Learning your own process, overview

"Do you follow me?" the teacher asks after having explained one of the more difficult aspects of his class. Ironically, this rings true also for classes about leadership, where the correct answer to this question is not completely in the affirmative, but leans more towards "only with my attention".

Indeed, learning is more about paying attention and then applying new information to your current thinking, before individually deciding what makes sense. Hence true education is about students leading their own quest for knowledge, extracting required information from various sources (including the teacher) and finally evaluate.

This goes straight against the classic "the teacher leads the class" thinking. And while I'm not a teacher by profession, I have to think pedagogically many times every day. And I believe it is this pedagogic thinking that is the sole reason I don't walk around strangling the stupid. :)

Teaching occures in many different situations. I started out running the department with a monday morning class every week. For the longest time, it didn't work very well. Not until we put a lock on the door. During these monday sessions, we go through a book about leadership, chapter by chapter. Because obviously, even though I am the assigned leader of the department, my "subordinates" must also become leaders of their own work.

It is through individual leadership of their assigned tasks that we, as a team, can lead the organization's use of IT. And it is through this leadership that we can get things done, completing the task at hand instead of allowing ourselves to be interrupted every ten minutes to start on a new "urgent" task.

Seeing the low resources we have to work with, I wanted to rationalize our work process, enabling us to work efficiently on every task. This meant that working without interruption was one of my main priorities, and indeed that was a priority even before I started. The other main priority was to set up a ticketing system to keep track of all of our tasks, so that we wouldn't get any mad phone calls about how his or her task hadn't been touched for two years.

From these two priorities, a system evolved within a space where there was no earlier system. What I had not anticipated was that the rest of the organization did not buy into our processes! We calculated that we spend 20% of our time letting people tell us about their problem and talking about how important it is to them, and another 20% to listen to people complain about how their task has not been completed yet and how important it is. Which means that 40% of our time is spent listening to people, and we could have gotten twice as much done if they only had reported their problems directly into our support system.

Our "internal experiment" has had great success, and I firmly believe we have collectively managed to pull the department out of chaos and into something that works more and more efficient as we go along. While we have yet to grow this beyond our original sphere of influence, it is important to understand that our system has grown into process organization through self education and experimentation instead of completely buying a finished framework. Nothing has been imposed on us, but rather we worked together to constantly find out how we work and discuss how we can work better.

We can only hope that others will follow. Not by copying our work process, but paying attention to what we have done and find their own ways of leading their own departments into organizations that don't cause premature death by stress.