Ingenuity in the Workplace

There are a number of factors beside wages, commonly referred to as “quality of life” issues that affect job satisfaction. Obvious among these are safety and general working conditions. But probably at least as important are opportunities for self-expression and being treated with dignity and respect. At different periods following the Industrial Revolution some or none of these existed. This was a major contributor to the rise of communism and then fascism to counter it. Throughout history job satisfaction and the ability of workers to express themselves through their creativity has ebbed and flowed. I believe today it is in decline. Between the government and unions wages and general working conditions were improved but as far the ability of workers to express their creativity, they probably made that worse. The question is can it recover?
In “The Wealth of Nations” Adam Smith writes about advances in manufacturing technology, saying that many of them came from ideas of people working in the factories. He cites a major innovation of the time (mid 17 hundreds) coming from a young boy whose job was to activate a lever when another moved. Wanting “more time to play” he connected the two levers with his shoestrings negating the need for him to stand at the levers. And so during the time preceding Henry Ford’s production line, though many things were made by craftsmen needing to be filed, trimmed and fitted, more and more things were made in factories where “simple manufacturing” was carried out. Here there was always room for improvement and the factory workers could exercise some creativity. The Industrial Revolution all but negated the application of ingenuity on the production floor. Machines and methods standardized operations and outputs became independent of operator. The factory workers became interchangeable and easily replaced and thus their value diminished along with their quality of life.
In the 20th century new technologies started to emerge and manufacturing technology development could not keep pace. Products were being manufactured while tools and methods were still being developed and the lot of the factory worker improved. Before products matured, the output to some extent, again started to became dependant on the skill and creativity of the worker. Toward the end of the century, ever more sophisticated “high tech” manufacturing further raised the lot of the factory worker by creating high paying jobs for a new class of worker, the technician. Though we were loosing “mature” large scale manufacturing there were enough new technologies springing up to keep us at somewhat of a standstill.
We Americans take pride in our ingenuity being able to solve complex problems with baling wire (today its duct tape) and bubblegum like TV’s McGiver. This ingenuity gave us a strong edge until the introduction of the quality systems by Deming et al into Japan. The Japanese, not being as “ingenious” (or so we thought) could not as effectively make the “fast fixes” as we could. So the equipment and instructions we worked with could be flawed because we could work around them. The Japanese could not. They were forced to figure out how to make thing right the first time and gained an advantage when it came to making complex electronics and cars in volume. The up-front investment in time and money was large but it was more than made up for by the savings on long run production by not having to always fix, adjust and correct. Thus our manufacturing advantage deteriorated. Ingenuity being a source of national pride, improving manufacturing systems did not become a high priority for us.
When Japan started beating us in automobile and electronic manufacturing, we saw the light. However, as more and more new technologies started to emerge, manufacturing technology development, though accelerated, still could not keep pace. New products were being manufactured while tools and methods were still being developed and the lot of the factory worker, especially in the “high tech” sector, improved both in value and quality of life. Before products matured, the output to some extent again became dependant on the skill and creativity of the worker. Toward the end of the century, ever more sophisticated “high tech” manufacturing raised the lot of the factory worker and created high paying jobs for a new class of worker, the technician. Though we were loosing “mature” large scale manufacturing there were enough new technologies springing up to keep us at somewhat of a standstill.
More than 30 years ago I attended a four-day seminar presided over by Deming, the legendary American quality consultant who went to Japan and introduced statistical quality methods. I took away two things from the seminar. One was; don’t put up motivational posters because they don’t address the problems or help the workers do a better job but just frustrate them by suggesting that things would be better if only they just tried harder. The second thing was that 80% of problems are system problems. (My experience suggested 90%.) I believed that as soon as you lay the blame on individuals you capitulate and the problem, if it is indeed a systemic one, which the odds say it is, will never be solved. Today’s Quality Systems go even further assigning 100% of the blame to systems and an “operator error” becomes a system error attributed to things such as improper qualification, training or direction. Having learned from the Japanese experience, the modern manufacturing and quality systems now call for extreme rigor, demanding thorough specifications, instructions, methods and tools.
The instructions are becoming more precise and need to be followed to the letter. If they result in errors the operator cannot change the procedure on his own but must stop the work until the equipment, method or instructions are corrected. In a rigorous manufacturing system even the tools, paper and pencils have very specific spots designated on a workbench. The aim of management and engineering is to get to a point where there is no difference between the output of one operator from another given they were qualified and trained properly. Thus individualism in the manufacturing workplace is not only discouraged and reduced, it has now been forbidden and eliminated. The method works. It indeed improves productivity where the product and methods are mature. This is a system increasingly employed around the world and if we intend to be competitive with mature manufacturing, we have to continue implementation. However, I am not sure what taking away individualism from the job will do long term though I suspect it will not be good.
In my experience manufacturing can be broken down into three phases. A product with methods required to build it is developed. There is an initial production phase where the product is tested and tools and methods improved. Once refined and fully documented it matures and goes into the third phase, production. When I was running a manufacturing company, we decided to make a living in the first two phases. We continuously took on new and challenging work and training operators for new tasks. This strategy, besides creating a strong well-differentiated niche, combated the diminution of individual expression on the production line. The value of workers increasingly was determined by their intelligence, flexibility and speed with which they could master new procedures. Dan Land, the founder of Polaroid presented a paper at a Chemical Society Conference in Canada in 1937 entitled “Research and Development in a Small Company”. In this paper he spoke about an ideal situation where production workers would spend part of their time on the production floor and part in the development facility. This way they could add their experience to development and then, when it is time to move the project into manufacturing, they could better facilitate the transition. In essence he proposed combining phase one and two, which is what we did. And by allowing workers to use their ingenuity we were able to successfully build “leading edge” parts without needing to wait for their full maturity.
As long as there is recognition that there is a second phase, the initial production, there will be an opportunity for factory workers to be more than cogs in a machine. If not, and mature production rigors are applied to initial production, both workers and management will be frustrated and progress will slow. Unfortunately the third phase manufacturing will continue to diminish the worker and eventually automation will replace them. The question is what will be the ratio of phase two and three? My sense is that because of the accelerating rate at which new products are introduced and more automation in mature manufacturing, phase two will grow at a more rapid rate and the ingenuity of a segment of factory workers will be valued and quality of life in the workplace retained.