Point of View

If you read fiction, you’ll be familiar – whether you realise it or not – with the idea of point-of-view. (And if you watch TV, films or theatre, you might not: the concept doesn’t work the same way.) You can describe it as being something like ‘the angle from which the story is told’ (although Wikipedia does a pretty good job of explaining it if you want to spend a few minutes reading more).

In a first-person narrative, we see the plot, the action and the other characters as the narrator does: essentially the reader must interpret the narrator’s reliability as a raconteur and try to be aware of what they don’t see or hear – of what they can’t know. And there is no guarantee that a third-person narrator (He said, she did, they heard and so on) is necessarily any more reliable. So far, so much like real life – to a degree. But our human love of stories should not blind us to one frequent element of fiction – the omniscient narrator who can relay the thoughts and feelings of every character, seemingly at will and certainly when it’s convenient. Ah, if only reality were as plausible.

If your reading pile is typically more work-oriented, much of it will probably be journalism of one variety or another (even if it doesn’t always call itself that). Although fiction is sometimes written to deliver a message, the prose you encounter and the stories you hear in your working life are almost always told to deliver a point. That is, let’s face it, usually the story’s appeal to the storyteller. Few managers talk to their staff for the pure fun of it.

Unlike novelists – or least the better ones – not all workplace storytellers are alert to the possibilities of other points of view, or how their own version of the narrative might be interpreted. The classic example of someone being aware to this is probably a 1995 article that appeared in Fast Company magazine, The People Are the Company, written by John Seely Brown and Estee Solomon Gray.

They clue us into the scenario early on when they write that “The story begins in the 1980s.” The tale, for those who are not familiar with it, is of a group of Xerox tech reps who would take time to gather with each other round a convenient warehouse coffee pot and swap ‘war stories’ from the field. A Xerox anthropologist – conducting in-house research for the company – observed them, and their observations were to lead to an early milestone in knowledge management – or at least its recognition by organisations as not just a critical activity but a social and human one.

But the article’s authors allow a glimpse of how the tech rep story might have looked had it been written up from a different point of view:

Here’s what the anthropologist saw: Tech reps often made it a point to spend time not with customers but with each other. They’d gather in common areas, like the local parts warehouse, hang around the coffee pot, and swap stories from the field.

Think how a garden-variety reengineer would interpret this finding: Here’s “low-hanging fruit” — easy pickings for immediate productivity gains. Simply reroute the tech reps, cut out the conversation, eliminate the dead time — and pocket the savings.

The anthropologist saw the exact opposite. The time at the warehouse was anything but dead. The tech reps weren’t slacking off; they were doing some of their most valuable work. Field service, it turns out, is no job for lone wolves. It’s a social activity. Like most work, it involves a community of professionals. The tech reps weren’t just repairing machines; they were also coproducing insights about how to repair machines better.

We are not, to explain this is terms of the ‘writing a novel’ metaphor, party to whether the anthropologist had prior knowledge of re-engineering practices, processes and (whisper it) prejudices, although we’re left with the impression that the re-engineering consultants may have skipped anthropology classes at an earlier stage of their lives. (Although “Hey guys, let’s hang in the warehouse and coproduce insights over a cup of Java!” doesn’t make convincing dialogue either …)

The authors’ key point is a humanistic one: “Processes don’t do work, people do.” It’s a good point, and until the day when AI finally makes multimillionaires or hoboes of all of us it will have a considerable grain of truth in it. (Particularly, ironically, in tech industries where a really great interface is usually the product of a human intelligence rather than an artificial one.)

But it also inadvertently highlights another comparison with storytelling in the fictional sense. Beyond tales that are so non-specific as to border on the meaningless, the essential focus of the story – Romeo and Juliet’s ill-feted love, for example – is something we can zoom in on among the context. The warring families of the Shakespeare play are not, however, simply an older version of a disapproving mother-in-law. If you want to modernise the whole play, you have to do more than update the clothes.

Hence Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s transformation of the Montagues and Capulets into the Jets and the Sharks, street gangs in New York. Like other core human action, love essentially doesn’t change that much – but the surrounding story moves on in parallel with history. (One reason that some of us enjoy historical fiction is the escapism it thereby provides. We get to enjoy the vicarious thrill of ripping a bodice without the whole tedious business of lacing one up in the first place. Or explaining all that whalebone to an environmental campaigner just as things were getting romantic.)

After their central insight, Seely Brown and Solomon Gray go on to describe Xerox’s Eureka project as an early hypertextual KM model. And at this point, their story suddenly shows its age. They talk – at some length – about communities of practice and embedding them in organisations. They are, if you like (and we have the privileged narrative viewpoint of hindsight, so we might as well exploit it), prefiguring the now near-ubiquitious era of networking.

If you want to read an update of the story – or more accurately, a sequel, you can try a variety of options. In 2009, Mark Gould wrote a piece about knowledgement management and (enforced) organisational sharing that, to me, captured the human element that has been arguably as ignored by the KM engineers as the fictional re-engineers in the original story:

Going back to KM, this identity crisis is what often concerns people about organisationally forced (or incentivised) knowledge sharing. Once they share, they lose control of the information they provided. They also run the risk that the information will be misused without reference back to them. It isn’t surprising that people react to this kind of KM in the same way that concerned citizens have reacted to identity cards in the UK: rather than No2ID, we have No2KM (stop the database organisation).

For a more recent take on a different set of related dilemmas, try a recent post at The Huffington Post by Mark Drapeau of Microsoft’s Office of Civic Innovation. Considering the long and largely unsuccessful history of social networks for scientists, he is left to reflect that:

It’s easy to measure total users or total PDF’s uploaded or other metrics and claim some success. And we’re not really picking on any particular social network effort here. But why haven’t any of these platforms truly caught on in the scientific community? Fundamentally, it’s because they are add-ons to “the way things get done” and not replacements for the way scientists work day-to-day or how their careers are judged (i.e., you don’t get promoted for great science tweeting).

Reading his work so soon after re-reading the Steely Brown and Solomon Gray article, I couldn’t help but think that there was a point of view that was still not being heard. The tech reps. Or the knowledge workers in Gould’s case or the scientists in Drapeau’s. In each case, processes – which don’t do the job, we’re told – are being re-written by people who don’t do the job they are rewriting. And who, judging by the commentary above, aren’t making sufficient effort to understand the drivers of the people who do. Like, you know … asking them. This isn’t so much the blind leading the blind as the deaf leading them, surely?

Which seems unfortunately ironic. Irony is fine in the context of the metaphor-of-the-novel this blog post started from, but it takes an unusual mind set to get up every morning to go to work so you can enjoy the ironies of the situation. And I can’t help but wonder whether the organisations quite understand. Some of today’s thinking is eagerly exploring ways to fully embed the collaborative networking model into the heart of working structures and (er …) practices. Take, for example, the following words from Harold Jarche:

A coherent organization is structured to take advantage of the complexity and noisiness of social networks, allowing information to flow as freely as possible, and affording workers the space to make sense of it and share their experiences and knowledge.

Looking at Gould and Drapeau, the ‘workers’ have reasons not to want to play: the experiences and knowledge are, after all, ‘their ball’ (to couch the argument in the language of the playground). Given that organisations determine the recognition and reward processes and the other patterns that determine engagement and motivation, they also determine the things that drive the behaviours too. I wonder how many of them are hiring anthropologists?



Link to original post

Leave a Reply