Brain Breach

The following entry is a summary of this amazing article, Engines of Democracy . This is exciting info, and a good follow up on the previous entry on Simplexity. You can read my drab summary of the article, or read the 12 pages yourself, which I highly recommend. I understand the ideas presented here aren’t turn-key solutions for every organization. It sure is interesting to think HOW these principles can be applied to my current and future companies.

• Just one floor manager for 170 employees
• Teams, averaging 16 people, create jet engines
• Three levels of techs, with clear pay grades
• Level 3’s can do any jet job
• Each task has clear directions, with photos of each step
• Interview process takes 8 hours:
  > They are given tasks, work with the team, and build a presentation
  > Team rates interviewee on 11 criteria, many involve teamwork
• They give each other feedback when needed. They don’t have resentment, or hide feelings
• Employees get creativity with the exact process of building engines
• They are trained on how to reach consensus, or live without getting their way:
  > they know if it doesn’t work out, the have a chance to change it later on
• Sharing skill is important, it allows the team to operate without you when you need time off
• Teams are really tribes: accountability, culture, training, loyalty
• Members periodically join councils to decide hr/discipline/rewards for other teams
• A team is responsible for themselves with things like cleanup and tool tracking
• Basic principles, from managers mouth:
  > Layerless organization
  > People paid according to skill
  > Everyone certified/trained by FAA
  > Tribal mentality
• Three types of decisions for the company
  > A decisions – The plant manager decides (She only makes 10-12 of those a year)
  > B decision – The plant manger decides with input from teams
  > C decision – Decision is made by employee consensus (most common type)
• Though they technically have only one boss for 170 employees, they see it as having 15 bosses. Their peers.
• Employees don’t think their job is making jet engines, but making them better

Simplexity is the prefect marriage of simple and complex.  It’s accomplished by creating many simple parts, that create a larger complex system. Miguel Cunha is gold, if you haven’t read him before. He has a fascinating, although rough draft, article on Simplexity. There are many parallels for business, software, and life in the idea of simplexity, but he focuses on Business. It’s worth a read if you can find the time, otherwise, here are my notes from his article

Ashby’s Law:
only complex organizing – rather than complicated organizations – provides enough complexity to cope with environmental turbulence.
basically means only complexity can cope with complexity

Unintentional Complexity

Complexity is the cumulative by-product of organizational changes, big and small, that over the years weave complications (often invisibly) into the way work is done. pg 7

It is fought with intentional simplicity. Jack Welch turned around GE with his simplification process.

Unintentional simplicity is a problem also. it encourages exploitation over exploration. pg 8

Loosely coupled organizations can better handle the unexpected. pg 17

Only the complex organizing provided by simple structures – rather than complicated organizations – is flexible enough to cope with environmental complexity. pg 18

Complexity, top-down hierarchy, overdeveloped systems and processes seem to turn workers into machines. A hive-mind mentality should foster creativity.

organizations need to create designs that favor alertness and capacity of response, triggered wherever the information is. pg 19

Although the behavior that emerges is complex, the rules that guide it are necessarily simple. In fact it is their simplicity that creates the freedom to behave in complicated adaptive, and surprising ways. pg 20

One of the potential results of deliberately simple organizing is the creation of a developed collective mind, or what Weick and Roberts (1993) described as heedful interrelating. The concept refers to a developed attentiveness and caring about the actions of the other organizational members, in such a way that individual know-how is made subservient to group processes. pg 22

Simple infrastructures may result in complex behaviors because they support and facilitate a number of processes that encourage rich and mindful interactions. pg 22

in his Mann Gulch study, which showed that training and specialization may actually hamper the variety of behavioral repertoire. Again: complexity may block learning and adaptation. pg 25

This read was particularly reassuring for me. It’s the collective intelligence of the company that can really make a great company, not just mine. That’s great! Now the leader’s role is to facilitate such an atmosphere.

Resources

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/28/ge.html
http://www.complexityandeducation.ualberta.ca/COMPLICITY1/pdfs/Complicity11b_Intro.pdf

Scott Barttell (Director of World wide sales operations at Adobe) offered a tour of their headquarters. Are you kidding! Sign me up! So a couple weeks back I got to make the trip. Impressive.

Adobe one of the best technical companies of this generation, and their thoughtfulness and expertise in meeting needs/wants certainly translates over to their headquarters. Certainly the three towers are lavish where it counts. These towers host 3,000 well trained employees, and seem fit for them. Interesting the office spaces are humble. I signed a 3 page NDA twice about not giving away the Adobe secrets, or something, so, I hope I am not breaking that!

Lunch was great. There were a dozen gourmet chefs lined up waiting for our lunch time commands. It was fantastic! All the meals were $5-$9. The grass was beautifully trimmed, the seats comfy, the glass sparkling. Such thoughtfulness and good process management goes into all this, it’s amazing.

Well, I could go on, but I think you understand how impressed I was. I am inspired to care about the little things in the same way they did. It helps you recognize the big things!

I love good blogs, and important indicator for me is blog’s insight. Good information is important, but good insight is the ability to communicate the information in a different and compelling way. Insight is the one or two sentences you read the whole book for. One blog that has good insight is YoungEntrepreneur .

This blog reminds me of my previous post, “hire slow, fire fast”. Finding good blogs is similar to finding good employees in that you can find good blogs by reading good blogs, and you always have to fire, or remove the lowest 10%. I guess the parallels stop there.

YoungEntrepreneur is worth the reading just for their Modeling Masters section alone. In this section you get small nuggets of entrepreneurial gold from the masters of business. From Warren Buffet, “The business schools reward difficult complex behavior more than simple behavior, but simple behavior is more effective.” From John H. Johnson “Dream small dreams. If you make them too big, you get overwhelmed and you don’t do anything.”. Tasty, I know! Read the Modeling Masters section alone and see if you aren’t locked on the screen screen for 30 minutes.

I happen to be a young entrepreneur, and they really pegged me good as their target audience. In my opinion, this is a much more useful site, in my current stage, than many other highly touted ramblings.

Thanks for the blog YongEntrepreunuers, and keep the insight coming. Oh, and thanks for not posting about iPhones.