Sweat, Tears, And Taylorism: The Hidden Perils

This post by Brendan Best is from Red Plaid Barn

Scientific Management

While working at U.S. manufacturer Bethlehem Steel Frederick Taylor observed significant gaps in managers’ understanding of tasks under their supervision. Taylor rose through the ranks from industrial apprentice to gang-boss, foreman, and ultimately chief engineer. His career trajectory likely informed his professional interests: optimizing efficiency and minimizing waste. His focus on these objectives became the foundation for Scientific Management principles:

Use the scientific method¹ to determine the “one best way” to do the job, aka “best practices”
Decompose work tasks to the smallest reasonable units and assign jobs based on individual strengths and aptitudes. Following this, assess which workers are most capable of each specific job and train them to work at peak efficiency.
Monitor workers‘ productivity and efficiency, correct sub-optimal performance with further instruction or training when required.
Separation of managerial and worker responsibilities, where managers plan and train while workers execute tasks—a concept sometimes encapsulated as “Think / Do.”

These principles make sense when we work with consistent, predictable processes, especially where are identifiable in advance, where a successful business or product outcome is effectively static. In software development, projects taking less than a month to complete and well understood requirements. Most of these principles are applied to different degrees depending on circumstances.

To this day scientific management and its successors have proponents in almost every field of human activity. It’s hard to imagine that they wouldn’t continue to exert so much influence, if they were universally ineffective. The influence can be see in the way companies across sizes and industries, sports teans, non-profits, even political parties operate.

Hierarchy and its impact on information flow

It’s debatable whether it Taylor’s original intent to emphasize managerial control for optimal efficiency. There is no doubt that it fosters hierarchical structures that hinder lateral information flow and promote unidirectional top-down communication. This dynamic can deter workers from raising concerns about quality, efficiency, or safety, depending, somewhat on managerial accessibility and openness.

A text book example of poor information flow can have terrible consequences is the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster of 1986. It is regularly cited as an illustration of inadequate information flow within hierarchical systems, resulting in tragic consequences.

(Senior managers) did not have a clear understanding of Rockwell’s concern that it was not safe to launch because of ice on the pad.
Report of the PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSION on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident
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Fortunately few of us are likely to encounter situations involving life-and-death decisions or that have the scale of NASA’s operations. The fact remains that many of experience firsthand the impact of poor information flow. Research the field of cross functional healthcare settings found that hierarchical structures tend to impede effective information feedback. In turn this compromises decision-making and increases risks that could otherwise be mitigated or avoided.

Command and control

Scientific management, whether by design or inadvertently, fosters a command-and-control approach. This usually is the result of unexamined assumptions, such as the premise of a single “best way” to perform tasks or the reliability of performance metrics for measuring worker efficiency (e.g., lines of code) vs effectiveness, (e.g. outcomes, results). Uncritical application of Scientific Management principles diminishes organizations ability to leverage the expertise and insight of frontline workers, who possess invaluable knowledge of the tasks they perform. Paradoxically this recreates the exact problem Taylor sought to address.