Form: Question

HUMAN BEHAVIOR QUESTION: LOTTOCRATIC BUSINESS PROCESSES?

If you have worked with me before, you know that I have a sort of personal commitment to eliminating overhead bureaucracy and empowering the people who actually do the work. I’ve found that it’s better to distribute management functions to a large number of people, each of whom does just a little bit of it.

The side effects are fascinating. First, you educate a lot of people about how to run a business. If you rotate these duties you basically train most of your staff in how to operate the boring but necessary parts. Second, it makes it impossible for people to use their management duties to obscure information. Third, it prevents stagnation and encourages innovation. People want to eliminate these little process functions rather than expand them. So they tend to invent ways of making them go away.

TIME CARDS AND EXPENSES AS LOTTOCRACY

I have been toying with the idea of lottocratically assigning timesheet approvals around a services company. That is, anyone with one year of experience or more gets X randomly assigned timesheets and expense reports to review and approve. Most of what is accomplished by approvals is error checking. If accounting, upon entering and posting, approves it too, your score goes up, and if they reject it your score goes down.

Now you might think this is crazy. But I’m pretty sure, that if I made it an option. Most people in any company would want to do it. Particularly the less experienced people. And the senior people would avoid it at all costs.

People would want to do it because it increases Sovereignty. They are more in control, and participating more in their environment. And from my perspective, an informed and participatory employee is happier one, who brags about his or her job to others. Which helps recruiting. And customers ‘SENSE’ it. And that ‘sense’ sells.

I’M WONDERING WHAT YOU THINK?