Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Information at the bottom of an organization usually doesn’t move up to the top.

In the past, I have written about the information thermocline and the authority thermocline. Organizations have levels. Even “flat” organizations—regardless of claims to the contrary—have levels. Information and authority don’t flow down into the lower levels. About half of everything stops at each level.

Today I write of the reverse situation:

Information does not flow up in organizations.

About half of the information at the bottom of an organization stops at each level as it tries to rise to the top. Believe it or not, persons at the top need to know what is happening at the “working level.” Sometimes, persons at the top want to know what is happening at the “working level.”

The CEO of Wendy’s needs to know what is happening with those folks who are pressing hamburger patties to the grill and putting the lettuce and tomato on the buns. The backwards information thermocline, however, is stopping that information flow.

I mention something near and dear to my heart: Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). I first learned of this in 1983. I loved the idea. I wrote in OOP in grad school. I learned much of the concept of OOP. It had great promise.

Sorry, but OOP flOOPped or flopped or something. CEOs heard of OOP. C++ was OOP. Buy Microsoft Visual C++ and do OOP. Buy the Java IDEs and do OOP.

Persons at the bottom recognized that these tools from the major vendors that were bought by the CEOs were not OOP. They were nice tools that enabled some productivity gains, but they were not OOP. Some programmers protested. The information did not rise to the CEOs. The bad tools kept rolling in, and here we are two generations later with, well, pretty much nothing.

Are you “up” in the ladder? Go down a few rungs and have conversations with persons whose information is halved a few times before it reaches you.

You may not like what you hear, until you like that you are hearing it.