Increasing Human Efficiency

It is interesting, and more than a bit depressing, to read some of the classical works on topics such as management and economics - as it can very often be observed that a "new" trend is merely the revival of an idea that has been around for decades or centuries. And that there are many ideas that seem confounding simple - such that you can't read them without a sense of "of course this is so" and "why would anyone think otherwise" - but have been ignored or abandoned.

Reading Walter Dill Scott's book on Increasing Human Efficiency gave me exactly that sense.  Written in 1911, it outlines a number of ideas that seem entirely reasonable, and which have largely been ignored or forgotten over the course of the past century.   My sense is that productive workplaces employ at least some of the principles he mentions, and that unproductive ones ignore some or all of them.

There are so many principles in this book that are clearly beneficial to efficiency and effectiveness of work, and which are just as clearly being violated in many workplaces, that to do it justice would require re-typing the entire book - but to keep this meditation manageable, I'll focus on five ideas that seemed to strike a nerve.


The efficiency of work can only be improved by a change in the technique or technology by which it is done.  Simply insisting that men work faster and harder is insufficient.

Scott considers the practices of "scientific management" in which a manager observes his workers, notices the practices of those who are most efficient, and then teaches those practices to the less efficient worker in order to boost productivity.

Frank Gilbreth's work with masons is an excellent example: Gilbreth noticed the average worker used eighteen motions to lay a single brick, where the productive worker used but seven, and he was able to eliminate two of them.   By teaching a five-step process to a crew, he was able to boost the productivity from 40 bricks per hour per man to 120 - tripling the speed of work.

However, this practice does not seem to exist in the modern workplace.   Managers simply set production quotas without providing any indication of how they may be achieved: if you produced 1,000 units last month, you goal for this month is 1,100 or if you completed a task in thirty days you must now do it in twenty-eight.   Ask "how may I accomplish this?" and the answer will be "figure it out for yourself."

The bosses (who are not managing anything, merely bossing people around) do not even understand what a worker does, but insists that he must somehow figure out on his own a way to do it faster and better.  This is not scientific management by any means, and yet it is all too familiar to many workers.


In order to discover more efficient ways of working, the worker must be allowed to experiment with the process and technique by which he accomplishes a task.

Scott's insistence that men must be taught a process by which to work is mitigated by the insistence that they be provided some latitude in getting their work done: so long as their product is good and the rate of production is acceptable, they should be left alone.

The value in giving workers such latitude, and even being tolerant of some temporary decreases in productivity, is that they have the freedom to innovate - to deviate from standard practices and discover more efficient ways of working, which workers have an uncanny ability for doing.  If held too rigidly to standard procedures, the workers can only become as efficient as the procedure.

To discover a new method requires deviating from the prescribed method, in a process of trial and error to discover more efficient means of accomplishing a goal - with the risk that the new method may not be more efficient, and acceptance that a new method may be less efficient at first but be modified or habituated to gain proficiency.

But again, this does not happen. In the present day, workers are given the paradoxical command to "innovate while following procedures" - which is as logical as ordering them to "sit down while standing up."   It simply cannot be done, so workers end up following procedure - to attempt to innovate is to risk punishment merely for doing something in an unauthorized manner, and since the reward for success is paltry (if any at all) and the punishment of failure grievous, most workers regard innovation as an unacceptable risk.


When a worker's task is intellectual, more dependent on thought than physical action, he can only be productive if he is protected from distractions.

Scott gives special attention to the "intellectual worker," those who are in positions where the activity of their work is more mental than physical.   It would be entirely foolish to expect the task-worker to complete his work while he is constantly being physically jostled - and it is equally foolish to expect the mental-worker to give focus to his work while being constantly distracted.

This is clearly violated in the present workplace under the banner of "collaboration," which eliminates quiet places in the office in favor of creating an environment in which employees are constantly talking to one another, in meeting rooms or on the work floor, and having no opportunity to retreat to a quiet place and attend to the work that results from the conversation.

While it cannot be disputed that information exchange is a good thing, there can be too much of it.   In a circus-like environment in which there is too much noise and motion to remain focused on a thought for more than a few minutes, the mental worker simply cannot get tasks done in an efficient manner.   And yet, "open" office spaces with constant noise and distraction have come into fashion, in direct contradiction to Scott's principle of the necessity of concentration.


Loyalty is reciprocal.  An employer wins the loyalty of his workers by showing loyalty to them.  He cannot expect them to be attentive to his welfare unless he is attentive to theirs.

During the early industrial era, the workplace became a very unpleasant environment, and unions formed to protect the basic health and safety of workers, as well as to negotiate a fair wage, reasonable hours, and continuity of employment.  The result was a hostile relationship between employee and employer, and perhaps the worst in human history outside of the institution of slavery or serfdom.

An yet, even in his age of antipathy, there were stunning examples in which union workers would abdicate the terms of their contracts to give an extra effort to help employers in time of need: to work longer hours, accept less pay, and otherwise sacrifice for the good of their employers.

Scott was very quick to point out that "loyalty begets loyalty" and through real-world examples demonstrates that in every instance that workers were loyal to an employer during a time of crisis, the employer showed great loyalty to the workers well before the crisis arose.

There are many firms even in the present day that covet that level of devotion - and worse, who expect that level of devotion as a matter of course.   It is not uncommon for salaried workers to be expected to work fifty-hour weeks for no additional pay on a long-term basis (and sometimes on an ongoing basis), for exceptional performance to go unrewarded, for the annual increase in pay to be well below the increase in the cost of living.  And all of this from firms who wonder why employees have no loyalty to them.


Work becomes efficient when the worker is able to apply his skills in a consistent manner and discover methods of efficiency.  Any change disrupts his progress to efficiency, and constant change prevent him from ever becoming efficient.

Of all the various methods of increasing the efficiency of work, Scott considers habituation to be the most powerful.   The worker gains efficiency where there are consistent practices he may follow, devoting his attention to the things that are most important by being able to ignore the many things that are unimportant.   Any change in procedures, particularly for routine and inconsequential parts of a job, require attention and discipline until they can become routinized - and it is wholly unproductive if the practices that are changed are not contributing to production.

And yet, in the modern workplace, the pace of change is relentless.  Employees must constantly be attentive to the "new way" of doing something that is different to the "new way" it was done the month before.   It is insisted, without rationale, that changes bring improvement - but it is a consequence that constant change prevents efficiency from ever developing.  The employee is prodded from one awkward and unfamiliar way of doing things to another awkward and unfamiliar way, never becoming habituated enough to gain efficiency (and to reap the full benefit of the method prescribed).

It is not that change is universally undesirable, but should be mitigated: a change should be made when it provides an improvement to a process that creates greater efficiency in the work.  But in the present day, change is seldom explained - and it is wondered if it is ever considered in any meaningful way.   And moreover, many changes are implemented to create efficiency for non-productive staff (such as accounting clerks) by placing additional burden on productive staff (those who do the work to produce and deliver the product or service of the firm).

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In all, I have the pessimistic sense that I should perhaps simply stop reading so much to and instead focus my attention on mindless acceptance of things such as they are.   Knowledge of a better way only makes the present ways more noxious - and discovering that the "better way" has existed for decades or centuries but has simply been ignored depresses me profoundly.

Organizational Disorganization

In "Anarchy in the Office" I considered the rather bizarre concept of a project execution environment in which there were no formal leaders, merely ad-hoc coordinators that leveraged voluntary resources to complete tasks.   It seemed an interesting but likely impractical arrangement, and I've since read a book that proposes to do the same not only for a specific environment, but entire companies.

Peer Leadership proposes a networked (rather than hierarchical) organization structure, in which individual employees are like nodes of a computer network that are engaged as needed to accomplish organizational tasks - or which can, on occasion take on coordination of the efforts of others when they recognize the need for something to be done.

It remains an interesting concept, though it strikes me as being even more improbable on that level, given a number of potential issues - chiefly, that most of the day-to-day operations of a business are rather routine and non-dynamic and require the ongoing involvement of the same resources with few situations in which deviation from standard operating procedure is necessary.

Granted, the problems many companies face in a competitive environment is that standard operating procedure becomes bureaucratic and inflexible, as the author rightly suggests:  a front-line employee perceives a need for a change to be made, must communicate it up the chain of command to a high enough level for someone who is not familiar with the problem to authorize a change or deviation from established process, and then the change must be socialized within the organization before communicating back down to the front lines for implementation - a procedure which can take days or months.

But as in many things, I expect swinging the pendulum to the opposite extreme could do more harm than good ... or perhaps it's just that I've become institutionalized to the traditional approach of command-and-control hierarchies that I can't fully concretize the concept.  I don't really think that's the case, but I'll allow for the possibility.

My sense is that the determination of the amount of authority given to those on the front lines of an organization largely depend on the task in question.  For some tasks (day-to-day operations that are repeated) the procedure/control structure is likely the best approach whereas for others (which focus on changing the procedures that guide routine actions) a great deal more latitude is necessary to make progress.   To impose the organizational structure of one upon the other would be counterproductive.

Efficiency Isn't Innovation

In general, the approach to improving things, products or processes, begins with analyzing the as-is situation and identifying areas in which problems could be fixed or improvements could be made.   That is to say that it begins rooted in present reality and ends with only minor changes.   This is different to, and likely preventative of, true innovation, which requires starting with a blank slate and imagining the possibilities that might exist, independent of what currently does exist.

It is a common, but fundamental error, to regard anything new through the lens of existing processes.  This results not in innovation, but efficiency improvements, as firms seek to streamline what they are presently doing rather than considering whether there might be an entirely new way ("new" being the "nova" in "innovation") to achieve the desired goals - or even to change the way in which the goals are defined if doing so is necessary to achieve a better outcome.

In many instances, efficiency improvements are merely automation.   In the early industrial era, automation merely replicated human motion with machines; and in the present era of information technology, automation merely replaces human thought processes with digital ones - but "merely replaces" means the that task remains the same, it is just performed by a different actor.

For example, a computerized accounting system automates the way in which invoices are processed, in that the very same thing is done with databases and spreadsheets that nineteenth-century clerks did with ledgers and quill pens.   The process is made faster, and less labor is required, but the process itself has not changed.

In that sense, replacing a worker with a machine or a clerk with a computer system is not innovative at all: it's doing the same thing more quickly and efficiently, but still doing the same thing.   To innovate requires asking: what goal are we attempting to achieve by doing things this way ... and is there a different way in which we might achieve it?"

Knowledge of existing business practices is not only unnecessary, but can be harmful.   That's not to say that they can be completely ignored - the inputs and outputs are likely still the same (though one might reconsider whether the inputs or outputs could be improved) - but all the "stuff" in the middle is entirely irrelevant.   So long as the goals of the process are achieved, the rituals by which they are pursued is irrelevant.

As a final note: innovation is not always necessary, and sometimes efficiency improvements are the best that can be done - let's not throw that concept away entirely.  But at the same time, let's not assume that the two are similar or can be accomplished in the same way.  To be innovative in the outcome requires being innovative in the process - and that holds true even when the process is one of defining processes.

Technology Immortalizes Bad Practices

For all the benefits that technology can bring to an organization that adopts it to automate tasks, it has a smothering effect on innovation.  This likely elicits a incredulous "harrumph" from those who are of the opinion that technology alone is innovation - but there's a good case that it isn't, and that it is most often used to ensconce bad practices and prevent companies from being innovative.

Consider first that technology is used to replace processes without changing them in any significant way.   At the onset, a paper-based system of storing and managing  information was automated by technology, but the fundamental process by which the information was collected, organized, and accessed was carried over rather than reconsidered in light of the different, and in most cases superior, capabilities of technology.  

Has it never struck you as slightly idiotic that personal computers still mimic the artifacts of the ink-and-paper world?   Why is it that a word-processing file is represented by an icon that looks like a typewritten letter?   Why should data be stored in spreadsheets that look suspiciously like paper ledgers and graphical representations of database records look like 3-by-5 index cards or paper forms?   Why should "files" be stored in "folders" and the icon for a file server look suspiciously like a filing cabinet?

Certainly, when the graphical user interface first appeared on personal computers in 1984, it could be argued that representing computer files as if they were paper files was a friendly paradigm for office workers who felt reluctant to adopt the new technology.  But nearly thirty years later, we're still locked in a paradigm that content is stored in documents that must still be treated in the same way as paper artifacts that fewer people in each generation of workers have a memory of ever handling, which prevents us from even considering information in any other way.

It's a pernicious problem on a larger scale, when you consider that in order to make and pay for a purchase, you must still fill out a requisition, that is approved by one department, which creates a purchase order, which is compared to the requisition before being sent to another department, which places the order with a vendor, who ships the order with an invoice, which must be reconciled against the purchase order in one department and the original requisition form in another.   While technology has digitized the paper and transmits the data through cables instead of vacuum tubes, it's still fundamentally the same process with all its redundancies and checkpoints that has been in existence since the nineteenth century.

This entire nonsensical system exists because the purchasing process itself has remained the same.   Computers replaced paper files with digital ones and transmits data over cables instead of vacuum tubes, the same way that typewritten orders replaced those written on parchment with ostrich feathers to be carried about by human runners.   Never once in all this time has it been questioned whether the process makes sense, or if a lot of the busyness of business could be reduced by reconsidering the necessity of the process in light of the capabilities of the technology with which it is executed.

This is the basis of my argument that technology alone isn't innovation: it makes the tasks we do faster and less cumbersome, but it doesn't change the pointless ritual of the process itself.  True innovation would not merely automate an existing way of doing things, but change the way things are done, eliminating busywork, redundancies, and the expense and delay that they cause.  But this didn't happen when technology was introduced - it merely mimicked the old way of doing things.

The second point of my argument is that technology smothers innovation, and immortalizes bad practices.   And that's a boarder argument - but one that seems sensible to anyone who has changed jobs and spent a significant amount of time having to be trained, or discover by trial-and-error, how "the system" works and the ridiculously complex things they have to do to perform a simple task.   And if you suggest there might be a better or more efficient way, you hear "the system won't let you do that."

It's paralyzing in the course of trying to implement process improvements by modifying existing information systems to eradicate some of the fuss and bother.   Why do we ask the person to enter the same data twice in the course of a single task?  Why do we ask for some information on screen five and other information on screen three when the two or closely related?    Because that's the way the back-end system is designed to work.   And why can't we change it?   Because it would be difficult and expensive to do so.

And that, I believe, is a serious issue for many firms who have lived for many years with information systems that has prevented any deviation from processes that have not changed in decades: even if they recognize that there would be greater expediency and efficiency in changing their business processes, they are being held back by archaic paradigms they are forced to accept by adopting technology that mimics traditional and entirely unnecessary processes.

In fairness, this has been a long rant by someone who has of late run into one too many brick walls and smeared lipstick on one too many pigs ... but I can't help the sense that the frustration that I feel at this moment is entirely warranted, and the blithe complacency to accept the limitations of outdated information technology is smothering innovation and progress.

And as much as I love to smirk at the irony that this has all been brought about by the very technology that promised to move us forward, I just can't muster the enthusiasm.  So I rant.  Isn't that what blogs are for?

Division or Unification of Labor

I heard a fairly convincing two-part argument against Smith's principle of the division of labor.   I use the qualifier of "fairly" because I don't think that it entirely disproves the theory, nor does it replace it, but it does cast some doubt as to whether it is universally applicable.

Division of Labor

As a refresher on the original principle: Smith suggested that dividing a task into a number of simpler tasks, and training workers to perform only a small step in an overall process, enabled considerably greater production with considerably less skilled hands.  It's the theory that was best demonstrated by assembly-line production, and the astounding level of output that could be achieved.

Smith's example was that of a pin factory: each worker performs a simple task: one draws the wire, another cuts it, another straightens it, another grinds the head, and another sharpens the point.  And by this method, a small group of illiterate farmhands could, with very little training, far outproduce an equal number of master blacksmiths.

Strictly speaking, this was not the origin of the division of labor.  Even before Smith's theory was put into practice, separate tradesmen mined the ore, smelted the metal, and fashioned it into useful objects.   Blacksmiths also specialized according to the kinds of objects they were most skilled in fashioning, and there were separate "smiths" for various kinds of metal.    So in essence, Smith was merely observing an existing phenomenon, but he took it to the extreme.

First Rebuttal: Divisibility

The first rebuttal to Smith's theory draws on an example that seems patently ludicrous - but which seems no less extreme than the example proposed by Smith: that of typing a letter by using fifty or so workers, each of whom uses a machine that has a single key: one person types a lowercase "e", another an uppercase "T", another a comma, another the spacebar, etc.

This follows the very principle of the division of labor, and illustrates the dysfunction of taking it to extremes.  The amount of time to load and position the paper, strike the key, remove the paper, and transport it to the next workstation overwhelms any benefit of specialization, and requires a tremendous amount of coordination to move it from one worker to the next in proper order.

Plainly, the task can be performed most efficiently by a single skilled worker than a team of unskilled workers, and it makes little sense (and much waste) to subdivide it.  As such, the unification of the tasks involved into one skilled typist makes far more sense than the division of labor among many unskilled hands.

And to that point, the unification of labor is taken further by the elimination of the typist - as it is presently common for the author of a letter to do his own typing, and likely far more efficient, as the speed at which keys can be struck is of relatively minor effect.

Second Rebuttal: Skilled Labor

A second rebuttal, more philosophical than functional, is that Smith's theory was created at a time when skilled labor was in short supply: it was the perfect solution to the problem of manufacturing when there was not a ready supply of skilled blacksmiths and illiterate laborers had to be trained to perform tasks in a short amount of time (five years of apprenticeship was not feasible).

But in the present day, most workers are at least semi-literate and considerably more intellectually sophisticated than their eighteenth-century counterparts.  So it lo longer seems necessary or desirable to break down a task into functions that are so simple that they could be performed by a trained chimp or replaced by a mechanical device that repeatedly performs the same sequence of basic motions.

It's also worth considering that the manufacturing of goods has become a relatively minor part of the present economy.   Most workers in the post-industrial world are involved in what is generally called "knowledge work," in which the intellectual component is of far greater importance in the generation of value than the manual tasks involved in producing physical artifacts.

Many of the most highly-compensated professions produce no physical artifact at all: a doctor, an attorney, and an executive do not (directly) produce any physical object.  And neither is this work adaptable to the division of labor beyond a certain degree.   It can be argued that the work of a physician has been divided into specialized forms of medicine (podiatrists, oncologists, cardiologists, etc.) and that some of the tasks are handed off to labs or clinics (blood work, X-rays, etc.), but there remains the need for a general practitioner to manage the care of a given patient in a holistic manner, calling in specialists when it is beneficial.

In more abstract terms, an intelligent person is capable of performing more sophisticated tasks, and more tasks, and there is not a practical need to subdivide labor.  In addition to being counterproductive, it is patently unnecessary in a culture in which there is ready availability of an educated workforce.

Reconciling the Extremes

Each of these arguments takes an extreme position - the complete division of a process into minute tasks, or its complete unification onto a single workbench.  As in many things, my sense is that neither extreme is right, but represent the ends of a continuum along which an intelligent choice must be made.

When a task is too divided, there arises a need for administration and control, and the number of errors as a result of miscommunication and misdirection rise.  I vaguely recall an article that suggested it can be assessed by the ratio of non-productive employees who supervise and audit work as compared to the number of employees who are directly productive.   Where that ratio is less than 1-to10, the overhead cost of administration likely exceeds the efficiencies of division of labor.   Seems a bit arbitrary, but likely a good indicator that consideration is necessary.

When a task is too unified, productivity decreases.  I don't expect the argument of an educated workforce holds much weight here: I don't think education would have been a factor in Smith's pin-factory example.  The most educated and skilled blacksmith would still be capable of producing far fewer pins than an assembly-line of uneducated workers.  I can recall no guidance on this issue, but it seems to me that it has much to do with task-switching, and perhaps the same ratio of 1-to10 could be used to assess whether the nonproductive time of a given worker (switching from one task to the next) as compared to the productive time (performing a given task) likely exceeds the efficiency that can be gained by specialization, when considering both the time to move work from one person to the next as well as the overhead costs of coordination and control.

In terms of managing knowledge-workers, the educational factor likely comes into play.   While some individuals claim to be able to perform all tasks related to a given act of production with expert precision, it is very seldom true.   I've found this to be the case in print and Web production, where individuals arrogantly claim to be experts at every facet - only to find that they are very good at one or two things, marginally competent in a few others, and woefully inadequate at the rest.  There does seem to be a finite number of things a person can do very well, and when a task requires expertise in too many dimensions, unification of labor produces a low-quality and low-volume result.

As such, it seems necessary to determine the point between the extremes for any given task or process: division or unification of labor to the logical extreme is not a panacea for all forms of work - but instead, the idiosyncratic nature of the task, and the idiosyncratic capabilities of the individuals who perform it, must be intelligently assessed to arrive at a point where productivity, cost, and quality have achieved an optimum balance.

Customer Service vs. Process Management

Customer service and process management are often at odds with one another: the desire to improve gross margin requires creating a product as cheaply as possible (regardless of quality), whereas the desire to improve customer satisfaction requires creating a product that's as good as possible (regardless of cost). As such, the market offerings of most companies represent a compromise between the two - or at best, a calculated decision about the level of quality-versus-price that a given product represents.

On one end of the spectrum is the company that offers a very low-quality product, so poorly suited to the needs and desires of the consumer that no-one would be willing to buy it if it were even a little bit worse. On the other end of the spectrum is the company that offers a very high-quality product, but one that is very expensive, so much so that no-one would be willing to buy it if it the price were even a little bit higher.

My sense is that neither extreme is the "natural" winner in all instances: a company chooses to produce a product that balances quality against price to provide an offering that is appealing to a given market segment. Some customers are willing to pay a premium price for a high-quality product, whereas others seek to pay the lowest price possible and will accept a product that is barely sufficient.

And at this point, I'm going to stop writing: I suspect that I am merely rehashing a hackneyed argument of price versus quality and have forgotten what it was that entered my mind that brought something new to the conversation. I'll return to it later if it re-occurs to me.