I’ve been wrestling with a thought lately – if organizations are complex systems, and complex systems are continuously self-organizing, then why do we believe formal processes make these complex systems more efficient? Worse, when an organization is in need, why do we engage in process improvement – when what may be needed is process reduction or elimination?

This is not the first paragraph to question process improvement, this is not some original Eureka moment.  This is a personal journey, and the enormity of the mistake is beyond what I had considered previously. Friends, more erudite than I, have used similar words before – but for some reason I’m realizing, only recently, a simple truth: the implications for the baseless faith in the machine-based approach to management and the firm are global and profound.

A process-heavy enterprise isn’t cold and impersonal – because humans are still warm and social.  Instead, a process-heavy enterprise creates the need for larger social networks.  Formal processes do not capture the natural evolving paths people take to confront their tasks.  In response, people do what is natural, they use their social network to navigate the workplace – looking inward to find others who have succeeded despite the process.  We know that excessive time spent focused inward leads to burned-out employees, who must work the “second eight” to comply with organizational reporting and the like.  On a larger scale, this wasted effort presents – at the limit – an opportunity cost for the enterprise as a whole.  Perhaps the path to efficiency is to set the conditions for processes to emerge at the point of need, rather than Six Sigma-ing the (majority of) tasks that require creativity and agility.

In the famous early mistakes in business process re-engineering, managers believed once their processes were “streamlined” and “documented” (and embedded in enterprise software tools), they could realize savings by reducing the number of humans.  For routinized tasks, this may be a reasonable assumption – however, what percentage of your workday is routine?  Look to your own environment – do you rely on your social network to find the informal work-arounds for corporate process?  When faced with a challenging problem, do you find solace in the documented process?

Work to Rule. In labor relations, there is a term called “work to rule.”  Simply stated, this means that union workers have a negotiating tool that enables them to paralyze an enterprise – by merely doing only what is considered ‘by the book.’  No creativity, no work-arounds, no focus on task accomplishment – just fealty to the process.  Consider this message:  the way to crash some enterprises is to do what is expected by procedure manuals and process charts.

Business Development. In one company, I observed a set process for preparing contract proposals:  with clear roles, authorities, assignments, formats, and process steps.  Chokepoints were established along the way, when “pencils” down would precede a murder board review to assess the quality of the proposal against the procurement specifications.  These comments were returned to the writing team, who would tackle their task anew. The information technology consisted of shared folders, and the writers laboring over each section would be required to post their documents in the appropriate folder at the required hour.  The work was intense and draining, writers were often unaware of each other’s work, and the review team invariably excoriated the team for the lack of a “single voice” or “storyline.”

In another company, the proposal response was visible at all times to the entire proposal team.  In a shared online space, the sections were worked in parallel, each writer able to observe the other’s ongoing work.  The team met daily to talk through issues, but kept in touch throughout the process through instant messaging and email. There were roles and authorities, assignments and formats here as well – but the process was determined by the writing team, and emerged and adapted based on the demands of the work and the schedule.  As the storyline evolved transparently, there were fewer surprises, people were able to lend value across the work throughout – and the end product was coherent and compelling.  This without a review team’s intervention.

Software Development. In software development, Agile methods are triumphing over waterfall or other linear methods – users are happier because their approach to their work changes as they learn what is possible from the technology solution.  The human and the software evolve together.  The old approach was to gather what people thought they needed, build the software according to specifications, and then train the humans to operate the solution.  There may be a correlation between how much training is needed and how disconnected the solution is from how people work.  When software methods allow the humans and technology to co-evolve, when humans are co-designing the solution during “development” – we seem to have happier humans.

The thoughts bouncing in my head now are:  what needs to be in place to allow for emergent processes? Formal process has a small place – compliance processes dictated by, for example, government regulation come to mind.  However, value-creating processes must emerge from the interaction of the work and the humans.  They cannot be formalized absent the humans or the situational context – if they are, then humans will circumvent them, creating a more inefficient enterprise… or follow them to the letter, and destroy value.  In a real sense, process improvement should be replaced by process enablement.  Let the approach to work emerge from the situational context.

Putting aside the fact that, back in my day, “the Olds” referred to a car owned by someone on the brighter side of the tracks – I recognize that this term now refers to the generations beyond the one currently in fashion.  I realize that while I do not consider myself old; I do remember Watergate, the Vietnam War, the moon landing, and the deaths of all three Kennedy brothers.  And so I write to praise them, me, this holiday for a simple reason:  The Olds enjoy life more than you do.

Our holiday toasts often feature a few seconds of silence.  We aren’t grasping for words, we are connecting to memories that predate you.  We mist up easily for the same reason.  We smile at soiled toddlers because we remember the stress when we were first confronted with tiny people – you.  (Also, we are no longer responsible to remove said soil. Our joy in reminding you of this is unceasing.)

I found myself at a large sing-along last week in a small town North of Boston.  A dear friend has hosted these gatherings for over 15 years, such that now their 18th century home bursts each holiday season with guitars, pianos, a harp and violin, and nearly one hundred voices.  I was privileged this year to be holding one of those guitars, and was therefore provided a front-row seat to enjoy these many souls.  Their ages ranged from six to eighty.  The young teens sprawled like puppies for a third of the room, while the adults stood towards the back, nearer to the wine selection located back in the kitchen area.  The smiles were shared: for one evening there was no toddler whine, no teen angst, no mid-life crises, no fears of mortality, no tears of sadness.  There was only laughter, music, warmth, and love.

While all had a good time, the Olds had a better time.  Only looking back through years can one appreciate the joy of connection.  In looking across the room, I saw myself at each age – from the shy child, to the teens who only gain confidence in groups, to the later awkward attempts at self-expression, to the college students, to the young fathers, to the truly confident Lions at the peak of their game, to the Olds.  We all wonder what is next, but for the Olds that question has been answered many times.  For this one magical evening, there were no questions of what is next – there was a sharing of magic, song, and later, dance.  The season features moments like this.  When all ages are joined in the same laughter, when a stranger wandering into the home would feel right at home.  Only the Olds appreciate how rare and wonderful such evenings are.

Here’s to the holiday. Here’s to the child on Christmas morning, the young teens exiled to the kid’s table, the older teens laughing too loudly at play, the Lions reveling in their ability to sustain a home.  But more than all, here is to the Olds.  Who have lived each phase, and only now fully understand we are all One.

In the never ending search to know “what works,” we have a few choices.  We can look to theories, i.e., this ‘should’ work; or we can look to data.  Often the latter choice is considered backward looking, or stripped of context.  Data autopsies are conducted with the results analyzed and presented as a ‘case study.’  Here is what happened with BP, or Enron, or the 111th Congress.

The former choice, relying on theoretical principles, is considered by some more noble and can be expressed simply:  spread democracy, protect the borders, cut taxes, etc.  Theories that are believed to represent fundamental levers of reality – when pushed in a certain direction, desired outcomes result.  These theories are often referred to as ‘common sense.’  Of course, yesterday’s common sense included such principles as racial inequality, ignorance to environmental stewardship, ever-rising housing prices, sexual preference as a preference, etc.  It takes frightening shocks to the system to shake our faith in such levers.

Yet, ever hopeful, we press on to learn what levers control our universe.  What works, and why?  And how can we scale it?  The answer, I believe, comes from data.  But not just any data.  And not through data autopsy and case studies.

Take education.  We can approach improving education as a principled journey, applying common sense: reduce class size, return to single-gender classrooms, dress them up in uniforms, etc.  Or we can turn to data.  Yes, we can do both, but levers must be informed and confirmed by data.  As a friend tells me: The data must precede the framework.

In education, however, we have a paucity of data.  In a conversation with a senior official at the Department of Education last year, I discussed our shared idea of data platforms until he stopped me mid-sentence:  “You’re assuming we have the right data.”  No, I didn’t, but he was right.  I was designing the platform before taking on the fight to tease out relevant data about student performance.

Even that phrase, student performance, is loaded with assumptions.  Performance as measured by what? Standardized tests?  Only last year did the majority of U.S. states agree to a common set of performance standards – and only then applicable to middle-school math and English.  As to how students are assessed against these standards?  That remains in debate, currently there are two clusters of states reviewing approaches to common assessment regimes.  We are years from a U.S. approach to these fundamental levers for K-12 education:  What is the standard against which student performance is measured, and how is that performance measured?  (I should acknowledge a competing theoretical construct that opposes any national approach to education – again, I seek the data here.)

It gets worse.  Institutions of higher education find an increasing number of applicants, year over year, lacking in the skills needed to succeed in their first-year studies.  The resulting ‘remediation’ classes are nothing more an extension of high school.  However, talk with those in the field of education, and they will tell you that K-12 schools have no common tasking from higher education regarding what is considered an acceptable skill set.  While we work to get to a U.S. approach to these fundamental levers for K-12 education, this effort is not coordinated with the expectations of universities and colleges – who themselves do not agree on the answer to that basic question.

It gets worse.  A recent study by IBM surveying CEOs found that the most pressing challenge is the complexity of their enterprise and industry, and the most necessary skill is and will be creativity.  The ability to think critically, understand variables, and make decisions amidst uncertainty.  Meanwhile, the fundamental levers we believe are necessary for K-12 education are descendants of the Trivium – the triad of grammar, logic and rhetoric developed first to shape medieval liberal arts students.   A consortium of technology companies are working to develop the definition of ‘21st century skills’ they believe are necessary for their incoming labor force – but in the radically localized Education field, there is no King to accept their input.  One large government contractor laments:  we would like to remain an American company, but we need 70,000 engineers over the next ten years.  How can we accomplish both goals, when only one represents shareholder needs?  A senior education administrator meekly suggests the adoption of international standards, PISA, as a baseline for common standards only to be scolded by a peer; “But this is America!”

How do we untangle education?  By fighting over which fundamental levers matter, or turning to relevant data?

There is hope.

A student returns home from a day struggling to master Algebra as her teacher struggles to increase comprehension, while not ‘teaching to the test.’ The results of this test will drive the reputation of, and government investment in, the school district.  The reputation of the school district will drive housing prices, and shape neighborhoods. All are exhausted by the end of the school day, but the data collected at the point of learning remains tiny ovals filled in by a child’s number two pencil.

Returning home, the student unwinds by loading up a multi-player online immersive video game.  The players navigate a complex environment, their interactions driving the direction of the game, as the game algorithms respond to player progression through the landscape.  Each move is measured, assessed, and the game evolves along one of a thousand paths – this path of learning is determined by the player’s interactions, both with their computer environment and with one another.  The players are connected via voice connections, as they work as a team to navigate the game’s landscape – often matched up against a set of adversaries, a mirror-image team tackling the same challenges and competing with them.

The next morning, the student loads her textbook-laden rucksack and trudges off to sit in a classroom designed during the Victorian-era, hoping to color in the ovals correctly before Christmas.

Which experience better prepared her for the ability to think critically, understand variables, and make decisions amidst uncertainty?  What data matters in this story?

Let’s start here.

I’ve been reflecting lately on my brief sojourn into education reform prior to returning to “the world.”  Several things I learned there, including the idea that how brains work and how people interact represent new fields of study to the Field of Education. (With apologies to any of my new Ed friends, please correct me if I heard wrong!)

Yeah, I was appalled too.  Turns out it’s called there “The Learning Sciences,” and while I don’t know when it started to gain traction, people in education somewhat recently started to compare the education system we have with the stuff we’re learning from cognitive science, sociology, etc.  Pretty exciting stuff, and I can’t help but compare this welcome attention to interdisciplinary studies to the breakthrough in economics when – RECENTLY – leading economists began to realize that people are messy and don’t have consistent utility functions.  (In both cases, the system failures become a tad obvious using this lens.)

So the world is changing.  All around us.  One meme in education making the rounds is, attributed to The Learning Sciences:  “All learning is social!”  As someone mentioned this weekend on Twitter: The learning that isn’t social, isn’t worth our time studying. This remains controversial – what about human instinct, core behaviors, the idea that some of our personality traits may be inherited?  Surely these aren’t learned! But then we read that an infant, long before she can understand a language, is able to discern WHICH language is spoken by her tiny tribe.  And before she understands that she belongs to the same animal group as her parents and siblings, she can discern individual faces among primates.  Once she learns that she is one of the naked apes, the individuality among chimpanzee faces becomes invisible to her, as it is to us.

Ponder that one for a minute.  Heady stuff.

This weekend, I was struck by a logic stick.  If all learning is social, is all social learning?  We know this is not automatically so, learned that in the intro to Logic, Sets and Numbers (an actual college course I took in the 70’s).  But when we engage in a social setting, online or offline, are we ever not learning?  Let’s add in a third statement: we are constantly learning.  Even while asleep, some research indicates, the brain assembles and makes sense of what it experienced that day.  There isn’t a time when our brains aren’t rewiring themselves based on input from our environment.

We learn something from every experience.  If events occur as predicted, we reinforce that cognitive pattern for the next use (naturally, we have the ability to learn the wrong things here).  If they do not, we reconsider our pattern assessment logic.  We descend the stairs at 3 am differently once we learn the fourth step from the landing squeaks now – and will subsequently do that in another’s home without thinking.

So we’re constantly learning, and all learning is social.  (Is it?  We learned that squeaky stair avoidance thing on our own, didn’t we?  Hint:  No.)

Enter social media!  What is your social media strategy?  Does that question even make sense anymore?  Or should we ask now:  What is your learning strategy, and what role is played therein by social media, happy hours, phone calls, email, downtime, etc.?  If all social is learning, shouldn’t any associated strategy for socializing tools be focused there?

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24 Nov: Update, thanks to the great comments I’m getting here.  Here is a another great resource exploring this notion that all learning is social, and questioning the value of corporate training methods as a result: http://www.lifescapes.org/Papers/0212_from_training_to_learning.htm

• Facebook privacy challenges continue as applications you trusted expose data you thought was private. Facebook is alarmed and promises to fix this. Your new normal: stop playing Mafia Wars.
• The “evening news” is no longer the authoritative source for What To Know, as it was when I was a child (as nicely articulated by Clay Shirky). Media outlets frame information within a comforting tribal narrative – as research confirms that we trust scientists (and, theoretically, newsreaders) who confirm our belief system. Your new normal: commit to reading / viewing several different biased media outlets, in hopes of getting “the whole story.”
• You think telecommuting would be the dream job – then realize your home is designed for distracted comfort rather than productive work. Your new normal: rethink your sanctuary.

This isn’t new, the association of increased responsibility with increased autonomy is a constant requirement for civilization. The U.S. military adopted ancient models when it structured decision making as a distributed function, within established rules and roles. As an enlisted recruit in basic training, I was told when and how to disobey an order that could be unlawful.  It was my responsibility to disobey such an order, which meant it was my responsibility to understand the difference between lawful and not. This ‘professionalization’ of the enlisted was extraordinary (but not unique), and represented an advantage of decision agility over adversaries who employed a more autocratic decision model.

Being a technically literate and responsible citizen / internet user / driver is more important than ever, as consumer electronics and information acceleration places more responsibility on our shoulders. At a dinner recently, a friend recounted her experiences at a recent college reunion. Leafing through a friend’s photo album, she was aghast at what was considered appropriate party behavior (and costume) in the 1980s. Thankfully, this was before Facebook – so her secret is safe (until someone decides to buy a scanner). If those photos were available online, some of us would have different careers today.

Kids today aren’t more wild than we were, they just have more ways to have their past attached to their adult identity – and more ways to indulge a short attention span. Do we even know what is expected of our children, in order to manage safely their transition to adult? To be a responsible teen, children need to navigate significant ravines of risk while interacting with their friends. These ravines were puddles in the 90s, and cracks

in the sidewalk in the 60s. Gone is the long phone cord, stretched into a closet for privacy. Interactions ping them in the backpack or pocket – and can come from anywhere on Earth. And present an almost irresistible pull to teens and adults alike, even while attempting to drive a 3,000 lb automobile.

In the 70s, I balanced an AM radio on the dashboard to keep me company while driving a sales route in Manhattan. This, because the glovebox was unavailable, because that is where I stuffed an after-market 8-track player (also, the antenna needed to be closer to the windshield). Hard left turns sent the radio flying across the dash – a distraction because I wasn’t responsible enough to get the factory radio fixed. Compare this to the distractions available to drivers today. My Rube Goldberg sound system is nothing compared to the world of smart phone interactions that beckon us at every turn.

We are called upon to evolve. Faster. Develop greater discipline regarding what earns our attention, and how we make decisions. The new normal: Don’t trust anything you hear, even on cable or sent to your inbox or posted on your Facebook wall. Don’t indulge in every tempting distraction, however urgent that wall post or text seems to be. Also: don’t presume the answer is to avoid consumer electronics altogether. Government services will expect citizens to be connected and literate. Consider the broadband initiatives from the FCC – the interstate highway system of the 21st century is considered necessary to connect us to the new normals. Some advocates are seeking to prioritize these connections to favor first hospitals, libraries…and schoolhouses.

It’s idle fun for me to gaze at my grandchildren and wonder what their work and social life will be like in twenty years. I tend to forget that I expect to be around to witness it, and therefore will have some adapting of my own to accomplish.

What’s your new normal? How fast can you evolve? How do you avoid the inadvertent base jump?