Algo para fermentar

Volta e meia repito uma frase que aprendi em São João da Madeira:

"O boi cresce mais com o olhar do dono do que com a erva do pasto"

Ainda ontem de manhã, em Felgueiras, a usei para resumir o que me estavam a contar. Fui com um controlador da qualidade de calçado visitar várias pequenas empresas que trabalham como costuras subcontratadas. Contou-me como em algumas costuras, a patroa olha para um modelo e visualiza logo a sequência de trabalho, alterando o posicionamento das máquinas para minimizar operações e tempos sem acrescento de valor.

No dia anterior tinha lido mais uma porção de "Reinventing Organizations: An Illustrated Invitation to Join the Conversation on Next-Stage Organizations" de Frederic Laloux:

"Self-management has proven itself in many industries. There are, for instance, a number of very successful factories that operate in this way. One of them is FAVI, a five hundred-person brass foundry in the north of France that produces gearbox forks for the automotive industry, among others."

Estas pequenas unidades não têm nada a ver com o conceito de "self-management", mas é interessante como conseguem que muitas decisões cheguem mais próximo da trabalhadora da linha do que na produção de uma empresa de maior dimensão.

Entretanto, encontrei esta reflexão, "We need to shift our focus from competencies to agency":

"In mass-production, work corresponds mainly with what has been planned and budgeted. But today, knowledge work is understood as creative work we do in interaction. Unlike the repetitive business processes we know so well, where inputs are acted on in some predictable, structured way and converted into outputs, the inputs and outputs of knowledge work are problem definitions and exploration for solutions. Even more, there are no predetermined task sequences that, if executed, would guarantee success.
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Due to the variety of contexts people link to and work in, work requires interpretation, exploration and negotiation, work requires a new kind agency. What defines most problems today is that they are not isolated and independent. To solve them, a person has to think not only about what she believes the right answer is, but also about what other people think the right answers might be. Work, then, is exploration both what comes to defining the problems and finding the solutions.
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The industrial make-and-sell model required categorical skills, as we still know them. The decisive thing was your individual knowledge and individual education. Today, in new creative spaces you work more from your presence and network than your explicit skills. Agency is more important than education.
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The most important reason why we need a new concept of agency insted of competences is because the workers and their contributions in the post-industrial world are contextual and, at best, too diverse to rank. They are, and should be, too qualitatively different to compare quantitatively.
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Instead of talking about generic competences we need to focus on continuously developing agency."

Decididamente algo para fermentar.