HP and Surveillance in the Workplace
Anyone keeping up with the news has no doubt read about the current controversy surrounding HP’s surveillance of board members. While the ethical dimensions of such “misplaced priorities” are well covered on other sites, I haven’t seen much attention paid to the more utilitarian aspects of Patricia Dunn’s methods. What, for instance, is the predicted effect of such surveillance (or the knowledge of such surveillance) on HP’s operations? If we ignore ethics for a minute (admittedly, not generally a good idea), was this good strategy?
It strikes me that, as hinted at above, the real problem is what the knowledge of surveillance does to HP’s culture. Even if Perkins hadn’t forced HP into making Dunn’s actions public, it can be reasonably assumed that word would have gotten out among HP’s executives and managers. Would this knowledge make them worry that they too could be the subject of investigations? Would it affect their performance?
There is a good deal of theory regarding what happens when workers are aware of surveillance. The most famous of which is Foucault’s notion of panoptic control (taken from Bentham’s panopticon). Foucault’s idea was that mere knowledge of constant observation had devastating effects on a person’s sense of freedom and identity. More recently, scholars like Graham Sewell have explored the idea of panoptic control in the workplace.
There is not, however, a good deal of evidence regarding the actual (empirical) affects of surveillance on the workplace. This is particularly true with regard to its effects on upper-level management. In that view, I wonder if any readers could comment on their own experiences or thoughts.
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Posted in Commentary by Ralph Maurer
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September 5, 2006
Creativity and Constraint, Part 2
In my last blog entry I used Jon Elster’s work to discuss how two kinds of constraint could be enabling to creativity: specific and arbitrary. In this entry I want to explore the notion of specific constraint. These are situations where introducing certain specific constraints aids rather than hinders creativity.
Elster gives much attention in Ulysses Unbound to the idea of precommitment. This occurs when people precommit to a set of constraints in order to reduce the influence of “passion” at some point in the future. Elster argues that people can often anticipate that when a particular decision or task arises they will be under stress and be likely to choose options that, while not attractive in the present, might be downright seductive at the time the decision must be made. In these cases they may choose to precommit themselves to a set of future constraints.
One example Elster employs is that of an alcoholic who turns down invitations to social events because he/she knows that they will not have the will power to resist alcohol once they are at the party. Elster also employs substantial evidence from more ‘far flung’ domains including the tendency of tourism in Amish communities to reinforce Amish lifestyle because, by inviting tourism, the Amish precommit to a way of life consistent with Amish tradition.
In the context of creative work, precommitment can help produce better results. Take, for example, the case of a designer who wants to create something relatively innovative but always has the option of falling back on a boring, but reliable design if need be. This is often the case in industry and contributes to a phenomena termed ‘satisficing’ in management literature (see Wikipedia entry). Simply put, satisficing is the tendency to do only what is absolutely necessary, rather than what is optimal.
Our designer may wish to innovate now, knowing that a more creative solution, while risky, is more likely to optimally fit the project needs. But the designer may also have the sense that once deadlines loom they are likely to choose the easier route. In this case, Elster argues that people often will, and probably should, introduce specific constraints that will prevent such a decision in the future. Often such precommitment takes the form of attaching penalties to the choices that are to be avoided (if not eliminated).
From the standpoint of a manager overseeing creative work, the implication is two-fold. First, it is useful to talk with creative workers about crucial decision-making events well before they happen. How do these workers feel when ‘crunch-time’ is upon them? How does their cognition of options and goals change when stress is introduced to the process? What options would be useful to eliminate or make less attractive? Second, the manager should introduce these constraints and ‘stick to their guns’ once deadlines loom. Allowing creative professionals to precommit in this way can make for much better end results. It also happens to be a strategy that fits with some of the best available research on creativity and constraint.
In my next entry I will take up the issue of arbitrary constraint and its relationship to creativity.
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Posted in Academic research by Ralph Maurer
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Why Assumptions Matter:Escape from a Submarine
I put this post up awhile back on www.bobsutton.com, but I think it is worth reprinting here because it is a good example of why Jeff Pfeffer and I constantly press people to think and talk about the assumptions that drive their behavior. Too often, they aren’t even aware of such beliefs, and when they start thinking about whether their assumptions and ideologies make any sense, they start questioning their practices and actions – and are motivated to get better evidence too.
The importance of identifying and testing the assumptions that determine how organizations and technologies are designed sounds so obvious – yet we’ve learned that, when we don’t press managers, consultants, and researchers (including ourselves) to take a hard look at their deeply held beliefs about what they are doing and why, they will unwittingly do horrible – or at least very expensive – things over and over. In the management arena, the assumptions held by people who design organizations are often dangerous half-truths. So, for example, assuming that human beings are always selfish and can’t be trusted is dangerous because, if you operate on that assumption, you will design a fear-driven organization that will encourage people to act that way – and never give people a chance to earn trust.
Another area is teacher incentives and student test scores. Politicians and school administrators often argue that teacher’s pay should be linked to student test scores. That all sounds wonderful, until you start examining the basic assumption: If teachers work harder, their students will do better on standardized tests. Unfortunately, if you dig into this assumption, you will start realizing that teachers have little or no control over which students they teach, how many students are in their classes, what levels of resources they have, and what materials they use. So, even if financial incentives do actually encourage teachers to work harder (another suspect assumption), increasing motivation doesn’t increase student performance much, if at all, because teachers don’t have enough control over the work. And, at least in the short-term, incentives don’t affect teacher’s knowledge and skill.
That is why studies going back nearly 100 years show that teacher incentive pay has little if any impact on student achievement scores; it does have other predictable effects – teachers and school administrators will try to change things that they can control: Like cheating on the tests to get their students higher scores, either by changing the forms themselves or telling students the right answers. And, as I’ve heard from researchers and parents in the Chicago school system, teachers respond to these incentives by moving their weakest students into special education classes (which are overflowing with kids who really aren’t well-suited to those classes) and when they have a gifted child who should probably skip a grade or move to a classroom or school of gifted kids, they squelch efforts to take those kids out of their classes. In other words, the incentive pay does affect teacher effort: They focus on ways to get their test scores up that they can control, even though those changes have nothing to do with student learning, and in fact, may actually undermine learning. Yes, incentives do drive behavior, but sometimes the wrong kind (See Chapter 5 of Hard Facts for an in-depth discussion of incentives).
What does this have to do with escape from submarines? Perhaps the clearest, and most troubling, case I know of a deadly assumption (that was held for over 50 years) has to do with the problem of escaping from a sunken submarine. C.B. “Swede” Momsen was a colorful and charismatic U.S. Naval officer who unwittingly perpetuated false and deadly beliefs about the best way to ascend to the surface. Check out The Terrible Hours to read about this maverick. Momsen was deeply disturbed by several incidents where submariners were trapped at depths of 100 to 200 feet beneath the surface, with no apparent means for escape. They all died waiting for a rescue that never came. “Swede” dedicated years of his life to developing the Momsen lung in the 1930’s, a complicated apparatus that –- by the time development was completed — included a mouth piece, a breathing bag, a canister of soda lime, goggles, a nose clip, and a marker buoy attached to 500 feet of rope that had a knot every ten feet. The idea was “Escaping submariners were to pause every ten feet, where they found a knot, so as to ascend no faster than fifty feet per minute.” The Germans had used a similar device called the Dräger breathing set, going back to World War I.
The perceived need for these cumbersome devices – and the actions of people on submarines –were based on the assumption that simply exiting the submarine and swimming to the surface meant certain death. But research done after World War II showed that this assumption was false: at depths of less than 300 feet, a trapped submariner’s best chance of survival was a “free ascent.” As Ann Jensen’s 1986 article Why the Best Technology for Escaping from a Submarine is No Technology reports:
The solution was a British suggestion. Inflate a life jacket while in the submarine. The jacket would be designed with a flapper valve to release the expanding air as it carried its wearer upward. “Once you’re out, you start blowing as hard as you can blow,” said Schlech. “The jacket takes you up and out of the water like a shot. We called the system ‘Blow and Go.’ There was a lot of opposition at first, but eventually it got rid of the Momsen Lungs and all the other equipment, and it’s still in use in depths of up to three hundred feet.”
Moreover, Jensen reports that German experience going back to World War I showed that –-even without a life jacket — simply exhaling while making the ascent is effective as well, although such experience was not known or was ignored as research focused on developing better devices for escaping submarines, even though none were needed. To quote Jensen’s article:
The case of the German U-57, which hit a mine north of Scotland in 1915, is typical. The U-boat went down in 128 feet of water with twenty men alive inside. The air in the submarine quickly filled with chlorine gas as seawater flooded the boat’s electric batteries. The fumes burned the men’s eyes and made breathing nearly impossible. Their ears ached as pressure increased. They found only four Dräger units aboard; believing their situation hopeless, two of the men shot themselves. Then the captain decided to make one last, desperate effort to save the remainder of his crew by opening a hatch.
To his amazement the hatch flew open and he was drawn out and upward. He had no time to inflate his life jacket or even to take a breath. As he recounted later, “I had no desire to inhale, but to forcibly exhale so that I constantly had to blow air out.” The air in his lungs had expanded as he rose. If he hadn’t exhaled, his lungs probably would have burst. The rest of the crew followed him; seven survived the ascent and were later picked up.
The upshot is that –- whether you are talking about teachers or technology –- stopping to identify and test your assumptions is something that isn’t done often enough, and can save a lot of money and a lot of lives. And a related lesson, is that the most effective people and organizations are often masters of the obvious.
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Posted in Beliefs and assumptions by Bob Sutton
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