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One of the hardest things I face as a developer is to get the number of billable hours right in the timesheet. Traditional office work always meant to be hours present in the office to be equivalent to the number of hours worked as there was a structure and flow to the work. It is unfortunate that the knowledge workers fall into the bucket of hours of work at the workplace as a measure of billable work.

Knowledge workers have to do a good deal of home work to stay up to date. Any task at hand they pick, will involve some amount of deep thinking and application of knowledge. Thinking can happen anytime and not necessarily at workplace. Hypnagogia has provided me some solutions for some pressing problem, it is also famous for discovering Benzene ring structure. If a scientist can benefit (eventually monetary) from that kind of discovery, then why not we bill the time we spend in thinking about the problem in hand while waiting at the traffic signal lights or having a shower.

In the book Pragmatic thinking and learning, the author mentions about L-mode and R-mode of the brain; there is an example of that here. What we usually end up billing as a knowledge worker is what is done by L-mode, but the many of the inputs comes from the R-mode of the brain. The bias of billing for the L-mode makes people spend a good deal of time with tools rather than thinking about the solution and constantly striving to update themselves. It leads into a vicious cycle of working too long without success if the task at hand requires deep knowledge and application, which leads to more hours billed without any work done.

We should look at work as a whole outcome than measuring it in terms of man hours or lines of code. In that way it provides the individuals the freedom to plan their day and deliver effectively at their job.

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Most of my school days the responsibility of learning something was always for the student, if we did not understand something or we are confused then it was so easy for the teacher to punish or give a bad rating. When I had to don the role of a trainer I decided that both the learner and the teacher are responsible for the task.

The first part of any learning is to avoid fear of failure. No one can succeed in the first attempt unless it is a gamble or the steps to success is just one or two steps. It is not just in learning, fear is present in all fields. I happened to read about Doug Dietz and his contribution to make children enjoy the hospital experience, children are given a pleasant experience to go through what might otherwise be a harrowing experience. The details about that has been captured here by Vivek Kemp. At this point the engineers and the medics did not say that we have the state of the art of the systems, we do not care if children like it or not; instead they went to the extent of making it a pleasure ride.

I related Doug Dietz’s experiment to the training world. The trainers as I have seen put immense efforts to prepare and deliver, this puts a narrow focus on the outcome and the pressure to learn and excel is transferred to the students. Most of the world’s lectures are boring, students wander off and people just sit through the lecture. Presentation tools have added to the misery where the documents get converted into slides which has led to the famous term “Death by Powerpoint”.

How can we guide someone to mastery?

Engineers at GE when they created the adventure for the kids, they literally tested the setup from a kid’s perspective. They knelt down to a child’s height and prepared the room at that eye level. Like that everyone who is trying to get something done or help someone achieve something, then it is mandatory that the style of delivery is prepared as per the receiver. The preparation should be such a way that there is mutual respect, clarity of content and should give an experience that will leave people wanting for more.

Image(s): FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Almost every office room meeting place has a table. Rooms of different sizes gets filled up with tables of comparable sizes barely leaving enough space for the chairs and some people to move around. Using the right tools for the right job is necessary, the same way the right meeting room setup is necessary for different types of meetings. A typical conference table usually creates a perception in the attendees that either there is a head of the table or sub consciously it is a Us vs Them debate. If a lot of collaboration is required in the gathering then the table in between the people does not help.

Anything in between people is a barrier, unless people are trained to overcome that. Tables are usually designed to fit the room such that the periphery is a usable space. A typical conference is room is bigger length wise, trying to focus on one side of the room where the presenter or the head of the table is. I have observed in many of the meetings when we need to have a huddle or a focussed discussion then most of the people leave their seats and crowd around a corner to put their ideas together and come with a common picture. Every person in the room has to shift to some other side leaving the comfort of their seats to get something done.

Increasingly we use workshop/brainstorm style meetings which requires frequent huddles and group interactions. By having a large almost square shaped room without tables to occupy the free space, we will be able to promote free movement of people. Also the square shape will not plant a thought in people’s mind that the conversation is unidirectional. The times I have tried this approach of having sessions in large rooms and easy to move furniture, I found good level of participation from everyone.

Table is definitely an important furniture but filling rooms entirely with a table for convenience will make people just too comfortable in their zones.

Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net