Improvement by Letting Go (Hans Monderman)
When nothing is done, nothing is left undone?
[ . . .] They let it go, until reaching no action.
When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.
Doadejing Chapter 48
One of the biggest frustrations of the modern day office worker is the feeling of being micro-managed. Nobody likes having someone hovering around, always ready to pick on even the most minute flaws in your work. Yet it has become an all too familiar reality to a majority of us; why?
I think this is because most managers haven’t yet been able to step out of the Industrial Age paradigm and move into the modern, more creative, era. There was a time that employees were mere uneducated workers who needed to be told what to do and whose work needed to be checked for flaws. But those were different times. Back in those days most employees went to work after completing primary, maybe secondary, school and were able to do little more than the low-skilled blue collar job they were hired to do, most likely a skill learnt on the job at their place of work.
Today, however, most staff work with their heads rather than their hands and are far better educated than their predecessors. In fact, in a workplace with young staff working under elderly supervisors, it is very likely that even the least educated staff members outqualify their managers. This is where micro-management originates. Because it’s only their relevant work experience that places most managers above their staff, nitpicking on small practical mistakes a team member makes feels to them like the only justified way to assert authority.
This is a mistake. Most errors someone makes while working on a task are things they’d easily pick out and correct themselves before considering the task completed. If managers intervene every time their experienced eyes see someone moving towards a mistake or doing something in a different way from how it is usually done, employees will get frustrated and stop caring about their work all together.
When I was in high school, I did a short stint — less than a week to be exact — as a shelf stocker at a local supermarket. As I was busy with the soup cans, putting new ones on the back of the shelf while shoving the older ones to the front and turning them so that the labels would face the customers as I had been told, the shift-manager stopped me. “You’re doing it wrong,” he said, “Let me show you.” He then began to put new cans on the back of the shelf, moving the older ones to the front and turning the labels so they would be facing the customers.
“But that’s exactly what I was doing,” I told him, obviously unable to comprehend the complicated science behind shelf stacking.
“No, you’re not paying attention,” he snarled. “Look!” He then continued doing the exact same thing. I really wasn’t getting his point and gave him a puzzled look. “Why don’t you see,” he almost shouted in frustration. “You’re using the wrong hand!”
The wrong hand? “But, but I’m left-handed.”
“Everybody else is doing it right-handed, I don’t see why you should be any different,” the manager said, and he meant it. Needless to say, I didn’t even respond, packed my belongings and left, never to return.
This manager made a classic mistake, not telling me what to do, but how to do it. That never works. As shelf stackers, we already knew how to shelve the cans and so all he should have done is keep an eye on us from a distance to make sure we followed his basic instructions and near the end of the shift make a quick round past the shelves to check if all the labels faced front and that’s it. How I achieved the objective as an individual was in this case completely irrelevant. By interrupting me because he wasn’t happy that, as a leftie, I used my left hand, my work remained unfinished and I’m sure that the other shelf stackers took advantage of the commotion, taking the easy way out by simply putting the new cans on the front of the shelves instead of moving everything around. Because the manager took (unnecessary) action, the work was left undone.
Hans Monderman, Letting Go of Traffic Signs
The aforementioned is a rather personalized example, but the same holds true on a broader scale. In 2002, in the Netherlands, a nation with arguably the highest density of traffic signs in the world, traffic expert Hans Monderman was allowed to conduct a ground-breaking experiment. In the Frisian city of Drachten, he removed nearly all traffic signs, claiming that this would increase traffic flow and decrease the number of accidents. He argued that by removing the false security provided by traffic lights and signs, both motorists and pedestrians would be more aware of their surroundings and more responsible in their actions.
The experiment was a success. Whereas the number of accidents in the period 1994-2002 averaged at 8.3 per year, this number fell to just one (!!) in 2005, this despite of an significant increase in traffic volume. All the previous traffic signs had been put in place over the years with the aim to make the roads safer for everyone, yet by removing them, i.e. ‘Doing nothing’, the situation really improved. Since 2002, Hans Monderman’s experiment has been recreated in cities in Germany, the UK and New Zealand with similar results.
Around 2,500 years ago, Chinese sage Laozi wrote that, “If nothing is done, nothing is left undone.” It seems to me he made a valid point.
[T]here you are.
References:
Laozi., Ames, R. and Hall, D. (2004). Daodejing. 1st ed. New York: Ballantine Books, pp.151-152.
Appelo, J. (2011). Management 3.0. 1st ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Addison-Wesley, pp.209-211.
Lyall, S. (2005). A Path to Road Safety With No Signposts. [online] New York Times. Available at: http://ow.ly/l8bh307MUrL [Accessed 6 Jan. 2017].
Senthilingam, M. (2014). Shared space, where the streets have no rules. [online] CNN. Available at: http://ow.ly/ZwEP307MUt6 [Accessed 7 Jan. 2017].
