#management #delivery #control #planning #system #management #organization #SOPs
idea
Top-down and bottom-up management approaches are complementary[1]. Building a vision and settings goals is a responsibility of a leader, but involving bottom-up is required to generate new ideas and create a sense of ownership.
Personal productivity is benefitting the individual and helping to deal with the noise, however it does not help reducing the noise. A balance needs to be found between autonomy and prescription for knowledge workers[2]. Leaving everyone to decide is prone to the Tragedy of commons, and structuring the system helps it being more efficient as a whole rather than at an individual level. While no-one likes to be micro-managed, there are some aspects of knowledge work that can be prescribed: rules around meetings, distractions, emails, office-hours, how to interact with other teams, and focus - where clear rules[3] not only set a common structure but also reduce the Cognitive load and working memory around marginal decisions ; while some others such as idea generation, how to solve a problem, design and such need to be left to the individual - where the cognitive load is required.
links
Control systems and goals on how to control a system with goals (set direction to steer)
Hierarchy of objectives is one way to setup the vision and generate some bottom up on how to achieve it. See also Lag and lead metrics on the same topic. However this leaves organization to the individual, while some structure is required.
[3]: Delegation Framework is dealing with delegation vs. abdication - which is the balance to be obtained between top-down and bottom-up. A delegation framework sets structure that allows the system to function with order.
references
[1]: Fast company / The False Choice Between Top-Down And Bottom-Up Leadershipref Is discussing the false dichotomy
[2]: Cal Newport / The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Doneref (Annotated version in Feedly) - An article on personal productivity vs. organization productivity. Personal productivity is benefitting the individual, but taking a step back it corresponds to tragedy of commons. The problem of lack of structure and autonomy is that it creates noise - a person is incentivized to send messages and ask questions to throw the ball away, shifting work to other people. GTD helps dealing with that noise but it fails to reduce it.
"And yet, even if we accept that people don’t want to be micromanaged, it doesn’t follow that every single aspect of knowledge work must be left to the individual. If I’m a computer programmer, I might not want my project manager telling me how to solve a coding problem, but I would welcome clear-cut rules that limit the ability of other divisions to rope me into endless meetings or demand responses to never-ending urgent messages."