Accidental Light

I picked up the following quote from JP’s post An open source essay worth reading which in turn extracted and extrapolated from the original piece What business can learn from open source.

The basic idea behind office hours is that if you can’t make people work, you can at least prevent them from having fun. If employees have to be in the building a certain number of hours a day, and are forbidden to do non-work things while there, then they must be working. In theory. In practice they spend a lot of their time in a no-man’s land, where they’re neither working nor having fun.

Absolutely. Indeed the whole essay is well worth reading for anyone interested in how organisations work. Maybe one more quote from many that could be chosen:

I had the misfortune to participate in what amounted to a controlled experiment to prove that. After Yahoo bought our startup I went to work for them. I was doing exactly the same work, except with bosses. And to my horror I started acting like a child. The situation pushed buttons I’d forgotten I had.

I have talked before about liberating the entropy in an organisation and how people have approached this but it is equally important to understand what one should not do. In a strict manager-employee relationship the manager tells the employee what to do, the employee does it and is then appraised and compensated commensurate to the success. In this relationship, which is in essence a parent-child relationship, one will find a number of things which should not be surprising but do surprise many people:

• The employee will stop thinking thus increasing the entropy of your organisation.
• In a parent-child type relationship the child will act as a child
• In a parent-child relationship the context of an instruction does not need to be based on conversation - without appropriate context an instruction will be executed badly
• In a parent-child relationship the child is not trusted to think outside of an instruction and is compensated for executing on the strict instruction. No goal can be expressed ever in a simple instruction as a simple instruction cannot cover execution possibilities under all possible scenarios.

The essay also goes on with some important observations about open source working bottom-up and organisations top-down. Bottom-up thinking only works if individuals are empowered (or forced in many instances) to think and empowered to act. An important point to note here is that an individual as well as empowerment will require protection to think and act for themselves as every action in an organisation is a risk.

Some of the best and most sticky ideas we have had in this organisation are ones that have emerged bottom-up. The trick is to notice the emergence of these things, track them and note their success or failure and to capture and promote the successful ones.