Productivity Spurned

In the latest struggle to become more productive business are placing their staff under more stress and pressure than ever before. I don't have an argument that industry should be more productive. That makes real sense. What does not make sense is that this will just happen organically. By that I mean if management cut the workforce and expect the other workers to just take up the slack. This could be expected to work if the staff were all working at much less than capacity. That is not the case in most areas because businesses have been working at the thin edge of the productivity wedge for many years now. Each year they have found some more ways for staff to be productive. Again, that is fine but what is not being taken into account is the domino effect. Most times you make your business and therefore your staff work more productively, you are really making staff do more with less. This can work with the introduction of creative thinking techniques otherwise it will lead to a drain of the best staff from your business as they look for better working alternatives.

I am not saying that businesses can't find continuous ways to improve. On the contrary I agree that this is achievable and necessary. What I don't agree with is when it is done without giving staff the new skills and tools to make it work. As logical thinking has been around for over 2400 years with very little adaptation it is now not able to adapt to the new pressures of productivity changes. It falls to the creative thinkers of this world to find new ways of doing business and a fleet of new techniques that will deliver far greater productivity improvements to staff. Most of these creative thinking techniques are simple to learn and easy to implement. It is for this reason that they are often overlooked because they are deemed too simple to bring that full value that management is wanting to achieve. Let me assure you that creative thinking tools and techniques are incredibly powerful both because they are simple and easy to implement but also as they have been specifically developed to fill the holes left by the old style logical thinking.

Logical thinking is still very valuable though it never hurts to possess a complete new suite of tools to complement it. That is extremely smart thinking and it will allow individuals and business to keep driving productivities year after year without the added stress and pressure on staff so long as staff are well trained and can see the real true value in these new creative thinking tools.

The catch with creative thinking is that it pays large dividends to think about what you are trying to achieve before you start so that you can pick the simplest and easiest tool for the job. This thinking about thinking brings with it unparalleled return on investment but is a new way of looking at things that is not highly adopted yet.

I hope you are able to use these ideas to improve your work life. Until we meet again have fun and stay safe.

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