Knowledge workers are fueling the engine of change and software is eating the world… The weight of investments is rapidly shifting from tangible to intangible. Establishing barriers to entry is beginning to look like a lost cause. The resulting changes have exposed businesses to a host of new challenges unlike those they have wrestled with before.
The metaphors, allegories, and methods of past management concepts are running thread bare and management in organizations across the world is struggling. Workers are bound to systems designed to manage investments in machines, not humans. Mismatched foci, tools and processes produce ever greater amounts of unsustainable waste.
This speech will explore these problems and present The Library Corporation’s experimental efforts to create solutions to them by moving away from deadline focused project management and establish a Humanistic Flow-based Knowledge System.
As the Lean System Society gathers for the first Reactor conference, it is my hope that a careful examination may spur others to investigate new ways of working that improve the world's systems and deliver better economic and sociological outcomes.
4. @cyetain
To envision the the types technology that teams
may reasonably be expected produce in 5-10
years and to prepare those teams to envision,
create, produce, and support that technology.
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It has been said that man is
a rational animal. All my
life I have been searching
for evidence which could
support this.
-Russell
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Work != Working != Worker
Pin
Car
Artifacts
Code
Hammering
Carrying
Thinking
Creating
HUMANS
Bounded:
Perception
Understanding
Rationality
Fallible
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If the parts of an entity do not
interact, they form an aggregation,
not a system. A crowd, as distinct
from an organization, is a familiar
example.
-Ackoff
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The dynamic whole has
greater degrees of freedom
than its components
individually
-Alicia Juarrero
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knowledge of psychology is incomplete
without knowledge of variation. The
managers of people need to understand
that all people are different.
~W. Edwards Deming
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Knowledge can only be volunteered it cannot
be conscripted.
We only know what we know when we need to
know it.
Everything is fragmented
The way we know things is not the way we
report we know things.
We always know more than we can say, and we
will always say more than we can write down.
Working software over comprehensive documentation
-Snowden
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Information, skill and knowledge
are embedded in networks and
relationships.
Individuals, instead of “owning”
information, attract, translate and
know how to and where to access
to the information that emerges
in the networks around them.
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Enjoyment appears at
the boundary between
boredom and anxiety,
when the challenges are
just balanced with the
person's capacity to act.
―Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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No man treats a motor car as
foolishly as he treats another human
being. When the car will not go, he
does not attribute its annoying
behavior to sin, he does not say,
"You are a wicked motorcar, and I
shall not give you any more petrol
until you go." He attempts to find
out what is wrong and set it right.
-Russell
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Who is In Control
Around Here Anyway?
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
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Perhaps the most costly disassembly in
which our culture has been engaged is
the disaggregation of life itself into work,
play, learning, and inspiration.
-Ackoff
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Managers, Executives
and Leaders are
Humans
(not heros)
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. -Lord Acton
Humans tend to be fallible, and leaders are absolutely Human. -Jabe
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The Intentional Stance
One of the issues with Hierarchical thinking & decision
making is the implicit assumption that someone has
thought & decided.
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Culture as a set of basic
assumptions defines for us
what to pay attention to, what
things mean, how to react
emotionally to what is going
on, and what actions to take in
various kinds of situations.
-Edgar H. Schein
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Humans can and will
learn if they are
provided the resources
and the necessary
psychological safety.
~Edgar Schein
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Joy in work comes from understanding
why your work is important. Not from
the work, but from knowledge of who’s
going to use it... Motivation— nonsense.
All that people need to know is why
their work is important.
-W. Edwards Deming
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If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I? If not
now, when?
-Rabbi Hillel
Agency
and
Communion
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I have adopted the terms "agency" and
"communion" to characterize two
fundamental modalities in the existence of
living forms, agency for the existence of an
organism as an individual, and communion for
the participation of the individual in some
large organism of which the individual is part.
-Bakan
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Individuals with Agency
and Communion are more
engaged in their work.
They notice and react to
changes in context which
enables Continuous
Adaptation
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The temporal and social
distance between
relevant information and
those making decisions
impacts the quality,
efficiency and timeliness
of those decisions
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NOTICE DECISION
POINTS
Before doing the right thing righter… there is simply noticing
what you are doing and simply asking… why am I doing this?
DECISIONS
are the result of
Interactions
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A system that requires
certain environmental
conditions in order to carry
out its defining function is
an open system.
-Russell L. Ackoff