ECOLOGY, ECONOMICS, ERGONOMICS AND CULTURE!

ECOLOGY, ECONOMICS, ERGONOMICS AND CULTURE!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 7, 2010

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BB and I were having a discussion the other night. She was talking about renovations being made in the school where she is the business manager, tearing down walls, replacing them with floor-to-ceiling glass walls and opening up the classroom to uninterrupted transparent space where teachers and students have no barriers between them. Some of the older teachers are having trouble with the concept, which is understandable.

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I can relate to the teachers' difficulty with this, BB said, as I worked from a cubicle in accounting at Honeywell. You had a private office with a secretary because you were an executive.

Honey, at Clearwater I was designated a management and organizational development psychologist, not an executive. That said it is true I have always had my own office.

Well, I’ve never had that.

I know. But you do now. Can you imagine doing the multitasks you do operating out of a bullpen? You have your own secretary, direct reports and can come and go as you please.

Is that why I work such long hours?

The difference, my dear, is you are committed to ends and don't sweat the small stuff such as the many hours required. You are qualitatively not quantitatively driven. I have watched you grow, find your niche, and make a difference. Yet, you’ve not lost your touch for relating to others.

Jim, where is this going? I get my work done because I have an office?

No not necessarily.

Then what?

I’m not really sure. I was just thinking about the challenge and opportunity you have at your school, and how it translates in a broader sense.

Is this going to take a long time because I have to get some sleep?

Please bear with me. There were a thousand engineers at Honeywell when I was there. Each of them had a cubicle. Chief engineers across this ten-acre campus had private offices. The two thousand professionals that supported these engineers also had cubicles. Their managers had private offices.

Meaning?

I’m not sure. It represents a dichotomy, a vertical and horizontal separation. I don’t think I could have functioned in a cubicle.

Why is that?

For one, I’m a private person. Even as a chemist, I worked best alone. For another, I have been criticized for always having my door shut.

You didn’t believe in an open door policy?

Having your door open has little to do with being open, I assure you. People could come anytime night or day and I would hear them out, and I would stay as long as they liked.

But you were a psychologist!

Only one part of my career, but I've acted much the same in other parts as well.

I’ll bet you even had a private room in the dorm at university.

As a matter of fact, I did.

And you say you were a poor boy.

I was but I always worked a way to acquire a private room.

What was the benefit to that?

It was the best way for me to function, as you should know.

I should know?

Yes, you should. I wrote WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990) mainly while we were in Brussels, Belgium working for Honeywell Europe. You did the secondary research, collating and classifying references not to mention typing as I walked about my study dictating the book, and then editing the final draft. It gave the book spontaneity and freshness I’ve not been able to duplicate. Come to think of it, ever since I was a kid, I’ve always had a study separate from everyone else.

You wrote about it IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003).

Yes, it was the chicken coop at the back of our house that I converted into a study.

So, you treated me like a secretary.

No, that’s not fair. I treated you as a collaborator. However, I did dictate a book to my secretary when I was living in South Africa. It was called SALES TRAINING & TECHNICAL DEVELOPMENT (1968). She was not a collaborator.

So, you’ve always had someone to assist you.

Not true, as you know, once we were back in the States, and you went on to your own career, I had to do my own research, and all the rest, and my writing has suffered for the lack of your participation. I’m mainly an idea guy and not all that proficient in the editing department, as you well know. You were superb!

Flattery will get you nowhere. Jim I need to get some sleep.

It is not meant as flattery. Writing takes a lot of energy something I have in short supply.

But you’ve always written. You’ll write until you die.

I suppose that’s true. I am an idea guy who writes.

You’re telling me all this because?

I’m trying to understand what is the ideal situation for people to be creative.

And you think it is a private office?

No, it worked for me, but I’m not sure about others. In the early 1980s, I spent nearly a month at Charles Stark Draper Laboratories (CSDL) of MIT working with engineers and scientists who designed the ring laser gyros produced at Honeywell Avionics (Clearwater, Florida). They all had private offices and arrogance to match.

Like someone else I know.

Perhaps. In any case, I never saw a place of work so designed to discourage collaboration. CSDL was housed in twin circular towers connected by a bridge. Engineers and scientists had offices around the periphery of that circular space. To make matters worse there was a discrete pecking order: physicists, mathematicians, systems analysts, electrical engineers, chemical engineers, mechanical engineers, physical chemists, chemists down to technicians.

Your point?

They didn’t communicate outside their disciplines. For example, I was talking to a physical chemist who had an office next door to a biochemist. We discussed the design-production problem between Cambridge and Clearwater. The scientist next door was not in, so I asked, how does your neighbor feel? I have no idea, he said, I haven’t spoken to him in years. Why, I asked. He’s a biochemist, he answered, he doesn’t even belong here.

How juvenile.

Well, I found this mindset repeated throughout CSDL. Ergonomically, people were situated in these two circular towers according to technological status. Small wonder they hardly communicated with each other.

But why were you there?

The managing director at CSDL was exasperated. He had read a paper of mine given at the National Conference of the Institute of Printed Circuits in Dallas, Texas (October 1981) on “Motivation Through Participative Management.” He met with me and asked my management to allow me to come to MIT and work with his people.

So you were there to save them from themselves.

You know I don’t work that way. I first interviewed the managers and engineers at Clearwater to get their sense of the design-production problem. Then I happened on a report written by a product assurance engineer who claimed production at Clearwater was generating $5 million worth the scrap in an effort to produce the gyro for the Navy. Since it was a Department of Defense contract and a cost-plus program, no one gave it much attention. He did and nearly lost his job for the effort. I wrote a long piece on this in the AQP Journal (July/August 1999), and then included the study in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007), calling the Clearwater-Cambridge separation, "A Bridge too Far.” Don’t you remember?

When do I have time to read all your stuff? Please, give me the short version so I can go to sleep.

For starters, I put together a book of my articles published by Honeywell calling it TEAMING: PRODUCTIVITY THROUGH COOPERATION (1983).

Jim! I mean it. I've got to get some sleep!

I mention this for background. I wanted something to engage this group. Management assembled some thirty scientists and engineers into the conference room in a circular fashion. Predictably, they started chipping away at me from the first. One said, why are you here, another, who invited you? I listened, and finally said, “You did,” explaining the failure of their designs to be producible. I felt it was a bridge too far, more than 1,000 miles between the two critical phases. I must add, at this point, that I did not know it was a bridge too far between towers and disciplines. You want the short version, okay. I handed out my book, then counted them out “one-two-three-four-five,” to separate those sitting together, and called them “teams.” I gave them the assignment to read the book, and to return the next day. Having read the book, they had a sense of how a team works. I then had them work in teams on the design-production snafu, reassembled them in a group and discussed aspects of the book and its relevance to the team building. We did this for days. Then I had each team control a session ensconced in the middle of the circular assembly with discussions following each presentation.

Like a play?

I suppose, or a play within a play.

And it worked?

Indeed. Had I outlined this approach to my management it would have been deemed absurd. And it was. But what is more childish than bias, and what better way to expose it than to put it on display? I couldn’t compete with their brilliance but I could redirect it away from their collective hubris, and I did.

So, you knew exactly what you were going to do before you got there.

No, not at all. Once the managing director introduced me, I could tell nobody wanted me to be there. I could feel what I once felt when I was an athlete when somebody new came on board. Show me something new! Well, I didn’t have anything new, did I? My book was meant as an icebreaker as was dividing them up into teams of multiple disciplines, away from comfortable biases. To a person they claimed the design phase was perfection and that production problems were due to the incompetence of Clearwater.

How did you answer that?

I didn't. I couldn’t could I? I was not competent to make that determination nor could I accept the perfection of the gyro design to which they alluded.

So, you had a stalemate?

Not necessarily. You see I had a secret weapon.

Really!

Well, maybe not a secret weapon, but I knew they were all trained in deductive reasoning, quantitative or vertical thinking, and unlikely to integrate this thinking into inductive reasoning, qualitative or horizontal thinking. As a result, they were naked and vulnerable to my synthetic subjective climate.

Translate that into English.

Deduction is the process of reasoning from the general to the particular. It is used in the Scientific Method where specific hypothesis are derived from broader theoretical principles. Induction, on the other hand, is the process of reasoning from the particular to the general. We are all basically inductive thinkers in that we come to hold certain things to be true based upon our experience.

Give me an example of deduction.

We like to watch Sherlock Holmes’s mysteries on TV, right? Well, he meets a stranger and tells Watson precisely who the stranger is by his deductive thinking process. I’ve already described inductive thinking. Deductive thinking is scientific, critical and vertical. Inductive thinking is subjective, creative and horizontal. Deductive thinking is hindsight thinking or hierarchical thinking. Inductive thinking is foresight thinking or horizontal thinking. My job was to get these people beyond these limitations to see Clearwater as an indispensable partner in this enterprise.

And I suppose you did.

No, they did. They worked out that a delegation of engineers should go to Clearwater to see what was the problem with the production of their design, and have Clearwater engineers come up to MIT to see how the design was created to better understand how it could be modified to be more successfully produced.

So everyone was happy ever after.

I don’t know about that, but the bridge was narrowed between Cambridge and Clearwater, and scrap was reduced substantially.

How about the bridge between the towers?

That was another problem. You don’t change cultures. Cultures see the necessity for change and act accordingly. CSDL management saw the problem a manpower one, and not a management problem. The irony is that vertical management and decision-making at both CSDL and Clearwater contributed to the problem. That product assurance engineer nearly lost his job for identifying the $5 million of scrap being generated. Vertical-horizontal integration of technology and management remains the challenge.

You still haven’t answered the question of the ideal work environment.

Oh, that! I’m not sure. I don’t know if anyone is. Given the territorial imperatives of groups, that is a tough one. It might be useful to create cubicles in a circular pattern open in the center with workers able to spin their chairs around to ask someone in the circle a question. Moreover, the arrangement should be no more than five and preferably four individuals in a cubicle grouping. But that is just a thought. I’m surprised you’re still with me.

I’m wide a wake now. I think I’ll read for a while.

Me, too!

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