Do people really know what they think about their work?
They’re humans after all, and that means that they don’t make rational
decisions (especially in the presence of zombies),
they have very selective memories (and we’re biased to the
negative), they make emotional judgements (which
can be affected by cake). And so much of the working experience is tied up
in relationships with other humans with all the same faults. That’s always
going to be hard to understand.
Then think about the other complicating factors in working
life today: understanding your role in a changing strategy, delivering ever-more
challenging targets, being always-on, taking more accountability for making
customer decisions, probably with less direction. Work is a confusing place to
be.
And yet it’s vital to understand what people think about
their work, and how well they are dealing with those challenges. This
blog puts it well. Fundamentally, very few of us manufacture widgets
anymore. The best measures for our capacity to improve aren’t in how many
widgets come off the line and how much faster that line can run. The capacity
to improve is in the hearts and minds of the people. And if you take as your starting
point that people can’t rattle off a rational, complete and objective view of
what’s right, wrong and missing from their working lives, then you’re going to
have to work hard to get to the real truths.
You need the richest possible mix of qualitative and quantitative
work to get a spread of opinion and deep discussion. Those human factors mean
that everyone has a highly individual experience; it’s a complex picture and it
can be tempting to present that picture. But you must resist and search only
for the universal, unifying truths. You must draw them out to see what to
celebrate, cultivate or change. That’s where simplicity lies and there’s real
comfort in simplicity. In a complicated world, simple is do-able, simple is
buyable. Simple happens.
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