Of Accountants, Project Managers and Long Term Thinking

During the past week I was asked to sit in a value management workshop for the design of a new facility for emergency management. While sitting in the workshop I was struck by the short term viewpoints which seem to dominate our thinking as a society. As discussed elsewhere in this website, the design of new working environments needs to incorporate human considerations in its design. There is a fine balance between form and function and the need to provide work environments in which humans can act and work effectively for sustained periods of time. This is no more evident than in the context of emergency management centres where high information workloads are combined with long hours and high impact decision to create difficult working environments.

During the workshop I was struck, however, by the dominance of short term thinking which seems to dominate our present modes of thinking. During the workshop, the operational personnel who would have to work in this environment were in effect being dictated to by project managers and accountants about how they should operate and what their facility should look like. Staff amenities, comfortable work environments and ergonomic considerations were considered to be of less importance than meeting budget and schedule considerations.

Our thinking in the West has become dominated by such paradigms over the last twenty years. The accountants have been able to rule and dictate conditions to technical staff. Research is sacrificed for the ability to "reduce overheads". So now thinking is dominated by the cost in cash rather than in human terms. It is as if the life of the money is more important than the life of the people. The achievement of individual bonuses tied to cost reductions which are measured in quarterly terms becomes a "raison d'etre" for those who are in a position to make decisions on funding, staffing and facilities.

So the West is dominated by a lack of innovative thinking and short term solutions. This is one of the issues we will have to deal with in a post inflection society. We need to think beyond the short term and we need to think about human and environmental impacts from the design of work environments. In addition, we need to avoid sending the problems which are considered "too hard" into the future for our children and grandchildren to solve. Our generation has created this mess and it is up to us to start the work of cleaning it up.

About slade

Slade is an Enterprise Architect, Business Analyst and Project Manager with extensive experience in the Defence, National Security, Emergency Services and secure systems environment. Slade has been in the IT industry since 1988, and is experienced in systems engineering, systems architecture, systems integration, security assessment and development of sustainment frameworks for new systems. He is also a thought leader in human factors for the design of critical decision support systems and environments and the development of enterprise and solution level architecture for high information workload environments. Slade is the Director of EcoThought Pty Ltd