Book Review: Continuous and Embedded Learning for Organizations

When I wrote this review I suppressed it as not being encouraging to the authors. Jon Quigley said he wanted to see it, though...so today I dug back through the archives and found it. You can buy it from my Bookshop--why not?

Title: Continuous and Embedded Learning for Organizations 

Authors: Jon and Shawn Quigley

Date: 2020

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

ISBN: 978-0-367-18387-5

Length: 295 pages

Quote: "Modern work is now taking on a new flavor in many organizations, often described as a lean or agile approach to the work, that stresses learning throughout the project and product development effort. Software has been moving toward an approach that is often referred to as agile, with one version of that being scrum."

What does that mean in plain English? As best I can tell, after reading this book, it means that the state of many corporate offices is approaching Chaos Mode. The goal seems to be that constantly forcing people to learn things that will be useless even on their jobs next month, as in Google "phone updates," will distract their attention from ever-increasing expectations that they'll make bricks without straw, and accept the "wages" of not being whipped, without noticing. 

What the Quigleys mean by "lean and agile" is not, of course, "Then the huge corporation declared itself unmanageable and spontaneously fissioned, restoring complete independence for each of its brands and products and also for each town in which it had an office or an outlet. The boss got back to actually working  on the product that had made the company great--yes, that's right, Bill Gates stopped trying to be God and went back to simply making Microsoft the beautiful, elegant, user-friendly,  interwoven software system it used to be. Then the land had rest, the economy recovered, Tinkerbell came back to life, and, for an encore, one of the Presley grandchildren started singing exactly like Elvis. Meanwhile, the workers were happy because they had fewer tiers of management to worry about and more chance to impress their one and only boss by just doing good work without having to worry about office politics, either, and everyone lived happily ever after."

However, what they do mean is seldom made clear, because this book is written in Academic Regalian. The Quigleys are trying so hard to show how well they use the "technical vocabulary" of Business Studies that they usually avoid explaining what they mean in terms of any actual office's actual practices. So, as far as most readers, including Business Studies students and probably three-fifths of their teachers, are concerned, this book is just one big waffle: page after page of words that buzz in a trendy way, whatever you do with them. This is a book of theory. Organizations have to define for themselves what, if anything, most of the sentences in this book are going to mean.

My generation optimized a lot of parameters in our day so it is sort of interesting to learn what the young are doing in Business Studies courses now. Well, they assess--not anything in particular; they merely assess, in a vacuum, on page 1. They establish mechanisms--not to do anything in particular, but "as to why it is important" (with "it" appearing to refer to "the items"). It's always fun to try to visualize how people are doing the trendy things they do in corporate offices. I remember telling an older acquaintance I was doing data entry that week and having him exclaim, "So you stand in front of the door and wave to the data, 'Enter!' or 'To the right' or maybe 'Don't enter; go away'?" What I did was type a lot of numbers onto a computer screen, and the older acquaintance provided much-needed comic relief, which I suppose is what I'm trying to do for Business Studies students in trying to picture how a mechanism would work "as to why" anything. 

Here is a tip for Business Studies majors: If a corporation is going to pay you for studying this kind of thing, it's paying your tuition. Do not take out a bank loan to read it. 

As Business Studies books go, however, this one is good because it gives readers fair warning: If you pursue a degree in any form of Business Studies, or a job that requires one, in today's world you are likely to be expected to go on reading this kind of material. Year after year. It is not too late to change to Veterinary Medicine or Electrical Engineering. 

Or, if you've already been chosen for a corporate "leadership" position, you can sit through a course in this kind of material every year or two (overcaffeination may help) and get paid for repeating it to shareholders and middle managers. Figuring out what it means will be the middle managers' job. It will probably involve more actual work than optimizing parameters, which basically meant being young and cute, trying to seem clever and energetic when anyone else was in your cubicle, and doing all your errands and social life from the cubicle when alone in it. 

Well, when I was young, I remember optimizing my parameters by learning all those different software systems that were on the market, and as many as possible of the dedicated computers, too. Offices might have invested in one device, the smallest of which were more than a foot square, say a Wang or a Lanier or a Qyx; it never took long to learn all the tricks they could do and how to make them do their tricks. Or they might have ventured into owning an IBM PC or an Apple ("Mac"). You could tell the difference because Apples had a scrollwork design key in the place where the Windows key on your laptop probably is now, and PC's did't. This required all the commands to be completely different, e.g., on a Mac you had to press the scrollwork design and a letter together, whereas on a PC you miht have to press some combination of CTRL, SHIFT, and ALT and the letter. In my twenties I advertised that I needed one day to learn to use the whole program and one week to learn to teach it.

While this kind of knowledge (and mental agility!) .was useful as a way to offset the social consequences of not having reached our full adult sizes yet (some of us were still in college, I'd dropped out without graduating myself, and on one Defense Department job I'm positive my supervisor's voice was still changing), all good things come to an end. There are some things we need to learn and unlearn as we go through life, like changes of address, appointment dates, bus schedules, the names and ages and terms of kinship for your living relatives...your own age. At a forum frequented by baby-boomers I learned that quite a few of us at least claimed, in efforts to cheer up an e-friend, a tendency to forget exactly how old we are. We remember when we were born and calculate from there but, since we no longer go about proudly announcing "I'm fifty-three!" or "I'm sixty-nine!", our immediate reaction to the question how old we are is "Sixty...er um...I was born in 1960 so I'll be sixty-three in...er um...May." 

The number of dats, or memes, or bytes, or whatever you want to call tidbits of this kind of important trivia, that we can remember is finite. By age 25 most of us have figured out that we can remember a recently learned item like "The Wang uses 'execute' for most of the same functions for which the PC uses 'enter'," or one like "I've moved to Bethesda so I now take the J2 bus from Bethesda station, not the F6 from Silver Spring," but probably not both. We're happy when we learn new skills on a job. We're not at all happy when the job uses up more than its fair share of our available memory for new trivia.

The Quigleys discuss ways to manage offices that use up people's memory for new trivia. In an appendix they outline several different psychological theories of human motivation. They can't claim that any of those theories has provided a way to make it worth people's time to keep up with ever-changing trivia but they do explain, with examples, how you too can learn to rationalize tweaking trivia in a way that may impress or even persuade some people. 

Obviously I don't like this kind of book, nor do I like the kind of business it serves...but Continuous and Embedded Learning for Organizations is the sort of book it will be valuable to own, and cite, if you work in that kind of business. 

I'm tempted to give it four stars...three for being a representative sample of its genre, and one for explaining something that used to be too often left out of explanations of Abraham Maslow's "needs pyramid." Maslow described human motivation in terms of "emotional needs" for all sorts of things beyond survival. He believed people first meet their survival needs and then go on to focus on, in order, meeting their needs for security, social status, self-esteem, and finally self-actualization. Some Christians used to criticize this simple explanation of Maslow's thought because the saints and martyrs obviously put service to God ahead of all of those things, even ahead of survival. A clearer understanding of Maslow's writings is that he did recognize that people can value "service to God" or "doing the right thing," which he classified as self-actualization even though they take the focus off the self, above security or social status or even survival. His way of explaining this was that, while the lower-level "needs" are met first, people who achieve self-actualization need less on the lower levels in order to act on the higher levels of emotional "needs." It's always good, if people are going to discuss Maslow at all, that they begin without wasting time objecting to an error Maslow never made.

But I think this really is a three-star book, about a two-star approach to business practices that's based on Total Quality Management and may, like TQM, be fairly described as a strategy for destroying integrity, efficiency, or sustainability in the workplace. 

A useful word that's not used in this book is "flux." Flux refers to a state of continuous or excessive change and movement. Medicine teaches us that, although some organisms can survive prolonged states of dormancy, if a living thing never moves or changes it eventually dies. If, on the other hand, some part of an organism--typically the intestines--remain in a prolonged state of flux, the living thing dies even sooner than it would die of inactivity. Living creatures can recover quickly from the physical symptom called flux or diarrhea, and businesses can recover quickly from a period of embracing "change for its own sake," but recovery begins with stopping the flux and the living creature or the business would be better off if they'd avoided the flux from the beginning.