Ultimately, the modern workplace fears soloists. They have good reason to fear them. The soloist has power. Like in a music concert, if the soloist can’t show up, the show can not go on with just the accompanists. If the soloist fails, there is nothing the accompanist can do to save the show.
When a customer gets his hair cut, there is only one person doing the cutting from the start to the finish. That cutting involves observing, analyzing, planning, and acting. He succeeds because this is not a team effort.
I suspect the agile paradigm has taken over the aircraft industry, or at least in Boeing and the FAA. The MCAS was a sprint for the 737 Max, and the 737 Max was a sprint to incorporate the new engine. There was a lot of engineering and testing in these sprints: these sprints took a long time. However, the fundamental thinking changed from a requirements-first approach to an agile approach that seeks to fail quickly.
Following the lessons from computer neural networks, we should recognize that intelligence in an organizational neural network arises within the network itself. It does not dependent on hierarchical decision makers. Neural-network organizations have no need for individually accountable human decision makers such as managers or officers. Such an outcome is consistent with the goals of evidence-based decision making that ideally obligate decisions based on the evidence alone and not on whim of a designated leader.
Updated 2/13/2015: Revised title because this was getting too many hits for the wrong reasons. When I wrote this I was thinking about a science about data content that I later called dedomenology (naturalist of the datum) to distinguish it from the sub-discipline of computer science called data science. Popular usage of data…
I follow news about Affordable Care Act in general because it is affecting me now as a long-term individual-market subscriber. Besides a personal stake in the overall program, I am curious about the ongoing drama of the failures and delays of implementation of the software and IT required to make the legislation work. In…
