I challenge myself each day to hearing something different.  Sometimes this is about education, liberals, conservatives, tree huggers or many other opinions and topics that counter my perspective.  For me, this develops new perspectives on problems and issues that service organizations face.  Even if the topic is distasteful and challenges my core values.

Scientific management theory has long driven our education, management thinking and our design of work.  The plight of Call Center Cindy in a government agency still haunts me.  Too many service organizations have killed innovation and destroyed hopes for change (that is improvement) by the organizations we have built.

Students are trained to do well on tests and workers are trained to comply with scripts, audits, monitoring, entrapping technology, and procedures.  Then the question is asked “why can’t we get workers to change?”  Because the system has built droids that learn to comply and not think.

The sad news is that this thinking is making us less competitive.  We have a few people making decisions at the top based on information from financials and reports.   This gives executives little context to make decisions and to make better ones they need the help of those that understand the work that pleases customers.

The gap organizations have built between the top floor and the front-line may only be an elevator ride, but they may as well be in different continents with different languages.  Service organizations have coffee with the boss days, Undercover Boss programs on TV, summer picnics and other activities to bridge the gap.  But when push comes to shove . . . manager’s manager and worker’s work.

Executives need a new perspective when making decisions.  This perspective needs to be from understanding the work and how customers view the performance against their purpose (or what matters to them).  This act only turns front-line workers from droids to important sources of information to drive revenue and reduce costs.

Together a combination of executives, managers and workers can look at their systems and perform check on their system.  This will help all to understand customer purpose, core end-to-end processes, capability and the systems conditions that exist that help us understand why the system behaves that way.  All focused on a common purpose and not the type of office or which function you work in.

Droids armed with customer purpose (and customer measures derived from purpose)  become innovative juggernauts.  Executives can clear paths for innovation as workers experiment with method to achieve customer purpose.  Roles may change, but executives and managers will replace conformance and rules with innovation.

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/TriBabbitt or LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.