Empowering Employees
2017-05-18
I recently listened to this lecture Richard
Feynman gave to UCSB in 1975. Feynman can quite honestly endlessly go on ego-inflating rants, but there
are engineering nuggets hidden in between.
Near the end of the talk, Feynman goes on a small tangent about a failing software project at Los Alamos
and how he turned the failing team around with a very simple strategy.
I have transcribed the section below, but feel free to listen to it
here
I was asked to stop working on the stuff I was doing in my group and to go
down and take over the IBM group. [...]
And although they did three problems in nine months, I had a very good group.
The first problem was that they had never told the fellas - they had selected
all over the country, a thing called Special Engineer Detachment.
There were clever boys from high school who had engineering ability,
and the Army collected them together in the Special Engineer Detachment.
They sent them up to Los Alamos. They put them in barracks, and they would tell them NOTHING.
Then they came to work and what they had to do was work on
IBM machines, punching holes, numbers that they didn't understand.
Nobody told them what it was.
The thing was going very slowly. I said that the first thing that has to be is that
the technical guys KNOW WHAT WE'RE DOING.
So, Oppenheimer went and talked to the security. I had special permission so I
had a nice lecture in which I told them about what we're doing and they were
all excited! 'We're fighting a war! We see what it is!'
They knew what the numbers meant. If the pressure came out higher than it meant that
there was more energy released and so on and so on. They knew what they were doing. Complete
Transformation! They began to invent ways of doing it better. They improved the scheme.
They worked at night. They didn't need supervisors in the night. They didn't need anything.
They invented several of the programs that we used.
So my boys really came through, and all that had to be done was tell them what it was, that's all. Just
don't tell them they are punching holes, please. As a result, although it took them 9 months to do 3
problems before, now they did 9 problems in 3 months. [...]
Empower people with knowledge, freedom, and trust, and the results will speak
for themselves. Put them in boxes, keep them in the dark, have people N layers above the actual work
making
most of the technical decisions, and you should not act surprised by the final results.