Do What You Love, Automate the Muda

"Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies."

— Albert Camus

As many of you know, while running Gray Hill Solutions I also had a few side Social Media clients.  Over the last few years, it has become clear to me that my real passions were always firmly routed in collaboration.

Attempts to express these passions in cognitive psychology, urban planning, technology planning and agile management have given me a lot to think about over the years.  But what has come back time and again to haunt me is, well, boredom and frustration.

I've been lucky enough to work with some of the best teams in any industry.  The sad thing is that they operate under corporate cultures that unwittingly destroy their morale.  Corporate cultures that usually mean well.  Corporate cultures that usually do most things right.

I love to work. Ask any of my friends. I'm not a workaholic.  I'm a playaholic and working is just plain fun for me. If I didn't have something to think about, some problem to solve, I would be less productive.

What always did me in was drudgery.  And what I've learned over the last few years is: 90% of all business drudgery is waste.  This drudgery can fit somewhere in the Japanese concepts of Muda, Mura and Muri.

Muda - An activity that adds no value to the product or organization

Mura - Spiritual discomfort

Muri - a system that is unreasonable or a burden

I was being buried in drudgery that my colleagues (perhaps rightly) saw as just part of their jobs and dealt with.  I would chafe and scrap around and refuse to do these things that the system was dictating for me to do.

This Muda, Mura, Muri waste-o-plex doesn't just congeal out of thin air.  There is usually something that someone needs from these actions.  It's just that these actions are boring, repetitive, and soul-killing. 

So when you go to do the fun stuff, you are still demoralized by the boring stuff.

As organizations grow, they come up with more boring stuff and distribute the fun stuff either evenly in very tiny chunks to a fun-starved workforce or in one large bulk to a lucky few who get to have fun often.

All this important information is important - but why not automate its collection and distribute its analysis? In my days as a consultant to government and large business, I've seen countless opportunities for data automation - both in the collection and the distribution.

Everyone loves this data.

No one wants to painstakingly type it out.

Rather than making people type it out, why not automate the collection, automate the analysis of it, and make sure all those people (those smart, expensive people) see its results immediately?  Turn them from data producers to data processors.

Think of it this way... would you give up your computers and go to typewriters?  Typewriters gave you the information, but didn't do anything with it.  That's what staff is doing when they write reports, when they pull numbers out of one machine and type them into another, when they do their time sheets, when they painstakingly create a spec they know will never be accurately fulfilled.

Most staff, like me, wants to come to work and do something - and it's usually not the mind numbing stuff.  You pay a lot for these people.  Their value massively increases when they are happy. 

So why engage them in tasks that don't provide value (Muda), destroy their spirit (Mura) and create a burden on productivity (Muri)?

Over the next few weeks, I'll be blogging about how the introduction of collaborative technologies (which include social media) into the workplace can streamline processes, provide rewarding performance measures and give team members the chance to be enthusiastic.

Remember: Zombies make bad employees.

Technorati Tags: muda, mura, muri, toyota way, agile management, social media, bureaucracy, performance measures, automated data collection, focused social media, management, cubes, office zombies

Comments

[nhodge@microsoft.com]

I *lived* this today.

Just wanna do things. Don't wanna read process documents.

The Borg is eatin' mah brains!

[Ben Tremblay]

Your last line and the Camus quote tied in directly with what I've been writing all afternoon / evening. Generally it's about how economic factors like rent are determined by complex functions that don't always reflect the state of the majority. (The gross manifestation is the growing disparity in wealth ... one cable-TV renovation show last week included the installation of /5/ big-screen TVs in the single family residence!) Specifically, I'm remembering the bus-culture of the 60s when we could pool our money to buy a new engine or a new amp for the band, and comparing it to this moment when nobody I know has the free time or cash to do a startup with me.

Earlier in the day I had included a quote in a LiveJournal discussion that, coincidentally, was also from Camus: "Don't be lucid and ironic. People will turn it against you saying, ''Ah-ha, you see? He isn't a nice person!''"

But what really gets me is the impact of folk opting in to zombie-hood ... a very real analog to BluePill in Matrix.

This is a bit of what I wrote (working off what I'd written to a friend who's suffering from severe fatigue:
"Is one of many reasons I opted to leave the career track that is; I refuse to do it to myself again. (One time, in a 60/hr-week situation, things got snarled before a major critical design review by the Feds ... I went 7 weeks with 2 days off. I finished that contract, but it learned me.)

Is why I'm relaxed and engaged and energetic and being driven into abjection by prevailing prices ...
... while my peers are exhausted and buried in debt.

They actually opt in to that.
I was there, once upon a time. Did it. Know it from the inside.
Opted out.
"Voluntary simplicity", is whott.
But now I'm an army of 1.

How do folk rationalize neurotic self-destruction? With neurotic sophistry, of course ... a no-brainer.
Which makes them impossible to communicate with.

In just this day I talked to 2 other online acquaintances who were both of them equally harried, if not quite exhausted.

I read a lot about co-working, and I used to read a lot about co-housing. I know from experience that both of these are very effective, very economical, and actually wholesome.
But I see neither of them actualized.

Something's amiss.

*blockquote disallowed ... so sad*

cheers
ben