Andy Billings explains why old factory-floor management doesn't work anymore. In a VUCA world—volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous—teams need to pivot and experiment fast. The industrial model assumed workers were lazy and needed tight control. Today's teams need decentralized decisions and creativity to handle constant change.
Chapters
All right. So who agrees with the following? Just this kind of a show of hands. Who agrees with that one? Success. All right. Need execution. All right. Good. All right. Creative— see if you guys are still awake. Creativity and innovation is part of a team. All right. So how about this one? So this one's the one I would really raise my hand on. Why is it that we all know teamwork is important, We can see it. You guys have said it's important. Some of you even had programs and training in it. Why is it so incredibly hard to get good teams to form? Let's try and cover a little bit. To form, collaborate, bond, connect, and actually get to a high-performing state. Why it's hard. Pardon me? Why it's hard. Why it's hard? You ask him. Yeah, so I'm kind of asking that rhetorically. Just to kind of get you guys prepared for— I'm going to try and say what I think are some of the things that make for that, the difference between those 2 teams. All right. I think there's a couple of ideas that we've gotten historically that have come from a manufacturing environment. It's kind of a lot of what you'll see in management theory, some in leadership work. Some of this you'll still see in business schools. You'll still see some of these concepts kind of percolating around. Do you know who this guy is? Yes, Henry Ford. Henry Ford, right. And for those of you maybe didn't grow up in the US, what did he do? He created cars. Yeah, invented cars, right. And here was one of his friends. Do you know who that guy is? Oh, his name's on there. Yeah, and what did this guy do? Do you know what he was up to? Yes. Yeah, look, he wrote— he was the author of the book— he wrote 2 books on what he called the science of management. I think the science part was he thought it up and wrote it down. I don't think it was necessarily a lot of research. He said things like, these principles will lead to making better cars. He said, if you take all the tasks and you break them down in really small units, that will lead to more effective production. The leader's role is really more of a supervisor. This is where authority and direction comes from the supervisor. You have to watch those workers very carefully because they're really probably not that reliable and they're not necessarily that motivated. In terms of impact, Control, everything in this theory says you should try and control workers very carefully. You should try and control those members because of this kind of basic belief that people really aren't very motivated to do hard work. They're not really motivated to get a good result. You need to lay over a set of concepts, decision-making controls, and structure because people are not intrinsically motivated to do good work. You can kind of look at that maybe and smile today. But I think if you look at a lot of our management practices still today, a lot of that's still influenced by that core underlying assumption. Getting more— just a quote out of that. You can see there's a very harsh view of people and what their motivations were. Left unsupervised, things were really going to go amok. And so Taylor and his crew got in there, and they put all of these principles into play. In Ford's manufacturing plants. So today, if you said we were going to do those things, you'd go, oh, that would be horrible. This is going to be a disaster. But it was amazingly successful. A car that used to take like a day to build, a day and a half to build, when those principles went into place— divide up the tasks, supervise like crazy— And centralized control in a few people, that led to making cars dramatically, dramatically more effective. And everyone got excited by that and concluded that not only were the principles true, but kind of the underlying base assumptions must be true. I mean, after all, we're building these cars very successfully. And so this kind of mindset about how to run an organization just spread. So I think some of these things are probably not that helpful to us anymore. And they're getting in the way. But anyway, here's some of the things that still come out of this. The team members— well, actually, there isn't a huge amount of teamwork in an organization like this. You've kind of divided up the tasks and you've told people what to do, so there really isn't a lot of what you might call collaboration. The very few decisions that members of the organization will make You make those pretty much at the top. Failure, pretty much in cars you don't want to have those, so you figure out ways so that there are no mistakes and you actually call any of those things defects and you have a very elaborate way of managing those out. Teams, pretty much the best way to work then is to dampen down any kind of creativity, dampen down innovation, don't take risks, keep everything kind of flat and calm, and that gets cars And other kinds of manufactured goods really, really effectively produced. So that's kind of the world that this was built on where information was really linear, knowledge was pretty static, the world really unfolded at a pretty slow pace. And so today, things really go at a lot faster pace. I don't know if you guys heard the word VUCA, a VUCA world? FUKA is actually a term that came out of leadership college for American military. And they do— they— first world countries like the United States and others were really devastated by guerrilla warfare. They just had no idea how to handle that. People riding around on horses, hiding behind bushes, putting incendiary— putting explosive devices on the highways, other kinds of things. So when Vietnam War and then the other wars came on, They took a look and said, we really live in a VUCA world, which meant the world is very volatile, meaning things are changing very fast. Events are somewhat uncertain around what they mean. The world is complex instead of the Henry Ford days, and complex meaning there are variables there that you no longer control. In a complicated system, there are lots of variables that you can manage how to control them. In a complex world, things are so complex you really don't know how to control them. all of the variables. I mean, for instance, if you wanted to start to work on the climate or you wanted to work on the economy of a country, those things are so complex no one really fully understands all the variables. And ambiguous means we really don't know exactly where the world's going to go. We don't know exactly what success is going to be in the future. So I would say that this is the world we live in. It's a VUCA world now. And so a lot of the principles around teamwork and collaboration that worked fine in the industrial manufacturing, more linear area, don't work so well in a VUCA world. All right, so I'm not going to read all these to you, but just see if this doesn't feel like a couple of weeks maybe in your life here. Multiple teams going on simultaneously, you're working across time zones, you have family in other parts of the world, you may have other projects or parts of your company going simultaneously. Who knows, you may have several companies going simultaneously. You're constantly refactoring your plans. And exactly how you're defining success in all your ventures is— you've probably heard the word pivoting and changing and evolving and iterating and experimentation, right? Those are all terms for the world's a VUCA place and we don't know exactly what success is going to be about. So that's now what the team environment is all about. So I'd like to just talk a little bit about a different mindset that's maybe more prepared for a VUCA world. Because I think if you start with the right mindset, the right assumptions, the right kind of fundamental beliefs, it kind of sets you up well when you start to manage your own organizations in the future.
