(13) From Systematic Management to Scientific Management
- Jon Smart
- 4 minutes ago
- 12 min read
This is the 13th blog post in the Organising for Outcomes series. It is helpful to understand where we’ve come from, how today’s ways of working have evolved, and the context that those ways of working evolved in. This helps us to understand why we’re working the way we’re working and what we might want to change in today’s context, which is significantly different compared to previous technology-led revolutions.
In previous posts we looked at the growth of Systematic Management between 1870 to 1900. With each industrial revolution, there is innovation in ways of working. The 3rd Industrial Revolution, the Age of Steel and Heavy Engineering shone a light on existing limitations in ways of working, as firms grew to a larger scale than ever before enabled by the railroads and with downward pressure on prices. This led to the introduction of Systematic Management, going from laissez-faire, rule-of-thumb ways of working, to putting the organisation into organisations. Systems were introduced to get a handle on financial transparency and pricing, on production control and on how to incentivise workers to produce more for less. There was also increased specialisation, centralisation and the use of data to help increase efficiency and effectiveness.
In this post, we look at the ongoing innovation in ways of working as part of the 3rd Industrial Revolution, the more well-known Scientific Management, in order to understand why we work the way we do today and to (re)learn lessons from the past.
From Systematic Management to Scientific Management
It’s August 1915, 6:45am in the morning and the sun is rising in Cleveland, Ohio. Elizabeth spills out of a streetcar and into the flow of workers pouring into the factory in their thousands, carried along by the tide. Like every day, Elizabeth has already got the children up and fed the family. For six days of the week it’s groundhog day as her time card is punched and she threads her way to her seat amongst hundreds of others on the same floor. Unlike the dark, stuffy sweatshop where Elizabeth last worked, the sawtooth skylights in this factory let in a good amount of natural light, a visible sign that the factory owners care somewhat about worker welfare.
Elizabeth is assembling jacket linings. At her workstation her tools are neatly arranged, her sewing machine oiled, bobbins replenished and belt drive tensioned overnight. The Bundle Girl has already brought over a bundle of parts. Previously, Elizabeth had to leave her workstation and walk from department to department around the factory to get all the parts she needed, which she quite liked as it was a change of environment, a chance to chat to colleagues and besides, the number of jacket linings she produced had no bearing on pay. In fact, Elizabeth and colleagues had agreed between themselves to limit the number of jacket linings produced per day, to avoid anyone needing to work too hard. The art of walking slowly between departments had been perfected over many years.
However, that was in the past. Today, the Rate Fixer gives Elizabeth her daily orders, in the form of an instruction card. Elizabeth takes the work order without question. In fact, now if it wasn’t for the instruction card and the Bundle Girl, Elizabeth would be quite helpless, not knowing exactly what to work on or where to get the parts from. She previously could make an entire suit jacket from the large rolls of fabric, cutting, sewing and finishing, now she no longer needs to bring her brain to work. Planning and thinking has been removed from the shop floor.
Today Elizabeth is to assemble linings for the Blue Serge Suit, the Ford Model T of the clothing industry. The instruction card has precise steps with precise timings, down to the second, which are to be repeated for each lining. This works out to be a quota of 200 jacket linings for the day. If the quota is met, excluding defects, Elizabeth will receive a bonus payment of 30% on top of her daily base pay.
This is a meaningful financial incentive for Elizabeth and so, like her colleagues, she no longer works at the slowest pace that she can get away with. The peer pressure to work slowly has gone, as have some of her colleagues who refused to work at a pace set by someone else.
The timings came from a privileged young ‘Industrial Engineer’ with family ties to the factory owners, who had stood over her with a clipboard and stopwatch, timing her every step. Elizabeth remembers thinking that he clearly had been nowhere near any manual work, never mind a sewing machine. The observations were handed to the Planning Department who have been writing out daily instructions for her and her colleagues ever since. Gone were the days of autonomy, caring for your own tools and individual skill in the order of assembly. Elizabeth felt that there was less craft in the work now, any individual who could follow the instructions and maintain the relentless pace could do the work.
A whistle blows signalling the start of the working day, belt drives engage and there is a rising mechanical symphony of clattering machines, whirring belts, thudding foot pedals, and shouted conversations. The work is repetitive and monotonous; take the back linings, sew them together, take the side linings, sew them to the back lining, take the front lining (pockets already added by a pocket operator), sew them to the side linings, take the sleeve linings (already sewn by the sleeve makers), sew them to the armholes of the lining body and bundle up the finished lining shells for the Bundle Girl to take to the next station. Elizabeth never saw the finished product, at least not in the factory.
The whistle blew again marking the end of the day, she punched out and joined the flow of thousands of workers dissipating into the evening by streetcars, train carriages, bicycles and on foot. Elizabeth resumed her second job, at home, feeding and caring for the family, before settling down for the night.
Elizabeth doesn’t need to think too much about tomorrow, it will be predictable. She is ready to leave her brain at home and obey her detailed instructions come the morning whistle.
1.1 What is Scientific Management?
▶️ Systematic Management was primarily concerned with improving the efficiency of a group of people, putting the organisation into organisation.
▶️ Scientific Management was primarily concerned with increasing the efficiency and output of an individual.
Scientific Management was only possible because of, and built on, the advances introduced by Systematic Management.
The focus was on individual worker productivity, to overcome workers ‘soldiering’. The systematising was extended from the organisation to the individual.
The person most commonly associated with Scientific Management is Frederick Winslow Taylor, and as always, there are a number of key people involved in this story who we will meet.
According to Taylor in Principles of Scientific Management (1911):
“Perhaps the most prominent single element in modern scientific management is the task idea. The work of every workman is fully planned out by the management at least one day in advance, and each man receives in most cases complete written instructions, describing in detail the task which he is to accomplish, as well as the means to be used in doing the work. This task specifies not only what is to be done but how it is to be done and the exact time allowed for doing it. And whenever the workman succeeds in doing his task right, and within the time limit specified, he receives an addition to his ordinary wages”
Scientific Management is all of Systematic Management plus:
time and motion studies (to determine what the employer deems to be an acceptable level of daily output)
financial incentives at an individual level (to maintain that level of output)
separation of planning and doing (the worker following the orders of the rate-fixer)
standardisation (such as tools, methods and machining speeds)
further division of labour with multiple ‘functional foremen’
Taylor’s ‘Scientific Time Study’, as he called it, involved breaking a job down into atomic tasks, removing wasteful movements, timing each of those atomic tasks to the second, adding them up and then adding a percentage contingency, in order to determine ‘the quickest time in which each piece of work can be done’ . The atomic tasks and the times for each task are set by a rate fixer from the Planning Department and are handed to a worker as a detailed instruction card. The behavioural norm is order-giver and order-taker, with orders not to be questioned. This is combined with a financial stick and carrot for the worker to maintain this ‘scientifically’ determined pace of output.
The image above is an example of an Instruction Card for ‘sewing in sleeves’. There are a total of 21 detailed steps, each with an allowed time in seconds, some just 2 seconds in duration. There is also an allowance for ‘variation and fatigue’ of 32.5% of the overall calculated time. These allowances were arbitrarily determined by rate fixers and bring into question the word ‘scientific’ in Scientific Management.
With Taylor’s Differential Piece Rate wage system, if a worker manages to complete the pre-determined amount of work, with no imperfections, by the end of the day, a higher price per piece is paid, potentially earning more than the previous day’s pay. If not, a lower price is paid, potentially earning less than the previous day’s pay. Taylor’s approach was to set the bar intentionally high so that only a “first class man” could maintain the pace, “sifting out men who are incurably lazy or inferior”. (source: "A Piece-Rate System" ASME paper, 1895, Taylor)
In his first paper presented at the American Society of Mechanical Engineering (ASME) meeting in Detroit, June 1895, Taylor wrote:
“while foreman of the machine shop of the Midvale Steel Company of Philadelphia, it occurred to the writer that it was simpler to time each of the elements of the various kinds of work done in the place, and then find the quickest time in which each job could be done, by summing up the total times of its component parts, than it was to search through the records of former jobs and guess at the proper price.
After practising this method of rate-fixing himself for about a year as well as circumstances would permit, it became evident that the system was a success. The writer then established the rate-fixing department which has given out piece-work prices in the place ever since.“
Prior to being called Scientific Management, Taylor used a number of different terms including Elementary Rate Fixing, Scientific Time Study and Task Management. Time study came from Taylor, and motion study evolved in parallel and was taken further by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth. Together, in the context of repetitive, knowable, physical work, time and motion studies endeavoured to optimise output and answer the question of ‘what is an ideal day’s work’ at an individual level, from the perspective of the employer.
The incentive for the employer was increased productivity, overcoming workers soldiering, that is deliberately working slowly.
The incentive (and threat) for workers was financial and not being fired. The implication was less autonomy, more narrow, lower-skilled roles and more monotony.
1.2 Delineating Taylor and Scientific Management
It is important to delineate between Taylor’s behaviours and beliefs and those of other practitioners who were implementing Scientific Management. Taylor had a particular approach which, even given the context and norms of the time, can be viewed as demanding, autocratic, classist, paternalistic, lacking in empathy or an understanding of an organisation as a social entity. Taylor’s employment was marred by disputes of his own making, antagonising both workers and management alike.
It would be wrong to tar Scientific Management with the same brush, as there were leaders and practitioners, such as Henry Gantt, Carl Barth, James Dodge, Frank Gilbreth, Lillian Gilbreth and Mary Follett, who within the prevailing worldview, had more empathy for the human side of change and understood the importance of worker welfare.
It should come as no surprise that the most successful examples of the implementation of Scientific Management were the ones where worker welfare was a priority, where the ‘socio’ aspects of ‘socio-technical systems’ were taken into account, where people were not treated as cogs in a machine, such as Link-Belt Company and the Tabor Manufacturing Company, which also happen to be organisations where Taylor was not personally involved.
Order Giving and Order Taking
According to Taylor, instructions were to be followed without question. In 1905, in Shop Management, he writes:
“It may be accepted as an unquestioned fact that no gang boss is fit to direct his men until after he has learned to promptly obey instructions received from any proper source, whether he likes his instructions and the instructor or not, and even although he may be convinced that he knows a much better way of doing the work.”
Taylor repeats this in 1911 in The Principles of Scientific Management:
“Each man is instructed in the exact manner in which he is to do his work and the time which is allowed for doing it. He must do it in the time and in the way laid down, and not in his own way.”
In Taylor’s testimony at a US House Committee on Labor hearing in January 1912, triggered by a petition and walkout at the US Government’s Watertown Arsenal, Boston, he softens this stance slightly saying that workers can make suggestions for management to consider, after having followed the orders without question:
“It is the rule under scientific management that the workman works in accordance with the laws that have been developed, and that they shall at least practice the method that has been set before them once before raising any objection or any kick about it. If after having tried the new method once any workman has a better suggestion to make, […] that suggestion is most welcome to the management.”
This was in the face of challenging questioning by William B Wilson, chair of the House Committee on Labor. Wilson had started work in coal mines at 9 years old and had been an active leader in the United Mine Workers of America labor union, campaigning for shorter hours, better wages and safer working conditions. Wilson was respected by workers and very much had the autonomy and welfare of workers in mind in his line of questioning.
Taylor’s approach explicitly industrialised the separation of thinking from doing, of planning from execution, from craftsmanship to workers as a cog in the machine, with order-giving and order-taking at scale, significantly reducing autonomy and agency. From Shop Management (1905):
“All possible brain work should be removed from the shop and centred in the planning department.”
The rate fixing department planned the work at the individual level and the individual had to do exactly as they were told to do in minute detail. Workers had to meet the time, quality and output, or be paid less than a day’s pay, quit or be fired. There was more output, but with people as automatons, explicitly doing, not thinking. To meet the daily instructions handed down, there was an incentive to not take time out to improve, for fear of not making your daily quota.
This was with a view, informed by the Scientific Revolution in the 1600s, that once discovered there were universal laws of work, a clockwork universe worldview, the misapplication of physics to biological and social systems. There was the one best way, and it just needed to be discovered by intelligent people and then the less intelligent people repeated it, without thinking. Like Newton's universal laws of motion.
As we will see in a subsequent post, there is direct link from the Scientific Revolution to Taylor, showing up in the language used, such as the use of the word 'law' in relation to work, not a legal context. Taylor was educated via a curriculum created by Professor Thurston. Thurston was educated by Professor Norton at West Point Academy. Norton was educated by Claude Crozet, who came from the French Ecole Polytechnique, found in year one of the French Revolution, a product of the Enlightment, itself a product of the Scientific Revolution. The Ecole Polytechnique was the first major institution to turn the worldview of predictable, mathematical laws into a national education system.
This culture of order-giver and order-taker, leading to learned helplessness is still prevalent in organisations today, for example the relationship between ‘the business’ and ‘IT’, passively waiting for orders to be handed out and output to be delivered. Incentives in role based silos further exacerbate finger pointing and a blame game.
Also still prevalent, in the context of change, is a 'clockwork universe' predictable worldview, with someone putting together a plan (in a Gantt chart, which comes directly from the era of scientific management) without input from the people doing the work, treating unique unknowable work as if it is knowable, the plan put together at the point of having learnt the least, inhibiting change, treating the definition of success as hitting a ‘drop dead date’ milestone and inflicting that plan on workers, measuring and rewarding output in role silos, with financial incentives in year end pay and bonus. This is a mindset that has prevailed over the past 400 years and it is only relatively recently (1950s to 1970s) that we've come to realise that it does not optimise for outcomes in social systems, i.e. with people.
The shadow of Scientific Management, as Taylor articulated it, still hangs over how we work and behave today in large organisations, in a very different context.
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