What Empowerment? Enterprise 2.0 Meets Taylorism!
04 June 2010 Tweet One buzzword of Enterprise 2.0 is EMPOWERMENT. The reasoning goes that empowerment leads to ownership, motivation, creativity, learning & growth, and superior performance, and so on (insert other organization development buzzwords here!). Proponents of the Enterprise 2.0 movement tell us what we should do and why, vis-à-vis empowerment. But, when it comes to the “how” in the real-world, the guidance is a bit sketchy.
Here is what we face. We still use methods to manage collaborative efforts that go back to the command & control mindset of Taylorism, with task orientation and assignments. Sometimes, these tasks can be down to hourly or daily levels. Sophisticated tools exist and are in use today that allow for near real-time update and monitoring of progress.
What is happening in practice, as the promise of Enterprise 2.0 collides with the project management approaches of Taylorism’s command & control?
Let us look briefly at the meaning of empowerment and the origins of modern project management approaches.
According to Wikipedia, “Empowerment includes the following, or similar, capabilities:
- The ability to make decisions about personal/collective circumstances
- The ability to access information and resources for decision-making
- Ability to consider a range of options from which to choose (not just yes/no, either/or.)
- Ability to exercise assertiveness in collective decision making
- Having positive-thinking about the ability to make change
- Ability to learn and access skills for improving personal/collective circumstance.
- Ability to inform others’ perceptions though exchange, education and engagement.
- Involving in the growth process and changes that is never ending and self-initiated
- Increasing one's positive self-image and overcoming stigma
- Increasing one's ability in discreet thinking to sort out right and wrong”
This is quite an impressive list, indeed!
Now when it comes to project management, here is what we find in Wikipedia (adapted for this discussion).
“Two forefathers of project management are: i) Henry Gantt, of the Gantt chart fame, is called the father of planning and control techniques, and ii) Henri Fayol who created the 5 management functions which are the foundation of project and program management. Both Gantt and Fayol were students of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s theories of scientific management. His work is the forerunner to modern project management tools including work breakdown structure (WBS) and resource allocation.
Prior to the 1950s, projects were managed on an ad hoc basis using mostly Gantt Charts, and informal techniques and tools. At that time, two mathematical project-scheduling models were developed: i) The Critical Path Method (CPM), and ii) the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT).”
As you can see, the modern techniques find their origins in Taylorism, the very foundation of task-division and command & control for assembly lines. The collision between the capabilities that define empowerment and the command & control nature of project management techniques is evident. Well, you do not have to worry about the definitions and history of project management; just consider your experiences and have a look around! How did you manage or how were you managed?
I recognize that the extreme of empowerment is anarchy and the extreme of command & control is dictatorship. Neither extreme is true, nor should it be. Extremes lay out the boundaries for discussion and action. We will always find ourselves in this spectrum of extremes. So, the issue I am raising is not either-or, instead, whether we are making progress towards the promise of Enterprise 2.0 as it relates to empowerment.
Where do we go from here and, and more importantly, how?
Lokesh Datta
Reader Comments (8)
Yeah, good thoughts. Love the pm history. Good for a newbie like me especially. As I talk with companies it becomes increasingly apparent that sone have cultures ready for 2.0 and others would fall flat even with the best tools and strategy because it's not in the blood.
Thanks Ljseverson!
Hope you stay tuned, for I have a few posts coming on this topic.
Regards, Lokesh
Great article and I concur completely. What will change the "traditional organization leadership" is the success of the competition that is using a collaborative approach of "stakeholder relationship management (SRM(TM))", "stratified leadership" and "cross functional teams" to deal with the entire organizational operations, externally and internally.
Commenting on this post, Guy Benchimol, Technical writer and moderator of the discussion group Management Tools on Linkedin said,
“Empowering individuals on one hand, managing projects on the other hand is a good balance; but if you don't put something in the middle, the balance will lean in one direction or another that is the extremes you underlined.
This "something" is dialogue, conversation, net working, collaborative decision making and so on.
But it will work only if you have good leaders who are able to canalize discussions, help focussing on pertinent topics, remind the strategy and goals, enforce the culture and rules and obtain a consensus.
This implies a peculiar organization with team building and ad hoc committees. It is not an easy task!”
Great insight. It's interesting to see how enterprise 2.0 relates to much older things. You mentioned empowerment, but I also found many points of comparison with Deming's 14 points about quality.
Similarities are impressive. (http://www.duperrin.com/english/2009/07/14/enterprise-20-and-quality/)
Not sure about the extreme of empowerment being anarchy.
Check out Isaac Getz Study : Liberating Leadership http://wp.me/p58hh-Ha
The continual drive towards greater productivity and efficiency also reeks a bit of "scientific management" or "Taylorism". It's almost like the time and motion studies of yesteryear when every bit of work was sought to be squeezed from workers. The fact that collaboration 2.0 tools ease work pressure, and hence improve employee satisfaction should not be discounted as a valid goal.
Thanks for sharing this point, which we have also found in our organisational research work. We have studied a number of organisations and found that most follow some clear patterns in the way they organise and do things. Interesting is that most organisations run very distinctively in either of the two modes you mention above, "command and control" or an "ad-hoc" mode. Both are appropriate in some situations, but not very effective for achieving real innovation results.
There is a third mode, where people share common purpose, take on own responsibility, while observing and collaborating with others. Karl Weik has called this "Heedful interrelating", and there is a good paper about this in innovative companies: Dougherty, D. and Takacs, C. H. (2004). Team play: Heedful interrelating as the boundary for innovation. Long Range Planning, 37, 569-590.
When teams or departments work in this mode, it is a real productivity and innovation value booster.
Another observation we made in our research: Collaboration tools have implicit assumptions about the "mode" and provide functionality fitting to it. Most "Project Management"-Tools (MS Project, Daptive, @Task, etc.) are on the command and control side, while the general workspaces (Basecamp, Huddle, etc.) are on the ad-hoc management side. You have a really hard time if the organisational mode and the tool mode do not fit together. Problems of tool adoption are often linked to this.
However, to our knowledge, there is no tool that fits with "heedful interrelating", which is empowerment with coordination. We therefore developed with user companies an enterprise collaboration platform that takes exactly this mode as the paradigm - as well as does a number of other things quite differently to current platforms - fitting modern organisations much better. We are currently introducing it to the broader enterprise market (www.ve-a.com)