Decisions and fear
I’ve often sat pondering what causes people to always seek advice or wait to be told before they take action. In startups this sort of behaviour is ok if it occurs once in a while, but in over a decade of working in companies and self funded startups I’ve noticed that the success in a company really hinges on the ratio of decision makers to non decision makers.
Decision Makers
Also known as the people who every minute of the day are able to evaluate all the knowledge they currently have access to at that point to make a swift and timely choice as the best possible path of action. They’re not scared to put their careers on the line, get fired or take the heat for it, because deep down they know it’s the right thing to do.
Autonomy
One of my key beliefs of why such methodologies such as Lean, Agile etc has gained traction is because it strongly favours the organisation with the most number of decision makers.
Cross functional teams, software engineers who are no longer silo’d into titles such as architect, DBA etc. But instead are able to gather business requirements. Have a true understand of the needs of the business/customers and then finally implement what is required to bring those needs to fruition without having to go through multiple layers of bureaucracy.
I’d always wondered where the whole manager/foreman, worker hierarchy came from. I used to think it was of military origins where wars where mostly won by numbers and an overarching strategy.
It actually turns out that it’s a post industrial headache left over from the productization of industry. Where people who most likely were poorly educated were gathered together to perform one simplistic task. But when the tasks were combined together they could form something really quite complex. Like a ship or an engine of some sorts.
Makes sense doesn’t it? It works for fast food outlets (no disrespect to them, as I do like a good burger once in a while). But is it suited todays world where a lot of value is now not physically created but lies in the intellectual realms?
Sure some people argue that companies like Apple build laptops in factories where structurally this workflow occurs. But there’s a lot of intellectual effort that’s gone into everything from the power cord to the laser that was specially designed to tease a unibody frame from a one inch sheet of aluminium.
Saving the economy
I get a little confused when I see people lamenting the decline of British manufacturing and focusing solely on physical products. Sure, every Tom, Dick and Harry is expecting the latest in tech at bargain basement prices so the UK has great difficulty in competing.
But let’s just stand back for a minute. Get away from the physical and start concentrating on the engineering, the design and more importantly the innovation. The only way to accomplish this is to make people fearless, encourage autonomy and more importantly make everyone feel their actions contribute so they can see the positive result of their decisions.
