Management by fiddling about

I was recently gifted a complex pump and filter system for my pond.  I’m no plumber and have little experience of this kind of thing.  However there is obviously a fair amount one can accomplish with a bit of common sense,  a bit more with some trial and error.  The fact is, if you just look at the outside of the box, it is just that, a black box that does stuff.  Take off the lid and you can understand more, take it to bits and reassemble it and one gets closer to understanding it and how it works.

A similar thing applies to human systems too.  If you just stand outside them you have little real understanding of how they function and what makes them work.  It really is important to get inside a system to try to truly understand it.  I suspect far too many consultants and managers make ‘improvements’ and ‘rationalisations’ based on no real understanding of what really makes them work.  The very same knowledge is required to make them work better…

Whilst fiddling about does have its dangers, (at one stage I wondered if I was going to be able to get it working again) not understanding the workings of something you depend on is even more dangerous.

“You can fiddle enough with the system to (make the office) look better,”   James Adams

Tags: fiddling, managing, managment, systems, understanding

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 9th, 2009 at 14:22 and is filed under Business Change, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.