Category: Uncategorized

In today's New York Times there's an article about breast cancer diagnosis being prone to error. I read it carefully as one of my close relatives has just been told that she has breast cancer. What struck me about the article was the statement that there are

Reports in medical literature of a "wide array of variability" in interpreting breast pathology. "It is not a breach of the standard of care for one pathologist to have one opinion and another competent pathologist to have another opinion," the lawyers said.

"To recognize the problem requires you to acknowledge that there's room for improvement and that some of your colleagues are not really making the correct diagnosis," said Dr. Michael Lagios, a California pathologist"

To diagnose a breast cancer, pathologists look at slides mounted with thin slices of breast tissue.
… At larger hospitals, the findings are often presented to a tumor board, in which a team of doctors from various disciplines reviews the pathology report and develops a treatment plan.

A number of pathology practices around the country also specialize in rendering second opinions.
Dr. Ira J. Bleiweiss, chief of surgical pathology at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, said that ideally, all breast cancer diagnoses would be referred for a second opinion. He warns patients and their doctors: "Don't rush to the operating room." …

[The] director [of West Palm Beach V.A. Medical Center], Charleen R. Szabo, said in a statement: "Medicine is not an exact science. Treatment options are based on information available at a period in time. When additional information comes to light, altering the course of treatment may become necessary."

As I read the article I made the connection that that organizational development consultants are diagnosticians. Indeed a book The NTL Handbook of Organization Development and Change came in the mail today for me to evaluate, and Chapter 11 is called 'Organization Diagnosis Phase'.

Turning to this chapter I read that

'organization diagnosis is a collaborative process between organization members and the OD practitioner to collect relevant information, organize it, and feed the data back to the client system in such a way as to build commitment, energy and direction for action planning'

To me that sounded very similar to breast cancer diagnosis but there were two major differences. In breast cancer diagnosis the client is not an equal party in the diagnosis he/she is reliant on 'experts', but there is the opportunity for a second opinion. In organizational diagnosis the OD practitioner is collecting the data and then, according to this book, "diagnosing collaboratively". This is true up to a point, but in most cases that I've been involved in the OD consultant takes the lead in presenting a diagnostic report that offers an assessment of the situation and proffers a way forward. I wonder how many clients then think that they could get a second opinion on the situation from a different OD consultant?

So the questions this diagnosis connection raised in my mind was a) how expert are OD consultants when it comes to diagnosis -surely there is, or could be, just as much variability in interpreting organizational pathology as there is in breast cancer? b) How many OD consultants' clients ask for a second opinion on the diagnosis before 'rushing to the operating room' i.e. acting immediately. Indeed in the chapter I was reading the point is made that 'Today's faster-paced and global business environment pressures OD practitioners to minimize the diagnosis stage'.

Could it be that OD practitioners are misdiagnosing organizations a lot of the time? How would we know given that like medicine

"Consulting is not an exact science. Treatment options are based on information available at a period in time. When additional information comes to light, altering the course of treatment may become necessary."

(In this quote I just substituted 'consulting' for the orginal 'medicine'). But then I wondered how many organizations, with or without a second opinion, are willing to alter a course of treatment even when additional information does come to light. And how many organizationds ask for a second opinion on the original diagnosis further down the line? Would it alter the nature of OD consulting if it had some of the checks and balance that medical diagnosis (sometimes) brings into play?

I was on a short flight today and didn't hear the sole flight attendant tell us that it was a 'no beverage service flight'. About 20 minutes into the trip I asked her if I could have a glass of water. Her response caused me to think a bit. Clearly I was a 'customer' and she must have had extensive training in customer service. But at odds with this training was the obvious irritation she felt that I'd dared to ask for a 'beverage' on a no beverage flight. It seemed to me that she was trying to decide whether to refuse to bring the glass of water. Maybe she thought if other passengers saw me getting a glass of water she would have to serve them with one too.

Fortunately, for me, customer service prevailed and I got a glass of water. But she did not deliver this with a warm smile or any semblance of authentic service. Instead it came with a lecturette delivered loudly enough to put off other passengers from asking for water. Something on the lines of if I'd been paying attention as the flight took off I would have heard this was a no-beverage flight, and could I please remember that none of the flights on this route offered beverages (why beverages and not drinks I wondered?) and on the next flight I took on this route I must not ask for a drink/beverage.

Shortly afterwards she reminded all passengers to take the customer feedback survey with the carrot of winning 100,000 airmiles. So when I got home I logged into the survey. The first page offers a choice of languages. The second screen is stern about eligibility to participate in the survey "Star Alliance® partner flights (e.g. Lufthansa, Air Canada, Air China, etc.) are not eligible. United flights code-shared with another carrier's flight are not eligible."

Undaunted (since I was eligible) I entered my frequent flier number. The first set of questions related to the reservation process. At this point I noticed that the survey is addressed to United's 'guests' not 'customers'. So maybe the flight attendant felt I was an unwelcome guest, or a naughty child 'guest' – I hadn't listened to what mommy was saying. Finally, I got to the question I wanted that asked me to indicate my satisfaction with "United's flight attendant service on your flight" . I had five choices from "Extremely satisfied – Dissatisfied" and then a sixth possibility "Did not experience".

Here my dissatisfaction with surveys of this nature surfaced. I was satisfied that I got the drink I asked for, but I don't think I experienced 'service' in the way I interpret it. Of course, you can't check two options for the same question, so I copped out and put 'neither satisfied nor dissatisfied' – the opposite of what I felt which was 'both satisfied and dissatisfied' but that wasn't an option.

Later in the day, as I was clearing out my emails, I came across an article I'd skimmed the previous week when it was sent to me, and saved for more concentrated reading when I had a moment. The sender was continuing a face to face discussion we'd be having on equality and he'd sent me the article making the point that "Related to these issues of equality is the issue of dignity. The challenge: to create a world where the inherent dignity of each person is respected and honored. That's what we all deserve…that is where we are equal."

The he article he attached refers to the concepts of 'rankism', explaining that "Rankism occurs when rank-holders use the power of their position to secure unwarranted advantages or benefits for themselves. It typically takes the form of self-aggrandizement and exploitation of subordinates. It is the opposite of service." So, I wondered, had the flight attendant pulled rankism on me? Yes in part. Granted, I hadn't heard her announcement, but it wouldn't have taken significant effort to bring the drink and make a kindly point that short flights don't normally offer beverages, but she was happy to provide one in this instance.

The article is interesting in its discussion of the relationship between equality, rankism, and dignity. "To achieve a just society, we have to decide what it means to be a nation of equals. Indeed, at first glance, such a goal might seem absurd. How can we be equals when we are obviously unequal in skill, talent, beauty, strength, health and wealth – in any commonly recognized trait for that matter? The answer is that
people are equal in a sense they have always considered fundamental to being human: They are equal in dignity.

The article was written by Robert W Fuller, the author of Somebodies and Nobodies: overcoming the abuse of rank, and All Rise:Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity, strategy+business magazine in an interview with Fuller comments that "These books have generated a large following, but businesspeople have responded with ambivalence; after all, in many companies, the right to abuse rank is seen as one of the perks of a successful career. Fuller argues to the contrary that rankism diminishes both the "somebodies" and the "nobodies" (as he calls people of greater and lesser status), and he proposes that if organizations eliminated their rankism, they would be not just better places to work, but more successful in the bargain."

The same person who sent the article, talking about 'fairness' and what is deemed 'fair' pointed out that 'fairness' is usually described from the 'nobodies' perspective as in 'It's not fair that I can't get a glass of water, but she can'. An alternative perspective, rarely heard is from the 'somebodies' as in 'It's not fair that I get a glass of water and that person doesn't.' Next time I'll know to bring my own water – but what will the 'guest' who inadvertently asks for one from that flight attendant feel like?

In a results oriented world of measurement, analytics, and accountability there is little room for functions that are unable to prove that they add value to the bottom line. Evaluating the link between organizational performance and OD/HR practices is complex and there is no one right way to do it.

A report commissioned by the UK's Institute of Personnel and Development in 1997 (Patterson, M. G., West, M.A., Lawthorn, R. and Nickell, S. Impact of People Management Practices on Business Performance) sought to establish a link between Human Resource Management (HRM) practices and the financial performance of organizations: one in a series of efforts to prove that HRM contributes positively to the 'bottom line'. The findings from this research did reveal the possibilities of demonstrating a measurable impact of HRM on organisation performance and productivity.

More recently (2003), and building on the original research, the CIPD published Understanding the people and performance link: unlocking the black box. The model developed in this research demonstrates that people management practices in themselves do not create value. They do, however, create the building blocks of performance: ability, motivation and opportunity:

• Ability is the assumption that people want to apply for jobs, have their attributes recognised and are willing to learn new skills.
• Motivation assumes that people can be motivated to use their ability in a productive manner.
• Opportunity assumes people will perform well, engage in high-quality work and participate in wider activities such as team initiatives or problem-solving if they are given the opportunity to do so.

Another research report on the links HR practices and organizational performance comes from, Laurie McBassi, reporting on her research in the paper Employers' Perspectives on Human Capital Development and Management , submitted to the OECD in 2006 found that

A wide variety of human capital elements that are statistically associated with key organisational outcomes, but that the exact list of items that are most closely related to key outcomes in any given organisation bears little relation to the list of most important items in other organisations, even (in the case of the two manufacturing firms) within the same industry. It points to the complexity of measuring and managing human capital within organisations: there is no handy list of a small number of items that can be targeted in a quick effort to address an organisation's human capital deficiencies. Rather, a wide range of items, across multiple categories of human capital, must first be examined in order to identify those that are most closely related to the outcomes that the organisation is seeking. Only then can an organisation know where its human capital improvement efforts might most usefully be targeted.

Method of evaluating the effectiveness of OD interventions lag those of HRM. A 2009 report by Liz Finney and Carol Jefkins of the UK Roffey Park Institute, Best Practice in OD Evaluation opens with the words

We approached our research aware that there are many practitioners in the field of OD who believe that its systemic nature makes it hard to measure; some hold a world view that says it's inappropriate even to try.

…. In the prevailing economic climate we would argue that it is critically important. And as we emerge into a post recession world, we believe that being able and willing to demonstrate the impact of OD on the effectiveness of organizations will be imperative if the discipline is to maintain and increase its credibility.

Thinking about evaluation I'm wondering how important it is for HR and OD to show by rigorous analytics that they add value to business performance and productivity? Does it make business sense to do so, or is it too complex and time-consuming a task to get to reliable and tailored metrics that drive business strategy and performance? Does the ability to evaluate effectively have a bearing on the relationship and organisational positioning between OD and HR?

Yesterday I've was working with a group of people to orchestrate a communication session. As I moved through the day I wondered how we were deciding who was going to do what to get the session designed, resourced, and seamless to the participants.

It's a group of people I haven't worked with before and we're under very tight time restrictions. So when I stumbled across a review I happened to come across in my files of a book called Results without Authority: Controlling a Project When the Team Doesn't Report to You Tom Kendrick. New York: AMACOM, 2006. I stopped the thing I was doing and re-read the review. Kendrick is a project manager, and as the book reviewer reports the book is written from a project perspective :

structured in two parts, the first one describing three elements of project control: process,
influence, and measurement. The second part shows when to use these three elements of control throughout the life of a typical project, following the five process groups defined by the Project Management Institute's (PMI, 2004) A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK).

The piece of work to get the communication session ready is really a project – if only a 6 day one. (It happens next week). It's one that demands quick responses from people to pull it together so influence skills are needed, and the communication session itself is one where we hope to influence positively the perceptions of the matter being discussed. Thus I was caught by the 10-Step Process for Influence that Kendrick discusses.

The ten steps are:

(1) Document your objective. – this is ok because we have a purpose and outcomes for the session so we know what we want to achieve and roughly how to do it.

(2) Identify who could do the work – this is the struggle. We are all fully committed to other stuff, and we don't know who is available to work on the project and how good they might be if we could find them. (A learning point is to set up with the training manager some kind of pool of people who would love to be called on at very short notice to work on a significant project as a development opportunity).

(3) Evaluate your options and select the best person. In terms of preparing the session at the moment the options seem to be do it ourselves so maybe we're the best people. (That is , the group of four of us who coalesced around the idea that we had to do something quickly) but in terms of putting the message across in a way that positively influences perceptions that's absolutely a question of evaluating options and selecting the best people to do that.

(4) Consider the other person's perspective. Again in bearing in mind our audience for the communication session, we are aware that we might be treading on people's toes, covering old ground, working in counter-cultural ways so hopefully that will help us be sensitive to the way we put things across. But how will we know until we've done it? We're trying to see it from all angles but inevitably we're individually and collectively biased.

(5) Consider possibilities for exchange – this is where the point of the session comes in. We want to influence the session participants so how much voice should we have, how much should they have, and what level of talk versus participation are all things that are coming into play as we sketch up the design. Things like video shots, photos, web demos, etc all require resources (and time) to pull together – and both are in short supply.

(6) Meet with the other person. Here we have two tracks of influence – how are the project teams members influencing each other's thinking and tasks as we pull together short meetings and even shorter phone calls/instant messages. How will the project team influence the session participant's thinking when we do meet face to face next week? Will what we have designed work in practice (no time for piloting or test running)?

(7) Verify your assumptions and determine what to exchange. – As I said no time for piloting and test running so what level of risk are we prepared to take? We have senior leadership support for the approach we've put forward – which is supposed to be the most important attribute of any project.

(8) Request a commitment. For the team – we are making a big assumption that we can rely on each other. But I'm confident that will be fine. For the audience we are going to ask them to commit to what we propose. How we will seal the commitment has not yet been determined.

(9) Document the agreement. We don't have time as a team to document what we are doing in a formal way, but there are informal emails, meeting notes and so on that are flying about. But as a general principle documenting the progress of a project is a sound idea. We will be documenting the outcomes of the communication session and following though on them.

(10) Deliver on your offer and track the work to completion. This comes after the communication session. Assuming it goes well we will have a raft of work to do.

So although I am somewhat skeptical of a 10 step plan to influence it does serve as a useful checklist and 'steadying device' when things seem chaotic.

I've just read two questionnaires aiming to find out what people feel about working in their office space (or rather doing their work).

As I read them I wondered how many people, when they are looking for a job, factor in the physical office space. (Beyond how long their commute to it is).

How many people at a job interview get the chance to actually look at the space they will be working in and work out whether its physical aspects of: light, heat, noise, closeness to coffee machine, lavatories, etc. are conducive to their well-being?

In my experience, asking interview questions about the physical space are not frequently found on a standard checklist of interview questions (either for the interviewee or the interviewer). But that would be useful for both parties. The physical space has significant impact on productivity.

However, the two surveys I looked both had severe limitations. What, for example, is gained by asking the questions:

In general, how satisfied are you with your office location in terms of the neighborhood or town that surrounds it?

Overall, how satisfied are you with the physical work environment, which includes all offices, workstations, hallways, common areas, reception, waiting areas, etc.?

If a respondent says they are not satisfied with the office location in terms of the neighborhood what is the action that can be taken?

On the second question why lump every part of the office into one 'overall' impression about satisfaction? Again what is the action that can be taken at that level?

Maybe in both these instances they would be better framed as questions about 'attitudes' of the organization – so the first could read 'the place where my office is located reflects the image that it want to project' and the second 'the physical work environment overall shows the level of care the organization takes of its employees and customers'. Though information gained from this may not be actionable either but it may be more useful than satisfaction levels.

Edgar Schein a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, discusses several reasons "why culture surveys do not and cannot measure culture". What he says could equally be applied to office space surveys.

1. There is no way of knowing what office space attributes are important in any one organisation. Even so, the off the shelf surveys make an assumption that the dimensions they pick up are the same for all organisations that take that survey. Without doing a lot more digging for information it is not clear on what basis these dimensions have been picked out,whether they are relevant to the organization being surveyed, and even if so, the relative contribution of each to the culture of the organisation.

2. There is no way of knowing what a respondent is reading into the questions. In the examples above, is 'neighborhood' being experienced in the same way by everyone? Are individuals consistent in their thinking about what constitutes 'waiting areas'?

3. There is no way of knowing what the individual interpretation of a question is (or, indeed, if the respondent is answering honestly or in good faith), it is a leap of faith to assume that individual responses can be aggregated into a perspective on the whole organisation's work space.

4. There is an implication that if the survey results show issues or problems then something will happen to address these. However, there may not be a will to do anything about the issues. If there is no budget to address issues, or the organisation is performing well enough what is the impetus to change anything?

5. The surveys take a reductionist view of space which attempts to isolate independent variables (heat, light, noise). The problem with this is that even if surveys had meaningful variables they are not independent. Every variable is dependent in some way on every other.

6. Assume, by using the same dimensions in the survey, that attitudes to space are homogeneous and shared across all employees. Again this is not typically the case. In organisations of any size there are variations in layout, furnishings, equipment, interaction possibilities, and so on.

7. Imply that they are more than a snapshot in a particular time – over-riding the dynamic and constantly changing nature of space. (It can be hot and noisy one day, and cool and quiet the next).

That is not to say that surveys like the two I looked at are valueless. It is to say that they have many limitations and to get to meaningful and actionable information requires more and different work than simply analyzing survey responses. Interviewing people doing different types of jobs in a variety of locations in a particular organization might get over some of the survey problems. Recognizing the limitations of the findings would also facilitate proceeding with caution.

In a results oriented world of measurement, analytics, and accountability there is little room for functions that are unable to prove that they add value to the bottom line. Evaluating the link between organizational performance and OD/HR practices is complex and there is no one right way to do it.

A report commissioned by the UK's Institute of Personnel and Development in 1997 sought to establish a link between HRM practices and the financial performance of organizations: one in a series of efforts to prove that HRM contributes positively to the 'bottom line'. The findings from this research revealed a measurable impact of HRM on organisation performance and productivity. The (now) CIPD has an update on this The People and Performance Link.

Another example comes from, Laurie McBassi, reporting on her research in the paper Employers' Perspectives on Human Capital Development and Management , submitted to the OECD in 2006 found that

A wide variety of human capital elements that are statistically associated with key organisational outcomes, but that the exact list of items that are most closely related to key outcomes in any given organisation bears little relation to the list of most important items in other organisations, even (in the case of the two manufacturing firms) within the same industry. It points to the complexity of measuring and managing human capital within organisations: there is no handy list of a small number of items that can be targeted in a quick effort to address an organisation's human capital deficiencies. Rather, a wide range of items, across multiple categories of human capital, must first be examined in order to identify those that are most closely related to the outcomes that the organisation is seeking. Only then can an organisation know where its human capital improvement efforts might most usefully be targeted.

Method of evaluating the effectiveness of OD interventions lag those of HRM. A 2009 report by Liz Finney and Carol Jefkins of UK's Roffey Park Institute Best Practice in OD Evaluation opens with the words:

We approached our research aware that there are many practitioners in the field of OD who believe that its systemic nature makes it hard to measure; some hold a world view that says it's inappropriate even to try.

…. In the prevailing economic climate we would argue that it is critically important. And as we emerge into a post recession world, we believe that being able and willing to demonstrate the impact of OD on the effectiveness of organizations will be imperative if the discipline is to maintain and increase its credibility.

Think about evaluation
How important is it for HR and OD to show by rigorous analytics that they add value to business performance and productivity? Does the ability to evaluate effectively have a bearing on the relationship and organisational positioning between OD and HR?

Leading change is top of the agenda right now. Yesterday someone sent me a piece from Saturday's NY Times. It makes the point that "Leaders shape followers' perceptions. That is what actors do. And what is it that great actors have? A presence." The article goes on to describe a five day course in theater techniques taken by

some of the 50 fellows at the World Economic Forum who came to New York this week to explore how theater and the arts can help them, say, someday run an international conglomerate or a finance ministry. … The idea was to teach the fellows – who hail from 40 countries and range in age from 26 to 36 – the techniques that actors employ to hold an audience's attention. … A second aspect of the week's activities is to see art and culture as a vital force for social change."

At more or less the same time I was writing a piece on skills for leading change. I re-discovered Rosabeth Moss Kanter's article 'The Enduring Skills of Change Leaders'. It was first published in 1999 in Leader to Leader and is a classic that is freely available. In the article Kanter reminds us that

In a global, high tech world, organizations need to be more fluid, inclusive, and responsive. They need to manage complex information flows, grasp new ideas quickly, and spread those ideas throughout the enterprise. What counts is not whether everybody uses e-mail but whether people quickly absorb the impact of information and respond to opportunity.

She suggests that to set the direction, define the context, and help produce coherence for their organizations leaders of change need seven skills to inspire voluntary behavior – the degree of effort, innovation, and entrepreneurship with which employees serve customers and seek opportunities:

• Tuning in to the environment.
• Challenging the prevailing organizational wisdom
• Communicating a compelling aspiration
• Building coalitions
• Transferring ownership to a working team
• Learning to persevere
• Making everyone a hero

Later in the day, I read a coaching enquiry about observation. It focused on the notion that observation without evaluation is a great leadership quality to practice. The writer described the work of a naturalist whose job it is to track flora and fauna:

His job this summer was to observe. That's it. Not to evaluate. Not to manipulate. Not to agitate, integrate, or extrapolate. His job was just to observe and to record everything that he saw.

The writer continues with the suggestion

Wouldn't it be great if we could all learn to navigate a bit more slowly, on the basis of observational data rather than evaluative judgments? That's especially true for leaders. We are quick to size up situations and to fly into action. We want results, and if we see or hear of someone who is "not doing his or her job" we want to fix the problem as promptly as possible. … If we hope to serve as great leaders, then it's important to become great observers. Forget your assumptions as to who is to blame and how to move forward. Take a new tack. Open your eyes and ears.

Finally, that day someone told me a story about a 26 year old squadron leader in Afghanistan. His wife was pregnant with their first child. He drowned trying to save someone else from drowning. The speaker told of Javed's immense talents in empathy, getting support for a course of action, being fair and just, and challenging norms so effectively.

These four different perspectives on leading change had one significant theme in common – challenging the prevailing (organizational) wisdom – This is, perhaps, the bravest and most difficult thing to do but skilled challengers of norms make change they don't just manage it.

The Independent printed a piece titled 'A hard chair equals a hard heart'. It's an interesting idea that psychologists have found that the texture and feel of objects around us, even those we are sitting on, can affect the way we think and behave.

Given that the office move I am involved in means buying furniture the thought fleetingly crossed my mind that if we insisted easy-going, laissez faire managers can only sit on hard chairs, and driving, hard pushing managers must have soft chairs, the result might be more equitable treatment of employees.

So I read the article playing with this idea, and discovered:

In an experiment in which volunteers engaged in mock haggling over the price of a car, those sitting in hard, cushionless chairs were tougher negotiators than those in soft, comfortable ones.

The Independent article goes on to explain in easy enough to follow language the various experiments done that gave rise to the assertion.

Then, because I like to check the sources of things, I went in search of the research report which I have now ordered from an academic library I belong to. What
struck me as I ordered it was the difference in language between the newspaper article and the research abstract. (A bit of a sidetrack from how we should allocate chairs).

Begin with the titles 'A hard chair equals a hard heart' v. "Incidental Haptic Sensations Influence Social Judgments and Decisions" which is easier to get to grips with. If I'd only read the research I maybe I wouldn't have got the idea that we could manipulate behavior by chair provision.

But having read the research paper abstract, once I'd waded through the academic jargon I might have got an idea that we could manipulate behavior by the type of clipboards we provide, and the sort of table tops we offer or that union negotiation might run more smoothly if the meeting room tables were covered in velvet cloths. The abstract reads:

Touch is both the first sense to develop and a critical means of information acquisition and environmental manipulation. Physical touch experiences may create an ontological scaffold for the development of intrapersonal and interpersonal conceptual and metaphorical knowledge, as well as a springboard for the application of this knowledge. In six experiments, holding heavy or light clipboards, solving rough or smooth puzzles, and touching hard or soft objects nonconsciously influenced impressions and decisions formed about unrelated people and situations. Among other effects, heavy objects made job candidates appear more important, rough objects made social interactions appear more difficult, and hard objects increased rigidity in negotiations. Basic tactile sensations are thus shown to influence higher social cognitive processing in dimension-specific and metaphor-specific ways.

Again the Independent article interprets by including speech from the researchers (and did they really say it or is it journalist's licence?)

Dr Bargh said touch was an important sense not only for exploring the world but for shaping our understanding of it, reflected in expressions such as "weighing in with an opinion", "having a rough day" or "taking a hard line".

"These physical experiences not only shape the foundation of our thoughts and perceptions" Dr Bargh said, "but influence our behaviour towards others, sometimes just because we are sitting in a hard instead of a soft chair."

These experiments brought to mind Harlow's experiments on rhesus monkey described in a book Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection by Deborah Blum. One reviewer of the book summarized the research

What Harlow did, in the 1950's, was to separate infant monkeys from their mothers only hours after birth. He then divided the monkeys into two groups: both were to be fed and "raised" by a machine, but in half, the machine was just a wire monkey, and in half the wire monkey was covered with a soft terry cloth and given a face. The results were dramatic. The monkeys with the wire mothers grew up to be psychologically damaged and even physically sickly, whereas those raised by the cloth mothers were healthier in every respect.

So is there enough evidence to suggest that organizational performance and individual behaviour can be manipulated and/or modified by the types of furniture, furnishings, and other tactile surfaces? To my mind it is well worth thinking about in the whole scheme of office space and organizational performance improvement.

Lucy Kellaway, a Financial Times columnist, came up with a great idea in her column earlier this week.

In Britain they are cutting about a million jobs. In France, they have axed the Bastille Day garden party. All governments are looking for ways big and small to cut spending. But there is a better way that no one has yet considered: cut Fridays.

By making Thursday the last day of the working week, 20 per cent would be cut off the wage bill, yet, miraculously, productivity would hardly fall.

She continues with some scant evidence that productivity falls as the week progresses, reaching virtually zero by the end of Thursday. (She tells readers the evidence is scant so a good research project for someone). When I googled 'what weekdays are workers most productive?' what popped up was the report of a survey by Robert Half International

After getting over the Monday blues it appears that Tuesday is the most productive day for employees, according to a recent survey by Robert Half International.

The company polled 150 senior executives about their most productive day, and almost six in 10 listed Tuesday as the day they get most work done. As expected, the least productive day was Friday,

"In addition to serving as a 'catch-up' day after the weekend, Monday is when many regularly scheduled meetings occur, which can decrease the time available to complete tasks," said Max Messmer, chairman of Accountemps. "Many view Tuesday as an opportunity to focus their efforts and establish momentum for the rest of the week." This survey was done in 2008 so I wonder if things have changed?

The reason I'm interested in Fridays is on two counts. 1) People in the office I'm currently working wtih are asking if we can have a 'dress down' policy for Fridays 2) There is a telework policy and most people telework on Fridays. So here's the question – do we need a dress down policy if most people are off site (and presumably dressing down, if at all) while they're teleworking?

My next question is – if people are not productive on Fridays should we be allowing them to telework that day – would it be better to have them sitting in the office under close supervision on a Friday in which case a dress down policy might make them feel better about coming in on Friday – or is Lucy Kellaway's point correct that people can do their five days work in four ?

If this is the case a) we could run a four day week and/or b) we could have a dress down policy that was for a different day of the week c) we could allow people to telework only on the day that was also the dress down day, and one of the most productive days (it turns out this is Tuesday).

But then there's the question of telework. We've started to ask whether we should change the telework policy so people can telework more than the 'allowed' one day a week. There are several views on this and I was interested to see another report – this one on teleworking commissioned by Microsoft and published in March 2010. It says:

Despite high costs for maintaining acres of office cubicles and the attendant facilities expenses, many U.S. companies are still skeptical that employees can be as productive working from home as from a regulated office environment, according to a new study.

Microsoft commissioned the online survey (available here as PDF), which found a sizable disparity between workers' and managers' viewpoints.

"Sixty percent of respondents to the Microsoft Telework survey — conducted among 3,600 employees in 36 cities nationwide — say they are actually more productive and efficient when working remotely," said a statement accompanying the survey results.

So now I have an emerging idea, establish a 5-day productivity baseline (how comes later), run a four day week with no teleworking at first and see if it matches or exceeds the 5-day baseline, then introduce one or more days teleworking, and again measure against the baseline.

We may end up working a three day week being as productive as in a five day week – especially if we're wearing whatever clothes we feel most productive in.

In the organization I'm currently working with I met a person who's worked there for 44 years, and all in the same building. Many members of the workforce are long serving and it's a challenge now that the whole office is moving to a new building to develop a pragmatic approach to the emotional trauma many are feeling about the move in a way that will enable seamless business continuity. Somehow we have to encourage people who wouldn't dream of moving to a new job, new office, new house, etc. to at least keep an open mind about what it will mean for them. I have to hold back on judging them for being less than adventurous, and tap into the vast organizational knowledge they have to add value to the move in some way.

Pursuing this thought this took me to a coaching website that I get a regular email newsletter from (Life Trek Coaching). I remembered that last week's 'lecturette' had been on curiosity. The writer suggested that 'the key to unleashing curiosity is letting go of fear. Nothing squelches curiosity more than being afraid to fail, or being afraid of making mistakes, or being afraid of embarrassing oneself. Curious people live by the mantra "fail often to succeed sooner".

I'm curious on two counts about the long-servers. One – does long service in the same role, in the same building, with the same organization suggest these people are lacking in curiosity and/or are afraid of something? Two, assuming that this might be the case (I haven't tested it) what is the best thing to do to help them be curious about the move and less fearful of it? We don't want people to leave in droves because they can't face a different commute to work.

Pondering this I came across a snippet about gloomy unemployment numbers and low workplace morale – we don't want the move to engender low morale either. So reading that "building a more committed workforce can be as simple as asking employees to reflect on their company's history" caught my attention. The researchers suggest that:

"Institutions that can communicate a compelling historical narrative often inspire a special kind of commitment among employees. It is this dedication that directly affects a company's success and is critical to creating a strong corporate legacy," said author Adam Galinsky.

"Our study demonstrates that this process is a universal one, applying also to countries and personal connections," said another of the researchers. Galinsky added that these results suggest "that this link is an endemic aspect of the human mind. Ruminating on origin stories and reflecting back on what might have happened rather than what actually took place leads to increased commitment."

Once a business (or even a country government) identifies key turning points, it should make reference to them in its origin story with a focus on how things could have turned out differently. The result is a renewed sense of devotion that is an inherent factor in an institution's overall success and crucial to its ability to prosper within the current, fragile state of the economy.

This suggested that asking the long servers to tell stories about the history of the organization, the various turns it has taken, the challenges it has met, and how they've handled these event effectively might provide a path to helping them feel curious about the stories they'll be able to tell about the forthcoming move. So I'll give that some more thought.

Going back to being curious the Life Trek Coaching piece mentioned the Martin Seligman site Authentic Happiness (University of Pennsylvania). There you can take a free test to identify your signature strengths. (You have to register). I went to take a look and found that I'd taken the test (VIA Survey of Character Strengths) in July 2004 so I took it again today. In 2004 my top two strengths were 'curiosity and interest in the world' and 'hope optimism and future mindedness.' Six years on nothing has changed! Those are still my top two strengths.

The Life Trek piece finishes with some questions How curious are you? What would it take for you to unleash even more curiosity? What is one adventure you would like to embark upon right now? How could that adventure enrich your life and the lives of others? How could you bring curiosity to bear to the challenges you face at work? At home? In life?

Thinking of the moving adventure these may be useful to ask the people nervous about moving.