Rob Paterson talks about the power of social media, especially Google Maps and Twitter, in a case study of San Diego’s KPBS Public Radio during the recent forest fires.
Social media are serious tools that can be used to address many of the needs of our communities, but they haven’t been adopted because they are not accepted by the organisational culture. Luckily for KPBS, several decisions helped an already open culture to meet the needs of their community.
The technologies called social media are highlighting the constraints of the industrial mechanistic model premised on Taylor’s, The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), which has informed management for the past century:
To explain briefly: owing to the fact that the workmen in all of our trades have been taught the details of their work by observation of those immediately around them, there are many different ways in common use for doing the same thing, perhaps forty, fifty, or a hundred ways of doing each act in each trade, and for the same reason there is a great variety in the implements used for each class of work. Now, among the various methods and implements used in each element of each trade there is always one method and one implement which is quicker and better than any of the rest. And this one best method and best implement can only be discovered or developed through a scientific study and analysis of all of the methods and implements in use, together with accurate, minute, motion and time study. This involves the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.
There is no single best way to address our pressing business, societal or environmental issues. The majority of our challenges are not Simple (addressed with best practice, as Taylor prescribed) nor are they merely Complicated (addressed by good practice) but more of our issues are Complex (addressed through emergent practice) and Chaotic (addressed by novel practice). Here is the Cynefin model:
The use of social media within and without an organisation allows a free flow of conversation and knowledge-sharing and better enables emergent and novel practices. As Deanna Mackey of KPBS said, “It was not business as usual and the site had to focus on the job at hand”. Social media help you deal with “not business as usual“.
Taylor was just questioning the Status quo such as you are doing today. He was trying to apply scientific principles to the concept of work.
If Taylor was alive today he would have strongly supported social networking. He would criticize the organizations that work by rule of thumb severely.
Basically what Taylor did is stop taking the status quo as a sacred cow. He argued that workers wanted to be productive. Management had to provide the means and stop assuming that workers where fundamentally lazy,evil etc.
Social networking willneed someone like Taylor to make it happen at a large organization scale.