Discussions may help people do a better work

Web 2.0 is about discussions. Enterprise 2.0 is about giving value to discussions. But people are paid to work and not to discuss, and when you say “discussion” you often the Taylor that sleeps into many manager’s mind.

Would it be possible to envisage that discussions can help people doing their job better ? Not at all. Everybody knows what he has to do. Once it’s completed, he hands over to someone else who does his job and so on, following a well defined process. Except “I’ve done my part, now it’s up to you” they have no reason to say anything else and any other discussion is a waste of time.

Sure ?

Last year, Louis Schweitzer opened the Pandora’s box, admitting that technical discussions were not enough, and than something more was needed.

Let me tell you something I saw a few years ago. Any similarity with existing people or scenes that take place in the office near yours is accidental, of course.

Take a 6 people team (it was a board) which suffers from lack of efficiency. Everybody does his job quite well but the final result is disappointing.

They understood, at their surprise, that the sum of all individual works of good quality may produce a bad quality final result. So they came to the conclusion that they didn’t organize the work as well as they thought, for them and probably for their teams too.

Issue : everyone’s job is rationalized in order no time is wasted in useless discussions and meetings. Is it still possible to improve things ?

Answer : perharps there’s too much optimization and you need to discuss more.

Reaction : we want efficiency, no discussions.

Then…

• You go to the shop around the corner and by what’s needed to build a kite. Paper, wooden sticks, glue, string…a simple goole search may help you to find what’s needed for a minimalist kite.

• Divide people into 3 groups of two.

• Ask each group de write a guide on “how to build a kite” with the materials at their disposal. Each group is satisfied with their own work..

• Then each group gives it guide to another group. Now ask he groups to build a kite according to the guide they were given. If you listent to their discussions you’ll understand they find their colleagues didn’t make a clear documentation, they find it hard to understand. Of course their own guide was better.

• Once the kite are built, each group gives it to the third group. Then everybody goes to the building’s parking or the nearest par and try to make them fly. In many cases you’ll hear “it doesn’t fly because it was not well assembled”.

Conclusion

• Everyone does his job well but, at the end, nothing work.

• When you pu everybody around a table in order to gather their impressions and know what should have been done to get better results they say : “we should have been able to explain, give feedback in order to improve things…we had to exchange instead of just passing instructions on”.

So :

• Technical information is key put conversations helps to use it.

• If we consider that each group is independant from the other, we could give good evaluations to each one although the final purpose, the only that matters, can’t be achieved.

Bertrand DUPERRIN
Bertrand DUPERRINhttps://www.duperrin.com/english
Head of People and Business Delivery @Emakina / Former consulting director / Crossroads of people, business and technology / Speaker / Compulsive traveler
Head of People and Business Delivery @Emakina / Former consulting director / Crossroads of people, business and technology / Speaker / Compulsive traveler
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