Misapplication of science to leadership

Here’s another reason I suspect may be behind why Western business didn’t quite ‘get’ the empowered workforce aspect of Japanese lean approaches:

It doesn’t feel very scientific.

Our logic follows ’cause and effect’ rules and some assumptions feel as immutable as the law of gravity.

• We think that documenting a procedure reduces the risk of it going wrong.
• We believe that introducing a bonus will improve performance.
• We know that separating work into its smallest parts will make it easier to learn and produce an economy of scale.

 

Bad Science (Ben Goldacre) by David Bailey's Son (cc)

The concerns a command and control manager would express about my suggestions for bringing about real empowerment would be:

• “If you let front line workers make decisions, there’ll be inconsistency and chaos.”
• “People will slack off if you give them freedom to decide how to work.”
• “Concepts like targets, SLAs and bonuses provide control.”

The problem here is that we’ve let long-held assumptions about work performance become unstated ‘law’.

What we should be doing instead is developing new hypotheses and testing them.

Those new hypotheses should come from mapping what’s happening in the work today.

But for that to happen, leaders need to completely change how they operate.

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