Is it OK to ask for help?

Is it OK to ask for help? Reflecting on this question can give us some insight on why it's so hard in the US to adopt Toyota type "lean" operation models.

By "OK" I'm referring to the cultural norms and standards that we live by, the unwritten rules that we are supposed to know without asking. If we ask for help, will we will be punished by society?

All through the educational and socialization process in the US schools, at least Kindergarten to PhD, we are told "Do your own work." Consulting with others on homework is usually a "bad" thing. Consulting with others when it really matters, on "exams" is seriously punished. Tenure tends to depend on having done work that is clearly and recognizably "your own work" and discourages young faculty members from collaboration.

Then, one 25-30 years of such conditioning is completed, "workers" are released into the real world, where they discover that they are now supposed to collaborate and work together to get things done. The boss doesn't care if they check with each other, or use notes, or call a friend, or look things up on the internet -- the boss only cares that the work-product be completed on time. In fact, NOT escalating a problem to available experts who can help crack logjams is now punished and possibly cause for being fired. It's now bad to delay a process while trying to puzzle something out for yourself when someone nearby can just tell you the answer.


Whoa! What a disconnect!

The "workaround" used in the educational system these days is the dreaded "group work" project, generally hated by everyone from the teacher to the students. There always seems to be 3 or 4 students who are loafers and moochers and want a free ride, and one person who does all the work and gets little of the credit. It always slows down the work. No one sees the point of it, and I've had faculty apologize profusely for it but say they were told the have to do this.

That model makes it even LESS likely that anyone in business would want to participate in a "group" project or grant. Then, along comes the NIH and other funding agencies, always demanding multidisciplinary teams, or worse, interdisciplinary teams. ("multi" means they can just divide up the work and engage i parallel play and not talk much. "inter" means they actually have to collaborate on everything as they go.)

Again with the mixed messages!

And, on a larger scale, when work breaks up naturally into disciplines, departments, specialties, or "silos", the comfort level is again attacked by upper management that asks, on this scale, for TEAMS or DEPARTMENTS to "work together". It's "group project" squared!!

Somewhere along the line here the directives from above to "work together" seem somewhat like, to put it crudely, pissing upwind -- the result is unpleasant and shows no learning curve.

It's easier to deal with this issue if we understand the root causes of the conflicting message streams. It's also obvious, since "culture" eats "management initiatives" for lunch, that management initiatives for people to "work together" are, frankly, pissing upwind into the face of the very deep, very strong cultural message that "working together is BAD!!"

And, cultural messages don't come in the front door, throught our consciousness, as "rules". We just "pick them up" sideways somehow, through peripheral vision. We know, for example, that it is not permissiable to eat popcorn at a sermon in church, even though no one ever gave us a rule book that says that. These days it appears OK to bring a 3-course meal to the front row of a lecture, however, and eat it while the lecture goes on - quite a change from 30 years ago. Of course, college males no longer wear ties to class either.

So, it's less that we have a "Rule" that says "working together is bad" -- we just have a deeply trained conditioned reflex to turn away from it and avoid it, particularly when we need it the most (as in exams.) We "feel" that it is wrong, a violation of social norms, that we will be a "bad person" and rejected by society if we're "one of those people who keeps asking for help and mooching off others." It's a diffuse resistance and reluctance that may never be explicit.

And, it's the "wet blanket" that puts out the fires of initiative at collaboration.

So, how do we convert this culture into one where asking for help is OK, and giving help to someone who asks is OK, and our school system reflects that set of social norms? This seems to be important, if it is the primary obstacle to adoption of efficient "lean" approaches to our businesses that can make them globally competitive with other businesses in countries where it is OK, or even expected that people work together on things.

No, leeches who never want to carry their share of the work will still be "bad", but there's no problem if the rest of us swap and rearrange who carries what when, if it gets the job done faster and more easily.

One thing I've noticed is that a lot of times a discussion will get up to the point where "culture" is mentioned, and that's almost a signal to give up and change the topic, instead of a signal to go get a cultural-change expert to come assist with that part of the work.

Maybe engineers and IT people and doctors don't realize that there are people who specialize in social engineering and know how to do it? I don't know. It's puzzling.

Certainly experts can be found in seeing the problem and measuring it in cultural anthropology, or in changing group behaviors or population behaviors among "behavioral education" practice experts in Schools of Public Health, or in media/marketing/crowd-manipulation experts with MBA's (on Madison Avenue) or Public Policy backgrounds ( in social marketing firms.) Of course, public health is oriented to helping people improve their lives, and the marketing people often with destroying their lives but paying to do it (tobacco, alcohol, "adult" entertainment and prostitution, harder drugs and hard-core pornography and white-slavery, etc.)

But many corporations have life improving products too - from cars that work to toasters that work, so they shouldn't be painted as "bad" with a broad brush that covers the obviously bad ones.

Still, it's ironic or something that the companies that are merchants of death seem to have mastered the art of population-behavior manipulation, and those that are trying to be merchants of life are still trying to figure out how to remove the shrink wrap from the package.

Nevertheless, there is a deep literature of social engineering for public health behavior change of populations, and doing work that doesn't collapse as soon as the intervention team departs or the grant runs out.

The best book but perhaps hardest to read, and the one used at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health is titled Health Program Planning - An Educational and Ecological Approach (4th ed), by Lawrence W. Green and Marshall W. Kreuter. The first edition was in 1961, and the 4th edition in 2005, so this includes 44 years of experience with the techniques and what has happened trying them on different cultures and problem sizes around the globe.

It's pretty solidly based in "what actually works" by now.

The problem (of course there's a catch) is that what actually works is basically systems thinking, (aka "ecological approach"), and for most of the last 44 years, there weren't even words for these concepts and people didn't believe in "ecology" or "systems". Now, finally, with 1 gigahertz laptops, we have enough power to start modeling what happens with complex interacting systems and the reasons behind what works in practice are becoming clear.

Still, since what works is very heavily based on feedback loops, and since feedback loops are forbidden in classical statistical analysis of causality, this "new" paradigm has been strongly discounted, disparaged, resisted, rejected, opposed, attacked, minimized, dumped-on, and otherwise culturally marked as close as we can (being primates) by being smeared with feces and considered "bad".

Besides, "systems" means we'd have to "work together". It brings to mind this logic:

I'm glad I don't like ice cream - because, if I liked it, I might eat it, and I hate it!

Well, at least the work is cut out for us and we know what to do, and need to apply cultural change engineering to the very concept of accepting social change engineering as something we should all learn, not just the tobacco and fast-foot companies.

And, to model the non-linear and "surprising" (but fully predictable) tendency of complex systems to show "unintended side-effects", tools such as Systems Dynamics need to be used, which, of course, is why I'm currently taking that class via distance education at WPI, the world's experts (along with MIT, where the faculty overlap.)

I think the combination of lean-thinking, ecological model cultural analysis tools from population behavior modification (otherwise disguised as the field called "public health"), discussion and model building tools from Systems Dynamics, I think that's a complete set of what's needed to make this fly.

Meanwhile, I got my first new US 1-dollar coin in change this morning. It's the first coin or bill in the US history (I think) to not have the two phrases "In God we trust" and "e pluribus unum" (from many, one) on either side. (It hides them on the EDGE of the coin.)

It's almost like the US is embarrassed about the idea of trying to take many people and make one nation, and wants to hide or bury the idea somewhere, like a dog scratching dirt over its droppings.

Such mixed messages we get. It's no wonder it's hard to get people to adopt "lean thinking" or "systems thinking" when our schools, employment compensation programs, and government itself reject the paradigm.

Still, our best and brightest thinkers from the last 4000 years or so have urged us to look at cooperative social interactions in a good light. Enlightened managers urge us to follow Toyota's astoundingly successful lead and change to "lean thinking" - which is basically ecological or systems thinking. The National Institutes of Health requires interdisciplinary teams on many new grants because, frankly, they get garbage otherwise. So, the paradigm refuses to die, even if the NIH-Office of Social Science Research gets abused, dumped on, and Norm Anderson pretty much left in disappointment (at least) and forced to try to get the good work done from outside instead of from inside.




Wade