Recently, this urban legend was posted on Hacker News. It’s one of those stories where a grunt on the factory floor came up with a better, cheaper solution than a large bureaucracy.
Surprisingly, my comment there got a lot of upvotes:
I think another take-away from the story is that the domain you work in will dictate the solution you come up with.
If you are a high-level exec, the domain you have, the levers and pulleys available to you, are asking your direct reports to investigate the issue and come up with a report on the problem and generate potential solutions, which will then be discussed and evaluated in meetings–at a very high level. To somebody on the ground level, the domain of the problem is “what do I have around me to save time? oh, I have a fan, let me use that. Done.”
I think your point about incentivizing workers is part of it. This story reminds me of the This American Life piece about the NUMMI plant where Toyota worked with GM to teach them the Toyota way of assembling cars. [1] Part of the Toyota Way is to empower the individuals at the ground level to own the process and to improve it. The interviews are surprisingly emotional for something that’s “just work”, but I think it shows how empowering people to own and improve their everyday gives them agency.
Similar to Conway’s Law, the solution you come up with is dictated by the process or tools used to come up with it. Taking this further, it’s like the idea in linguistics that the structure of the language you use shapes your world view.
To me, what this all tells me is if you want to come up with better solutions, or see the world in new ways, or just be more creative, you really do need to expose yourself to new ideas and modes of thinking. If anything, modes of thinking that are completely foreign to you, or are hard for your brain to grok, are the very ones you should be focusing on if you wish to expand your thinking.