This week’s chapter of Why Limit WIP: We Are Drowning In Work opens with a quote from The Dalai Lama linking effective self-discipline with awareness of consequences. The chapter, titled Awareness, speaks to me of redemption. Awareness is a precursor to shedding helplessness and ignites the desire to act. I have spent a large part of my career participating, influencing, and/or leading change. Struggle is a common thread in nearly all of these efforts when entrenched leaders push back against ideas that bubble up from teams or other levels of the organization. Whether from fear or myriad other reasons, there are consequences for everyone involved. Learned helplessness, as noted in Chapter 7, or a dawning awareness that there are other possibilities creates an impetus for change. Whether change creates better processes, products, relationships, or changes in the workforce (that means people leaving) boils down to agency.
Being able to experiment and evaluate the results is a working definition of agency that I have found useful to apply as a change agent. If team and leaders are not allowed to evolve how they are working there can’t be any seachange within the organization. Conversations with colleagues have led me to believe that many (a great plurality) organizations allow a limited form of agency in which minor changes can be made but most changes need approval and then approvals of the approval. Whether this is a reflection of fear or entrenched organizational bureaucracy it is almost never codified as policy. I recently sat in on a company-wide meeting. The executive giving the briefing extolled how the organization embraced change and provided teams and leaders with the space to make stuff happen (they had a snappier catchphrase). After laying out the agency people had to drive change, they rattled off approximately three paragraphs of caveats without batting an eye. Pharmaceutical commercials have nothing on this presentation. Agency has to have reasonable limits, software teams should not be able to redirect all their effort to become professional bowlers, but agency that requires a law degree to leverage is not really agency.
The quote from the Dalai Lama opening the chapter has stayed with me all week. The quote establishes that we need to have self-discipline and the inner strength to understand the consequences of our behavior. When overwhelmed by out-of-control WIP, there is no time to introspect or retrospect so consequences become a surprise. While I am a big fan of happy surprises when WIP is out of control the surprises I encounter are rarely happy.
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Previous Entries
Week 1: Preface, Foreword, Introduction, and Logistics – https://bit.ly/3iDezbp
Week 2: Processing and Memory – https://bit.ly/3qYR4yg
Week 3: Completion – https://bit.ly/3usMiLm
Week 4: Multitasking – https://bit.ly/37hUh5z
Week 5: Context Switching – https://bit.ly/3K8KADF
Week 6: Creating An Economy – https://bit.ly/3F1XKkZ
Week 7: Healthy Constraints – https://bit.ly/3kM8xqh
Week 8: Focus – https://bit.ly/3PkE0hg
