Empowerment: Owning problems, and NOT merely tasks!

One buzzword of Enterprise 2.0 is empowerment. Empowerment leads to motivation, creativity, ownership, learning & growth and superior performance! In What Empowerment? Enterprise 2.0 Meets Taylorism!, we highlighted the current challenges.

Challenge: We still use methods/approaches 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 that allow for near real-time monitoring of progress.

What if we could …

• Break-down the business problem/challenge into sub-problems, to whatever level appropriate
• Maintain and highlight inherent dependencies (precedence) of sub-problems; that is, the order in which they should be solved
• Highlight the expertise needed to solve sub-problems and thus identify any skills/capabilities gaps
• Translate collection of sub-problems into a “Solution Plan” (similar to a Project Plan)
• Develop contingency plans for inherently visible dependencies
• Have collaborators own sub-problems, for which they easily and clearly understand the impact and contribution of their efforts in the context of the larger business challenge
• Effectively communicate the progress in terms of solution progress, instead of task status
• Create an organization of THINKERS (problem-solvers), not task-performers

Eventually, tasks need to be performed of course, but now the tasks would be in the context of a sub-problem, which is defined in the larger context of the business challenge.

What if we could actually do “What if we could …”? Is it even possible? It is, indeed! Strategic Mind ArtSM (SMArt) is a collaborative problem-solving technique that has the “What if we could …” attributes. We shall introduce this approach in the next few posts.

Would this “What if we could …” outline lead to empowerment, which in turn would lead to motivation, creativity, ownership, learning & growth and superior performance? What about more effective collaboration?

Update on 25 December 2010 by Lokesh Datta

See Related Posts:

• The What and Why of Enterprise 2.0
• What Empowerment? Enterprise 2.0 Meets Taylorism!
• Effective Collaboration Is More than Deliverables
• Organizational Challenges