The No Tool Zone

A colleague sent me another article on the BP oil spill and this one is about as alarming as anything I have read to date.  The article from AP is titled Workers Describe Failures on Oil Rig.  The article describes how a worker had to seek approval to hit the switch on the emergency disconnect system.  By the time approval was given the hydraulics were out.  You can’t make this stuff up.

We are talking about the epitome of command and control management.  Can you imagine standing on a burning platform calling for approval?  I can’t, but something made this individual perform in this way.  I can not blame the individual, he did what he was told to do.

I saw the same thing in my bank management consulting days where workers are monitored and inspected into compliance to rules about giving a $5 credit to a customer.  But it was bank management making the really big mistakes on bad loans or acquisitions of mortgage companies.  These are truly broken systems.

Don’t give me the BS empowerment thing I keep hearing.  Organizations have built these systems to fail if not now . . . eventually.  To compete in the new world we have to stop the insanity.

A.P. Sloan separated the decision-making from the work long ago.  We have continued this practice to the point common sense is compromised.  I can not imagine anything more important for a company to do then putting decision-making back with the work where context and knowledge exist.

Most decisions are not life threatening, but I would much rather have someone making the decision that knows the conditions on the ground than some manager without knowledge or (worse) some cost accountant.

Command and control has run its course.  Until organizations discover that improvement and innovation comes from rethinking the design and management of work we face more disasters, less profit and dysfunctional organizations.

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