People are not your hands
When lead developers build relationships in the team and solve the problem of the "I'm shorthanded" situation, they sometimes get this expression too literally. But people are not hands.
People are people.
OK, I understand your idea. People are people, hands are hands, nothing except hands is hands.
This thesis should be fined for obviousness.
Or populism. In case all you wanted to say was not to think about people in a way other than as personalities.
No. People are not hands because it's impossible to control them with the same level of intuitiveness as hands.
Ultimately, if you perceive people as a tool, they will resemble high-tech, multifunctional prostheses without a high-tech control interface. They can do a lot, but it's impossible to command them. As a result, they can, at best, crack nuts. But, for cracking nuts, it's better to use a specialized tool - a nutcracker.
Assuming that people could follow complex external orders is just naive.
Am I mistaken, or have you become a cynic? If so, then congrats on growing up. I completely support you in this: people are not able to do what they are asked to do.
So, is the whole problem only the fact that a high-tech interface for transmitting commands has not been developed yet?
I didn't mean that people are stupid, unskilled, or lazy. I claim that it's simply not inherent in a person to execute external orders flawlessly. People will always move according to their own interests. It's naive to think that people will perform complex work with high quality, accurately following all rules and regulations, without seeing benefits for them.
Those naive managers:
- take that "high-tech prosthesis"
- write numerous regulations for every new operation, trying to define the boundaries of what is allowed or not in any scenario (and there is an infinite number of conditions)
- stimulate people externally with a whip or a carrot
finally, workers simply go through the motions, bypassing the obstacles built by the regulations.
Now you only have a source of motion: a physical force constrained by walls and traps. A crowd that must constantly be monitored.
What's the problem? It works great in the vast majority of businesses. The military is organized like this: regulations, rewards and punishments, and discipline. If you don't like to pay a lot of attention, then hire some 'proxy' people, prescribe protocols to them, and assign them badges of power. People like those are cheap and will perfectly build order on their own (according to the Stanford prison experiment).
As a result, you have got a controllable system that can be expected to produce understandable results.
Stanford prison experiment is an old experiment about how people behave when they are given power over others. It was conducted in 1971 by Philip Zimbardo.
This system is fragile. It's not capable of adaptation, because no one acts according to their interests. It's not able to withstand sudden cataclysms, because they require a quick reaction, which is not possible if everything is built on regulations.
This approach is needed for conserved systems. Those that work in a stable environment. And for retributive prisons.
Regulations, discipline, reward, and punishment: simple, understandable principles. You can quickly build a system using them and start making money. Any alternative I can imagine looks complicated and unpredictable. And what you are trying to overthrow, on the contrary, works like clockwork.
Yes, such a system works like clockwork. The only thing is not everyone has the talent to be a watchmaker.
Moreover, the analogy with the clock is not that accurate. Watches have the privilege of having been soldered and not interacting with the world. Ordinary companies do not have such privileges: they interact with the world, at least by participating in the economy. Even if you take a closed community that grows food for itself and lives on self-sufficiency, they still use nature that is a part of the world. And the world is volatile. And it can hit hard.
One business will die, and another will grow in its place, what's the problem? Why do you make everything more complicated by throwing in all this stuff about free will?
I'm concerned that many businesses fail to reach their full potential due to their short lifetime. While newly created businesses may bring innovation and a fresh approach to the industry, they can quickly die if they adopt punitive management methods.
In such an environment, it's difficult for employees to feel satisfied or fulfilled. They burn out and may seek relief by constantly changing jobs. But it also means that organizations lose their expertise and become weaker, reducing their chances of long-term survival.
I'm not sure why we're even discussing long-term survival. Do people still want that?
Many employees are OK with switching jobs frequently. And owners just need to be ready for short experiments and have many different businesses, each of which can die. But the owner will be fine.
I see what you mean. You suggest that businesses should be viewed not as purposeful systems, but as part of a conglomerate of businesses. As if a business is a cell, and the whole holding is an organism.
Exactly. There is no point in trying to build a complex business when you can build a dozen of simple ones. I don't mean their size, I mean their determinism. It will be cheap and predictable.
In a deterministic system, the outcome can be predicted precisely if the initial conditions are known with accuracy. This means that if the same input is given to a deterministic system multiple times, it will produce the same output each time. Examples of deterministic systems include a simple calculator or clock.
I'm concerned that if the holding company is a purposeful system and its parts are not, then if we go down one level, we will find purposeful people there. It's like atoms with free will. The system ceases to be predictable. This is a direct violation of security.
That's why there are regulations. And professional ethics, which prescribe how to behave at work.
These regulations, discipline, the carrot and the stick will ensure this order. It will knock all the nonsense and free will out of the employee's head while they are at work. That will make the system deterministic. And any deviations will be taken over by the immune system (the security service) and will put the negligent employees out in the cold.
But how can you give birth to innovations in such an authoritarian environment? If employees are only stimulated to follow orders from above, suppressing all mutations?
That system will be creatively limited by the abilities of the owner, that system will repeat itself, and it'll kill it because the rest of the world is changing rapidly.
Yes, there is a flaw in this: you cannot get predictability without sacrificing the potential for innovation. But this can be compensated by the absorption of young companies that still have this potential. This is simple.
So you think it would be right to build a business with the carrot-and-stick approach, knock creativity out of people to achieve predictability, increase the number of units in the holding to insure against the volatility of the world, and simply buy innovation?
I understand that this is how the world works, but isn't it fucked up?
If you turned off this meaningless romanticism inside you and looked at things without rose-colored glasses, you would understand there is nothing wrong with that. That's how it works. And it works stably. And it will work for a long time. And no one needs anything else: neither managers nor subordinates.
No, I don't intend to accept this state of affairs.
The world shouldn't move like that. Such a world is a rickety monster on crooked legs, devouring everything in the area of availability, with the only purpose of surviving.
People have an inner potential for creation without coercion. This potential can be used if you allow yourself as a manager to become smarter. Perhaps you will have to become much smarter than you can imagine now.
I am sure that a world with competently created connections between small purposeful systems is more resistant to storms and can become more productive.
If in your team you treat people as your own children, it gives these people the opportunity to become better than you.
Loving parents give freedom of knowledge to their children. They give direction by their personal example rather than directly (rather than giving direct orders). They create tools that will allow you to avoid fatal blunders but give you the freedom to make mistakes.
Romantically naive.
I don't care. People are not hands.
