Jan 07 2009
Problem Owners Should Fix The Problem
Late last year I wrote about reading “Human Connection and the New Media“ ©1973 edited by Barry N. Schwartz. It was fascinating to see a glimpse of what people at that time expected the future to be like.
The book is a compilation of essays about the “future” and how new media impacts the human experience. One of the best was by Buckminister Fuller, whom I first learned about in a Chad Davies physical science class as an undergraduate. Fuller writes:
Born utterly helpless, and gaining independent competence only slowly, youth’s reflexes are preconditioned to expect some older authority to be responsible for its welfare. Youth assumes that the political authority is a public parent. When dissatisfied, youth protests to the authorities assuming the authorities can, if they wish, make everything satisfactory. Often, the “authority” lacks such capability….
It’s a question of problem ownership
Hmm, an insight I had not before considered, but almost certainly true. Thirty-five years hence, nothing has changed with these youthful expectations. I have been watching with great interest the US presidential election of Barack Obama. People are excited and incredibly optimistic about everything he is going to fix. I predict a certain amount of disillusionment because some problems simply are not as solvable by political authority as they are by the person(s) closest to the problem.
Stephen Covey in “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” calls it the “Circle of Influence” Dave Ramsey simply says, “You fix you!”
In It’s Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy author Michael Abrashoff writes about his experience as a destroyer skipper who went against the traditional Navy hierarchical approach to decision making by empowering the sailors closest to a problem to solve that problem. It is an ingenious approach that makes a lot of sense but is a little scary to the leader who feels like they might be giving up control.
But as Jim Fay explains with his Love & Logic philosophy, control is at best an illusion. Fay says that control is a bit like love in that you only get it when you give some of it away. The notion of letting the owner of a problem solve the problem is a classic Love & Logic approach to teaching responsibility, yet how many times do we see authority figures using top-down management techniques that do not empower the owner of the problem to solve it for fear of “losing control”?
Hierarchies vs Flat Organizations
Much has been written recently about a “flattening” that is happening thanks in no small part to the popularity of Thomas Friedman’s “The World Is Flat:A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century“. Friedman discusses how technology is enabling participation in the global economy of anyone, anywhere at anytime.
Hierarchies tend to remove the leaders further from the people doing the work and solving the problems, leading to bureaucratic inefficiencies. With all of the improvements in communications technologies, I find it amazing that still today the number one problem most organizations face is a lackof communication.
One of the best books I have read about combating the tendency of buck passing and general lack of personal responsibility is “QBQ The Question Behind the Question” by John Miller. If it is an issue where you work and live, I highly recommend this read!






