Reinventing organizations. Good start

Why do so many people work so hard so they can
escape to Disneyland? Why are video games more
popular than work? ... Why do many workers spend years
dreaming about and planning for retirement?
The reason is simple and dispiriting. We have
made the workplace a

frustrating and joyless place where
people do what they’re told and have few ways to
participate in decisions or fully use their talents. As a
result, they naturally gravitate to pursuits in which they can
exercise a measure of control over their lives.
In most organizations I have been exposed to
around the world, ... we still have the offices “above” the
working people ... who, without consulting workers, make
decisions that dramatically affect their lives.

Dennis Bakke

     Тепер я пройшов половину, і точно раджу цю книгу для всіх хто цікавиться питаннями організації праці і мотивації. Зазвичай авторам і сценаристам важко мені догодити, та від цього твору я не можу відірватись, хоч мені нелегко читати англійською.

Автори пропонують грунтовне дослідження на теми:

Чи можлива і наскільки життєздатна інша структура організацій крім стандартної пірамідальної, в яких всі ми працюємо?

Чому часто люди ставляться до своєї роботи пасивно і безініціативно, і як це змінити?

     Висновки авторів часом важко сприймаються. Розмірковуючи над подібним, я мав підозру, що класичний менеджмент і тип керування самі деякою мірою розбещують працівників, відбиваючи в них здатність приймати рішення і брати на себе відповідальність за них. І як "бонус" - віддаляють їх від проблем, які вирішує організація, тим самим позбавляючи роботу сенсу, а людей - мотивації і блиску в очах. 

        Це все обгрунтовано і класно написано, багато в чому перегукується з близькими всім темами типу виховання дітей, і сприяє роздумам над сенсом життя. І при тому написано без претензій на абсолютну істину, і без фанатизму. Одним словом, хайлі рекоменд.

Я взяв на себе сміливість насмикати з книги цитат, що дають уявлення про вміст книги.

***

The concentration of power at the top, separating colleagues into the powerful and the powerless, brings with it problems that have plagued organizations for as long as we can remember. Power in organizations is seen as a scarce commodity worth fighting for. This situation invariably brings out the shadowy side of human nature:

personal ambition, politics, mistrust, fear, and greed.

Приклад - нідерландська компанія в сфері хелскиа

Since the 19th century, every neighborhood in the Netherlands had a  neighborhood nurse who would make home visits to care for the sick and the elderly. Neighborhood nurses are an essential piece of the Dutch health care system, working hand-in-hand with family doctors and the hospital system. 

Яку захотіли змінити на краще - організувати

In the 1990s, the health insurance system (which over time had taken on footing most of the bill), came up with a logical idea: why not group the self-employed nurses into  organizations? After all, there are obvious economies of scale and skill. When one nurse is on vacation, sick, or simply trying to get a good night’s sleep, someone else can take over. If one has too much work while another has a lull, the organization can balance the load. And not every nurse knows how to treat every type of pathology, so there are complementarities in terms of skills. 

Soon enough, the organizations that grouped the nurses started merging themselves, in pursuit of ever more scale: the number of organizations dropped from 295 to 86 in just five years, from 1990 to 1995. Piece by piece, the Achievement-Orange logic grew deeper roots. Tasks were specialized: some people would take care of intake of new patients and determine how nurses would best serve them; planners were hired to provide nurses with a daily schedule, optimizing the route from patient to patient; call center employees started taking patients calls; given the growing size of the organizations, regional managers and directors were appointed as bosses to supervise the nurses in the field.

To ensure accurate planning and drive up efficiency, time norms were established for each type of intervention: in one company, for instance, intravenous injections would be allotted exactly 10 minutes, bathing 15 minutes, wound dressing 10 minutes, and changing a compression stocking 2.5 minutes. To reduce costs, these different health treatments (now called “products”) were tiered according to the expertise they required. The more experienced and expensive nurses perform only the more difficult products, so that cheaper nurses can do all the others. To
be able to keep track of efficiencies, a sticker with a bar code is placed on the door of every patient’s home and nurses have to scan in the barcode, along with the “product” they have delivered, after every visit. All activities are time-stamped in the central system, and can be monitored and analyzed from afar.

Як ці зміни вплинули на мотивацію людей?

Nurses find these working conditions degrading. Most of them chose their profession out of vocation to care for those in need―nursing is hardly a profession in which to get rich―and these practices make a mockery of their vocation. One of the nurses now working at Buurtzorg says this about her previous work in a neighborhood nursing organization:

The whole day, the electronic registration system that you have to carry with you is making you crazy. Some evenings I had to go and see 19 different patients. Then there is nothing you can do but run inside, put on a bandage or give a shot, and run out. You can never finish your work in a qualitative way. And when you go home, you keep thinking all the time, “I hope the nurse that comes after me doesn’t forget to do this or that.”

Another nurse tells a similar story of her experience in one of the neighborhood nursing organizations:

The last years I was responsible for 80 patients that I never got to know well. ... The planning was done somewhere else by someone who didn’t know the patients. It went wrong so many times that at some point I could no longer explain to patients why nobody would come or why the agreed time wasn’t respected. In seven years I had 14 managers and was tired of that too. The organization had become too big and difficult to navigate. Nobody felt responsible for the care of patients. Every day there were complaints and conflicts among colleagues.

A third nurse tells the following story:

The final straw came when my previous organization wanted us to sell stuff to our patients. We had to sell products from the internal pharmacy that the organization had set up. We felt deeply troubled because our expertise and integrity were abused. ...

І приклад іншого підходу

Buurtzorg, the organization that has caused a revolution in neighborhood nursing, was founded in late 2006 by Jos de Blok. Jos had been a nurse for 10 years and had then climbed the ladder to assume management functions and staff roles in a nursing organization. When he saw that he couldn’t effect change from the inside, he decided to start his own organization. 4 An entirely different paradigm would inform the care and the organizational set-up. Buurtzorg, the organization he cre-
ated, has become extraordinarily successful, growing from 10 to 7,000 nurses in seven years and achieving outstanding levels of care.

Within Buurtzorg (which means “neighborhood care” in Dutch), nurses work in teams of 10 to 12, with each team serving around 50 patients in a small, well-defined neighborhood. The team is in charge of all the tasks that were previously fragmented across different departments. They are responsible not only for providing care, but for deciding how many and which patients to serve. They do the intake, the planning, the vacation and holiday scheduling, and the administration. They decide where to rent an office and how to decorate it. They determine how best to integrate with the local community, which doctors and

pharmacies to reach out to, and how to best work with local hospitals. They decide when they meet and how they will distribute tasks among themselves, and they make up their individual and team training plans. They decide if they need to expand the team or split it in two if there are more patients than they can keep up with, and they monitor their own performance and decide on corrective action if productivity drops. There is no leader within the team; important decisions are made collectively.

Care is no longer fragmented. Whenever possible, things are planned so that a patient always sees the same one or two nurses. Nurses take time to sit down, drink a cup of coffee, and get to know the patients and their history and preferences. Over the course of days and weeks, deep trust can take root in the relationship. Care is no longer reduced to a shot or a bandage―patients can be seen and honored in their wholeness, with attention paid not only to their physical needs, but also their emotional, relational, and spiritual ones. Take the case of a
nurse who senses that a proud older lady has stopped inviting friends to visit because she feels bad about her sickly appearance. The nurse might arrange a home visit from a hairdresser, or she might call the lady’s daughter to suggest buying some new clothes.

Приклад іншої компанії

     At Sun Hydraulics, all of this is radically simplified. There is no management that wants to understand and control the complexity. Projects happen organically and informally. Engineers are typically working on several projects in parallel. They constantly rearrange their priorities, based on what they sense is the most important, most urgent, or most fun to do. Google has the famous practice of “20 percent time”―engineers are free to decide how to spend their Fridays. Sun and

other self-managing organizations basically extend this to the whole week. There is no master plan. There are no project charters and no one bothers with staffing people on projects. Project teams form organically and disband again when work is done. Nobody knows if projects are on time or on budget, because for 90 percent of the projects, no one cares to put a timeline on paper or to establish a budget. A huge amount of time is freed by dropping all the formalities of project planning―writing the plan, getting approval, reporting on progress, explaining variations, rescheduling, and re-estimating, not to mention the politics that go into

securing resources for one’s project or to find someone to blame when projects are over time or over budget. When I discussed with Kirsten Regal, one of Sun’s leaders, how little their meeting rooms seemed to be used, she quipped, “We don’t waste time being busy.”

Project prioritization

But then how are things prioritized? Who decides what should take precedence? “Things have a natural way of taking priority,” one of Sun’s engineers told me. At Sun, people have dropped the illusion that one person, however competent, could master all the information of such a complex system and heroically, from above, make the right call for hundreds of decisions that need to be made every week. Instead, they trust the collective intelligence of the system.

“The more you increase individual responsibility, the better the chances for incremental improvements in operations,”

Про тайтли

        In most organizations, especially of the Orange sort, job titles are a currency for status. Like all currencies, job titles are subject to the law of inflation. In many companies, they seem to swell and multiply―there are vice presidents, senior vice presidents, executive vice presidents, junior or senior directors, and ever more types of chief officers. It is a common expectation, in the Orange worldview, that people will work hard to achieve the next promotion and a bigger title.

       From the Evolutionary-Teal perspective, job titles are like honeypots to the ego: alluring and addictive, but ultimately unhealthy. We can quickly get attached to our job title if it carries social prestige, and we can easily fall into the trap of believing we “are” our job identity. And in a hierarchical system, it’s all too natural to start considering that we are somehow above certain people and below others. Unsurprisingly, Teal Organizations mostly do without job titles.

Про систему освіти

       Our schools today are probably further away from self-management than most other types of organizations. We have turned schools, almost everywhere, into soulless factories that process students in batches of 25 per class, one year at a time. Children are viewed essentially as interchangeable units that need to be channeled through a pre-defined curriculum. At the end of the cycle, those that fit the mold are graduated; castoffs are discarded along the way. Learning happens

best, this system seems to believe, when students sit quietly for hours in front of all-knowing teachers who fill their heads with information. Children can’t be trusted to define their own learning plans and set their own goals; that must be done by the teachers. But, really, teachers cannot be trusted either; they must be tightly supervised by principals and superintendents and school districts and expert commissions and standardized tests and mandatory school programs, to make sure they do at least a somewhat decent job.