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February 16, 2007
Sheepwalking
From Seth's Blog: Sheepwalking
I define "sheepwalking" as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a braindead job and enough fear to keep them in line.
You've probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking.
The TSA 'screener' who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A 'customer service' rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars of TV time even though she knows it's not working--she does it because her boss told her to.
It's ironic but not surprising that in our age of increased reliance on new ideas, rapid change and innovation, sheepwalking is actually on the rise. That's because we can no longer rely on machines to do the brain-dead stuff.
We've mechanized what we could mechanize. What's left is to cost-reduce the manual labor that must be done by a human. So we write manuals and race to the bottom in our search for the cheapest possible labor. And it's not surprising that when we go to hire that labor, we search for people who have already been trained to be sheepish.
Interesting, but I think not inevitable. Sheepwalking is the end point of the Taylorist/Fordist era of "scientific management" where people are treated as parts of the machine. Others (managers, engineers, etc.) do the thinking for them.
But in the I-Cubed Economy, it is more and more important that the innovative and creative resources of workers are utilized. We used to call these "high-performance workplaces" (see my piece "Time to Get Serious About Workplace Change").
I also disagree that "we can no longer rely on machine to do the brain dead work." As Frank Levy has pointed out, if the job can be described in enough detail to be written down in a manual (a true brain-dead job), then it can either be automated or transferred offshore. Whether a company has brain dead jobs depends on how the workplace is designed. A well design workplace turns brain-dead in to brain-rich activities.
As I've argued before, the I-Cubed Economy is very different from the industrial economy's never ending quest for standardization and optimization of routine activities. Those companies who rely on sheepwalking will not survive. Nor should they.
However, we can not simply let the market take its course. The costs are too high and the outcome uncertain. We could just as easily end up in a race to the bottom as a journey to the peak. The public policy goal should be to help companies make the transition and ease the pain of the inevitable disruption. Expanding and transforming the Manufacturing Extension Partnership program is one example of what could be done. Tax credits for on-the-job worker training (to help keep they competitive rather than wait until they are unemployed) is another.
And there is more, much more. But first we need to get rid of our mind old industrial age mindset of workers as physical cogs in the machine and replace it with the view of workers as creative information contributors. Only then can we avoid sheepwalking.
Posted by Ken Jarboe at February 16, 2007 8:54 AM
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