A harsh reality of the modern workplace is that people are often hired for their purely mental qualities - analytical faculty, strategic skill, creative ability, and so on - then penalized for using them.
In particular, there is a general perception that managers judge time spent "just" thinking as time wasted. Whether or not managers actually think this is almost beside the point! The culture of many workplaces is such that people feel they have to "look busy", which often means sacrificing the valuable thought they could be putting into their work for the sake of filler activities whose outputs can at least be measured.
Of course, many managers are sensible enough to understand that their staff are not always daydreaming when they sit staring at the wall. However, without a simple and effective means of planning, supporting and measuring mental work, managers are caught in something of a double bind. This is captured perfectly by an old cartoon in which 2 managers of the Acme Soap Company walk past the open door of an office in which a man is sitting with his legs up on his desk, staring out of the window. "That's Jones", says one manager to the other, "one of our best thinkers." "Yes", says the other manager, "but how do we know he's thinking about soap?"
Human Interaction Management (HIM) helps deal with this problem, by explicitly recognizing the need to support mental work as the third of its 5 basic principles:
Organizations must learn to manage the time and mental effort their staff invest in researching, comparing, considering, deciding, and generally turning information into knowledge and ideas.
HIM sets out a notation including the necessary elements to support its principles, and provides guidelines on use of this notation by identifying a number of patterns characteristic of human work. Of particular relevance to mental work are the REACT pattern and its sub-pattern AIM:
Discussing the stages of REACT in turn:
- Research
Map out the terrain, investigate the principles, talk to those in the know, locate potential threats, and so on, in order to gain information from external sources, and turn it into personal knowledge. The external sources may be close at hand - members of a "community of practice," for example, as discussed below. Alternatively, information may be acquired from an impartial expert in the field, a textbook, or a search on the Web. The details are different every time, but the principle is the same. Before you can start to work on something, it is only common sense to find out what you are getting yourself into. - Evaluate
Step back and consider the knowledge thus acquired. Internalize it, in a sense, by making connections between different opinions or facts. Once you have discovered the general lay of the land, you then need to familiarize yourself with it. You may need to carefully read a pile of papers on your desk, or to mull over some advice that you don't yet understand. This stage may take minutes or years, but it is crucial - there is no point doing an investigation unless you make an effort to take on board the information you gathered. - Analyze
On the basis of your new-found understanding, decide on an approach to the problem. In general, the approach you settle on may result partly from applying logic to reduce the problem to more manageable sub-problems - and partly from an intuitive judgment on what feels "right." The balance varies both with the type of problem and with the type of person trying to solve it. However you arrive at a conclusion, though, the decisions made at this stage are not necessarily a final say on the matter - they are simply a way forward for now; enough to let you proceed further with the work in hand. Sometimes it is hard to be sure whether you are doing the right thing, so you might choose a way forward that hedges our bets - following multiple paths at the same time, in the hope that at least one will work - or decide only on the first few steps, and leave decisions about other steps for later. But you have to make some kind of decision at this point, at least on how to start. - Constrain
Divide the work into separate chunks, and organize them. This may be simply a matter of deciding an approximate order to do them in, or it may be a huge task involving all the techniques of project planning: dependency and impact analysis, critical path definition, resource allocation, budgeting, contingency planning, and so on. However, you are dealing with human-driven processes here - in which people rarely do things in the order laid down, and rightly see it as part of their work to determine how things should proceed. So this stage is not about defining "workflows," in the sense of ordering activities into strict sequence - it is about laying down the constraints that govern the chunks of work, insofar as they can be understood at this point. Typically, constraints are of rather vague form: "before you can promise a delivery date for a product, make sure the component suppliers can meet it," or "it is okay in principle to take on contract staff, as long as you've made a reasonable effort to resource the project internally first." - Task
You have determined how to break the work into chunks, and handed out these chunks to appropriate people (including yourself, perhaps), so now all those concerned can get on with the tasks at hand. For a small job there might only be one chunk, and you might do it yourself. For a large one, this stage may involve many different people and organizations working together to deliver a product or service.
Of the 5 stages of REACT, the first 3 are entirely mental. The first stage of REACT, Research, can be further broken down into a sub-pattern AIM, which describes any research activity:
- Access discovery services
Decide where you will go to obtain information, and obtain any necessary authorization. This might be permission to contact someone, login details for a database, or funds to use some kind of finder agency. - Identify resources required
From the service(s) above, choose resources likely to be of interest. At this stage, you will have only cursory understanding of their content - what matters is that they seem likely to be useful. - Memorize information obtained from particular resources
It is important to focus on committing information to memory, even if the information is only the outline of an idea you will use later on. Unless you have memorized information gathered at this first stage of REACT, it is no use in the following stage, Evaluate - you cannot synthesize ideas you have forgotten, or need to look up in order to understand. This stage is all about internalizing the ideas in question.
Similarly to the way REACT describes human work in general, AIM describes the particular activities of information discovery.
Taken together, the REACT and AIM patterns describe all human working behavior. The patterns capture the way that people respond to an assignment, fulfill a responsibility, achieve a goal - the way they react to the work they take on. REACT and AIM help simplify complex situations, since the patterns can be repeated, overlapped, and nested in order to reduce any work assignment to the same fundamental stages.
TAKE AWAY
For many organizations, one of their highest costs is their knowledge workers - for which I prefer the term interaction workers, to indicate the degree to which knowledge work is dependent on collaboration. Yet such work is usually poorly managed, in that little or no place is formally allowed for the mental activities of which it consists. Managers plan and measure on the basis of concrete outputs, not mental inputs.
To get value for money from your interaction workers, this has to change. Adopt HIM principles and give your interaction workers the space to do what they do best! The first step is to plan and execute human-driven business processes using a HIMS such as the free HumanEdj. However, this is only the beginning. Once work processes have been put in place that actually reflect what people are trying to achieve, managers can then start doing their real job, which is to support the efforts of their staff by enhancing their workplace environment.
For instance, new and interesting software tools are emerging to support the process of information discovery - finding, assembling and writing up information in order to transform it first into knowledge and subsequently into decisions. These tools often emerge from academia, but are highly relevant to a world in which Google is everyone's de facto home page.
Wikipedia provides a useful Comparison of reference management software. My personal favourite is Zotero, which is free and so easy to use that I can see it dominating the space before very long.
Give you interaction workers what they need: plans that allow for them, tools that help them, and (most important of all) official recognition for the effort they put in with their minds, as well as with their hands.
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