Re: [ba-ohs-talk] OHS/DKR Design for KM and Licensing
John Maloney wrote: (01)
> Here is data from a recent worldwide survey on "Organizational Culture and
> Knowledge Sharing."
> ...
> The close second, (and often overlooked) cultural factor is a strong "Future
> orientation," i.e, "encourages and rewards long-term versus short-term
> planning and projects."
>
> Cultural planks such as these are critical to any successful OHS platform. (02)
Don't I wish! (03)
My experience in the business world, however, suggests that the opposite
is the case. (04)
When I have successfully managed to predict the future, the planning I put
into developing in anticipation of it has proven incredibly useful. However,
in a far larger percentage of the cases, I have over-thought and over-engineered (05)
features into products that took too long to develop, and which provided
features that no one ever needed or used. (06)
I think we can take as a truism that we would *like* to encourage long term
planning. But the hard facts of history and experience suggest that, (a) the
world is likely to change in the interim, (b) our best guesses are likely to be
wrong, (c) complex systems by their very nature often seem to produce
results contrary to those we expect. (07)
The newest development methodology (can't remember its name) uses
3-week development cycles, so it can do fast iterations and learn from
experience. (08)
In addition, those who get something out the door next week, no matter
how flawed, tend to accumulate more funding, whether in the form of
organizational buy-in, project funding, or customer use, than projects
that take longer -- even if they turn out to be "better", in theory, the
problems attendant upon learning a new, complex technology provides
a powerful barrier to acceptance among people who "grew up" with
the competing technology when it was first introduced. (Some of whom
will have been writing books and running courses, by now.) (09)
So I would argue that "enouraging long term planning" might not only
be unnecesary, it might actually be detrimental to the acceptance of
an OHS. (010)
At least, my experience suggests that might be the counter-intuitive
result of such a goal, which on its own merits is so inherently
laudable. (011)