Primed to Perform by Neel Doshi

Author:Neel Doshi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

4. PERFORMING

When coauthor Neel learned to drive, his father would take him out on the roads and highways of New York City in their four-door family sedan. On the roads, he knew that he had to follow the rules. On occasion, they would pull into an empty parking lot where there were no rules. They could play—seeing how hard the car could take corners, or how fast it could break. This is the playground, where learning happens fast. In this simple story, it is obvious where the playground begins and ends, but in most jobs, it isn’t so obvious.

Organizations spend far too much time telling employees what they can’t do. At the extreme, employees must follow scripts and strict protocols in every aspect of their job, all designed to maximize tactical performance. Employees feel as if there is no playground where they can try new ideas and change how they work.

While every job is subject to nonnegotiable policies and strategies, a well-crafted role should also have a place where it’s normal to experiment and learn. We call this zone “the playground.”

To build a playground, you should first consider where the job needs adaptability to achieve the highest levels of performance. Where is VUCA the greatest? The playground may be in the area where your competitors are most active, where quality is most important, where requirements change most frequently, or where the customer needs distinctive treatment.

At a Toyota assembly line, there is significant VUCA causing manufacturing defects. The line workers’ playground is in identifying ways to improve their process or tools, or solving quality problems at the source. Toyota goes through great lengths to build this playground right into the job itself. For example, above each station at the assembly line hangs the famous andon cord. If an employee has an idea for an improvement, he can pull the cord, and a manager comes to his station to act on the idea.

At Starbucks, how a barista makes your triple-grande soy latte must be the same from store to store. That’s the zone of tactical performance. However, how they deal with each unique customer, or how they address the problems that inevitably arise, is the playground where they can experiment with better ways of working.

Agile software developers face significant VUCA from constantly changing business requirements, new technologies, and even bugs. The whole process of developing a feature or product can become a playground (as you will see later in the chapter).

Whole Foods strategy of sourcing the best organic goods from local producers has extremely high VUCA. From season to season, the best producers or even customer tastes can change. The process that store clerks follow to select merchandise is their playground.

The playground isn’t about Ping-Pong tables. It is about giving people clarity that when doing certain parts of their job, they have wide degrees of freedom to experiment, and even fail, as long as they learn from it.

For a long time, we thought that giving people autonomy was critical to a high-performing culture.

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