Would you rather think or obey?
A great irony of our tech industry is the way so many highly educated people spend our work lives. Despite technical and advanced degrees, we lay waste our powers— slaving over elaborate processes for the sake of appearance, enduring mandated meetings, and devoting endless hours asking permission just to get something done. Our human equipment, a laser-sharp but narrow mental bandwidth, prevents us from reflecting on the value of what we are habitually doing while we are doing it. The most our minds can muster while revising that PowerPoint is feeling annoyance rather than changing gears to reflect on the worth of the activity itself.
And given that much of this claptrap is tied to mandated goals, resistance seems futile. So much to do! No point to even bother thinking about it.
Thus are a lot of very smart people dumbed down, missing opportunities to help companies make or save money, our workdays clattering habits on a runaway train.
Why would companies hire “the best talent,” only to turn us into automata? I think it is because businesses have not reflected on it. “It’s the way we do things,” or “this is most efficient,” may be the best they can muster. Covert reasons might be “we want to keep control over those below us, even if it isn’t as good for the company” or even “if we’re at the top of the company we must be smarter. They don’t need to think much.”
This is unsettling, given the worry that most workers will be supplanted by robots in a few years. Absent the best part of the human mind, robots could probably do as well on worthless clerical activities, and one can only hope they are not conscious enough to be bored by it all.
What if all us highly educated people were allowed to think critically about what we are doing, theorize and pilot test alternatives that could save time, reduce costs and even open new opportunities for the company? I believe that this FLEX approach would lead to an explosion of innovation within companies. Allowing groups to experiment is key, as recounted in The Progress Principle. Autonomy is a huge motivator. In Drive, Dan Pink gives an entertaining reprise of the literature on motivation. Decades of research strongly suggest that self-direction is key to worker satisfaction. And boy is it missing in corporations.
Why is this? Think of the history of the family. It wasn’t too long ago that the best way to run a family was obviously through command and control from the top, i.e., the father. Over the past 75 years this idea has faded to the point that rigid control over children is seen as counterproductive. The workplace hasn’t caught up with the social sciences yet.
Until we start trusting decades of solid data, highly trained people on the lower rungs will be squandered, required to obey and obey and obey until we are so obedient that we get promoted and then get to tell those beneath us to obey and obey and obey.
If we’re lucky, in a decade or two this way of treating workers will seem as detrimental as the “obvious” notion that spanking children is the only sensible way to raise them.
?Connie Missimer 2016 https://criticalthinkingatwork.com