Scroll down for earlier posts …..
SOME BLUE SKY THINKING TO DEAL WITH TODAY’S OLD-FASHIONED WORKPLACE
By Arnold Kransdorff, aka Mr Corporate Amnesia
Picture the pre-Covid-19 workplace. Workers, including professionals and senior decision-makers, were changing their employer every five years on average, requiring businesses and other employing organisations to rehire and induct continuously high numbers of employees, at least in the UK. In the US, staff turnover was even higher. Such short-tenure employment, which was widely reducing individuals’ higher productivity periods for their employers, was already providing a continuous drag on efficient output.
Now, just one year later alongside Covid-19, there’s a huge number of employees working from home. Some are calling them hybrid or furlough workers, all of whom are now even more disconnected from their employers and colleagues. Linked to a corporate base by wi-fi, their new relationship with their employer is disjointed, more confusing and without much hands-on support from their bosses or colleagues. Individuals are now their own supervisor having to make many of their own unfamiliar work decisions. Importantly, there is little or no main office connection, no shared cultural signposts on which to depend and no toe-to-toe leadership or feedback. Many employees are on their own for the very first time. With independence, the environment might seem sweet to some but corporately and personally, isolation is the new reality and the reinforcement of a collegial business ethos is almost as rare as hens’ teeth.
What’s happened to home workers is that employee remoteness is removing the intimacy of the employers’ cultural environment and the awareness of corporate practice, both staples of co-operative progress. This, in turn, impacts the organic journey that depends on building one experience on another. In truth, the mainstay of evolvement has disengaged itself, even for those short termers who don’t end up working away. Both types of individuals are working with just their acquired skills and prior experiences – and, crucially, NOT alongside their current employers’ special and hard-won knowledge and cultural environment. Flexible working and Covid-19 are transforming almost everything by helping employers to largely lose their unique raison d’être. In effect, both employers and employees are working with only a half deck of cards.
However change comes about, uninitiated employees still have to be relatable to their new employer’s pertinent resident differences and particularly their special circumstances. This is usually attempted through piecemeal induction/onboarding that takes up around a fifth of employees’ remaining tenure – and often more – to become fully productive. As it is, it doesn’t mean that because workers are more mobile or remote, an employers’ past or organisational memory (OM) is any less important, or even irretrievable.
Just replace what’s lost
So, what to do? Or to put it better, how to continue to take advantage of being more fully incremental? Instead of having to completely reinvent the workplace, how can an employer make continuous what has become discontinuous – and then provide an organic way of sustaining that change? In management speak it’s called experiential learning (EL), a much-overlooked way of more effectively learning from experience in today’s highly flexible labour market, where the loss of established practice through departures has given our sophisticated workplaces its own pandemic of repeated mistakes, re-invented wheels and other unlearned lessons. For proof, the vaccines rollout notwithstanding, just refer to Covid’s stumbling beginnings that has put the UK’s pandemic deaths and costs at the bottom of the G7 barrel. And where conventional decision making hasn’t yet tried to deal with the departed detail of short-tenure’s exited knowledge and experience.
The most powerful way of doing this is to provide that which both home and flexible working removes.
Important employees can be provided with professionally constructed and detailed oral debriefings of their departing predecessors that go way beyond conventional exit interviews, typically constructed to try and learn why employees leave. For the more specialist approach, the required debriefing skills have generally been unskilled or outsourced but because of the private and intimate nature of corporate debriefing, a new Toolkit is available for employers to train up suitable in-house individuals to carry out the debriefings themselves (http://www.mrcorporateamnesia.com/). It’s backed up with a mentoring service.
To accommodate remote working, such evidence could be collected, for example, after 12 months in the first instance or when all short tenure employees are replaced. Delivered to replacements via audio, video or transcript, continuity could then be efficiently replaced for learning to address the missing knowledge and experiences of both employers and their employees. Productivity depends on it.
=============================================
EXCLUSIVE: COVID-19 SHOWS WHY THE UK DOESN’T LEARN LESSONS
By Arnold Kransdorff
Much is being written – and will continue to be written – about the way the UK has handled its Covid-19 crisis. A running discussion of what has gone wrong fills both the airwaves and newspapers but no one has answered the awkward and critical question WHY we’ve performed worse than many. The short answer is that we don’t learn well from experience – and the pandemic illustrates this precisely.
To explain.
Good decision-making is key to ALL forms of progress/improvement and change. This typically happens incrementally, the building of one experience on another. Even innovative progress, that which displaces the organic, requires a measure of the incremental, as does the import of practice from outside sources. They are journeys that demand an awareness of prior practice to sustain and improve itself. It’s otherwise known as experience, organisational (or institutional) memory (OM) or, in its unfashionable format, history.
In the workplace, this is traditionally serviced by induction/onboarding, a one- or two-day familiarisation process that typically includes more terms-of-employment type information than actual organisational memory. This is compounded by the effect of the flexible labour market, whose high staff turnover is now endemic enough to provide employees with around 10 different employers in a working lifetime and average corporate tenures of less than five years. This nomadic behaviour is now also evident with important decision makers and professionals as individuals use walkabout to improve their remuneration and career prospects.
For employers, this means that they’re losing much of their own knowledge and experience that academics describe as their source of competitive advantage. Enter Covid-19, the world of corporate amnesia and the role of HR.
While individuals might acquire greater knowledge of individual businesses, what flexible working has done is ensure that the determinations of short-tenure employees are typically grounded around the activities of their previous employers, whose instinctive behaviour is often to disclaim ownership and responsibility for others’ previous practice, also known as the not-invented-here syndrome. Without an intimate knowledge of their new employers’ hard-won and unique experience, employees’ decisions are characteristically less rigorous than otherwise possible, making their determinations more experimental than experiential. Hence their pervasive inability to learn from their immediate employers at all levels – and the pandemic of mistakes and unlearned lessons that continually engage commerce and industry. Alongside inbuilt short, selective and defensive memory recall, workplace discontinuity’s continual stop-start and corporate amnesia reigns.
Which is where the UK’s efforts to fight Covid-19 is illustrative and instructive. Alongside the many, many instances of missteps – recurring shutdown delays, PPE equipment, test and trace, care homes, education, travel, masks, eat-out-to-help-out, among others – the pandemic’s countless thousands of key decisions have cost more than 125,000 deaths (among the highest per capita number in the world), costs of at least £394 billion and with public-sector skewed GDP down 10% in 2020 (the biggest drop for 300 years), the deepest recession among the advanced G7 economies. The fact that the UK scores lower than many other countries that are dealing with the self-same problem must, surely, raise questions ….?
The unrecognised answer
The main political decision makers, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his cabinet colleagues, are all ‘short tenure’ employees alongside huge recent staff turnovers in many attendant civil service departments and where the private sector was involved. Two big upfront decisions that could have yielded valuable lessons arose from the actual experience of numerous worldwide epidemic outbreaks as well as a ‘dummy run’ of an influenza outbreak held in 2016.
The first covered the real outbreaks of HIV/AIDS, Dengue, Cholera, Ebola, Yellow Fever, Swine Flu and Mers, including the Plague, that occurred in the lifetime of many of today’s serving employees, the list being even longer if one goes back before 1988 when this list was compiled. Unfortunately in Covid-19’s case, the UK chose the wrong disease to heed. Unlike some Asian countries like South Korea and Singapore, the UK focussed on pandemic flu, not pandemic coronaviruses such as Sars or Mers, an oversight pointed out by former Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, MP, in the House of Commons on May 11, 2020. The other event, the earlier dummy run of an influenza epidemic, went unheeded, an observation offered by Professor Sir Ian Boyd, chief scientific adviser to the UK Government between 2012 and 2019, who said: “We learnt what would help, but did not necessarily implement those lessons.”
While these examples clearly demonstrate our experiential NON-learning credentials, not all decisions have gone badly, the main examples being the rapid building of the Nightingale hospitals, the scientists’ swift invention of the various reactive vaccines and the current rollout of said vaccines to the public in super-efficient time. It is enlightening how their more positive outcomes speak to their better decision making. The Nightingale hospitals were built by the military, whose decision-making is firmly disciplined around learned and taught tested practice. The vaccine scientists’ inventive work was based on systemic incremental precedent while the on-going arm-jab rollout has the accustomed annual flu programme and the same military’s decision-making discipline on which to build.
In learning language, all were using their inheritance or history as their building block, a process that equates to the organised awareness and application of organisational memory, which is not resolutely made available in the modern walkabout workplace. Without it, we can’t efficiently learn on behalf of a current employer. We make mistakes, then repeat them again and again. We can’t even learn resourcefully from successes and the chorus of ‘We must learn the lessons’ continues to deafen the workplace.
To directly address the knowledge loss from flexible working, employers need to embrace more efficient knowledge capture, knowledge sharing and improved experiential learning, with the initial process undertaken by skilful oral debriefings of exiting individuals for the benefit of new appointees. Delivered via audio, video or transcript – and done well – they can dramatically reduce the normal 12-month induction periods of our new replacements, themselves expected to be short tenure, with content allowing them to replace the necessary incremental corporate inheritance required to top up and learn from their employers’ restricted evidence base.
Employees’ short-changed evidential base covers the broad areas of operational and important cultural comprehension, the latter known as organisational socialisation that the MIT’s J.E. Van Maanen and E.H. Schein describe as the “long-standing rules of thumb” and “horse sense”, now identified by the characterisation of tacit or cognitive knowledge. Less to do with functioning technical skills, it comprises the unspoken, mostly subtle, obscure and intangible issues alongside the organisations’ cultural ideals, values and the special way of doing things such as distinctive language and ideology, matter-of-fact prejudices, customs and rituals. Covering the type of know-how that doesn’t appear in emails or reports, context-, co-worker- and organisation-specific, it can, with instruction, be extracted from organisations’ tried-and-tested experience.
Oral history is just one of the ‘history’ mediums that would benefit the business community but whose application gets virtually no traction in the education system. Economic history, the academic study of economies and/or economic events of the past, is declining as a dedicated subject in our business schools. Business history, the account of themes ranging from entrepreneurship, innovation, globalisation and environmental sustainability, is non-existent in both business schools and secondary schools, while corporate history, perhaps the most useful history product for induction, is only indulged as a celebratory tool every 50 or 100 years.
The evidential inputs from these different history products would cover for the necessary incremental corporate inheritance for employees at their various operational levels. Returning to things pandemic, the success of the vaccine rollout might allow us to lose sight of the actual Covid-19 journey, but – using the Prime Minister’s own metaphor to emulate poor decision making (Lifting the lockdown, Reply to questions, House of Commons, February 22, 2021) – imagine a rookie skipper NOT steering a narrowboat into so many zigzags.
An aside: Flexible working is just one of the factors in the story of more efficient experiential learning. It is as important as the availability of relevant skills but, at the end of the day, historical awareness is key to smarter learning generally, however the evidence avauls itself. It also fits snugly into the ability to improve productivity and competitiveness, which we’re also keen to improve.
=============================================
POLITICIANS AND EDITORS, MIND YOUR P’s & Q’s WHEN YOU USE THE WORD ‘U-TURN’
In the public debate around Covid-19, politicians and the press are increasingly using the descriptive word u-turn? It’s meant to portray a reversal in a policy, plan or action that represents poor decision-making.
While ALL decisions, including new decisions and even some of the original coronavirus decisions, can be disputed, even wholly undone, the use of u-turn is entirely inappropriate In the current environment. Because of the fast-moving situation where the infection rate of the pandemic changes on a regular basis, this requires reassessment on the same regular basis. In an ongoing situation, regular changes actually reflect a healthy attitude to decision making.
In this observation there is an underlying misunderstanding by its users around how good decision making is made. The practice is called experiential learning, an organic process whereby an actual experience is reflectively built upon. Even innovative progress, that which displaces organic progress, requires a large measure of historical awareness with which to occur and sustain itself. It incorporates the process of knowledge transfer where old knowledge can be transformed into new knowledge, a practice that is increasingly overlooked in today’s employee unfamiliarity and corporate amnesia caused by high staff turnover.
By using the word U-turn in its deprecating context, users, specifically the press, are being inaccurate and prejudicial while the politicians and other detractors are being opportunistically partisan. About-turn, flip-flop, reversal, turnaround, volte-face and switcheroo are similarly unfitting.
For decisions that need revision, u-turn is an incorrect description where modified, adjusted, reconsidered, altered, corrected, adapted, modified and/or reconsidered would be more precise.
========================================
IF YOU’RE HIRING, ARE YOU MISSING OUT ON WIN-WIN?
What’s worth more – the experience of a serving employee or that of a new hire? The question is as academic as the prospective answer because of the many imponderables but there IS a good point to the question. Stay with me.
There are four main categories of employees – those who stay with their employer, those who move of their own accord, those who leave because of redundancy and those who depart through dismissal. This posting refers to the categories that need to be replaced.
It’s important for one simple reason; employers have lost control of one of those categories that accounts for the vast majority of their jobs change. 
The rate at which this is happening is equivalent to replacing ENTIRE workforce numbers every five years, exposing a misunderstanding of what’s actually happening at the coal face of work and a miscalculation that questions how employers value their own knowledge and experience.
The category is the one that covers employees who flip their employers at will in the big idea of the 1980s known as the flexible labour market, which was originally designed to enable employers to cater more efficiently with the rapidly changing market place. It did – and does – and it even helped to increase overall employment but it has also driven an unplanned and unacknowledged coach and horses through conventional business practice.
With employee turnover highly dependent on economic conditions, replacement rates can vary. In the UK for example, average staff renewal has topped 20% a year – the most recent resignation figures being just over 15% (XpertHR, October 2017) – with signpost estimates that everyone will move employers on average EIGHT times in their working lifetime (it’s higher in the US). In many cases this movement is just to boost their own income and experience and is happening to almost EVERY employer across ALL of commerce and industry ALL the time, the movement involving everyone from new entrants to the workforce to main decision-makers. Stealthily, it replaced what was the commonplace job-for-life and became the single biggest change in workplace practice. Ever since, employers have been trying to restrain the turnover.
For good reason. Alongside huge additional employment and induction costs, the workplace is in constant turmoil, with few jobs or projects ever persisting with the same employees. It’s not often acknowledged but there’s an uncanny relationship between the short-term decision-making of many modern economies and the short-term tenure of their workplace individuals.
Short-tenure has also inadvertently brought with it the widespread and rolling loss of unique employer-specific knowledge relevant, in varying degrees of consequence, to every job. This has reduced the available body of the employers’ own important knowledge and experience with which replacement decision-makers would otherwise use to make good and better decisions – and accounts for the overabundance of repeated mistakes, reinvented wheels and other unlearned lessons that plague commerce and industry.
Alongside the breakdown of natural organic progress – i.e. the building of one experience on another – there’s the disappearance of corporate loyalty and individual commitment. And then, without regular reinforcement of all those special qualities that make employers distinctive in their own right, comes the painstaking dilution of individual corporate culture. In today’s workplace, employee fickleness has become a career-advancing requirement while organisations have begun to look homogeneous in the way they are managed. On a linked issue, it’s an outcome that gets no help from business education, which has not changed the way it teaches decision-making to accommodate the changed workplace demographic, where employers have NO enduring long-term memory, NO medium-term memory and a dislocated short-term memory. What it’s done is increase the dependency on the one-size-fits-all way the academics traditionally teach how to make decisions and reduce determinations to formulaic rote. Thusly, the determinations of employers’ new hires are inescapably short-changed and invariably suspect.
Of course, some of the employers’ replacement employees might be ‘better’ qualified, which would obviously boost the considered value of their experience but consider some academic research into this category that confirms that no employee change, whatever the skill set of the individual, is seamless, requiring adaptation to the new employers’ ways and means. An investigation into poaching, which represents a large proportion of executive and vocational workplace change, found that high flyers, however good in one corporate environment, were not necessarily equally effective in another (Groysberg, Nanda, and Nohria, 2004). Specifically 46% of such individuals performed poorly in the year after they left one employer for another. And after switching loyalties, their performance plummeted by an average of about 20% and did not climb back to old levels even after five years.
The traditional way corporates have tried to assuage the downside aspects of flexible working has been to upgrade their induction processes but its typical content exposes another misunderstanding of how best to compensate for the loss of their own knowledge. Alongside more comprehensive explanation of contract issues such as pension information and discipline/grievance procedures as well as introductions to new colleagues, management usually argues that peripatetic employees don’t all move at the same time, that the replacement pool routinely provides them with wider cognition of commerce and industry and that the investment in their databases and access to predecessors’ emails does the job.
Thankfully YES to the former and NO, the latter provision being just the explicit part of knowledge, the ‘what’ of know-how to which, according to the research, few replacements refer. Academics have calculated that when individuals leave, they take with them up to 90% of their employers’ distinct knowledge and experience (F. Bonner, American Society for Training & Development, 2003), including the most important part of the knowledge mix – the more practical non-technical TACIT knowledge known as the ‘how’ of know-how. With many employers not even acknowledging its existence, it’s normally unwritten, unspoken and unshared, mainly implicit, esoteric and context-, co-worker- and employer-specific that’s buried in tried-and-tested experience, whether successful or otherwise. It’s the oil that lubricates the corporate wheel and would enable more efficient application of available evidence.
Without it, is this not an explanation why a supposedly sophisticated workforce is falling short? Consider this up-to-date aphorism: Individuals can impress with many passwords but they still need to know which is the one to make anything happen ….
All this has unquestionably offset flexible working’s original intention and weakened productivity – as the output statistics show. Given it affects practically ALL employees and EVERY employer across the WHOLE of commerce and industry, it’s a big, unacknowledged reason for the experts’ puzzlement why growth has stalled.
From this, the suggested conclusion is that employers should not be as cavalier with their own knowledge and experience. Employer familiarity/articulacy of actual experience is VERY valuable.
At this point it should be clearly stated that outside experience is not necessarily without value, even on its own, but it’s that much better when considered ALONGSIDE the home experience. So rather than spend so much time trying to mitigate existing employee renewals, employers should better address its effects rather than the irrepressible cause – i.e. their own exiting knowledge and experience. Instead of letting it walk out of the front door, it needs to be better managed – just like any other important corporate asset. It would also enable employers to continue taking advantage of flexible working. Win win!
It does require a collaborative effort by Human Resources (HR), Knowledge Management (KM) and business education/training but first, what price one’s own, already paid for, knowledge and experience? If current sums fall short of ‘could-be’, employers’ need to open their own separate in-box labelled ‘How We Did It’ and get some better instruction on how to apply that good/bad reality alongside the imported experience of new hires. It’s called Experiential Learning (EL), now a skill of more importance than ever in our walkabout workplace.
=============================================
THE UK’S ECONOMY IS MENOPAUSAL …. WHAT’S THIS REALLY ABOUT?
Likening the state of the UK economy to being menopausal is a metaphor that hits hard. The word’s descriptive power goes to the heart of the national condition – the country’s output is much too low in spite of employment numbers 
never higher. All those employees are just not productive enough, highlighting the national predicament; more is less!
According to the phrase’s latest town crier – no less than Ben Broadbent, the Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, who quickly apologised for his accidental-on-purpose sexist connotation and replaced it with the unfamiliar word ‘climacteric’ used by economic historians – its underlying meaning is that the country is no longer as potent, that it has passed its peak and that growth is lower than is otherwise possible. Whilst the word did its job in drawing attention to the problem, it paints a picture of how wages inescapably stagnate and the nation’s tax take and public spending slow – all as accurate as the reality.
The experts still do not know why exactly but Mr Broadbent suggests that the downturn is comparable to the lull at the end of the 19th century when the height of the steam era was over and the age of electricity was yet to begin. He is, of course, referring to artificial intelligence (AI). Would this be the case but there are a couple of wild cards that could scupper this hopeful viewpoint.
Yes, AI will provide welcome technological improvements, which is the usual way productivity has grown in the past. But, as the record shows, the UK has remained uncompetitive, no thanks to the unaddressed issue that appears to affect local commerce and industry more than other flexible labour economies. That being the high rate of job change, the point here is that its underlying character is not going to go away, with all the unacknowledged and accumulating consequences it has brought to the workplace over the last 35 years.
With UK employees now clocking up an average of eight different employers in their working life times, the workforce is now recognisably short term, just like corporate decision-making. This gives individual tenures of just four to five years, providing employers with continual workplace disruption, the widespread loss of unique employer-specific knowledge that impacts the ability to efficiently learn from experience and the subsequent breakdown of organic progress. Muddled in with all this employee change comes the disappearance of corporate loyalty and commitment and, without regular reinforcement of all those special qualities that make employers distinctive in their own right, the dilution of individual corporate cultures. None of these are friends of intrinsic growth. Spread across EVERY employee and EVERY employer is one big answer to Mr Broadbent and the experts’ puzzlement why the quality of decision-making and productivity growth has slipped.
If not employment numbers, will the arrival of AI affect the high rate of primary jobs change? And if not, will it magically even solve the inevitable discontinuity in AI’s own organic development?
I wouldn’t bet on it. I’d rather concentrate on better addressing the more inherently downside aspects of flexible working so that the UK can become better experiential learners. I’d likewise remember that the word productivity is as gender neutral as is possible as well as being the most important nutrient in the corporate lunchbox.
=============================================
France’s current labour unrest: some muddle of the trades unions and how WIN-LOSE can become WIN-WIN
Looking elsewhere in the developed world, president Emmanuel Macron has concluded that his country’s poor employment record could be improved by introducing legislation that enabled commerce and industry to change their employees more easily – otherwise known as the flexible labour market. It being part of his overall reforms, the trades unions are furious and are demonstrating accordingly.
In the world of high staff turnover, the US and the UK, for example, have successfully reduced their unemployment to record lows which, if replicated in France, should be the outcome for which Monsieur Macron is aiming. Whilst the trades unions should, really, also approve – making their opposition to the flexible working aspect of his reforms a miscalculation – there’s one big unaddressed oversight. 
Employers have found it difficult to improve their productivity, no thanks to the constant workplace disruption, their unique institutional knowledge loss, the operational mistakes that get repeated and the other valuable lessons that go unlearned. With eight being the average number of employers that an employee will now have in a working lifetime – that’s a tenure of just over four years for each in the UK, even shorter in the US – corporate loyalty has largely disappeared, organic progress breaks down and investment returns suffer along with the many unintended effects on politics.
So, if Monsieur Macron gets his way on flexible working, France will likely go likewise. Is the inevitable win-lose worth it? And if not, can ‘lose’ be avoided?
To overcome the downside of constant employee change in the workforce, employers will need to first address their institutional knowledge loss. For this, they have to capture their unique know-how before it becomes disremembered, either at regular intervals during important employees’ employ, immediately after important events or before they leave. Their experience can then be shared with following generations and instead of having to be reinvented, it can be applied to new circumstances and environments. It’s called experiential learning through which new bloods can make good and better decisions.
Thusly, the flexible labour market CAN be win-win.
Scroll down for other posts on France and its drive to become a flexible labour economy on biggernumbers.wordpress.com/macro-matters/ and biggernumbers.wordpress.com/yesteryear/
=============================================
TO NATIONALISE OR NOT? Why it doesn’t have to be a POLITICAL decision? DISCUSS …..
With Brexit dominating the national consciousness, another debate is waiting to kick off at its more auspicious moment; it’s that all-too-familiar dialectic whether to nationalise some of the country’s privately-owned public utilities – or not?
With the railways, water, energy and the Royal Mail as signposted targets, these behemoths are turning in either high charges for consumers, low service provision and/or poor (or too high) returns for investors. 
Presenting arguments that have been around for decades, the one lot of politicians will be saying yea, the other will be insisting its nay, with the upshot depending on which colour of politician will be in Government. The reality is that BOTH forms of corporate structure have been tried in the UK – and still the arguments persist, always producing much bile and displacing more important business.
It’s a peculiarly enduring British issue. The Americans don’t have it; neither do the Germans, the French or many other developed economies, raising the question why?
However difficult it is to exclude political dogma, consider another explanation around a particular outcome that these other countries have that the UK lacks? It is that the employee output of their institutions is greater, reflected in their productivity. As confirmed by international statistics, the ability of their employees to produce more is glaringly higher. In the case of France, for example, their employees can produce by Thursday afternoon what British workers generate by knock-off on Friday evening.
The UK’s productivity shortfall has been evident for decades, as has been the effort to encourage greater investment, especially in technology, improving employee skills and business education, building up essential infrastructure and even employing tax incentives, all important components in the drive for productivity. But in terms of employee output, most of this deliberate effort to become more competitive – and especially in many of its public utilities – has been largely ineffective, except at the margins.
Typically, the explanation turns on the nation’s workers and/or its education system. But reflect on the long-available wisdom of the UK’s late management guru, Peter Drucker, who said that it is only managers, not nature, laws of economics or government that makes resources productive (Managing in Turbulent Times, 1980).
Unlike the myriad of worker studies, equivalent management efficacy is largely unrecorded territory. With productivity scores providing one pointer to the UK’s management skills, Capgemini, the professional services and business consulting organisation’s research into senior managers in UK companies turning over more than £200 million per year recorded them admitting that 25% of their decisions were wrong; the conceded rate of wrong decisions in the financial services sector was even higher – nearly one in three (Business Decisiveness report, 2004). A more recent indication is the British government’s own department for Business, Innovation and Skills whose assessment is that the UK has “significantly poorer management skills” (report, July 2012). Elsewhere, there is much anecdotal – and actual – evidence of an abundance of repeated mistakes, re-invented wheels and other unlearned lessons that litter commerce and industry, most of which subsist alongside the unaddressed consequences of high employee turnover, the subsequent unfamiliar awareness of employer-specific knowledge and experience, the ensuing inability to learn from their new employers’ unique experience and the widespread related breakdown in organic development. The stop-start effect of short employer tenure by employees, including top decision makers across every job and every employer across the entire workforce (the average paymaster change in the UK is now eight in a working lifetime), is surely systemic enough to contribute substantially to management consultant Proudfoot’s estimate of productivity waste costing 7.5% of GDP in 2005.
On this basis the submission is that if British managers made more good and better decisions, the toxic issue of yea or nay to nationalisation and private ownership would largely fall away, it becoming a question of output alone, plain and simple.
DISCUSS
=============================================
THE PRODUCTIVITY SOLUTION: John Lewis boss nails the pathway but what about addressing the systemic problem?
As the boss of one of the UK’s most successful companies, Sir Charles Mayfield’s view of the country’s most pressing business problem is important. So his “more micro-approach” (Sunday Telegraph, December 17,2017) to show how employers can boost their stubbornly low output should make the Government – and of course managers themselves – sit up and take better note.
Against the reality that employees in countries like the US, 
Germany and France continue to produce their widgets cheaper, faster and/or better than their UK counterparts, Sir Charles, of the John Lewis Partnership, has an answer. Instead of the Government trying to boost entire industries with grandiose investment plans such as those set out in the new industrial strategy, his approach would be to put the responsibility for productivity growth squarely on managers. Individual employers, he says, must be encouraged to improve their own performances by, for example, pairing productive companies with unproductive companies so that managers can identify problems and share ideas on how to make the most of their staff and equipment. If the productivity of the weakest businesses could be brought up to the strongest, Britain’s performance would improve dramatically, he says.
Quite coincidentally, Sir Charles’s ‘coal-face’ fix to the UK’s low productivity is identical to the forgotten 30-year-old advice given by the UK’s very own management guru, the late Peter Drucker, who counselled that “It is only managers – not nature, laws of economics or government – that make resources productive.” (The new productivity challenge, Harvard Business Review, Nov/Dec, 1991, Vol 69, Issue 6). But the ‘Be the Business’ campaign within the Government’s new Productivity Leadership Group, of which Sir Charles is chair, does little to address the more systemic problem that besets modern industry and commerce – the flexible labour market’s unnoticed flaw, which impacts every single employer.
While the short-tenure workplace has allowed employers to more flexibly adapt to fast-changing environments and circumstances, it has also imposed the unexpected downside of cutting employee output. Workplace disruption has increased dramatically, the employers’ unique knowledge and experience is constantly being dispersed and old-style organic growth has been dislocated.
Flexible working’s original postulation was that employers would also be able to benefit from an employee base that would provide much wider experience. In reality, replacement employees, even if better qualified, are never seamless in their employment. Additionally, second-hand experience doesn’t always work well WITHOUT the awareness of the acquired wisdom from employer-specific practice. To survive, organisations need to remain unique in their development but the continual replacements that flexible working has delivered invariably waters down original corporate advocacy, a phenomenon that arguably contributes to Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo’s law of diminishing returns.
Short tenure’s combined effects can been seen in the pandemic of repeated mistakes, re-invented wheels and other unlearned lessons that litter the workplace and a Proudfoot Consulting estimate that put the overall cost of wasted productivity in the UK at 7.5% of GDP in 2005.
Surprisingly, the 40-year-old flexible labour market’s unacknowledged downside has not been comprehensively addressed save for the futile efforts to reduce the levels of staff churn.
In simple terms, combatting the dysfunctional effects of flexible working involves capturing and sharing the employers’ unique knowledge and experience before it walks out of the front door, specifically the important contextual ‘how’ and ‘why’ of know-how that more tacitly characterises the way the employer does its business and which does not find a place in corporate data banks. Having provided rolling generations of new employees with this more comprehensive evidence base, it is then necessary to top up the employers’ in-house training with the largely untaught skill of Experiential Learning to enable new employees to better apply this and their own prior practice to their new employers’ new environments and circumstances. By enabling better decision-making, it’s the key to better productivity.
High staff turnover may not be as evident in the matchless John Lewis Partnership but the average jobs churn across the UK’s industrial spectrum in today’s workplace is now between four and five years. This includes many of the more productive companies to which Sir Charles alludes, suggesting that they, too, are operating at lesser output levels than otherwise possible. As such, addressing the downside effects of flexible working would constructively impact on ALL short-tenure companies.
In addition to mending single unproductive employers, would it not be more productive to also comprehensively encourage the employers’ OWN experiential learning solution to one of the biggest of productivity’s underlying problems? 
=============================================
Why employees – even the best – CAN’T excel in today’s modern workplace
It’s widely acknowledged that employees in many industrialised countries have become less productive, in spite of business education and training never more available. The instinct is to blame their education or employees themselves but consider this: their output deficit is directly linked to the imposed change in the workplace that 
the experts still consider to be of unquestionable benefit – the flexible labour market.
Introduced in the 1980s to help employers better cope with the rapidly changing marketplace, flexible working has hosted short tenure employment at every hierarchical level, with individuals now averaging eight different employers in their working lifetimes (in the US it’s higher), and rising. This four-to-five year employment duration has introduced widespread jobs disruption and little employee loyalty, with several systemic outcomes.
Firstly, up to 12 months at each end of every replacement employees’ tenure is typically worked at lesser productive levels, which automatically reduces the period of optimum output by a significant margin. Secondly, few of the many corporate functions within organisations ever survive without one or more employees leaving and a replacement arriving, heralding the breakdown in the way most progress occurs – organically, i.e. from the uninterrupted building of one experience on another. Thirdly comes the most dramatic consequence of all for the way good decision-making happens; exiting employees take with them much of their employers’ unique knowledge and experience, including their important tacit know-how, foreshadowing the onset of what’s called corporate amnesia, when businesses and other types of co-operative organisation lose their memory of how they do things in their own special way.
In addition to constantly diluting individual corporate cultures in an unmanageable way, this dramatically reduces the relevant evidence base with which replacement employees would otherwise need to make good and better decisions on behalf of their new employer. In effect, they end up utilising mostly the knowledge and experience of their prior employers and education, much of which is unrelated according to their employers’ unique selling point (USP) and experience and, anyway, is subject to inherent short, selective and defensive memory recall.
A more familiar scenario to employers is the same way knowledge loss occurs when employers host in-house training schemes. No sooner than up-skilling is effected, individuals move on. More often than not, training courses have to be repeated to maintain the skills base. The only other way such additional skills can be maintained is if replacement employees have been similarly retrained.
There is also an element of replacement employees consciously disassociating themselves from their employers’ prior experience (“not my responsibility!”). Even top-flight employees become disadvantaged, explanations for the many repeated mistakes, reinvented wheels and other unlearned lessons that now litter the modern workplace.
With jobs disruption and the absence of institute-specific evidence upsetting almost every job and every employer, EVERYTHING has slowed, exactly as the productivity scores in many countries show. Its pervasive span across the workplace, which is where commerce and industry’s main factor of production works, makes its overall effect truly impactful. Ironically, the disarray is as serious as it is strangely unnoticed, an outcome diminished by the futile efforts to unsuccessfully reduce the rate of staff turnover, which has never been higher.
Hence the conclusion that the flexible labour market is not all good, in fact it’s pretty wanting.
Conventional approaches to induction and onboarding are similarly superficial while mentoring and internships, the more resourceful of the solutions to short-term working, are still too rare to make much of an impact. In truth, they’re all good examples of managers electing to address the proximate, rather than the ultimate, cause.
For a Trump-imposed US, a Brexit-motivated UK and other productivity-thinned countries whose domestic harvests need to be improved to replace cheaper labour competitors overseas, what, then, needs to be done to counterbalance the admittedly useful flexible labour market?
It’s not rocket science but the answer nonetheless fills a huge hole in workplace practice and business education. In short, a collaborative effort by employers and educators is necessary to ensure that replacement employees can offset this unseen delinquent development.
Employers first need to capture their unique know-how before it walks out of the front door and then ensure that their replacement employees have access to this corporate evidence in an easily accessible and digestible format. The referred unique know-how is essentially a part of the overall knowledge substructure that is barely acknowledged by Western managers and many business academics. It differs from the so-called explicit knowledge that typically appears in organisations’ data banks by being the non-technical ‘how’ of getting things done. Also known as coping skills, its expression is implicit, ambiguous, interpretative and predictive, with its learned deductive character allowing its owner to understand the implications of information and act accordingly. It is also deeply rooted in ideals, values and emotions and is an essential part of the evolutionary process of applying prior experience to new circumstances, what educationists describe as ‘turning old knowledge into new knowledge’. It is difficult to capture but best done through oral skilled debriefing techniques rather than own-authored accounts.
With the employers’ knowledge and experience captured, business educators then have to step up to help host organisations to add true value to this body of knowledge – by enabling decision-makers to APPLY this experience to changed circumstances and environments. Conventionally, decision-making is taught as a one-size-fits all approach, a methodology designed for the old-fashioned workplace where individuals were long-standing employees supposedly aware of their past practice. Today’s workplace has upturned this orthodoxy, removing much of the employers’ personalised knowledge and experience. To do this, they have to introduce a new skill to how they teach individuals to make good and better decisions – the ability to learn from experience.
The theory and practice of Experiential Learning (EL) is already known, academically-acknowledged models of which include methodologies devised by its main proponent, Ohio’s Case Western Reserve University’s Professor David Kolb, more than 35 years ago. Ironically refined at around the time the flexible labour was being devised, its raison d’etre is “critical reflection based on concrete experience”, a widely ignored feature of traditional business education that is exposed in the attitude of many Western managers who, as a general rule, think little of the long past or the longer future but find safety in short views.
Imagine what modern, ‘walkabout’ and related employees could do if they had access to the hard-won and expensively-acquired knowledge and experience of a departed chief executive, an HR manager, the factory supervisor, even other key operatives, beyond their actual employ …..?
This new approach to using knowledge necessitates dealing with a range of newfound issues, among them persuading business people, especially in the Anglo Saxon world, that the precedence of history – and especially one’s own employer’s history, whether successful or otherwise – is a valid decision-making tool, even (and especially in) in a fast-changing environment. This goes to the heart of the debate between those who think that industry and commerce can learn from the past and those who think that old lessons are misleading or irrelevant because times change.
Then there’s the underlying and probably the most acute issue of all. It’s the question of who owns the knowledge and experience that employees acquire in their employers’ service – the employee, the employer or is it jointly owned by both parties? If the former, does the employee have a proprietary right to withhold its capture by an employer, an attitude actually tacitly held by the modern worker? In the past, when employees were generally long-term, the question wasn’t as exigent. Today, it’s both relevant and decisive to ensuring efficient continuity in today’s merry-go-round workplace. Does the fact that the knowledge and experience acquired in an employers employ is PAID FOR by that employer now settle the question?
Alongside this, employers will need to know how best to identify their important knowledge and experience, how to persuade existing employees to share their experiences, and how best to capture their memories and the stories of the institutions in which they work.
Against the background of high staff turnover, the methodology’s perspective shifts the emphasis so that learning’s benefit to decision-making is corporately centered and reinforces the universal conception that progress is mostly incremental and continuous. Connecting youth with business experience is a vision that surely also accords with educations’ wider role.
Flexible working is not an ogre as such. It has its place but its dramatic consequence of restricting replacement employees to just applying others’ experience is, simply put, not as good as also applying one’s own employers’ experience. As such, this unintended consequence of Adam Smith’s invisible hand needs to be better addressed.
=============================================
Learning how to learn: The case against ‘UNLEARNING’
There’s an important issue that keeps on coming up on relevant business groups on Linkedin. It’s whether it’s necessary to UNLEARN in order to learn. It seems that to make progress, one has to actively ‘delete’ existing knowledge and
from the intellectual knowledge base.
Is the word unlearning a misnomer? Is it an unfortunate description of one of the technical and philosophical confusions of how best we can and should learn? Does it confuse and disrupt the process of erudition? And does it negatively affect the quality of decision-making?
I’d like to subscribe to all of these portrayals alongside it being a part-explanation for why we’re so bad at implementing change and, indeed, why we don’t learn very well from experience.
The connotations of self-styled unlearning requires individuals or organisations to erase or forget prior knowledge and experience from their consciousness, effectively throwing away the intellectual evidence that delivered prevailing outcomes to date. To do so – as many are taught to do – there are a number of interrelated issues that also upset the process of actual learning.
To ‘unlearn’ means one has first to be aware of the historical evidence. To go through the process of demolishing part of an evidential base and then re-constructing it is extremely wasteful. Rather, APPLYING it to changed environments and circumstances – my preferred description of the learning process (see biggernumbers.wordpress.com) – is surely more constructive, a methodology that’s not yet fully accepted as the more suitable way to engage the process of ‘moving forward’.
It’s acknowledged, anyway, that the best way of making progress is organic – i.e. the building of one experience on another. So, removing the older experience – even if it didn’t turn up trumps – is just disruptive and hamstringing to the whole determination process, like the insensitive imagery of having one’s legs unnecessarily amputated at the knees.
In learning terms, the ‘deleted’ knowledge and experience also means that the presence of any historical perspective becomes unavailable, as does the opportunity to factor in another important factor in the decision-making process, precedent.
Moreover, the reasons why past decisions were taken were because they were once thought relevant. As such, the evidence remains pertinent for the reasons at the time, so unlearning it only reduces the evidential base and, in the process, increases the chance of repeating mistakes, reinventing the wheel and not learning past lessons.
And finally, it can also be argued that in today’s highly flexible labour market, walkabout employees reduce the organisations’ evidential base even further, making good and better determinations even more uncertain.
The alternative to unlearning is the acknowledged methodology known as Experiential Learning (EL), which specifically rejects the theory of removing any part of corporate body intellectual. Its methodology is to employ constructive reflection to the more comprehensive evidence base. As indicated, it is still little used in favour of the traditional one-size-fits-all approach to decision-making formulated for the old-fashioned and inflexible workplace when employees rarely moved away from their employer.
The reasons aside why employers and business educators have been slow to adapt to the new workplace, learning is unquestionably an essential component of decision-making. As such its importance to good decision-making shouldn’t be under-estimated, under-resourced or stripped of its raison d’etre. It might seem subtle to some but to unlearn is a supremely negative way of defining what the discipline is all about.
Bottom line, a truncated evidential base is no friend of good decision-making. Many educators and employers need to rearrange their mind sets ….
=============================================
The Big Question: What Lessons from History Keep Being Forgotten? HELP WANTED!
I’ve just read a motivating Paper published by the Swiss science-orientated university, ETH Zurich, on how a knowledge of history is “the best education fo
r those who aspire to change the world” (http://www.css.ethz.ch/en/services/digital-library/articles/article.html/5df93f32-73b6-4ae2-a0e8-92b63c0e9dbb).
The examples are short and all are related to POLITICAL events in different countries.
It strikes me that a similar BUSINESS-related Paper could also be put together. I’m happy to do it but rather than hog the project myself, I’m suggesting that I write one example and around a dozen of you also contribute.
Like the ETH example, you don’t have to be an academic. My idea is that we keep to the same format and length – i.e. be very short and very succinct. What would be especially interesting is a fresh collection of different geographical and/or industry-related examples such as the recurring mistakes of, say, a European, American or Asian country
or the unlearned lessons of food manufacturing, healthcare provision and high tech. For corporately political reasons the examples of own-employers are probably excused but, hey, here’s where the bulk of examples flourish in the undergrowth.
In addition to bringing timeworn case studies up to date, I’m thinking it would be enlightening, especially useful in today’s globalised marketplace and, importantly, also provide excellent ammo to get more of our business educators to use the concept to much greater effect. We all know how unfashionable is the ‘old’ to business.
I’m confident there are enough proponents of the underlying concept of good history as a decision-making tool and plenty of examples to illustrate it. Through my personal regard for Experiential Learning (EL), a subject that this blog deals with extensively, my own conviction is that without history’s awareness (in business I call it organisational or institutional memory because of managers’ aversion to the lexis ‘history) the evidential base is necessarily constrained, a characteristic that diminishes the ability to APPLY tried-and-tested practice to new environments and circumstances. In other words, it diminishes the quality of decision-making.
If the idea appeals, proposals please to ak@pencorp.co.uk I’ll keep responders informed of progress ….
=============================================
Output 
Leave a Reply