Another thought-provoker from last week’s management course was when discussing the concept of continuous improvement. The idea stemmed from movements like Kaizen in the industrial world, where organisation focused on making continual step improvements to processes to improve efficiency and quality.
During the course, a somewhat cliched slide appeared which had a graph – time ran along the x-axis, “improvement” up the y-axis, and little cycles of learning and improvement spiralled their way from bottom left to top right. I suddenly realised that, and after years of peddling this stuff myself, in much of the world of “knowledge working” we are actually having to continually learn just to stand still.
Over the course of my own career, I’ve been learning pretty much throughout. In fact, the point at which I generally change jobs is when the opportunity to learn new things dries up (or ideally, just before). But over that time, has my “performance” (as much as that can be measured) improved? Hopefully – but then what I do today is way different from what I did last year, and a million miles away from what I was doing 10 years ago. In short, over the years I have been continuously learning, but it has been to be able to to discard the things that I used to need to do to do my work. Over the years I’ve been reasonably successful in my career – but if I had wanted to stay in more or less the same role the past 10 years, I’d have had to have kept learning at a pretty similar rate just to stand still.
The worrying thing for most knowledge workers is that continous learning to stand still is going to increasingly be the norm, and that all of that hard work might come to nought at some point if a disruptive business emerges (how many encyclopaedia writers are there these days in the age of Wikipedia?). Industrial analogies like continuous improvement over-simplify the way in which human endeavour and effort works and can be deployed.
mmitII 