Humane Waste

"That's not work, it's toil", my mother said to me as we discussed the physically exhausting and psychologically monotonous work of toll road cashiers. Why do we subject ourselves and others to ill-health and unnecessary expense?

We seem sabotaged in our pursuit of healthy living, captured by incoherent decision-making. Join me in a conversation about evidence and experiments in the management of human performance.

Groups of self-managing teams are the most adaptive form of collective action. Clear thinking and engaged teams reduce wasted effort and reveal missed opportunities. Well intentioned management fall aparts without feedback then poor decision-making misleads goal pursuit.

Managers habitually perform as Managers of People not Managers of Problems. Management turns into a manager role: organize and separate priorities, shield teams from distractions; optimize process into a rigid, tested and explicit way of working, so that team roles are interchangeable and scalable.

Common sense, intuition and measurements are embedded with assumptions and cemented in context. Evidence and diversity help make assumptions explicit, so we are more able to adapt to novel situations and less likely to be mislead by predictors and experimentation.

Patterns of cognitive bias and other dysfunction are completely normal in human performance;  

poor productivity, waste within corporations is a symptom of those patterns and contributes to human suffering. Expertise in computational models and social sciences help people reintegrate observations of complex systems and their drift from an intrinsic and abiding respect for human beings.

Integrated social sciences (ISS) brings empirical studies of individuals and groups, gathered from the interactions from a particular time and place, into a framework of description and analysis . Where limitations of research in physical sciences may be moved by technological improvements in instrumentation, the reproduction of physical interactions, such as in a game of billiards, is simply infeasible when working with the the unique state of individuals and groups, those complex adaptive systems known as “human beings”.

Well-intentioned (and some not-so-well intentioned) structures in modern human society have inadvertently sabotaged their own well-being, as a necessary consequence of normal human behavior and the cognitive biases we all face. For this work to be useful to the visitor, it must provide strong references to other works, to both demonstrate credibility but also to engage in existing discourse. The work must also be accessible, through excellent presentation and available interaction with the author (me) or association with another place of conversation (the Internet)

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