Flow

In Lean Thinking, the authors reference a book by Mihalyi Csikzentmihalyi called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. I came across it again in a series of comments and posts on Catallarchy, so I finally broke down and bought it.

I heartily endorse the book. [Update: I confess to having been overexuberant about it. I think it was a case of extreme confirmation bias. In retrospect, it was neither a great read nor breathtakingly original. As I recall, the first third was really slow and promised more than the last 2/3 delivered.] The author (whose name I remember by pontificating that what this nation needs is a good "Six Cent Tamale") has conducted research at the University of Chicago for decades, primarily by giving people beepers that go off at random intervals, at which times they answer a series of questions about what they are currently doing and what their mood is (gross oversimplification, but that's what you get from reading psychology on a blog kept by an engineer). His conclusion based on this and other data is that people are happiest when they are involved in something that is so challenging as to require their undivided attention, but not so challenging as to be impossible to complete. In other words, people should have goals that are attainable, but only just attainable. In practice, that means that many people are just as likely to be enjoying themselves at work as they are outside of work; in many cases more so. Outside of work, many people are unable to find something that keeps them challenged. Our leisure activities are too dominated by television and other unchallenging diversions and his research showed that people were not as happy doing those things as they thought they might be (You can regularly see "happiness research" debated on econlog, The Fly Bottle, and agoraphilia).

In my last post on the new workplace, I surveyed three books that discuss the changing organizational structural (The 5th Discipline, The Future of Work, and Markets in the Firm), but didn't get around to pointing out what I would like work to be like. It seems to me that purging the workplace of Taylorism is essential to balancing the seemingly conflicting goals of making work for workers enjoyable yet productive for their employers and/or customers. Taylorism can best be expressed in the statement, "Managers think, workers do," a clear formula for thwarting the "flow experience" described by Csikzentmihalyi as essential to happiness. Both W. Edwards Deming and the more recent Lean or Toyota production literature emphasize the need to banish the 8th waste, that of neglecting the creativity of workers, in order to improve quality, reduce costs, and increase profits. In Markets in the Firm, Cowen and Parker bring forth the quote that scared much of America in the 1980's, Kanosuke Matsushita's famous claim that "Yes, we will win and you will lose. For you are not able to rid your minds of the obsolete Taylorism that we never had." It appears then that the answer to improving the job for both workers and management is to challenge workers with puzzles that they can solve. The means by which this is done is the self-directed continuous improvement team concept (call it what you will - Quality Circles, TQM, whatever - as long as you do it).

Fighting Taylorism is frequently cited as one purpose for unions. However, union positions on both Taylorism and self-directed teams have been mixed. UAW chief Walter Reuther bought into Taylorism and sought only to maximize their bargaining position on economic considerations rather than on the work experience. But they aren't embracing the new paradigm, either: Stephen Bainbridge (popularly known as Professor Bainbridge) has pointed out that workers tend to favor hierarchy over self-directed production contracts. In this article, he says,

As John Witte contended in his important case study of self-directed work teams, "there is little reason to suspect that most workers would either endorse participation or become actively involved if the opportunity arose." To the contrary, Witte posits that workers generally accept hierarchical authority and perceive obedience to authority as an integral part of their job: "for the majority, disobedience is unthinkable."

Witte's pessimistic prediction is confirmed by a wealth of data. Only about half of the participants in Witte's own case study were willing to change jobs in order to get more participation and that rate declined rapidly if doing so would require longer hours or lower pay. A study of transportation firms found that long-term use of employee involvement initiatives increased stress and decreased employee fulfillment. [Anderson (1996).] A study of "empowered" employees versus a control group of unempowered employees within a single insurance company found no statistical difference between the two groups on such productivity-related issues as motivation or even on some job satisfaction measurements. [Thorlakson & Murray (1996).]

And at the website of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), where they claim that "Most of these programs [kaizen, QC, and Just in Time] have evolved from the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor, who is credited with developing 'scientific management,'" they dedicate two pages (starting here) to throwing FUD at such management "schemes", among which there are two types:

One type strives to get the workers, with or without the union, to act in groups to help management improve productivity. These are sort of brainwashing sessions. They strive to get workers to think like a boss and to come up with ideas on how to cut other workers, speed-up production and ways to do more work. Quality Circles, Team Concept, and Kaizan [sic] fit into this category. These schemes often try to undermine the union by setting up non-union committees that will "make decisions for the workers."

A second employer scheme is usually tied to changes in how production or the work being done is organized. This could be cell manufacturing, Just in Time, Direct Flow Technology, pay for knowledge etc. These changes can have a direct effect on parts of the contract. Seniority, layoff and recall procedures, pay grades, and transfers may all be affected. This also gives the union some power, because in most cases the employer cannot make changes to the contract without the union membership's approval. [all emphasis in the original]

In other words, it appears that the ongoing demise of the Sloan/Taylorist management method in favor of the Toyota system, which achieves flow in both the production process and in each workers' experience, is coinciding with the demise of the unions in spite of them, not because of them. (Still, I caution readers to consider the reasons cited in the Bainbridge article: some worker resistance to self-direction may be understandable).

Since completing Flow, I started reading From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932 : The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States by David Hounshell, which I first saw referenced in the other Womack, et al book, The Machine that Changed the World. I was immediately struck by how Ford employees referred to their processes as "flow".

William Klann, a Ford deputy who was deeply involved in the innovation [the assembly line], agreed but noted that an equally important source of inspiration was flour milling technology as practiced in Minnesota. Klann summarized this technology in the expression "flow production."

So far, I find this book to be full of surprises, having already exploded the myth that Eli Whitney developed the first musket with interchangeable parts, and having revealed that the idea came from a French general through both Jefferson and a lieutenant of Lafayette who also happened to propose the idea for West Point.

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Are hierarchy and team production the only two possibilities for organizing labor? What about the old methods of putting-out and inside contracting? What about communally owned facilities?

Oliver Williamson attempts to address those questions in The Economic Institutions of Capitalism. Though the analysis is ultimately unsatisfying, for reasons explained by Williamson himself (and to which I will return in a later post), it is an interesting start and at least as interesting as the other books surveyed in my last post (but substantially more difficult reading). Williamson analyzes 6 different schemes on 11 different criteria (listed below in his notation style) and determines that hierarchy is the best system in terms of efficiency. In my next few posts, I propose to relate this analysis with comment.

Production modes:

• Putting-out
• Federated
• Communal-emh (every man for himself)
• Peer groups
• Inside contracting
• Authority relation (hierarchy)
  

Efficiencies:

a. Product flow

1. Transportation expense
2. Buffer inventories
3. Interface leakage

b. Assignment attributes

4. Station assignments
5. Leadership
6. Contracting

c. Incentive attributes

7. Work intensity
8. Equipment utilization
9. Local shock responsiveness
10. Local innovation
11. System responsiveness