Is your workplace a fast-moving super lane where every morning you enter the office there are a string of operational decisions to be taken, a day packed with meetings that are done to ensure everything and every decision gets subscribed and voted for by you?
Does it sound like a place in control and a place where you are aware of every move that goes in your space of influence? The reality is such workplaces are heavy in action but slow in terms of moving ahead.
This contradiction is the root cause that many find it difficult to understand as well as accept the notion that one can do more by doing less. Let us take a simple example of a typical home with kids and the parents as the managers around. If you have to micro-manage and take care of each step of your child, two things happen one gets lost in the daily grind and the children become dependent and never move an inch without your push or shove. The same analogy plays out in the workplace albeit with its own added flavors.
How does one take the jump to the next level of decisions? – Hyper-decisions!!!
This term by Ted Marra is definitely a good starting point. Hyper-decision making depends on the organization’s decision intelligence quotient. There are 8 factors that influence it – people, process, HR systems, sensing systems, culture, infrastructure, operating environment and alignment. There are many aspects which could be changed to enhance this ability. It may be required that this change needs to be percolated in a multi-pronged approach.
Let us look at how Process and Sensing Systems could play an active role towards it!!
Process
To enable the decision-making model which can have two characteristics
a) speed
b) autonomy
are very key to enable hyper decisions. These two aspects will need to be built into the management process so that there is acceptance from the top to the bottom of this new way of making decisions. The key thing to making it success would require that there is thought given and standards and procedures manuals changed so that this new style of decision making can be unleashed. To roll out the carpet, the floor needs to be flattened!!!
Sensing Systems
The key thing which is needed to make decisions is data or information which can be then used to bring out decisions that are no more ad-hoc and based on the whims and fancies of individuals. An example of severe floods in one of the parts of India has been attributed in some quarters to human errors or lack of decision-making as to if the dam water should be released or not.
If this decision making was to be done purely based on data and some predictive analysis, the decision could have been made without emotions and in a hyperdecision way. An ideal implementation would have been that there were systems in place in the dam that automatically let the excess water be thrown out based on daily analysis of current levels of water in the dam and the next 7 days of rains expected. This kind of eventuality that caused the loss of life and property could have been avoided.
A similar situation comes to play in a real-life work environment too. It may be about the decision to stop work and take on maintenance for a machine or the decision to schedule a certain amount of tasks on a machine based on the data obtained from the machine etc. There are many more possibilities that are emerging with the technologies like AI taking more powerful forms and learning where many such decisions would be taken on a live data set.
The Data Sets may be specific to each machine instead of using a common scale, thus machines with a part replaced may be working more efficiently and could be stretched more in terms of tasks and hours worked in a stretch. This may lead to a situation where there is no need for downtime as the monitoring is 24×7.
Big questions are the sensing systems available that can enable such hyper decisions!!!
Today’s technology is truly enabled and powerful enough to put in place such a reality. This would call for investments but surely they would be worth every penny. In fact, you may need to tread on this path sooner than you may think!!
Feel free to connect with us: https://www.quicsolv.com if you want to discuss or share your ideas. We provide IoT services as well as IoT solutions based on our ISaE framework.https://www.quicsolv.com/real-virtual-tech
