Out with the Old/In with the New

"Play casts a spell over us; it is 'enchanting,' 'captivating.' It is invested with the noblest qualities we are capable of perceiving in things: rhythm and harmony."       --Johann Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 1944

I am now into my fifth month of “retirement,” and lucky me I’m still doing what I’ve been doing pretty regularly for pay and for free since I was 13--writing, which means it’s a retirement from drawing a paycheck only (unless I count my Social Security check, which I may do if only to piss off those citizens whose heads explode at the thought of their tax dollars going to anything other than buying new battleships and prisons…but I digress…). 
One of the odd things about this retirement--other than the fact that I’ve spent just about all of it with my leg in a cast—is how much of it I’ve spent thinking about the working life. That is due, I suspect, to the fact that in my final two years of traditional employment, my company was involved in an excruciating and expensive effort to retool itself, which led me to write a book about the experience. The post-retirement launch of that book has kept my head deep in the work world (at grave expense to my golf game and fishing I might add…if I actually golfed and fished, but I don’t). I find myself thinking about the labor situation—both retrospectively and speculatively--because truly we are at a crossroads in regards the relationship between labor and management. At its most extreme, we now have corporate shareholders pining for a day when the companies they invest in are fully supported by the cheapest third world labor available or robots. What happens to the increasing number of skilled unemployed workers seems to many of our business leaders and politicians to be somebody else’s problem.
At the not so extreme end, we have companies, like the one I worked for, struggling to find their way in the new global economy and reduced to grasping at straws. As glad as I am to be out of the labor market, I’m disheartened to see the frustration and desperation that’s currently driving it. It wouldn’t be so bad if there were more jobs for more people, but an increase in the availability of jobs would only exacerbate the secondary labor problem, which is the quality of the modern working life. Currently that quality is being seriously degraded because a shortage of jobs means it’s a buyers’ market, and there’s really nothing quite like having the upper hand to bring out the very worst in management. The prevailing attitude toward workers is, You’re lucky to have a job, so don’t complain.
But even in the best of circumstances, all but the most enlightened management has been inclined to view workers as cogs in a wheel, which is why management approaches to productivity have focused on time and motion for more than a hundred years. The varying approaches have been dressed up with different jargon over time, but they all come down to the same thing--getting more out of fewer workers, better and faster.
The latest incarnation, which has particularly dominated my mind, is lean. For months now, the Nobby has been promoting Look Before You Lean: How a Lean Transformation Goes Bad—A Cautionary Tale , a book which makes a critical appraisal of one so-called lean transformation. But even Look Before You Lean’s scathing review of an actual (as opposed to theoretical) lean process at work never goes so far as this joint Japanese and American report, which accuses lean of introducing karoshi into the Japanese culture that spawned lean. Karoshi means death from over work. The authors of the article conclude:

The myth of … ‘lean production’ as the inevitable wave of the future has been widely promoted throughout the world by both the Japanese government and corporations and their followers… 

The risk factors in [such] work organizations should be studied both in terms of work intensity, the magnitude of working hours, and its effects on skill discretion, decision authority and workers’ social support. 

The real danger is that [this] may be a kind of work organization ‘Trojan Horse.’ Since it is often posed as a seemingly progressive change away from the authoritarian management style… and towards participation and team work, its anti-democratic implications have been well disguised. Health researchers and occupational health professionals should view the current popularity of …lean production techniques with some skepticism.

The authors are right in that lean advocates aggressively promote their hobby horse as the steed all businesses should ride into the future. Business has been seduced by the myth of the lean, mean fighting machine for decades, so it is no surprise that it continues to buy whole hog into a process with a dubious track record.
This can’t continue, however, and it won’t. Every day there is more and more exciting new research put out there, pointing us to more sophisticated answers to our problems. One of the pioneers of such research is Jane McGonigle, the professional gamer from Cal Berkeley who has studied how game playing can have a profoundly positive impact on society. She writes: 

Those who continue to dismiss games as merely escapist entertainment will find themselves at a major disadvantage in the years ahead, as more gamers start to harness this power for real good. My research over the past decade at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Institute for the Future has shown that games consistently provide us with the four ingredients that make for a happy and meaningful life: satisfying work, real hope for success, strong social connections and the chance to become a part of something bigger than ourselves.  

In a good game, we feel blissfully productive. We have clear goals and a sense of heroic purpose. More important, we're constantly able to see and feel the impact of our efforts on the virtual world around us. As a result, we have a stronger sense of our own agency—and we are more likely to set ambitious real-life goals….Research shows that gamers spend on average 80% of their time failing in game worlds, but instead of giving up, they stick with the difficult challenge and use the feedback of the game to get better. With some effort, we can learn to apply this resilience to the real-world challenges we face. 

Imagine a workforce that is satisfied, hopeful, tightly-knit, dedicated, and resilient! The tried and tired time and motion approaches to improving productivity in all its various disguises will soon be obsolete, as business leaders—only the visionary ones at first--finally realize that the way forward will not be found in the industrial past. Motivating workers for much of human history has been a pretty brutish science. Neuroscience, game theory, the avatar studies the Nob delved into last week all hint at a time when employees might fully immerse themselves into their work as a state of bliss rather than stress. It will come as employers make the difficult transition from ticking their employees off to understanding what makes them tick.