Jon Smart

The solution to all of our Psychological Safety problems!

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(13) From Systematic Management to Scientific Management This is the 13th blog post in the Organising for Outcomes series. It is helpful to understand where we’ve come from, how today’s ways of working have evolved, and the context that those ways of…

Read the blog here: www.soonersaferhappier.com/post/13-from...
Enjoy and please share your thoughts!

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Scientific Management was only possible because of, and built on, the advances introduced by Systematic Management. The focus was on individual worker productivity to overcome workers ‘soldiering’. The systematising was extended from the organisation to the individual.

What is Scientific Management?

▶️ Systematic Management was primarily concerned with improving the efficiency of a group of people.
▶️ Scientific Management was primarily concerned with increasing the efficiency of an individual.

New blog post (number 13 in the series): In this blog post, we look at the ongoing innovation in ways of working as part of the 3rd Industrial Revolution, the more well-known Scientific Management, in order to understand why we work the way we do today and to (re)learn lessons from the past.

▶️ Bring internal audit and any external regulators or auditors with you on the journey
▶️ Speed AND Control

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▶️ Minimal Viable Guardrails, in unique context
▶️ Collaboration in multidisciplinary teams (incl. Safety Team), aligned to value and the consumer
▶️ Appropriate to the Risk Profile and Risk Appetite
▶️ More smaller change, within Minimal Viable Guardrails, reduces risk

😎 Blind to risk
Eh? What controls?
What's risk appetite and risk profile?
What are Minimal Viable Guardrails?
"Don't know what you're talking about, need to get back to work"
Neither speed nor control

Instead, optimise for outcomes in context:
▶️ Not one size fits all approach to controls

Seeking perfection over safe progress with early and often learning.
Perversely leads to bigger risk, with late learning and a big bang.
Control over speed.

🤠 The Wild West
Spurs on.
Fragile over agile.
Incentivised for speed.
Poor discipline.
"We'll worry about that later"
Speed over control.

Risk: not risk averse, not the Wild West, not blind to risk.

🚫 Risk-averse bureaucracy
Layers of approvals. Committees everywhere.
One Size Fits All approach to risk and controls.
Decisions crawl.
Incentive for people in control roles, if in doubt, is to say 'no'.

Expected Opportunity Loss = cost of being wrong x probability of being wrong
Big batch, late learning: high cost and high probability.
Small slices, quick learning: low cost and low probability.

Crack on!

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Start small and safe, so that it's possible to 'fail forwards'.
Reduce risk, by acting.
Design is doing and doing is design.
Planning is continuous.

Perversely seeking perfection and delaying learning, increases risk.

Where work is unique and unknowable, in order to optimise for outcomes, there is a need for a bias to action.

Make the unknowable, knowable, by acting.
Especially if it's a two way door.
Clear the fog.

Seek progress over perfection, within minimal viable guardrails.

AI does not transform your organisation. You do.

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✅ if teams have autonomy, accountability and coherence within minimal viable guardrails,
✅ if there are fast feedback loops and adaptability,

then AI can become a positive multiplier for Better Value, Sooner, Safer and Happier.

This makes getting the foundations in place even more important.

❌ If governance is slow and overly risk-averse, AI will accelerate the creation of governance committees.

On the other hand...

✅ If people are incentivised and organised around outcomes and value,
✅ if funding is aligned to value,

❌ If ways of working are fragmented, siloed and output-driven, AI will help you produce more fragmented outputs, faster. Partially completed work will stack up ever higher on the brick walls between functional silos.
❌ If incentives reward local optimisation, AI will optimise locally at scale.

AI will not transform your organisation, it will amplify it.
It will amplify good and bad.

When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.

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Link-Belt became a model organisation with Taylor directing numerous visitors to tour the factory.

Source: "Frederick W Taylor: Father of Scientific Management" vol II, Copley, 1923.

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Changes were introduced gradually, there was no coercion, he created a workers committee, there was an upside financial benefit without threat of lower pay, and he avoided large-scale layoffs. Dodge built trust.

The quote is from James Dodge, president of Link-Belt Company in the early 1900s when adopting Scientific Management. Dodge took a not-one-size-fits-all approach and had respect for workers.

Organisational improvement takes time. Yes, there can be quick wins. And lasting improvement it takes years.

That has always been the case and will be the case, as it is about people changing behaviour and going through fear, with real or perceived threats.

AI antipattern: sprinkling AI on top of existing processes like parmesan on a tower pasta

youtu.be/11s7tqG9vuo?...

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We need to optimise for unknowability, for outcome hypotheses, experimentation and learning, if we want to optimise for outcomes.

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More people are spending more time on new value, on product development, making the most of the new means of production.

GenAI, as a stochastic probability engine, is emergence squared.

We write it once, refactor it and it then runs many times. There are robots on the factory floor. Applying for household insurance online involves no humans. We have automated many manual repetitive tasks.

▶️ We are now in the 1st Digital Revolution. This is the biggest change in how we think and work since the 1600s.

Increasingly, the work that people do in organisations, is unique and unknowable. It is emergent. We don't write the same code a million times.

This may apply to Physics and physical properties, it does not apply to social systems, to people.

This is why we have role-based silos, with work passing, a focus on output and view unique work as predictable, with a focus on a plan put together at the point of having learnt the least.

with planning (order givers) separated from execution (order takers) and a focus on output.

Previous ways of working have a direct link to the Scientific Revolution in the 1600s, with a view of the Clockwork Universe, where once observed, there are universal laws that forever hold true.