Don't just do something stand there

Reading Andrew McAfee's recent post on how there is a risk that the use of of Web 2.0 in business might be seen as time wasting reminded me of the following anecdote that I sometimes tell.

During my last workshop inside the BBC I noticed a manager sitting on the front row who looked uncomfortable the whole way through my presentation. He was fidgeting and looking uneasy right from the start and scowling at bits the others in the audience were enjoying the most. At the end he barely let me finish before he piled in and started criticizing what I had been saying.

"I could never trust my staff to use these sorts of tools", he said, "they would end up wasting all of their time".

To be honest I was a bit taken aback as people usually enjoy the workshops and some have been kind enough to call them inspirational. I could have deflected the challenge and diffused it but to be honest I realised that he represented one of the strongest forces of resistance to change in the workplace and I decided to tackle him head on.

The first thing I did was to ask if he thought his recruitment policy was working for him. If he couldn't trust his staff to make minute by minute decisions about how they spent their working days how on earth was he going to trust them to make bigger decisions on his behalf? He brushed this aside and restated that whatever his staff's judgement the sort of activity I had been describing was still a waste of time. To this I replied first that, contrary to his assumption, people took moments to glance at a forum or a blog and if by responding they answered a worthwhile question their answer could benefit thousands of others and save a lot of time and effort. Secondly I responded that people have always had all sorts of ways of wasting time available to them from staring out of the window to having a coffee and if they are truly wasting time then surely it was his job as a manager to deal with them and their under-performance?

He still wasn't happy with these responses so, as I was by now getting a bit irritated by him, I asked him straight out "So how do you spend your working day then?" to which he replied "I go to lots of meetings".

There was a burst of laughter from the other participants in the room and at this point he looked rather embarrassed. I said "So going to meetings where you are often not sure why you are there but your assistant has put it in the diary, spending an hour or so with a bunch of people who rarely agree something worthwhile, at best making a list of notes of actions to take, then moving on to the next meeting where you repeat the process until the end of the day when you go home just to return the next day to do much the same thing is "real" work!?"

It is important to remember that we shouldn't be comparing Enterprise 2.0 with some sort of utopia. There is a lot wrong with the workplace currently yet it is often not questioned to the same extent as proposed changes are. Andrew is right some current assumptions are very strongly held and won't go away over night. This has a lot to do with why I am currently reading The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber and the wonderful How to be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson.

Comments

[Matthew Rees]

Great story, I wish I had been there!

Now, having read your blog at work I'm off to "waste" more time having a coffee!

Matthew

[ditdotdat]

Come on, name names!

[Euan Semple]

Now that would be indiscrete!

Missing you on Flickr btw

[mark Earls]

Top post.

Do you know Pat Kane's anti-work thesis? http://theplayethic.typepad.com.

Sure you do.

Off now

[Euan Semple]

Yes I do know Pat's work and have heard him speak. Smart bloke.

[Lee White]

This is probably the one obstacle I run into the most when discussing e2.0 within the organization, and I think it is a real concern. Many people I work with are productive to the level of expectations of their superiors and they know how to function to produce at that level. Introducing a new process or a new way of thinking necessarily produces a "Non-productive" learning curve. People are afraid of this extra effort because it will (for the short term) impact their productivity. The question in my mind is, how can you convince them that the long term gain will ultimately exceed the short-term pain. I think this point identifies why an organic growth strategy is necessary to bring these new approached into an established enterprise. Find the few small groups that don't need convincing and let their results convince the doubters.

[Nigel]

Nicely put - I recently had a similar dialogue with the VP of smartsheet.com about the difficulties in getting his product adopted in our organisation, some people see the advantage and get plugging in straight away; while some need to see how other people are using it first.
The best strategy is always going to be to lower the threshold of engagement and as you say foster the early adopters.

PS - Euan, not too sure about Tom Hodgkinson and the whole 'Idler' ethos. I fell out with them after they were crowing about having 'thrashed the forces of capitalism' by beating a team from the Financial Times in a quiz show.
The guy on the Idler team who answered the most questions was a freelance cookery writer for the FT!! they failed to see the irony (I'm sure there's a moral here somewhere!).

[Euan Semple]

I actually think his latest one, How To Be Free, is a better book and indeed I would go so far as to say it made me think harder about more than things than any other book I have read for ages.

How To Be Idle is less focussed but still thought provoking.

IMHO there is such weight behind the assumed norms about what is or is not productive that anything which makes people think about them is a good thing.

If it is any comfort, and in total contrast, I am a big, big fan of David Allen's Getting Things Done!

[Gord]

I forgot to make a comment when you pulled out your hipster PDA last week.... I thought I recognized that GTD gear!

[Stefan]

Hilarious :-)