Today saw this talk at TED.com , it is called “Why work does not happen at work”

Hierarchy as solution to organizational problems

Basically it is critics on old and modern way of organization. Thing is that when someone works alone or in group from 2 to 5 they can manage to organize themselves more or less. But as number of people working in collaboration raises costs of managing collaboration raise too. I guess all of us know how it works… We need to start to manage our work, break it to smaller peaces, assign those puzzle parts to different workers, someone then should work bringing parts together and checking everything etc etc.

And we know how for last century various organization coped with it. Though basic ideas probably go far back be it Rome legions or other large collaborations. We humans start to make a hierarchy of management. Like there is Cesar who has legats, who have tribunes prefects etc etc. So we have small group that has manager, then there is manager higher that manages lower level managers etc etc. This kind of hierarchy allows to minimize organizational costs and inefficiencies, but not to remove them completely, and even add new organizational costs and inefficiencies like bureaucracy.

Here comes everybody

Few months ago I ordered some books from Amazon.com and wanted to cover them as I read them. But I was kind of slow with it :) Now I find this post cover things that intersect with one of them so it is a good time to mention it

This book by Clay Shirky covers a similar theme. Mostly it speaks about various sites, tools and phenomena where internet and tools built on it helped people to organize in situation it was not possible to organize before. Why? Because before organizing people on large scale in such cases without some management and organization was not possible while costs of management and organization were making such cases not  worthy to pursue.

Today with tools like flicker, tweeter, Wikipedia hurdles and price of large scale organization fall bringing new unexpected work models, content and media productions and various other human self organization without the organization. It is especial interesting in some cases where corporations, organizations or governments used this limitation before but now find themselves pressured but self organizing groups of shared interests.

Anyways I recommend this book to everyone who  is interested in such things. It will not teach you where and how to use aether hierarchical management or web tools to organize things but it will give and overview to how things start to change for some of the cases.

Why work does not happen at work

Back to ted video. In it Jason Fried tries to argue that hierarchical management is a wrong way to go. That costs we pay for organizing in such way often make things worse then better. We spend more time and resources on management levels, on communication with manager and planing, on various meetings and bureaucracy.

He mentions various things that you may notice yourself a lot in your work if you are working on large projects where people need to collaborate. People disturb you a lot, you take time to remember and concentrate at task again, at the end of the day you hardly remember what you did and probably feel you did not do much. As a result some people prefer to get to work early or late to have at least few hours when not one is there to disturb. Or some work on a go. Jason for examples mentions that office is not most popular place where work is done for many today(which I find hard to believe, guess he asks his freelancing clients which makes it biased) . He also seems to dislike managers and meetings saying that managers job is to disturb others from doing their work or that meetings talk about work and do not help at all on doing that work, just waste of time… He proposes things like ditching meetings if you can to see that you would do more work, not less. Or also proposing things like 4 hours of not talking and disturbing in other ways. Seem like ignorant and one sided stance, or probably just provocative unless he knows something we do not. That makes me curios to read book his company promote in the blog to see if there is something useful there.

Why we do not have a choice sometimes

Sadly I can’t agree with his stance. I wish I could but I can’t. Yes there are cases where using modern tools leads to job being done without much of management and organization. But there are not many cases  when people can work for such periods of time without need to synchronize their efforts with others. It would work for stable, predictable work where aims and goals of workers are more or less stable and everyone knows what and how to do. So everyone can sit down and work on it without bothering each other.

Now in my line of work there are many different elements that are made by different people that should work tightly together. Also aims are not stable and problems are solved as they are encountered. This is bad but some works are like that. Things change in outside environment weekly if not daily and you need to respond to changes quickly to get bigger benefits + there are tight deadlines sometimes that do not depend on you. You do not meet them? Then you did not did the job.

I guess you would like to know about examples. Well first that comes to my mind is that we for example have few different projects some of which use different librraries and code bases. But we make similarity products. Now worker from project A does something that was previously done in project B but same code base could not be used. By Jason idea person from project A does all the job himself from scratch probably using other code base as example. Worse case? He does all mistakes that were done in project B all over again spending time and resources or interprets some things in B code base differently and gets even new problems… In reality some workers from A and B will need at least disturb each other and at max do some meetings to discuss things. Honestly it seems to me that ditching meetings and not talking for 4 hours would make more bad then good here.

Then even if we take people in same project. Say server programmer and client programmer. Imagine both not talking for 4 hours… Result would be disaster… Each would build his own things without synchronizing with others efforts…

Or example of disastrous deadlines are seasons and celebrations. What’s point of releasing Christmas cookies after Christmas? Time have passed and release doe not make sense anymore. You were late. Well in my line of work we need to prepare content for various celebrations and events and not meeting those deadlines means we missed a revenue and clients.

Conclusions

I find it hard to buy Jason ideas from the start cuz I do not see them working i enviroment I work now. I hope it was possible but it would need some magical tools that would still take time to use and be similar disturbing. Problem is not management and disturbing but works that need people to collaborate often and synchronize their efforts. Clay in his book mentions that mangers hierarchies will not go the way of dinosaurs because there are new and old things that get transformed because of internet and tools. But there are things for which this would not work… But honestly I would have preferred to work ona kind of work where you are payed for amount of things done and can worker whenever and you want and in a way you want.

Also I find it interesting to check their books to see if there are some ideas I could use.