Don’t Let The Terminology Scare You Away From Ideas You Can Use

We’ve got a love affair with professions. It seems some people can’t be satisfied with working in a trade or occupation. A profession sounds better. People will take what we say more seriously.

The formal qualifications, admission and discipline, regulation and monopoly rights — the “clubhouse part” — may seem so attractive as to be a powerful incentive for those in an occupation to elevate it to professional, or semi-professional status, as the demand increases for their services. (For example, a 2012 paper explored the creation of a profession around the occupations involved with cybersecurity.)

But sometimes it’s just the new way of talking and thinking about old and familiar problems that attracts us — as sellers and buyers — to the promises of a new professional-sounding methodology.

Someone with a great idea for helping businesses work better develops, and then draws a line around, a body of information pertaining to their particular approach, and then fashions this as a semi-profession.

The creation of each of these special methodologies, complete with catchy labels and work flow diagrams, creates the impression of uniqueness: “This is different from anything you’ve seen. This can solve your problems.”

But then, the resulting confusion of competing approaches and the barriers of cost and disruption, discourage many potential customers from employing them.

There’s a way you can use these ideas to transform your workplace in your own way without the excessive disruption of swapping your culture for the trappings that have grown up around these new ideas.

Consider these examples from popular methodologies with labels that are either appropriations of commonly-used words or re-purposed words that have completely different meanings in normal usage:

1. A good leader develops the competence and commitment of people so they’re self-motivated rather than dependent on others for direction and guidance. There are levels of leadership that must be adapted to varying levels of follower maturity, depending on combinations of capability and willingness. That’s Situational Leadership.
2. Don’t be constrained by a linear approach to development — design, build, test, release — but rather adopt a more iterative process: Build, release, monitor, learn, repeat. That’s Lean.
3. Use a combination of analysis (pulling things apart) and synthesis (putting them back together) with the goal of improving an entire situation or environment, rather than solving just a discreet problem: Design Thinking.
4. Attack a high-priority portion of a problem with high intensity and time pressure, get it done and release it to the world. Then repeat with another high-priority portion: Scrum.

Sure, it might be good and right for you to incorporate one or more of these approaches wholesale into your operations. But you don’t have to start there. Do read about them, and do look for common themes:

1. Make sure every team member, regardless of unit, role, title or job description, is aware of your company’s overriding goals and is working towards them.
2. Allow leadership styles to adapt to the emergent needs of the project, the challenge and the team.
3. Make customers and users part of the process, and stay open to new ideas all the way through. (The specs are never locked.)
4. Break big problems down into meaningful, bite-sized pieces and attack the important ones first.

There’s no need to turn your workplace upside down trying to adopt a new methodology to get the benefit of the useful ideas upon which they’re based. Keep your eyes open for books and articles, scan them for the basic underlying concepts and brainstorm with your team the ways to you can use them to solve the thorny business problems in your workplace.