Why is construction so backward?

On By ChaunceyIn Construction, Mismanagement10 Comments

Hal Macomber and I have been talking about construction messes for many years. He regularly says good things on his blog, Reforming Project Management.

I use the word “mess” to refer to a situation that cannot be responsibly characterized as a problem, or even as a collection of problems. A problem is something which, by virtue of the idea that there are “solutions,” presents itself as sufficiently well understood that skilled and intelligent people can bring solutions to it. A leaking faucet or a car that is not working is a problem. An automobile accident is a problem. A simple illness is a problem. Modern construction is not a problem. It is a mess. It begs for a historical reconstruction and the creation of new interpretations, from which whole new approaches to making offers, organizing the work, and conducting the work, will be born.

Yesterday Hal cited an article in the Boston Globe entitled, The Industry that Time Forgot, by Barry LePatner. In the article, LePatner talks about the recent extraordinarily rapid repair of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, as an example of evidence that other futures for construction are possible. The author says, among other things, “The modern construction business hasn’t changed significantly since the first steel-frame skyscrapers began to rise in the early 1900s. Early tall buildings such as the Tribune Tower in Chicago and the Woolworth Building in New York grew too complex to remain under the purview of a single “master builder,” the architect who knew and supervised every detail of the project. Instead, each required an assembly of specialists — electricians, plumbers, heating contractors, excavators. Dozens, then hundreds of companies arose to handle those systems, each a local family-run shop that drove its truck to one project at a time. Today, in 2007, that’s still basically how the business works.”

What a wonderful opportunity!

As I write, I am listening to Scott Joplin’s Heliotrope Bouquet, from 1907, and the music fits perfectly. A lyrical piano piece 100 years old that would have been lovely accompaniment to a segment of a Charlie Chaplin comedy – perfect music for “modern” construction. Click here to hear the music played on YouTube by Andy Koehler.

John Prewer, called “the Godfather of modular construction,” recommended that I read Why is construction so backward a couple of years ago.

Anybody out there read it? I have found that most of my friends in the construction industry are not even aware of its existence.

Interview with Fernando Flores on Blogging

On By ChaunceyIn Language, Organization Theory16 Comments

Conducted earlier this year by Rosario Lizana, the full text of the interview can be found here.

The site is set up so that I could not cut and paste from it, so you will have to go there to see what he said. The interview is less than a page in length. In it, Flores talks about his blogging, what he doing with it, about language and what it is to give an opinion, and about bullshitting. The interviewer interpreted that he was talking about Harry Frankfurt’s book, but as one person commenting pointed out, Fernando Flores was talking about bullshitting decades before Frankfurt published his book.

William McDonough: His Design Vision

On By ChaunceyIn Design of Enterprise1 Comment

I have long been an admirer of the work of William McDonough. In February of 2005 he spoke before TED, and his talk was posted in April of this year (2007). I recommend the 20 minutes that it takes to listen to it.

TED’s introduction to McDonough runs like this: “Architect and designer William McDonough asks what our buildings and products would look like if designers took into account “All children, all species, for all time.” A tireless proponent of absolute sustainability (with a deadpan sense of humor), he explains his philosophy of “cradle to cradle” design, which bridge the needs of ecology and economics. He also shares some of his most inspiring work, including the world’s largest green roof (at the Ford plant in Dearborn, Michigan), and the entire sustainable cities he’s designing in China.”

A New Conversation: Service Design Series of Papers

On By ChaunceyIn Design of Enterprise, Organization Theory3 Comments

Over the last year I have begun the construction of a series of short papers bearing on the question of how we invent futures and enterprises in language, and conduct and manage our business in networks of commitments. My idea is that the papers will serve as provocations, inspirations, and foundations for a literature useful to practitioners seeking to build more resilient, adaptable, responsive enterprises. The plan is to publish them as part of a Wiki. There, people with experience in thinking about the design of enterprises as something centered in language will be able to adjust, add, repair, and contribute to the development of a useful literature. This literature, I hope, will be something taht we construct together, in the style of “open source” programming.

So here we announce and preview this series of papers, publishing a few initial chicken scratches to invite conversation and consideration of the idea. The initial set of papers I have drafted cover topics relevant to the questions, how do we bring action in enterprises, and what is language action? I have, in addition, sketched papers on topics such as listening, coming to resolution, preparing and leading meetings, speculating and innovating, and others. Without further ado,

Introduction to the Service Design Series
Chauncey Bell 20070418

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

In seeking wisdom, the first step is silence; the second, listening;
the third, remembering; the fourth, practicing; the fifth teaching others.
Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Jewish Poet and Philosopher (c. 1021-1058)

In this series of short papers we begin to lay stepping-stones for a new interpretation of the way that organizations deliver services that will let us vastly improve how services are designed and delivered. We are doing this in “wiki” format, which will allow people who have studied what we are discussing, and who have experience in applying it, to add to it, and to incorporate it (with attribution) in their own work, as long as they share back what they have contributed.

Our intention is to begin to build a rich, shared literature about a new way of observing and talking about the design of services.
Continue reading “A New Conversation: Service Design Series of Papers” →

What will it take to develop a new story?

On By ChaunceyIn Mismanagement, Toyota Prod System1 Comment

On the one hand, GM, Ford, and (Daimler) Chrysler are all in very serious trouble, and Toyota is flying, the most interesting large company in the world today. On the other hand, the media is full of opinions and strategies all constructed inside the very same philosophical structures in which the “big three” have gotten themselves into trouble – blame the unions, finished goods of $15 billion, millions of cars stacking up on lots, deep discounts and advertising campaigns, laying off thousands of employees, considering getting out of the car business, the truck business, sell off the company, … what next?

In a February 14th article titled “In Humbling Overhaul, Chrysler Faces Big Cuts”, Wall Street Journal writers begin, “… Chrysler becomes the last of the Detroit Big Three to abandon hope of growing its way out of problems. Now it has a humbler goal: making money.” The article quotes Tom Lasorda, Chrysler Group Chief Executive, explaining the way that the strategy functions: “We lost money building inventory, and then we lost money trying to get rid of it.” 

We are sure that the management of Chrysler, or Ford, and GM, are not humbled. If they were, they would begin to question the way they are thinking about the mess. 

What is it going to take for the Big Three to recognize that their stories about why Toyota has out-paced, out-flanked, out-thought, out-designed, and bested them in all aspects the running an automobile business are bad stories. Good stories give hints about what to do to change the situation. For literally decades the stories we have listened to from the Big Three have failed to point to new effective actions.

A Great Article about Toyota

On By ChaunceyIn Toyota Prod System3 Comments

Greg found a wonderful article by Charles Fishman in last month’s Fast Company that gives the best answer we’ve seen in writing to our question, why do so many attempt and fail to copy what Toyota has been doing so well for so long.

Here are selections from the conclusion of the article:

Lots of companies have tried to learn and use the methods that Toyota has refined into a routine, a science, a way of being and thinking. …

And the Big Three have each gotten better at making cars: … But they all still trail Toyota.

Without any fanfare at all, Toyota is confounding, if not defying, conventional wisdom about the current state of the U.S. economy.

Typically, though, the Big Three take an all-too-American approach to the idea of improvement. It’s episodic, it’s goal-oriented, it’s something special–it’s a pale imitation of the approach at Georgetown. “If you go to the Big Three, you’d find improvement projects just like you’d find at Georgetown,” says Jeffrey Liker, a professor of engineering at the University of Michigan and author of The Toyota Way, a classic exploration of Toyota’s methods. “But they would be led by some kind of engineering group, or a Six Sigma black belt, or a lean-manufacturing guru of some kind.

“They might even do as good a job as they did at Georgetown. But here’s the thing. Then they’d turn that project into a PowerPoint. They’d present it at every place in the whole company. They’d say, ‘Look what we did!’ In a year, that happens a couple of times in a whole plant for the Big Three. And it would get all kinds of publicity in the company.

“Toyota,” Liker says, “is doing it in every single department, every single day. They’re doing it on their own”–no black belts–“and they’re doing it regularly, not just once.”

So you can buy the books, you can hire the consultants, you can implement the program, you can preach business transformation–and you can eventually run out of energy, lose enthusiasm, be puzzled over why the program failed to catch fire and transform your business, put the fat binders on a conference-room shelf, and go back to business as usual.

What happens every day at Georgetown, and throughout Toyota, is teachable and learnable. But it’s not a set of goals, because goals mean there’s a finish line, and there is no finish line. It’s not something you can implement, because it’s not a checklist of improvements. It’s a way of looking at the world. …

If you’re looking for a plateau, you’re going to be frustrated. There is no ‘solution.'”…

“Once you realize that it’s the process itself–that you’re not seeking a plateau–you can relax. Doing the task and doing the task better become one and the same thing,” Shook says. “This is what it means to come to work.”

Much as we like the article (Greg loves the way that Fishman ‘distinguishes the two paradigms’ in the way that he talks about Toyota), we still doubt that anyone from the big three are going to begin the transformation of the US Automobile Industry from here. Why? What more is missing?

Talk to you later.

“Bold Moves” at Ford

On By ChaunceyIn Design of Enterprise, Mismanagement, Toyota Prod SystemLeave a comment

I just ran into Ford’s “Bold Moves” initiative, which imitates the “Reality Television” style of working out problems in front of an audience. 20 “Episodes” have been published already at http://www.fordboldmoves.com/default.aspx. In the episodes, Ford spokespeople where they say things like “We have to change or die.” and “Ford doesn’t have a PR prooblem; we have a product problem.” Meanwhile, the initiative is subtitled “Documenting the Future of Ford” – my suspicion is that this will turn out to be an attempt to do a new kind of PR.

Turns out Ford is a sponsor of “American Idol.” I suppose this is a very fancy case of life imitating (art).   

I will be reviewing the 20 “Episodes” shortly, and seeing what is there. Perhaps the designers of the program have begun to address some of the questions we have been bringing over the last postings. We shall see, and make assessments.

I attempted and failed to put the “Bold Moves” feed into my blog. If someone out there knows how to do that, the code is <script language=’javascript’ src=’http://www.fordboldmoves.com/clientscripts/externalflash.aspx?episode=20′></script&gt;, but I can’t figure out what to do with it.

More later; I am getting ready for a trip to Europe right now.

Give me your reactions and comments!

Best,

Chauncey Bell

The Toyota Dilemma

On By ChaunceyIn Design of Enterprise, Mismanagement, Toyota Prod System1 Comment

Over the past weeks we have been following threads that come from several questions that Greg and I have been asking. Our questions are like this:

  1. How come people keep trying and failing to copy what Toyota has done?
  2. Is Toyota really that good? Or does the spotty record of wanna-be copiers indicative of a half-baked theory? Does it work in Japan, but not here?
  3. How disastrously bad is their competition in the automobile industry? Is that why they are taking over the #1 spot globally, and winning so handily?
  4. What are people in the automobile industry watching that they keep (apparently) missing the beef? We think that they are not stupid people; then then they must be trapped in a really bad story about how the world works, and must be misunderstanding what Toyota has been doing.

One of the conversations that Greg and I have says that we are playing out different stories. We fell in love with cars in different ways than did the Japanese. Their national story about extraordinary human beings has in its background the Samurai tradition – in which, among other things, people surrender to disciplines and traditions, and build excellence out of time and practice. In the US, we fell in love with cars as part of our exploration of the dimensions of freedom. It is still a rite of initiation in this country for a young person to reach the age of 16, be licensed, and move towards owning a car. This is a nation of people who escaped from other tribes and refused to be dominated. Kind of the opposite of Toyota. We think, however, that it is possible to build a version of the Toyota Production System that fits with our impatient, freedom-loving, entrepreneurial and strongly independent way of being.

What do you think?

What do our questions provoke for you?

Payment for What?

On By ChaunceyIn Design of Enterprise, Mismanagement5 Comments

According to the San Francisco Chronicle of September 9th, in the Daily Digest, Alan Mulally, the incoming new CEO of Ford, will be paid:

  • An annual salary of $2 million.
  • A signing bonus of $7.5 million.
  • $11 million to offset the compensation he is giving up by leaving Boeing.
  • $10.5 million in stock options.
  • $11 million if Ford changes control or lets him go for any reason other than “cause” before 2011.

What promises do you suppose this man is really making to the stockholders, to the customers, to the citizens of Detroit, Michigan, and the United States? That he will “try harder”? That he will turn around the situation that has been brewing at Ford for 40 or 50 years? Impossible. No single human being, from outside the company, can fulfill such a promise. If no promise of that sort is being made, then what crazy habits have we arrived at for compensating senior executives in this country? What kind of a world are we making in which business executives are paid like rock stars and world-class athletes, to “play” in games where the play of the game is private, and success is measured the way it is in a modern business like Ford.

What is the board of Ford doing? Cutting 30,000 jobs, closing 14 plants, and investing $30 million in the dream that Mr. Mulally will leap tall buildings in a single bound?

© Copyright 2006, Chauncey Bell and BABDI, LLC. All rights reserved worldwide.

What Were They Thinking???

On By ChaunceyIn Design of Enterprise, MismanagementLeave a comment

Greg asks,

“How do people who are suffering in the middle of work that is horrifically organized and conducted tolerate that?”

“Does anyone really notice that they are not happy, or are we so used to the pain and convinced that it is inevitable that we go along? Do modern people just have a high pain threshold?”

“Is the cultural orientation of people in business so oriented to “producing” that people do not notice the way that things are being done?”

“What are managers and others listening to when, in the middle of observing and managing actions, they keep doing the same things and don’t stop to ask what’s happening and why people are doing things the way they are?”

The questions, he proposes, bring to the fore just how difficult it is to pay attention to our current, habitual ways of doing things, to break up old habits, and build new ones.

Heidegger might have said, in reply, that the people in question were, in fact, not thinking. In these circumstances, we might recognize that people are involved in transparent, recurrent coping with situations and circumstances in which what is happening, and the actions that are possible for dealing with what is happening are completely pre-programmed and automatic. The fact that we say we are thinking under these circumstances is, itself, only another part of our automaticity.

How do you break that up? We speak of pain as a goad to changing behavior. In training designers, I caution against the notion of people liking or being ‘comfortable’ with situtations and proposals. Normally, when everyone is comfortable, nothing important is happening. An effective designer must develop the skill of bringing the right discomfort to the right people in the right moments.

© Copyright 2006, Chauncey Bell and BABDI, LLC. All rights reserved worldwide.

When the Same “Error” is Repeated Over and Over ….

On By ChaunceyIn Mismanagement, Toyota Prod SystemLeave a comment

Hal Macomber, writing in Reforming Project Management, tells us that Jim Womack, has been advising Ford CEOs for many years about how to stay out of trouble: ‘copy Toyota:’

“…my prescription for new Ford CEO Alan Mullaly is the same (as it was for former CEO Jac Nassar): Fundamentally rethink the supplier management system. Fundamentally rethink the product development system. And fundamentally rethink the production system from order to raw materials and from raw materials to delivery, with special attention to the information management system. (Much can still be learned from Ford’s Mazda subsidiary, which became an able pupil of Toyota after a crisis in 1973.) Above all, fundamentally rethink what mangers do and how they do it in order to regain the gemba consciousness that originally took Ford to world dominance. In brief, Ford needs to remake itself once more, this time in the image of the company that copied Ford’s original system: Toyota.”

Why is he repeating a failed prescription, and as if the listener has not attempted to apply it? Greg points out that there is a major failure of speaking and listening happening here. Is what Womack is saying not sensical? Are the listeners not listening? Are they interpreting something different than what Womack is thinking himself?

Can it be possible that no one at Ford has done the homework to re-think what they are doing? Yes, it is.

More likely is the way that Greg put it: the cultural background in which people in the US tend to ask these questions – and to listen to Jim Womack, for example – is shallowly connected to questions of improving for the next quarter, for the next model year, and improving the things they are making. In that tradition, it is easy for no one to notice that what needs to be changed is the way that people are thinking about what they are doing, how they are oriented to the business, how they speak and listen to one another.

We don’t like the interpretation of our earlier list of possible sources of the failure of Ford, are they simply too stupid, block-headed, pig-headed, obtuse, perversely concerned with greedy topics, ensnarled in historic fights with labor and labor advocates, etc., etc.??

Well???

© Copyright 2006, Chauncey Bell and BABDI, LLC. All rights reserved worldwide.

“Advice to Ford: Dump cars”

On By ChaunceyIn Mismanagement, Toyota Prod SystemLeave a comment

David Olive, writing in the Toronto Star on Aug 28th, tells us the “truth” of Toyota’s secret of success, in an article about Ford’s difficulties:

“Ford Motor Co., revealed last week to be in even worse shape than its ailing crosstown rival, General Motors Corp., really should think about dumping everything but its truck business. Almost everything else at the world’s third-largest automaker is a costly distraction — conspicuously its crowded stable of car brands, including Volvo, Mazda, Jaguar, Land Rover and Aston Martin. …

“What we do know is that Ford’s core North American operation has bled $3.8 billion (U.S.) in red ink over the past year and a half. That its U.S. business has been losing market share for 11 consecutive years. And that its credit rating has been downgraded ever deeper into junk territory, sapping profits at its Ford Motor Credit division — one of Ford’s few reliable cash cows. …

“Even a cursory glance at Ford, with its revolving-door senior management woes and periodic crises dating from the 1940s, tells you it’s simply not a natural car maker, in the way that Toyota, Honda and BMW just naturally are. …”

Now, 50-odd years after starting the odyssey in which it invented its production system, we discover that Toyota is a born natural. God and destiny determined that they would succeed, and, sadly, that Ford would fail.

© Copyright 2006, Chauncey Bell and BABDI, LLC. All rights reserved worldwide.

You Can Waste a Lot of Money Eliminating Waste

On By ChaunceyIn Design of Enterprise, Mismanagement, Toyota Prod System1 Comment

Here is one reason that we think so many people have put so much effort into imitating the Toyota Production System and still we find Detroit in such a mess.

One of the cornerstones of the Toyota Production System is the commitment to eliminate waste. But “waste” in this context doesn’t mean what most people think it does.

Value and waste are interpretations, shaped by the concerns of the cultures and enterprises in which they appear. The most important wastes (and values) of the last 100+ years were shaped by industrial era concerns for conserving physical and economic resources, financial capital, and production capacity.

The most important values and wastes for the era we have entered are not the same.

Many of those hell-bent on eliminating waste are “looking for love in all the wrong places.”

The central wastes of the new era will be shaped by our concerns for building effective relationships to deal with the challenge of coordinating in this continuously changing, globally connected world.

Have you got examples? Can you see what we are pointing at?

 © Copyright 2006, Chauncey Bell and BABDI, LLC. All rights reserved worldwide.

Maybe the Great US Auto Industry is a Goner.

On By ChaunceyIn Design of Enterprise, Mismanagement, Toyota Prod System3 Comments

Greg Neil speculates that maybe the construction industry will be first to invent a 21st century version of what Toyota did, and the US will pass out of contention in the manufacture of automobiles over the coming decades. (Ps: Toyota is a major player in the housing industry in Japan ….)

In the 1950s, Japan was really listening. Life itself was at stake. For fifty years now, our executives in Detroit have had the opportunity to listen, and have not been listening. We have been copying Voltaire’s idiot, Candide, spouting “It’s all for the best in this best of all possible worlds.” I remember when my friend George Kuper returned from an early visit to a Toyota plant in Japan with a covey of US executives, who were puzzled, “What possessed those Japanese businessmen to try and convince us that they were running automobile plants without inventories and warehouses?”

Are essential qualities that have made this a great country disappearing? … no longer relevant? What were those of earlier eras in this country listening to? What are those running the automotive companies today listening to?

© Copyright 2006, Chauncey Bell and BABDI, LLC. All rights reserved worldwide.

Why Haven’t US Automakers Caught On?

On By ChaunceyIn Design of Enterprise, Mismanagement, Toyota Prod System2 Comments

While we are at it, let’s follow some other threads as well.

Why have GM and Ford, (and Daimler-Chrysler, and a host of others) not simply copied the successful practices of Toyota? Is what they are doing so unusual, mysterious, or hidden? Since the 1950’s Toyota has invited people to come and tour their plants. Later they sent some of their most senior engineers to Detroit to teach for a number of years in US schools. They said they were doing that to give honor to Henry Ford and others from whom they had learned.

For decades US automakers have picked up popular jargon that originated with the Toyota Production System – just-in-time, continuous improvement, eliminating waste, five why’s, root causes, and so forth – and used it in improvement programs and in describing to the press the things they were doing to improve their companies.

(Is this all marketing hype? Are the companies actually trying to do anything there? From a good deal of work inside the auto industry, I have the interpretation that a large number of people inside the companies are actually trying to improve what they are doing.)

Some claim that Japanese culture lends itself to the kind of operation that Toyota has, and the US culture does not lend itself to this. Taiichi Ohno, Continue reading “Why Haven’t US Automakers Caught On?” →

Why Toyota Dominates (part 2)

On By ChaunceyIn Toyota Prod System6 Comments

Shigeo Shingo, Chief of Industrial Engineering (who trained the company’s industrial engineers in the time that they built the Toyota Production System), explained that the key to the success of the production system was SMED – the Single Minute Exchange of Dies – which allowed them to run many different products on the same production line, and eliminated many kinds of waste.

Company executives ascribe their success to following the 14 principles of the Toyota Way (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Toyota_Way).

Why do you suppose that these might not be compelling answers for US Auto Industry Executives?

© Copyright 2006, Chauncey Bell and BABDI, LLC. All rights reserved worldwide.

Why Toyota Dominates.

On By ChaunceyIn Toyota Prod SystemLeave a comment

Toyota continues to dominate the automotive industry, reporting for FY 2006 “… earnings of US$180.29 billion, an increase of 13.4% over 2005.  This was the fifth consecutive year of sales increases at Toyota Motor (and since 2001, sales have increased a total of 57%).” 

They claim that the single most important reason for their success is that they follow ‘the 14 principles of the Toyota Way.’

US auto makers have heard Toyota talking loudly about the Toyota Production System and the Toyota Way since the 1970s.

 Our question is this: Why is it that the major US auto makers say they practice ‘lean principles,’ and yet are unable to produce even a shadow of the kind of robust performance in difficult times that Toyota has demonstrated for decades?

Do you find the standard list of excuses satisfying?

  • Labor contracts that contribute $1,000 per car to the cost of GM automobiles.
  • Bad marketing intelligence, so that the company(ies) aren’t offering what the customers want.
  • Excess capacity.
  • Inefficient plants and unproductive workers.
  • Workforces that don’t want to work.
  • Incompetent management.
  • Greedy management.
  • Slow innovation.  
  • etc.

I think the problem runs deeper than this. What do you think?

Chauncey Bell (with Greg Neil)

© Copyright 2006, Chauncey Bell and BABDI, LLC. All rights reserved worldwide.

Nicolas asks, “What about Wal-Mart….?”

On By ChaunceyIn Design of Enterprise, Mismanagement, Organization TheoryLeave a comment

Nicolas asks:

How do you see business enterprises that have historically done much harm to people and the environment as fitting into your claims about enterprises? For example, sugar and cotton production on the backs of African slaves in the New World, or the fossil fuel industry and its accompanying environmental degradation and military interventions in the Mid-East, or Wal-Mart-style corporations and the extinction of small businesses, or sweatshop commodity production? Are these enterprises just incredibly misguided?

Thank you for the great question(s)! Let’s explore:

  1. All of the examples fit. Each of the institutions you mention was constituted as a collection of historical communities to take care of particular concerns, constituted itself in networks of commitments, and accumulated capital (power is a good synonym) of various sorts – financial, pragmatic, symbolic or political. Continue reading “Nicolas asks, “What about Wal-Mart….?”” →

What IS a Business Enterprise?

On By ChaunceyIn Design of Enterprise2 Comments

Last night I attended Caryl Churchill’s play, A Number, at ACT in San Francisco. I found it valuable, challenging, sometimes funny, pithy, and short. A father confronts, one by one, several sons, all but one of them clones. So, they are the same, and different. The father attempts to figure out what mess he created by allowing the cloning, in his incautious desire to have more of “his son.” The sons are working out emotions ranging from a desperate ambition to discover “who they are,” to curiosity and enjoyment of the situation life is presenting.

Continue reading “What IS a Business Enterprise?” →

Designing Conversations

On By ChaunceyIn Design of Enterprise3 Comments

So, Greg asks me, what do you mean by “design” and “designing” here?

In the first chapter of their book Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design, Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores bring the question of design.

… the interaction between understanding and creation. In speaking here of
design, we are not restricting our concern to the methodology of conscious
design. we address the broader question of how a society engenders inventions whose existence in turn alters that society.

Continue reading “Designing Conversations” →

Questions about Human Practices

On By ChaunceyIn Design of Enterprise, Organization Theory7 Comments

Ever since I began to wonder about what my father was talking about when he spoke of why he was going to work, I have found myself asking about practices – the things we do over and over again. Over time, we forget how our practices began. They become habits, obligations, things we have to do. After a while, the inspirations, intentions, and commitments in which they were born are forgotten. Why do we have this meeting or that report? Where did this activity that we keep doing come from? Often, we suffer with the “mindless” repetitions of our activities. TGIF?

Continue reading “Questions about Human Practices” →