The Dark Ages of Work

Half a century ago, most employees were paid for their physical labor, and the relationship between management and worker was in the nature of an overseer whose role was directing the physical activities of a work crew whose efforts produced tangible and visual results.  The ideal employee was hands without a brain that would follow orders precisely, and the ideal manager was a brain without hands, whose chief skill was clearly and specifically directing drudges to perform tasks.

By the mid-twentieth century, the nature of work began to change, to where electricity and mechanization automated many of the physical tasks required to produce goods and employees moved to tasks such as operating equipment, managing information, and other secondary tasks.  In this era, management changed to providing processes and designing work flows, with a goal of finding ever greater efficiencies.  Even so, employees were not required to be particularly intelligent, just smart enough to follow orders.

In the present day, it is estimated between a third and a half of entry-level workers are “knowledge workers” who are engaged for their problem-solving capacity, and that most jobs above entry-level require at least moderate thinking skills. That is, people in the modern workplace are not being paid to do – they are being paid to think.  However, leaders and managers are still following leadership models and practices designed to give direction to activity-based employees.

As a result, the present state of leadership is outmoded, and the result is poor performance and a demoralized workforce: people want to think, and recognize that thinking is necessary to success in their professional roles, but are discouraged from thinking by policies, procedures, and management styles that effectively discourage thinking by punishing those who disregard rules and procedures that reflect the notion that employees are to do rather than to think.

Even firms that pay attention to employee morale and wish to encourage innovative thinking tend to be awful at it, or at best take a superficial and inconsistent approach: to send employees to “training” that is more in the nature of a pep rally to encourage them to think outside the box, and then to return to their boxes and carry on with business as usual, to be reprimanded for putting into practice the kind of thinking they have just been encouraged to do.

What is necessary is a change in the culture of business organizations to one that embraces the thinking employee rather than discourages him – but then, cultures change slowly even in the modern world, and it may well be that a generation (or two) of the American workforce will be trapped in the present paradox.

Knowledge and Creativity

To learn anything, we must first pay attention to the way things currently are rather than passively accepting established traditions.  To do nothing different and follow convention is always the easiest course, in that it requires the least effort and encounters the least resistance.

However, to undertake exploration we require leisure.  Those who are struggling to survive cannot spare the time and energy to try something new along with the risk that it may not work out.   It is no coincidence that the “golden ages” of invention, the arts, and other intellectual activities have only been achieved in cultures where the basic survival needs have been well met.

Discovery also requires having knowledge of what is already done, to enable a person to arrive at a conclusion that is truly novel rather than putting in the effort to “invent” something that already exists or is known to be less effective than current methods.   To arrive at this point, a person must know their craft – and ideally, he has learned it efficiently from other practitioners rather than having to discover it for himself.

The requirement of expertise is also a reason that creativity occurs in explosions, when there are many creative minds benefitting form the same information, than in isolated individuals in societies that are deprived of knowledge and hostile to information.   The culture must not only condone, but also support, the development of knowledge.

As the amount of knowledge grows, it becomes necessary to specialize by subdividing the various domains of knowledge and innovate in a very well defined space.  One can only be so good at “art” in every form, but can develop great expertise by specializing in sculpting marble.

Being a “Renaissance Man” was valued during the Renaissance, but today is merely a person who has very shallow knowledge of a myriad of fields and is highly unlikely to contribute anything meaningful to society.   Where little knowledge exists it is possible to know it all – and this is no longer possible given the breadth to which human knowledge has grown.   A person has to know “it all” within a very well defined area.

Granted, the trend to specialize has its drawbacks.  As knowledge becomes fragmented and the intellectuals become isolated from one another, delving into specialties of ever narrower scope, intellectuals become as the workers on the tower of Babel.  Each one is too focused on his own specific domain, does not understand other domains, and there is no common language that allows them to communicate or work together.

Another drawback to this specialization is that intellectuals become eccentric and withdrawn – the subjects of their interest are too far removed from the experience of the common person.  This causes their work to be ignored or dismissed by the culture whose acceptance is necessary for discoveries to have an impact on traditions.

Ultimately, a distinction must be drawn between knowledge and creativity – creativity must culminate in creation and is not done for its own sake.  The “aloof and sequestered” scientists who never present their ideas to culture for consumption are not producing a change in culture, and because of that cannot be considered creativity because all their work effects no change in culture until it is unearthed by someone else at a later time.

Evolution Toward Ethnography

Historically, organizations were run from the top down, with each lower rank following the orders of higher ranks without question.  Some organizations still operate according to this model – and even in organizations that have recognized that the most insight and expertise exists in lower ranks of the organization, rank is still respected – it intimidates, and is sometimes intentionally used to intimidate, people who know better into following orders they know to be dead wrong.

Next, there came an era of specialists and consultants, bringing in ”experts” from outside the firm to provide direction.  This was a slight improvement, as outsiders had no political agenda within an organization and no dedication to preserving business-as-usual, and could ostensibly be counted upon to provide a knowledgeable and objective point of view.   Unfortunately, this did not always happen because the consultants brought an agenda of their own: to be re-hired and recommended, and to do so they recognized that they could not present recommendations that were not palatable to their clients.   So eventually, and inevitably, the experts became the puppets of the ranking officers.

A further step was taken when firms recognized that their front-line employees that interact with customers regularly received direct feedback from the market.  They were able to quickly recognize the flaws in the instructions they received “from headquarters” and bore the brunt of unsatisfied and disgruntled customers.   However, the attempt to capture this information in knowledge management systems failed horribly, as employees feared losing their personal competitive edge (one cannot be “top salesman” if everyone else knows the same tricks) or retaliation if they admitted breaking rules and ignoring procedures to get the job done.

The closest that many firms have come to truly understanding the customer is through market research: interviews, focus groups, and surveys that attempt to gather feedback from the customers themselves.  However, the participation rate in these experiments tends to be low and the results are often skewed: customers rely on vague memories and speculate, and they very often posture by presenting rational reasons for an emotional reaction, a carefully process for a casual decision.  There have been many spectacular failures based on bad research, undertaken all the more boldly because there were numbers to back the decision.

This brings us to the latest attempt to gauge the preferences of the customer: ethnographic research, borrowed from sociology, which attempts to observe behavior “in the wild.”   It is particularly easy to do in online channels, where every click and keystroke can be monitored, though video surveillance in retail operations affords the same kind of data.   It is believed that actual behavior in the recent past is the best indication of what actual behavior will be in the near future, which seems entirely plausible.

However, even this method is not perfect – it observes only what is observable, and misses a great deal of the cognitive and emotional goings-on inside the mind of the customer that drive the decisions.  And worse, speculation is often done to fill the gap: one can see what the customer did, but can only make an educated guess as to why it was done.    But these limitations conceded, it is a promising advance that has significant potential to better align firms with the tastes and preferences of their customers.

The question remains as to how often and accurately ethnography will be leveraged.   It takes time to conduct an observational study, and in a climate of rapid change few are willing to invest the time.  It takes money to conduct such a study, and often the ROI cannot be proven because it is a research effort, so it may not be prioritized.  And just as in the earliest phases of evolution, the upper ranks of management are firmly in charge - they tend to favor research that supports their foregone conclusions, and use intimidation and threat to puppet the experts who conduct and analyze research - so just as much fake innovation and fake research is being done today (a veneer of objectivity over initiatives that are subjective and driven by gut instinct), so will this continue in the future, and it may be decades or generations before the vestiges of the most primitive approaches are at last laid to rest.

The Effort of Consumer Decision-Making

In a previous post, I considered the levels of consumer consciousness that might be employed in making a decision, and ended on the waffle of "it depends on the customer, purchase, and situation."   I still sense that to be true -no one level of effort is used by all customers for all purchases in all situations - but I likely could have gone further in considering the factors that influence the level of effort a customer will place in making a decision.   Hence, this follow-up:

In general, consumers decide how much effort they will place into the tasks of information-gatehring and decision-making for each purchase.   A person doesn't (or shouldn't) approach the task of deciding which beverage to have with a meal with the same level of effort and deliberation they approach purchasing real estate.   This much is intuitive - but to make it more deliberate, consider the following factors that may be influential:

• Information – People can only make decisions based on information that they have.   This includes both knowledge gained in the past and information that can be obtained prior to making a decision.
• Mental Ability – Likewise, people can only apply the systems and methods of analysis with which they are familiar or can become familiar before a decisions is made.  One cannot expect a simple-minded person to be capable of complex reasoning.
• Experience – An individual’s level of experience making a certain kind of decision will influence the level of effort.  This can work in either direction: experience provides more knowledge and logical tools that can be brought to bear, but it also causes a person to choose to be less deliberate and rely on their instincts or repeat past decisions without sufficient analysis.
• Importance of Outcome – A customer will place more or less effort into a decision based on the importance of the outcome they wish to achieve.  A fashion-conscious person will place greater effort into choosing a jacket than someone who simply wishes to be kept warm.
• Relative Cost of Acquisition – Greater effort will be placed into decisions where there is higher cost, which includes not only money-price, time, and effort but also opportunity cost (the ability to use the time and money to obtain something else to serve a different need).   Few people put much effort into decisions costing less than ten dollars, unless that is all they have to spend.
• Distraction – There are various situational factors that may prevent or obstruct an individual’s ability to acquire information and apply logic.  A common example is time pressure, which causes people to make decisions based on superficial information and logic out of panic.

There are likely many other factors that can influence the level of effort that a person can and will place into a decision.  Also, the degree to which each factor is influential is subjective.  Some people consciously decide to put a great deal of effort into seemingly trivial decisions and then take a very casual approach to more important ones - but the assessment of triviality/importance is done from the subjective perspective of the customer.

The Digital Leash

Mobile appeals to control-oriented individuals because of the potential to extend their command over great distances – but fail to consider that they are also nodes on the network, and are subject to the commands of others.  With a mobile device in your pocket, you are a node that others will seek to access and control.    And this can be dehumanizing and disempowering.

Consider the use of the telephone, mobile or otherwise: people delight in the ability to place outbound calls at their convenience, but find that inbound calls are an unwanted intrusion on their private lives.  While we generally do not mind the occasional call from friends and family, a call from the office or from a telemarketer is generally unpleasant and unwanted. 

Even when you yield to the schedules of others – expecting a call from someone – it is an unpleasant experience: people exhibit signs of anxiety and distraction, unable to focus on their current situation and those in their immediate environment because they are expecting the phone to ring, and show signs of panic when it does not.  This is not “empowerment.”

Security measures likewise reduce the power of the user: if you’ve forgotten a password, or accidentally locked yourself out of a device, the process to regain access is often extremely difficult.

As such, the mobile phone aggravates as often as it empowers, and it tops the list of surveys of devices that users feel they “hate the most but cannot live without.”