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I get bored easily.

Since my professions (writing and consulting) depend on my ability to persuade, this character defect has personal significance.

As a senior consultant of my acquaintance reminds me frequently, people rarely adopt new ideas before about seven repetitions. Seven? I’m bored by the third repetition!

Example: Last year I wrote a column or two in which I pointed out the cause of the productivity paradox: that productivity – items produced per unit of time – doesn’t apply to knowledge workers, who don’t produce the same thing over and over.

Computers can’t make knowledge workers more “productive” because the job doesn’t involve productivity in the first place. Computers make knowledge workers more effective, which is an entirely different matter. Effectiveness, of course, is hard to quantify, and even harder to turn into tangible financial benefits.

A few weeks ago I wrote a column on the “True Cost of Ownership” for personal computers, and of course I assumed everyone reading it understood the uselessness of searching for increased productivity. Nope. So think of this as repetition #2. More will be on the way.

Here’s an illustration of the difference between productivity and effectiveness: Executives used to either dictate memos and letters or scrawl them on a legal pad. Either way, their secretaries typed them and handed them back for revision. After several iterations of red pencil marks, their memos entered the mail.

From a productivity perspective, this was a wonderful process – the executive probably spent no more than five minutes on the whole process.

Now, those same executives compose electronic mail, twang the magic twanger, and launch their immortal prose into cyberspace. With any luck at all, the lucky recipients read their words within the hour.

The executive has lost productivity. Even without amortizing the time spent learning to type, the memo almost certainly has required much more executive time. Effectiveness, on the other hand, has increased by a huge factor – more than you may think, actually, because secretaries, no longer called on to interpret and type executive scrawls, now handle far more important tasks.

Think about everything that’s had to happen over the past fifteen years to create this result. The technology, by itself, had only a trivial impact. Coupled with the cultural change that accompanied it, the impact has been transformational.

The branch of anthropology called ethnoscience defines culture as the behavior people exhibit in response to their environment. In business, the environment is the behavior of other people. So, to change a culture, you either change the behavior people exhibit in response to their environment, or the behavior people exhibit that constitutes other people’s environments. You change the people, or the people.

Got that?

Take our executive. (Please.) Typing was beneath him. Female executives refused to type anything because they didn’t want their male counterparts to think of them as secretaries. Personal computers were useless on executive desks because execs looked at the keyboard and freaked out entirely.

When I first got involved in rolling out PCs in an organization, I suggested creating a typing class for managers. My boss told me this was an awful idea – nobody would take it. We could, though, create a class in “keyboarding skills” which would be useful to these guys.

Think about the changes between then and now. Then: an executive using a PC is wasting time doing a clerical job and not delegating effectively. Now: an executive not using a PC is too inept or lazy to learn the basic tools of the trade. And these attitudes are reflected in real behavior – who gets hired and promoted, how work gets done, and what we all expect of each other.

In the meantime, accountants manage to tally the “True Cost of Computing” at somewhere around eleven grand a year, but can’t seem to find any tangible benefit.

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|In: Organizational Effectiveness|Last Updated:

I’ve told my share of “dumb user” stories. Whiteout-on-the-screen is a popular entry. I’m fond of the using-a-bulk-tape-eraser-as-a-diskette-bookend story. My all-time favorite has the punch line, “Well, your first problem is, that’s not a modem, it’s an answering machine.”

You don’t hear as many “dumb IS analyst” stories. Here’s one: “We don’t have time to do it for you, and we won’t give you the tools to do it yourself.” Another favorite: “I don’t care if you’ve solved your business problem – your data model isn’t in third normal form!”

The all-time classic goes like this: “No I haven’t been on the factory floor. Why would I want to do that?”

This New Year I resolved to eschew dumb-user stories altogether. They have too much in common with ethnic humor – even if the gag is funny, it’s generally in poor taste, and ties your thinking into stupid stereotypes.

For example (you were wondering when I’d get to the actual topic, weren’t you?) it renders computer training programs completely ineffective. Start with a dumb-user premise and you’ll design boring, basic, pointless computer classes that convey so little information that attendees wander away muttering about their wasted time.

When you’re teaching (and I’ve done a fair amount of it in my career) your audience believes what you tell them. Tell your class that computers are complicated and they’ll believe you. If, on the other hand, you tell them the truth – that computers greatly simplify many complex tasks – they’ll believe that instead.

How has the myth arisen that computers are hard to use? I hosted an InfoWorld Electric Forum on this subject awhile back, and the consensus was remarkable. Computers have become increasingly hard to setup and maintain, in lockstep with a trend towards extraordinary ease of use. In this they have a lot in common with automobiles. Very few of us have the specialized knowledge needed to even tune a modern engine. Driving, however, has become easier: push on the gas to go, push on the brake to stop, turn the wheel to steer. Cars no longer have the manual chokes, standard transmissions, or crank ignitions that used to complicate learning to drive.

Hmmm … push and steer. Sounds a lot like “point and click” doesn’t it?

Computers seem hard to use for two basic reasons. We’ll address one of them this week, and save the other.

Computers make such a huge number of different things easy to do that just keeping track of them all is daunting. Want to change fonts? Easy. Bullets and numbering? Easy. Standard deviations? Same answer. And on and on and on.

In fact, computers and the Internet have this in common – the hardest part of using them is finding what you’re looking for among all the other stuff. The actual operation is simple. And even here, there are so many different routes to each operation (menus, button bars, the right mouse button) that you can generally figure things out without much difficulty.

When you teach, emphasized that every single task is easy, and establish three goals for every class: (1) Make sure to clarify the concepts (folders are like their paper equivalents – you use them to organize your files). (2) Help everyone succeed in the actual operation a few times, so they knew they’re capable of it. (3) Make sure everyone knows how to look for the functions they needed, so they have the confidence to poke around among the menus.

And give them a bit of great advice: For each project, add precisely one new technique to their bags o’ tricks. (In a very short period of time, they’ll master an awesome assortment of skills with very low stress.)

This teaching style will go along way to making your end-users self-sufficient. Of course, there’s a downside to all of this: you’ll have far fewer dumb-user stories to swap with your friends.

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