more powerful option emerges: “We can change the nature of the
work performed.”
Optimize processes, he urged, not people.
3
Which brings us back to the subject of this book: knowledge
work. In this sector, we stubbornly reject this insight from industrial
management. We largely ignore processes, investing our energy
instead in figuring out how to make people faster. We obsess over
hiring and promoting stars. We seek leadership consultants to help
us motivate people to work longer and harder. We embrace
innovations like the smartphone that allow more hours of the day to
be punctuated with work. We put dry cleaners on our corporate
campuses and wi-fi on our corporate buses, all in the service of
finding faster ways to shovel more proverbial slag.
Not
surprisingly, this hasn’t worked out well at all.
—
The core claim of this chapter is that production process thinking
applies equally well to knowledge work as it does to industrial
manufacturing. Just because you produce things with your brain
instead of your hands doesn’t change the fundamental reality that
these efforts must still be coordinated. The importance of organizing
decisions about who is working on what, and finding systematic ways
to check in on this work as it evolves, applies as much to generating
computer code or client proposals as it does to casting brass.
In knowledge work, any type of valuable result that you or your
organization regularly produces can be understood as the output of a
production process. If you’re a marketing firm that runs publicity
campaigns
for your clients, your firm has a publicity campaign
production process. If you work on an HR team that resolves salary
issues, your team has a salary issue resolution process. If you’re a
professor teaching a class that requires you to assign and grade
problem sets, you have a problem set process.
In the pages ahead, I’ll argue that if knowledge workers admit
that these processes exist, and then clarify and optimize their
operation, then they’ll discover the same result as the Pullman brass
works: the expense of the extra overhead will be far outweighed by
the boosts in productivity. When the costs and benefits are
compared, it’s common to end up with a “substantial profit.” The
problem, of course, is that few knowledge workers are used to
thinking this way: they focus on people, not processes.
As a result,
the knowledge sector prefers to leave these processes unspecified,
relying instead on the hyperactive hive mind workflow to informally
organize their work.
For sure, a major explanation for this process aversion is the
insistence on knowledge worker autonomy that we explored earlier.
Production processes, by definition, require rules about how work is
coordinated. Rules reduce autonomy—creating friction with the
belief that knowledge workers “must manage themselves,” as Peter
Drucker commanded. This dislike of processes, however, goes
beyond a general bias toward autonomy. There’s a belief, implicitly
held by many knowledge workers, that the
lack of processes in this
sector is not just an unavoidable side effect of self-management, but
actually a
smart way to work. A lack of processes, it’s commonly
understood, represents nimbleness and flexibility—a foundation for
the type of outside-the-box thinking we’re constantly told is critical.
This vision is fundamentally Rousseauian, a reference to the
eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, who believed that human nature, before the introduction
of political influence, was fundamentally virtuous. It claims that
when left alone to work in whatever way seems natural, knowledge
workers will adapt seamlessly to
the complex conditions they
confront, producing original solutions and game-changing
innovations. In this worldview, codified work processes are artificial:
they corrupt the Edenic creative, leading to bureaucracy and
stagnation—a
Dilbert comic brought to life.
Having spent years studying the nuances of knowledge worker
productivity, I believe this understanding is profoundly flawed. To
stick with the analogy to Enlightenment philosophy, the reality of
knowledge work is much more Hobbesian, a reference to Thomas
Hobbes’s belief, originally detailed in
Leviathan, that without the
constraints of the state, human life is “nasty, brutish, and short.”
When you reduce work to a state of nature by allowing processes to
unfold
informally, the resulting behavior is anything but utopian.
Much as is observed in actual natural settings, in the informal
process workplace, dominance hierarchies emerge. If you’re brash
and disagreeable, or are a favorite of the boss, you can, like the
strongest lion in the pride, avoid work you don’t like by staring down
those who try to pass it off to you, ignoring their messages, or
claiming overload. On the other hand, if you’re more reasonable and
agreeable, you’ll end up overloaded with more work than makes
sense for one person to handle. These
setups are both demoralizing
and a staggeringly inefficient deployment of attention capital. But
without a countervailing force, these hierarchies are often
unavoidable.
Also as in natural settings, in workplaces without well-defined
processes, energy minimization becomes prioritized. This is
fundamental human nature: if there’s no structure surrounding how
hard efforts are coordinated, we default to our instinct to not expend
any more energy than is necessary. Most of us are guilty of acting on
this instinct when given a chance. An email arrives that informally
represents a new responsibility for you to manage; because there’s no
formal process in place to assign the work or track its progress, you
seek instead the easiest way to get the responsibility off your plate—
even if just temporarily—so you send a quick reply asking for an
ambiguous clarification. Thus unfolds
a game of obligation hot
potato, as messages bounce around, each temporarily shifting
responsibility from one inbox to another, until a deadline or irate
boss finally stops the music, leading to a last-minute scramble to
churn out a barely acceptable result. This, too, is obviously a terribly
inefficient way to get work done.
A well-designed production process, in other words, isn’t an
obstacle to efficient knowledge work, but is instead often a
precondition. Which brings us to the principle that this chapter
elaborates.
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