First a little bit of building the case and understanding the challenges.
The business and work environment is changing fast. This has a profound impact on how we do things both at work and at home. We’ll focus on work. Technology is an important part of this impact. All around us technology is influencing every aspect of life. The cultural and sociological influences are all around us. This has gone to the extent that some folks like to take vacations away from technology. More and more people seek out the tech-free getaways. We now call it “getting totally off the grid.” This is telling as we are seeing the impact of fast-paced change and 24/7 overload of information.
There are literally weeks where the very same thing, maybe a process, a policy, procedure, or a aircraft part can change a couple of times or more. There are times when people are trying to get used to the changes from last week and here this week, it changes again. It's important to understand the why and the impact of all this.
Technology and decision making
Technology is a terrific tool to solve problems and sometimes solve problems that we didn’t even know we had. We have a love/hate relationship with it. However, from a human factors point of view, technology is providing choices. Choice is something we were all told "it is always good to have choices, the more choices the better." And boy, did technology ever prove that right. We have many choices these days. Many many choices. There used to be three ways to do things, now there are 300 ways to do the same thing. Maybe a little exaggeration but you get the gist. Think of it with this example; Take orange juice. There used to be a choice to drink orange juice. You got oranges or someone did and you had yourself some good old-fashioned OJ. Today, you have OJ with pulp, without pulp, small pulp, big pulp, with calcium or without, sugar free (yach!!), or you can have orange and grapefruit or mixed with pomegranate. You can have OJ that’s good for your joints or good for your cold or good for your eyes and on and on and on. They should have one OJ choice for headaches that you get just reviewing all these choices. While I’m at it by the way, can someone tell me what’s really the difference between 1 percent milk and 2 percent milk?? Yeah yeah yeah 1 percent.
So yes we got what we wanted, lots of choices. Now we are tasked with making the decisions about the choices? Recently I heard about a study that a really smart person did. They put a few people in a room and asked them to choose two items out of 15. Then they put a similar type group in the same room and asked them to choose two items out of four. Guess who was faster? By far the folks that had less choices. They were not stressed out and they had more time together because their decision making was simple and fast; they were done before the time was up. So they spent it chatting. (No smart devices were allowed in the room, by the way!)
Some will argue that choices have made things more complex and stressful. The decision-making process is full of anxiety and stress. We are always worried that we made the wrong choice, that we missed the one option that might have been better that we’ll get second guessed on Monday about for what we chose on Friday.
How do all these choices affect teams?
OK, by now you're wondering what the heck is all of this have to do with teams at work and business aviation and aircraft maintenance? It has a lot to do with it. In our industry we have not been spared from the advances of technology. In fact some would say our industry has experienced an immense influx of technology. Along with all of its symptoms and side-effects and cultural and organizational issues. So we have similar challenges. We have old technology aircraft and then we have very old technology aircraft and then we have even older, and then we have very new. We have all sorts of avionics packages, engines, and cabin choices. Lots of new gizmos and tons of options on how to use them or how to fix them when they break. And along with all of that we have different approaches to finding solutions to problems. Someone will go one way and trouble shoot. For some, money is not a big deal which creates faster choices. There are many more influencers. So then, you may have two people who will choose two different ways to solve an issue or a problem and they both get to the answer and the solution and they will both be right! It can be exhausting.
Then we add the different generations at work into this equation and as they say in New York “Forget about it.” Everyone has different ways of doing things and there are many opinions about how to do things and how do you even begin to figure this out or sort out who’s doing what or who should be involved in the decision making and what or how they should be doing it? Is this frustrating or what!
Here comes some ideas; Let’s reverse think the old ways of doing things, specially at work. There was a time when it was very much expected that the more complex the issue was, the more impressive it was. People assumed that it must be the person that really figured this out. This may have worked in the past. Today, we need to think “Simplicity is the best form of sophistication.” What that means is, in order to improve human factors and human interactions, our role is to take all the choices and ways of doing things and try and simplify them for our respective teams. Refine the process. Reduce the choices. It means dealing with people issues with a different approach. It means working to ensure the team is on the same page. It means reducing too many choices to a few digestible ones which work for you and your team.
Good teams and leaders these days should strive to spend more time with teammates on the human level and discuss the challenges we face. We need to emphasize communication. The less the communication, the more we are assuming that people understand the team direction. Big mistake. Whatever level of communication we were used to doing, we need to increase it 1000 percent. Yep, it’s not easy or definitely not something we are used to. But aim for the result which is a better team with a more cohesive focus and understanding of your specific group’s or organization’s culture and goals. Think of this increase in time with people on your team as an investment.
Leadership will play a big role in this. Leaders have to rethink their leadership techniques and tactics. We have to spend more time with people before we can get started on actual work! And while we do this we also need to balance it with “diversity in council and unity in command.” Leaders need to listen better and give people the opportunity to be heard. All the while making sure everyone knows and understands that once a decision is made or a choice has been made, we all need to get on the same page and move forward, 100 percent. You’ll have a very healthy team if you can achieve this. But it is not easy. It takes time to develop this culture. However, once you do, you’ll have a really fun place to work. Just a suggestion and an opinion! Good luck out there.
