terribly wrong, broken. Multi million dollar change efforts that failed in predictable patterns. Workers that feel alienated from middle management. Middle management that feel alienated from enterprise leadership. Cross functional finger pointing and the closing up of ranks. The mechanistic approach only worked when people acted like machines. People fundamentally are not machines, they are social psychological organisms working within and around mechanical processes. You could have the perfect business processes, but add the people components and the process would change shape and adapt to the environment (local and global) in ways that could never be anticipated by the original designers. To understand and improve work is to understand the human dynamics (organic) and the workflow steps (mechanics) that add value in the market place. Work is not one or the other, it is the inseparable synergy of the two constantly adapting to dynamic forces that cannot be seen or rationally understood.
The
last five years have been spent trying to understand how the mechanics of complex work processes interact with the social psychological dynamics of complex work groups. This paper is the result of that untangling. It is in the form of insights. Insights learned over 20 years of struggle and occasional joy. The insights are interdependent, forming a tapestry of my understanding of how work works. In writing it down I hope to codify the knowledge for myself (as in what did I do with all that time) and offer to the reader pieces that add to their own tapestry of knowledge.
To
some readers these insights may be common sense or simplistic, but for me they are hard earned insights. Their obviousness and simplicity only apparent after many dull blows to the head. In any case they are my insights into how work works, take them for what they are worth. There are no original thoughts presented, only my personal 'ah ha' in how the pieces fit together.
This
paper is presented in three segments. The first presents the major insights that have shaped my work as a business process design consultant. The second is a summary of tools and techniques (what I refer to as Interventions) that I have found to be most effective in my consulting practice. The third section is a methodology for business process design that incorporates the insights and interventions. The methodology takes you through the steps from discovery of strategic intent to tactical business and systems process initiatives.