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Saturday, May 15, 2004
When I was in college I worked for a time in a factory. It was a brutal place: dangerous machinery poorly maintained, seriously toxic chemicals everywhere, a temperature that rarely fell below triple digits. But the worst thing about it was how management perceived those of us out on the floor as recalcitrant and utterly fungible widgets whose humanity, such as they were willing to acknowledge it, existed only as an impediment to their wishes.
Well, as we were treated, so we behaved. The line I was on made steering wheels. Most of the time we did the best job we could under the circumstances. But from time to time, when things just got too much, one of the guys would break a machine on the line in a way that, to the engineer who would scurry out from his air-conditioned lab to fix it, was indistinguishable from the regular run of bad luck the machine was subject to. And so the line would be down for 15 or 20 minutes, while we sat in the trash-strewn break area at the center of the work floor or went into the (slightly) cooler summer night outside the corregated metal walls of the building and just took a little time to be ourselves - shoot the shit, grab a smoke, take a break.
The point, I suppose, is that this guy was mechanically talented, had a real knack for the machines. But the only way the system could incorporate his talent was as resistence. His demonstrable creative energy could only be made manifest in the productive flow through his ability to cleverly gum up the works. The company's refusal to understand him (and all of us) as actual human resources to be acknowledged and used, rather than impediments to be worked around, almost guarenteed that we would, in the end, be impediments.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately because of my current experience working at The Large Corporation. The working conditions there are much less oppressive, of course, and the pay is definitely better, but there remains a sense that the enterprise sees us as, at best, bad children who need to be disciplined rather than as individually creative sources of potential value to the larger project.
Yesterday my department went through a corporate evaluation process. The significance of the endeavor for which we were evaluated can be debated, but I want to bracket that for the moment. What I want to think about is the way the process was implemented. The entire thing was presented as something we, given who we obviously are, were likely to fail, unless we were shaped up and brought into line. Key in that was the threat that our failure would "go on our records", the same kind of records, apparently, that our grade school teachers used to threaten would be used to our future, undefined detriment if we didn't do what they wanted us to right now. It was the threat of that indeterminate punishment that was used to motivate us to learn the dance steps we needed to get through the process, rather than an understanding of how those very steps might be of value to us, as we learned to incorporate them into our actual contributions to the work at hand. "Don't question the process," we were told. "Answer only the questions you are asked," as if we were guilty defendants being prepared by our lawyers for cross-examination. "Offer nothing beyond that."
Which, in the end, is what such a process generally teaches you to do. Offer nothing beyond what you are, strictly speaking, required to do. And the problem with that is not only that all sorts of good, useful information is lost, it's that, as my experience in the factory taught me, human creativity, offering more than what is required, will come out, whether it's sought or not. If it isn't given a productive channel, it will emerge as resistence. People need to feel invested in what they are doing. If everything about the system tells people that their input is of no value, they will learn to have a different *kind* of input - honing their sense of what they can get away with, for example, rather than what value they can add, just so they can have some sense that this endeavor that takes up huge amounts of their time and energy somehow belongs to them. If a company can't figure how to benefit from that ineluctable quality of human beings, it will end up, I think, being actively damaged by the results. And in a world where competitive edges are razor thin to begin with, that might end up being too high a price to pay.
posted by jeev |
1:30 PM |
 
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
For the tot who has everything:
A cuddly ebola virus!
posted by jeev |
7:08 PM |
Monday, May 10, 2004
Because I am too tired to read anything, a pretty picture:
Also excellent chocolate.
posted by jeev |
4:37 PM |
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