Lean Mean Fighting Machine

Christine Koht, a Norwegian media personality and program leader, is also a columnist for A-magazine, Aftenposten’s weekend magazine. Her column this past Friday was about the Lean management philosophy, how it has invaded Norwegian workplaces, and the effect it has had on many employees, whom as she described, are just so tired of being told how to be better. She lectures and entertains at many different workplaces around the country, and described how many of the employees she meets in her travels are feeling these days about their workplaces (translated from Norwegian):

‘I travel quite a lot around this country, entertaining at different workplaces, and everywhere I go I encounter the same ideal—continuous improvement. Counting and measurements and endless documenting are presumably what it takes to find out how everything can always be better. But everyone is so tired of it. Doctors and plumbers, engineers and teachers--all of them are finding that their workdays and their job enthusiasm are being drained dry by the perpetual need to document everything they do’.  

I have to admit that this was the first time I had ever heard about this management philosophy. First it was New Public Management (NPM), now it's Lean. So I decided that it’s time to read up on these business philosophies that have taken over the workplace. I’ve already written a post on New Public Management. Actually, we're knee-deep in NPM in the public sector and rather stuck there, so how did Lean get a foothold? I am interested in these philosophies because I see what they are doing to workplaces. The first thing that came to mind when I saw the word Lean was the old expression ‘lean mean fighting machine’. And it seems that this management philosophy is all about reducing waste and continuous improvement, so that your company ends up ‘fit for fight’—a lean mean fighting machine in a competitive global economy. It seems to have started as a management philosophy for manufacturing—how to improve efficiency of production by focusing on waste reduction. For the life of me, I cannot imagine how this philosophy can be applied to public sector organizations. For one thing, it is the exact opposite of NPM as far as I can see. Correct me if I’m wrong, but NPM has only led to massive increases in layers of administration and administrative positions—too many chiefs and not enough Indians, in other words. So if Lean is now the management philosophy of choice—what possibilities exist to eliminate waste? Should the Lean business consultants, strategists and gurus start by ‘removing’ the very layers of administration that NPM set in place? Because anyone with an ounce of common sense can see that it is the exponential growth of administration that is clogging the system, reducing efficiency and causing waste. The administrators need to administrate and to control the employees who are doing the actual work. The numbers of actual workers are decreasing relative to the number of administrators set in place to administrate them.

I also see what these different trends in management philosophies have done to workplace leaders, how desperate some of them are to effect change, any change, in a panicked attempt to leave a legacy behind them when they go. They also have to be able to say to a new employer—‘I managed to implement this or that change in my former workplace, and it’s working very well. I can do miracles with your workplace if you only give me a chance’. Or I can at least imagine that this is what they are desperate to achieve, otherwise why do so many of them—men and women alike--look so harried and haggard? When you meet with them, they come up with yet another idea for how you can be better, how you can improve your workday, how you can best serve your workplace and those ideas are completely different than the ones they were so adamant about your accepting just a year ago. And when you remind them of what they insisted upon a year ago, they get irritated and don’t want to hear about the past. The past for them is the past—gone, non-existent (as though it never existed), passé, and a taboo topic of conversation. It’s all about relativeness (changing with circumstances) these days. When you remind them that you personally might want to learn from past mistakes, they don’t want to hear that either. They also don’t want to hear that you want to take your time now in making a decision that will affect how you perform your work duties for the next few years. They just want you to accept what they want you to accept—NOW. It doesn’t matter if they change their minds again in six months. 

When will workplace leaders realize that efficiency is the last thing that results from incessant poking and prodding and change? Employees work best and most efficiently in an environment that lets them do the job they are paid to do, in other words, in a stable and supportive environment. They work best in an environment where the infrastructure in place supports them in their quest to do a good job, rather than hindering them, as is often the case in overly-bureaucratic and overly-administrated environments. There is no stability in an atmosphere of constant change, in an environment that incessantly pokes and prods its employees at every turn in an effort to get them to produce more and to be more efficient. There are many employees who have done a terrific job, who have produced for their companies, and who are tired. Just plain tired—of being told they haven’t done enough, that they aren’t good enough, that they need to change, that they are resistant to change, that they are too set in their ways, or that they need to just ‘adapt’ to yet another way of looking at their job. What if the new management philosophy could be one with a laissez-faire focus, one that led to appreciation of employees and to company management which understood that employee competence and expertise are the reasons that employees were hired in the first place, which understood that ‘more and better’ all the time doesn’t lead to efficiency and that if employees are appreciated that they will produce in ways that a company could only dream of? What if companies understood that enough is enough and that better is often the enemy of good, and that more means never enough? Management should back off and let employees be. But that would mean treating employees like adults and not children. Are company managements up to that? Only time will tell.

I’m not arguing against all forms of self-improvement; I’m actually a proponent of self-improvement in the personal arena. By that I mean—striving to be the best person you can be in the situations in which you find yourself. We can always learn new ways of looking at things, always have new and different responses if we’ve learned from our mistakes. My problem is when self-improvement/job improvement is forced upon you by people who have little to no idea of what they’re doing and who have no idea of who you really are or of what you need in a workplace setting. So let’s see if I can get this right. If I need advice on how to be a better scientist, I will consult a highly-successful scientist, not an administrator. Likewise, if I need advice on how to be a better friend or spouse, I’ll consult people who have good track records in both departments or who work in the psychology and social work fields, but not an administrator. By documenting all that we do, administrators conclude that they know us and that they are competent enough to tell us how to do the jobs we were hired to do. But they are not. However, if I need help with balancing a budget sheet or with filling out a complicated form, I’ll consult an administrator. But that is very seldom. So perhaps these management philosophies are more about finding valid work for the administrators to do. The employees they are administrating know for the most part what they are doing and why, and how to reach their professional goals without administrative interference. The more time we spend on administrative tasks, the less time we have to work at our real jobs, and then productivity and efficiency fly out the window. 

New Public Management in a Nutshell

I don't know where this cartoon originally came from, but it's a good one. It demonstrates the system of New Public Management in a nutshell.

"In this economic crisis, we unfortunately have no option but to terminate Andre".

The Emperor's New Clothes--New Public Management

I attended a breakfast seminar yesterday morning sponsored by Forskerforbundet--my union. Yes, scientists here are unionized (you don’t have to join a union but it is encouraged and smart to do so for a lot of reasons), and Forskerforbundet is definitely one of the largest unions. It is quite an active group and keeps its members well-informed about what is happening on the scientific, political and economic fronts in this country and internationally. The topic of the seminar—‘Have current government politics led to a better everyday life for employees in academia?’--was the reason I decided to attend. The resounding answer for most of the attendees was no. There were four speakers who had brief presentations and then the floor was open for debate. One of the lectures was entitled—‘Accounting as Politics’; it was very enlightening. It was essentially a presentation of New Public Management (NPM), how this management style is defined, and its impact on the public sector when it is implemented. Afterwards it was interesting to hear university and college employees—scientists, teachers and educational administrators—talk about how bad the current situation has become under NPM. NPM in the public sector is the big topic of discussion these days. I found the seminar interesting because the speakers managed to crystallize, explain and confirm the feelings I have had about the changes in my workplace during the past few years. Things just don’t feel right anymore, but I couldn’t tell you exactly what is wrong either. What I do know is that finances and budgets are the only things that interest upper-level management these days; also that scientists are expected to understand complicated accounting practices and are reprimanded if they do not make an effort to understand them. A few years ago I remember telling an accountant in my workplace who called me about some mistake he thought I had made that if he wanted me to spend a lot of time learning his job, then he needed to come into my lab and learn how to do my job while I was busy learning his, because someone had to fill in the gap. There was silence on the other end of the phone and then a click as he hung up on me. I am certain that he made a note somewhere that ‘this woman is difficult’ or something similar. I am difficult—I question authority. I ask-- ‘who made these (new) rules’. We are expected to drop whatever we are doing on a moment’s notice to focus on some monetary or budget issue that is suddenly of prime importance today, but of course we know that tomorrow it will be something else again. It surprises me that no one in upper management has made the connection that the lack of focus on the actual job that a scientist was hired to do (research) due to constant administrative distractions and paper-pushing leads to a fragmented work approach that in turn leads to loss of productivity and reduced efficiency. This never seems to get discussed.

What is NPM, you may ask. A few years ago none of us knew what it was, let alone its impact on our daily work lives. NPM is a management theory that has already seen its day, as far as I can ascertain from the little I have read about it. It is already considered passé in other countries that fell willingly into its snares and then managed to free themselves from it. But Norway appears to have welcomed it with open arms, putting its unique twist on it as only socialist democrats can do. In theory, its tenet is that optimal management of the public budget results in better economic outcomes and increased efficiency (due to competition). It is rather utopian in its quest for perfect efficiency and a perfectly-balanced budget. We all know that in the real world, and especially in the health care system, perfect efficiency and a perfectly-balanced budget are impossible to achieve as long as patients are involved. But this system treats patients as commodities. And it treats the employees in these systems as commodities as well. It’s a cold management style. You are only as valuable to your workplace as your productivity deems you to be. In other words, you are measured by what you produce. The problem with this way of looking at things in the healthcare system and in academia/education is the following—what are doctors and nurses ‘producing’? Hospitals are not factories. Cancer research institutes are not factories. Colleges and universities are not factories. What are academicians, researchers and educators ‘producing’? Looked at in the NPM way, researchers are producing articles about their work. They are being measured by their output. The production of more articles and the production of more PhD and Masters students means more money for the institution one works for and for the individual researcher. The scientists and academicians who survive and who are rewarded in the current environment are those who are well-funded with large research groups. If you are a small research group, the idea of real competition with a large research group is a joke. How can large and small research groups compete on equal playing ground? They are not well-matched from the start point. But this is what we deal with now. We are told that ‘we are good, but not good enough’, and if we only do so-and-so, that we will suddenly get more money and more students. We are encouraged to ‘compete’ and to live up to our ‘potential’ even though most of us realize that the world is such that only a few people ever reach the top or become the best. Those of us who come from non-socialist systems understand this from the start point. But understanding this does not mean that you cannot do good work and find your niche in the system. Accepting that you are not the best in a particular field does not mean that you cannot work in and do good work in that field. But there is little room for that sort of thinking in NPM.

So what is a ‘good employee’ in an NPM system? As far as I can determine, a good employee is obedient, subservient to the goals of a balanced budget and perfect efficiency, and one that does not combat the system in any way. A good employee does not make waves, does not stick his or her head up, and does not state his or her opinion about particular issues. Conflict resolution and negotiation are key words in how to deal with employee problems if you are a leader, and as far as I can see, it mostly means sweeping those problems under the rug and forgetting about them. The rewards for this obedience are many—promotions to higher administrative positions with emphasis on leadership qualities (that promote the further spread of NPM), an automatic network of NPM supporters, and the feeling that you are part of something much bigger than yourself—that you are promoting change and helping your employees ‘reach their potential’ and become more efficient producers. If it wasn’t that this system has been unreservedly and unabashedly adopted as important to the future of public sector workplaces, I would dismiss it as more ‘new age’ thinking like EST and all those self-help philosophies that made their founders unbelievably wealthy. Don’t get me wrong, I can accept that some of those philosophies have helped some people. But by and large, I tend to be suspicious of ‘the emperor’s new clothes’ way of thinking. I don’t hop on the bandwagon just because a million other people are doing so. I like to think for myself and to be able to observe and judge for myself whether something works or not. I am inherently suspicious of anything that promotes utopian thinking. We are imperfect humans. We are not machines or robots. We will never ever manage to achieve perfect efficiency and perfect productivity on this earth. If NPM supporters start by accepting that tenet, we can work from there. It would mean that they would have to reverse their current approaches. That would be best. And then you’ll possibly have me on your side. 

Bye Bye Work Ethic

I’m always trying to make sense of my incredibly passive-aggressive workplace, a national hospital (which is a recent huge conglomerate of four Oslo hospitals) that has continually stated for the past several years that it wants to be the primo research hospital, but somehow never quite manages to get to that exalted position because it can never settle on one good philosophy for getting there. Trying to decipher the philosophies behind the decisions made over the past few years has preoccupied me for quite some time. The current philosophy is that in addition to being scientists, we should be accountants, bookkeepers, secretaries, technicians, group leaders, lecturers, teachers, inventors, patent holders and administrative geniuses. This should all be accomplished during the work day which consists of reading and answering a lot of useless emails describing the latest change or new regulation. Ok, before I hear the collective moan from my American friends who tell me how awful the job situation is in America right now, and I know it is, let me just say that the USA may be going through an economic crisis, but the ‘land of the oil money’ is also going through some kind of economic crisis as well. They are also going through a true existential crisis. I really don’t think the politicians know what they want anymore. And it really is no better here in social-democratic Norway than in the good ol’ USA, despite the NY Times articles that are always presenting Norway as such a wonderful country—the land of milk and honey. The milk and honey wells are drying up. There is major downsizing afoot here in the public sector, New Public Management (NPM) is taking over (even though there is ample data showing that this business philosophy does not work), and the emphasis is on efficiency, productivity and on marketing your work and yourself as a product. It’s all about the patents, baby—the more the better. It’s about competition and flying high over the radar. NPM is supposed to increase efficiency but as far as I can see the only thing that has increased is the number of bureaucrats needed to direct the few remaining workers who truly want to work, who still have their work ethic.

A good example of the new complexity associated with NPM is the division of leadership into administrative and professional leadership. A worker now reports to an administrative leader and a professional leader (in essence your real boss because this is the person who has the professional competence to function as a mentor for you). If one is lucky there are just two leaders to report to these days. Some workers now have four administrative bosses (who again all report up-over in the system to each other) whereas one year ago it was sufficient with one leader who tackled the administrative and professional tasks. The logistical problems associated with this are huge and the practical consequences are just confusing. Here’s a good example—a researcher talks to one administrative leader about his or her future and is advised to proceed in one way, however the other administrative leaders each have their takes on the situation and have not talked to the others, so the result is a huge mess. You can get told that you should not seek a research group leader position by one leader, whereas the other one comes into your office asking you if you want to be a group leader. And yet another one is advising you to build up your group this month but half a year ago the same person was telling you to wait a few years to do so and to rather focus on collaboration and teamwork with your current group leader. Is this crazy-making behavior? Yes, it is. Are these leaders aware of their inconsistent behaviors? I don’t think that they are. That’s the tragedy.

Thus, the goals are always moving targets. A few years ago, it was easier to take aim and to hit the target than it is now. My question now is more along the lines of—what are the goals really? At least a few years ago it seemed as though the goals were still to work hard and to produce good research work. Now I don’t know anymore.

I think reality TV thinking has invaded the mindsets of the public sector. Everyone is expected to be a star and to perform on cue. The problem of course is that this way of thinking IS the problem. There can only be a few stars, and the rest of us simply have to make do with the meager talents we have. Unfortunately, the biggest proponents of NPM are researchers who were never very good at research but who got promoted to cushy administrative positions, learning economy and management along the way in their endless leadership courses, and directing the productive researchers on how research should be done, all the while cutting the number of research positions available. The problem is one of envy if you ask me—the non-productive researchers who are now the administrators are envious of the researchers who actually DO the job they were hired to do—research, guiding students, writing articles, and publishing. I have a small problem believing that you can be a research hospital without doing research. What’s next—research outsourcing? That’s going to cost the country a pretty penny.

Jimmy Carter once used the word malaise to describe the feeling in America at the time he was president, if I remember correctly. That is what is happening to many researchers I know here—they are experiencing a malaise that is leading to a lethargy that will eventually be impossible to reverse. The desire to work hard and to do your best is disintegrating at a rapid rate. I understand why.