The No Tool Zone

My UK Vanguard counterparts have come across new method in education, something you like to see in these days of testing, standards and targets ( especially Deliverology).  The US has built such a bureaucracy in the Department of Education.  Established under President Jimmy Carter this department and all the state departments have grown into behemoths.

The only real value that is being added is in the classroom.  We have created all these non-value-adding education departments that have done so little to improve education.  Instead they create standards and targets for schools for things like graduation rates and mandatory school days holding schools and teachers accountable for the results. 

Testing students, targets and new standards do not change methods for learning.  Instead they create a defacto purpose where the game is to hit the target.  The State of Indiana’s Department of Education wants a 90% graduation rate as a target, but by what method?  If the jobs of teachers and administrators is at stake they will find a way to graduate 90% even if that  means Johnny can’t read.

In the Telegraph article, Revealed: new teaching methods that are producing dramatic results we finally have someone experimenting with method to improve education.  A relief from the status quo.  Finding better ways to teach requires experimentation and may even compromise the standards, testing and targets crowd.

The spaced learning outlined in the article is something different.  Is it the only answer to better education?  No.  Looking for better ways should be part of a teachers job and to try things that have promise a staple of education.

The question becomes how do we get more experimentation and less interference, we could get rid of them and give the money to teachers to experiment with method.  That is $53 billion dollars for the teaching profession and learning new methods for learning and/or deficit reduction.

The future of education is in the classroom, not in the education departments.  This is where the value work is and where experimentation with method is done.

Leave me a comment. . . share your opinion!  Click on comments below.

Make the new decade a profitable and rewarding one, start a new path here.  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about how to get started at tripp@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

My good friend David Joyce brought up an old post on IT with the title of this post.  David has a blog he started in April, 2009 titled Lean and Kanban and really has become a journey of applying systems thinking to software development and support.  Now, if I can just get David to change the name of his blog.

In my original post Innovation without Technology where I posed the question “If IT can, should it?” I called out those that use technology as a panacea for all the ills of service business . . . which is most people.  Calls for “Let’s automate the process” and  “Our processes are too paper-based or too manual” ring through many service companies.  These assumptions are costly.

 While doing bank management consulting I started to discover how badly IT was broken.  In small and mid-sized banks, there is a reliance on outside help for software development.  But these vendors were ill-equipped to help these banks.  Software vendors had ready made packages full of best practices, IVRs and other entrapping technology to achieve economies of scale.

The economy of scale proposition was attractive as they got software cheap or so they thought.  As with many other posts I have written, reducing costs always increases them.  Small and mid-sized banks cannot compete on scale, they must compete on flow (economies of flow). 

The flow is the ticket to overcome the scale advantage of big banks.  Just ask the Japanese how they were able to compete with and beat the US with few resources and a huge disadvantage in scale.  The answer, of course, is flow.

IT companies can gain a considerable advantage using systems thinking as David Joyce discovered.  Banks, governments and many other service organizations would gain greatly from software vendors that could grasp these concepts.  The problem is the thinking and system design that gets in the way.

My experience with software vendors in banking and government is not impressive.  The financials and structure get in the way.  Financial targets breed schedules and project plans and the game becomes hitting the targets and timelines . . . and managing the scope through contracts and change orders.  These things are all waste and when working with a software vendor beware the snake oil.

Before IT hits you for another expensive proposal – STOP!  The design of the work needs to be looked at first.  What is the work without technology?  What is the customer purpose?  Designing a system against customer purpose will save on your IT spend.

If you are looking to save on your IT spend, it will take a different approach than what software vendors are pushing.

Leave me a comment. . . share your opinion!  Click on comments below.

Make the new decade a profitable and rewarding one, start a new path here.  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about how to get started at tripp@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

World history is full of change and most of it has come from war or disease.  The coercive approach is certainly more direct and can yield results (submission), but uneasiness and resentment soon led to the next revolution.  Which leads us to more civilized times . . . of course a few hundred years from now they may not say that.

Organization change management is a difficult thing for many organizations.  Management articles and books abound about how to implement change in organizations.  The common denominator in many of them are that the workers need to change and management doesn’t.

Too often I hear executives and managers say “We just can’t get our workers to change.”  Really, because I rarely find that to be the problem.  The problem is that most change is done command and control style.

Executives come up with ideas from the reports and anecdotal evidence and build plans (strategic, project, risk management, etc.).  Top-down they are implemented and when workers start to see the change the resistance begins.  What positive culture there was collapses.

I find two primary reasons for the resistance:

1. The change is not an improvement.
2. Workers were beaten into submission for the last change and the new revolution begins to get compliance for this change.

The workers sometimes participate in these plans for change, but let’s be honest the manager makes the decision.  Change may come without death, but it just feels that way for the worker.  If you want to make change in the command and control world, you need to have power.

Two things are important for a systems thinking approach:

1. Organizations look at change outside-in (vs. top-down)
2. Decision-making is made with the work

The command and control nature of organizations prevents this from happening.  We have built whole organizations of strategic planners, project managers, marketers, etc. into our structure to implement what the all-seeing and crystal ball-reading executives and managers want.  The result is increased costs and workers wondering what brilliant idea is being force fed to them now.

A simple proposition to look at the organization from a customer perspective and put decision-making with the work meets with cheers from the workers and managers saying “Who? Me? Change . . . but I make all the decisions.”  Now whose cheese just got moved?

The approach is foreign to most managers, but I find that the results are far better and certainly less costly (that is if you can move the real dead weight from paper pushers and hall monitors to value-adders).  Worker engagement means decisions made with them and not to them.  Otherwise, how do managers make a worker accountable for decisions they made?

Change that is improvement needs to be emergent from understanding the context of the work and its interaction with customers.  You can only get this knowledge from the points of transaction where your customers do business.  This isn’t a “everybody hold hands and sing campfire songs” exercise, real learning about customer purpose needs to be achieved.

The result is predictable . . . experimentation with method against customer purpose will lead to improvement.  But managers must change the way they change.

Leave me a comment. . . share your opinion!  Click on comments below.

Make the new decade a profitable and rewarding one, start a new path here.  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about how to get started at tripp@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.