Читать книгу Navigate the Swirl - Richard S. Hawkes - Страница 22

If you work in a manufacturing context—in a production line, for example—it may not be that difficult to visualize the shared work of the team or company. You may be responsible for just one step in the process, but the production line itself is a physical representation of all the stages through which the work flows, and the order in which it must be enacted. You wouldn't try to pick up a widget from one end of the assembly line and move it somewhere else, and you're not worried that someone further down the line is going to start trying to do your job.

These days, however, most people don't work in production lines. In today's flat digital work world, most of us are “knowledge workers,” a term coined in 1959 by business writer and consultant Peter Drucker to refer to any person whose job involves handling or using information. According to research firm Gartner, there are now more than a billion knowledge workers globally.¹ And the core challenge for the knowledge worker is finding a way to optimize and streamline their shared work when the processes and products of that work are no longer physical objects being moved from one place to another. So much confusion in organizations comes down to these issues. Things fall through the cracks because no one feels responsible for them. Two people realize they're both doing the same thing. This person isn't talking to that person. No one knows who has the authority to make certain decisions. Or too many people have the authority to make certain decisions. Leaders try to move people around or redesign their org charts to fix these problems, but they don't really drill down to see the system or process that underlie those human roles, responsibilities, and relationships. That system is the business, and unless we get clarity on the business, our best attempts to organize around it will still be scattershot. As Drucker pointed out, in order to be productive and effective, teams engaged in knowledge work must invest the time and resources to visualize shared processes and ways of working, because how else will they be able to easily plan, start, stop, track, troubleshoot, and optimize shared work together?

The challenge of visualizing business processes has preoccupied some of the brightest minds over the past century, and you're probably familiar with concepts like value chains, value streams, Lean, Six Sigma, and so on. All these systems—which represented breakthroughs in management and organizational development—are approaches to mapping and optimizing business processes and workflows. However, many of them come out of a mechanistic, manufacturing mindset. They're top-down methods that a leader or consultant can apply to a system to reduce inefficiencies and increase throughput, but they're not really designed for a knowledge work environment in which team members need to be actively, ongoingly engaged in negotiating and optimizing their shared work. They describe a business workflow, but not the set of relationships and the nature of the relationships that have to be enacted for that workflow to happen smoothly. That's the question that preoccupied me, from my early days as a consultant. Even with my limited experience at that time, I could begin to see how the lack of shared clarity on what people were “in together” caused numerous problems. I was wrestling with this conundrum when I showed up for a consulting engagement one day—and stumbled upon an insight that would lead me to an answer so elegant that it became a staple of my own work and a foundational element of Growth River for well over a decade now. The story of how I came to it is worth sharing, since it highlights important distinctions. It all started out with the sides of a conference table.