Make a System Like a Haiku
In honor of National Haiku Poetry Day, and National Poetry Month as a whole, I have written a haiku about us here at TapRooT®:
…
TapRooT® helps with change;
Making a broken system
more human-friendly.
…
And let me tell you, I had a blast writing that. Haikus are known to be fun to write because of their brevity and structure; they are made up of a mere 17 syllables across three lines, broken into 5 syllables, 7 syllables, and 5 syllables again. They require no rhyme scheme, but they still carry a rhythm that free form poetry does not. They’re remarkable, and easy to write.
While I was writing this little haiku, I did some research into their history to find out what “National Haiku Poetry Day” was all about, and as I read I kept thinking the same thing: “Wow, writing a haiku is a lot like crafting a good work system.”
It sounds a bit silly, I know. At first glance, they have almost nothing in common, besides both being something that people create. But when it comes to their purpose for poets themselves, you start seeing a lot of overlap between the two.
The purpose of the haiku, as with most highly structured poetry, is actually to “free up” the writer’s words. It takes the hard work off their shoulders. The structure is already there, the system is already in place and it is tried and true. The writer can then generate their own creative ideas within that system, without having to worry about what rhyme schemes, syllable counts, and rhythms they are accidentally creating to do so.
A successful system does much the same thing for the employees operating within it. It takes the hard part of their work out of their hands, making it “easy to do the right thing” as we love to say. In doing so, the workplace poets find their creative minds free to solve problems when they arise in new and productive ways.
In high risk workplaces, employees often have to react to the inevitable unexpected. It can be more difficult to do so well when there is no good procedure to follow, or person to turn to. Like a haiku, a good system predicts this difficulty, and provides for it.
If you’re interested in learning how to improve the system at your workplace, TapRooT® RCA is here to help: you can contact us for a free briefing here.
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