The year of artificial intelligence looms. In organizations, the new technology will be inspected, experimented with, and its capabilities interweaved with the work of employees. More generally, we are probably entering one of those periods when the focus will be on revamping processes as new technology offers enticing possibilities.
It’s worth remembering technological advances have not always been warmly embraced. People tend to get overlooked in the process of process improvement.
Los Angeles Times technology columnist Brian Merchant notes the term Luddites these days is an epithet used against someone who hates or doesn’t understand technology. But in his book Blood in the Machines, he argues that “the Luddites understood technology all too well; they didn’t hate it, but rather the way it was used against them.”
Henry Ford gave us the efficient assembly line, borrowed from slaughter houses. “The drawback for workers was that Ford saw them as inconvenient cogs in the machine,” tech researcher John Willis observes in a book on process improvement, Deming’s Journey to Profound Knowledge, written with the assistance of Derek Lewis.
Frederick Winslow Taylor in the 1880s and 1890s gave us scientific management, which undergirds today’s workplace; he studied how people work and then implemented, and enforced, methods that required maximum possible effort and output every moment. “Where Ford treated people like cogs in a machine, Taylor approached workers as if they were machines themselves – machines that could be optimized for maximum efficiency given the right physical and psychological conditions,” Mr. Willis writes.
W. Edwards Deming, arguably the most influential process innovator, was critical to the American productivity effort during the Second World War and then forgotten, only to be embraced again after his methods allowed the Japanese auto industry to catapult past North American factories. He blended systems thinking, pragmatism and a focus on reducing variation in output with an effort to understand human behaviour rather than control it. “In the Japanese, Ed found a culture of inherent respect between manager and employee,” Mr. Willis writes.
Respect doesn’t seem part of Elon Musk’s management style. He uses the word “hardcore” to capture the periodic blitzes when he sleeps under his desk or on the factory floor, working around the clock beside the employees, goading them to achieve more. “Welcome to production hell!” he told Tesla employees in 2017.
He is guided by what he calls The Algorithm, which has five commandments that biographer Walter Isaacson shared in his recent book, Elon Musk:
- Question every requirement: “Make them less wrong and dumb because all requirements are somewhat wrong and dumb. And then delete, delete, delete,” Mr. Musk declares. He insists people know the name of the person who issued each requirement that is getting in the way. They can never accept it came from a department, such as “the legal department” or the “safety department.” Naming the person – or perhaps in future, the AI app – gives you someone to battle. Requirements from smart people are particularly dangerous, Mr. Musk warns, because they are less likely to be questioned. “Always do so, even if the requirements come from me,” he said. “Then make the requirement less dumb.”
- Delete any part or process you can: You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you don’t end up having to add back at least 10 per cent you haven’t cut enough.
- Simplify and optimize: Now you can simplify and optimize – but not before you have eliminated all the processes you can. It’s a mistake to simplify a process that shouldn’t exist, he stresses.
- Accelerate cycle time: Every process can be sped up. But again, only after the previous steps so you don’t waste time accelerating processes that shouldn’t exist, as he did at Tesla initially.
- Automate: Now you should automate whatever you can.
The five commandments are accompanied by corollaries. All technical managers must have continued hands-on experience – software managers, for example, should spend 20 per cent of their time coding. “Otherwise they are like a cavalry leader who can’t ride a horse,” Mr. Musk insists. He views camaraderie as dangerous because it makes it hard for people to challenge each other’s work. Another corollary is that it’s okay to be wrong, but don’t be confident and wrong. Finally, he insists you need a maniacal sense of urgency to change processes.
That urgency is challenged, however, in the three guidelines for improving your organization’s processes offered by performance experts Gene Kim and Steven Spear. They urge you to consider slowification, effectively gearing down to make solving problems more effective. “Slowification makes it easier to solve problems by pulling problem-solving out of the fast-paced and unforgiving realm of performance,” they write in Wiring the Winning Organization. Instead, you shift it to planning and where possible practice, to get things right. Examples of slowification practices are using mock-ups, prototypes, simulations and scale-model tests.
With that comes simplification and amplification. Simplification makes difficult problems easier to solve by reshaping them. Big problems are deliberately broken down into smaller, simpler ones. “These problems have fewer interacting factors, making them cognitively easier to solve,” they explain. Amplification makes it more obvious that there are problems that demand attention, by encouraging and listening to feedback. It can prevent small glitches from growing into systemically disruptive issues.
AI will reshape processes, in some cases profoundly. So 2024 will be the year of processes as well as AI. We need to remember the Luddites and the failings of Ford and Taylor, while finding the path forward.
Cannonballs
- Futurist Robert Tucker believes we will experience more change over the next 10 years than we have over the past 50 or 100 years. He urges you to think like a futurist, scanning and mentoring trends: “Everywhere you go and whatever you’re doing, be observant of the changes before your eyes. Read voraciously and skip the trivia. Engage yourself by asking questions: Where will this change seemingly go? How will this one develop?”
- Research shows that introverts don’t seem to be as passionate about work as extroverts, even when they actually are. Managers need to be alert to the potential bias: Often the passion will reveal itself through quiet, dedicated immersion in the work rather than overt comments. The researchers, two PhD students and Harvard Business School and professor Jon Jachimowicz, warn that “supervisors’ perceptions of employee passion came with real, tangible consequences: Supervisors rewarded extroverts’ more-animated expressions of passion with higher estimations of their status, which has been shown to be associated with preferential treatment, greater chances of promotions and raises and other benefits.”
- All turnover isn’t equal notes HR specialist John Sullivan so pay particular attention to “devastating turnover,” such as losing key innovators, revenue generators, AI experts, critical executives and those with extensive contacts. If you keep count of turnover, watch the number in that category.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.