“The easy way out usually leads back in” – This is one of the eleven laws mentioned in the book ‘The Fifth Discpline’ by Peter Senge. I have observed this too many times at my work place where a solution was more of an evasive move, trying to avoid the problem or use a clever alternative which hits back at us when we least expect. Last weekend I was reading the newspaper about how cane toads where introduced in Australia to control the beetle population and the result of that after some decades. The people who were interested in controlling the beetle population had a narrow view of the Australian biodiversity and did not know the long term effects of introducing the cane toads. They introduced these toads from South America to Australia.
What were the results? The cane toads were not able to control the beetle population as the beetles lived at the top of the sugarcanes in the fields. The toads were not able to climb the cane to feed on them, instead the native reptile population went down drastically as they fed on these toads which had a poison sac in them killing the predators. Without the intended effects this move has resulted in altering the biodiversity of Australia at a noticeable scale. Our workplace is no different, simple tactical moves which seemed to be clever choices will result in a bigger problem often for people who succeed in the roles. The only way to not get into these types of traps is ‘Systems thinking’ and to remember that if there is an easy way out then we will usually end up back in.
As days progress, I get increasingly overwhelmed with the amount of catchup I need to do in terms of learning new things, it creates an imbalance between what we want to know and what we can do. What people do to bridge these gaps at work place is to create structured training programs to up skill people. Sugata Mitra explains in his ted talk how seemingly difficult things are grasped by people if we let the learning happen. This talk explains that people will find a way if there are enough knowledge resources available and curiosity generated at the right time.
The structured training programs barring a few are none other than comforters which provide a false sense of security. We build a training program and let people adapt to ‘get me trained & I will do what you ask’ mindset. Increasingly organisations are relying on self sufficient & self organising teams but the learning and development is still structured and top down push.
What is necessary for ‘learning to happen’?
Curiosity – People will learn at any cost if they want to know something.
Tools & Resources – Easy access means there is one less barrier.
Creative tension – Do not let people settle for the ‘status quo’.
Autonomy – Structured & classroom learnings are optimised for lesser load on the teacher, each individual is unique & should be allowes to pace their learnings.
Time & Environment to share – The more loaded we are, the more we tend to seek rest and if the environment is not conducive for sharing and collaboration then that impacts the speed at which knowledge can be acquired and shared in a group setting. It also creates peer pressure.
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea
In medical field there is a term called Sutton’s slip which is used when possibilities other than the obvious are not considered. Problems are everywhere and when we try to solve them we tend go for the obvious solution. When going through the 11 laws of fifth discipline by Peter Senge I inferred that there are more problems created through easy corrective actions one takes for the problem. If we focus on the obvious solutions then as per the ‘laws of fifth discipline’ things seem to get better and then becomes worse than it was ever before.
One example I could think of ‘where going for the obvious was a wrong choice’ was at my workplace. Our software development team’s velocity was in a constant decline. Velocity directly translated to the requirements getting implemented and clients always had a close watch on it. One of us in the team decided to include a metric ‘Cost per story point’ to help bring visibility into the cost associated with building a feature which in turn he believed will drive the team to be conscious of the output and take corrective actions much early on to reduce the cost. What followed was the inflation in the estimates, the team was using fibonacci series as the estimation scale. We had 1,2,3,5 as possible sizes for our stories, what we did not notice was that there were no new 1 point stories added to the backlog. Slowly inflation ate up the 1 point story and the two point story became the beginning size. Though it eventually led to a lower cost per story point, the value delivered was much lesser.
When you’ve got a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail
Novi's 