Guest Post From Wal:

Wal is a colleague of mine that offered this criticism of the workshops that he assisted facillitating:

(NB: Comments in this instance were the SMI's [frustrations and improvements] captured over a number of weeks)

My main concern with the model creation was that the end result didn't leave me with an action plan that would solve the participants problems. The information used came from anyone within the organisation, which is what you are after. However, the problem I had with it was that each comment was placed straight onto the model and then allotted a position within one of the four sectors. These comments were not agreed upon by consensus or catalogued as the same point with other comments. They were looked at individually, allocated a sector then the group moved onto the next comment. Furthermore, if you have more than one group working on the same comments, each comment can be placed under any sector dependant on the groups thoughts. So it is possible you could end up with same comment under all four sectors, what does that prove??? If this did occur I would almost guarantee during the action planning phase all the groups would still come out with the near / same solution even though they were in different sectors. I say this because most participants in these form of workshops are not keen to be there, thus they will take the easy path out to get to the final result. Hence, even though the comments have been sorted into their respective sector the participants will not truly acknowledge that sector's title in problem solving, rather than they will concentrate on the comment itself and ignore that it is a complicated or simple problem.

Because the comments can emerge in any domain, I feel that the process doesn't allow for looking at the problems holistically. Each comment is looked at individually then allocated a sector, move on to the next problem. Because the comments are in no particular order, commonality between points or the holistic problem can be missed, especially if the group is not excited about being there. During the action planning they may be able to fix up a symptom but miss the real problem.

Duplication is also a problem. Because each group is working within their own table, they do not know what is happening on other tables. A situation could transpire where four groups are working on the same problem, yet come out with either four different solutions or all the same, either result doesn't seem to be an efficient method or use of participants time.

My last concern is again knowing your customer. As I have mentioned before many of these workshops have people who don't won't to be there but are volunteered. There attitude is not there so when the process is told to them and it is slightly confusing they shut down even more. When I saw this process done the facilitator explained it very well due to his thorough understanding of the process and theory behind it, but the group did not have the same comprehension of the facilitator. So even though it was well explained he still had to go through each separate table to explain again the process. Still further he was explaining the process whilst the table were doing it as they were still getting it wrong. From an observers point of view it was confusing for the group because they are not use to these types of processes and were not putting too much mind space into the tasks. Of course this is a problem with many workshops.

On Flexible Work Practices

It's an interesting thought this one. Reality is that employers hire people to go to work, to put in an appearance for 38-ish hours a week and to produce outcomes during that time. At least if employees are in the workplace there is a reasonable degree of confidence that they are working on something productive. Letting people work from home leaves them open to the distractions of personal tasks, tv, family and multitude of other activites that provide no benefit whatsoever to the business.

Then there's the equality issue. Do you allow people to opt out of the workplace once they reach a certain level in the hierarchy? Or is it based on their job function? Some combination of the two? Do you allow for the reality that some people are extremely productive working from home whereas others struggle against the distractions? How do you justify the decision to those who aren't extended the option of flexible work hours without impacting of their motivation?

At the end of the day there may be some value to be had at an individual level in allowing people the option of flexible work practices but I have doubts as to whether that value exceeds the cost of implementing the practice within an organisation.

On Serendipity

The best counter argument to this is provided by Scott Adams

On the journey not the end

In response to The Journey not the end:

A well designed and marketed program is far superior to this approach. Why should effort be put into holding both options open? The whole point of these improvements is to make an improvement? This can't be achieved if you carry the baggage over...

Decisiveness is to be valued here and there are no rewards in this sort of risk averse approach.

On Safety Management System

Safety Management:

How do you intend to fix the problems if you just capture stories? Surely there is a need for the processes of review and assigning causality to the failures in the system? Would you have just anybody entering their thoughts into the system? And by this, you are then willing to do nothing about something that is reported? I sure hope that you are willing to be sued

The whole basis for this system is to right the wrongs that lead to a failure such that it can't lead to another (worse) failure. Without meaningful consideration of each incident then what is the point of a Safety Management System?

On White Noise

White Noise:

Actually after writing all of the above, I stumbled across the aforementioned article and to remain true to type I will contradict everything to avoid accusation of falling into line. Are we underselling the human element? The evolution of learning and information transition has been great so why is this new advent of skimming terrifically huge amounts of information for the things that we need. Does this not increase the diversity of the masses as individuals interface with the information that interests them?

Fair enough that corruption of systems like Google can have the impact of referring people to the same source material, but this is well combatted by the Web2.0 and filtering through a trusted network of friends. Whilst we may change what we consider to be high intelligence I doubt that we are really seeing a decay in the knowledge of the populace? Is this not a co-emergence resulting in more specialists in more fields? Thus the only way to be a generalist is to flit from blog to link to wiki...

On Farr CIO

Farr CIO


Easy when you have this sort of budget, I think that a military advocating Network-centricity might need to move a lot further.

Rough Week

On Unity of Direction

In response to Unity of Direction:



What sort of business strategy advocates the firing of customers? Tried and true methods advocate finding a customer base and meeting their needs. Surely a better approach to so called delinquent customers is to ascertain and meet their needs. Ultimately, if you aren't meeting a need what are you doing?


Furthermore, it seems counterintuitive to throw away good staff that have already been invested in, why not just further develop them? Surely the cost of minor adjustments in their development is more effective than starting again.

On Values-based Leadership

Values-based Leadership:

Without the values of the organisation freely available in their various forms how would you have decision making occur in your business? Would you rely solely on the good-nature of individuals and the values that they personally hold dear?

Irrespective of this, my experience has been that given any group brought together to agree on the values of the organisation they will tend to come up with a series of Wank Words and then go on to make their decisions based on the rules...

The fact is that no Aircraft is signed up as Serviceable in accordance with the Organisational Values, so are we instituting Best (Past) Practice and thus replicating the end conditions and not the start...

On just a thought

Just a thought:

I think that the bleeding heart support of employee terrorism is irresponsible. The threats to strike over pay rises that are not aligned to productivity increases are blackmail and should be dealt with accordingly. Pandering to this sort of behaviour just encourages more of its kind.

The industry requires a high level of attention to detail by professional personnel, failure to perform at the appropriate level is tantamount to negligence would put lives at risk. Thus the two issues, Industrial Relations and Maintenance failures should not be related giving the CEO the right to express his counter position to unionist blackmail. If they are related then surely legal proceedings will for negligence from the CASA investigation.