Prescription, re-prescription and learning.

The paradoxes of presciption

Industrial production developed through the Taylorian model of scientific work organization.

The need for standardization of products and work organization led companies to set up a methods office whose mission was to develop work execution processes. The prescriptions produced by this methods office allowed operators who were often poorly qualified, and who needed to be productive very quickly, to produce without having any professional experience. It was a way of bypassing the human factor considered as an obstacle rather than a resource.

These task prescriptions, the result of the expertise of the methods office compensated for the experience that the operational staff lacked. These prescriptions generally take the form of putting into words the sequence of gestures and activities to be performed in order to accomplish a task.

In a traditional Taylorian process, the prescriber describes a procedure that he gives to the operational person to perform the task. The designer of the prescription, is the only legitimate one to validate the transformations necessary to achieve the prescription. The operator is excluded both from the elaboration of the prescription and from its adjustment. Yet this question of the prescription since always comes up against the reality of the action: the represcription as an inescapable but too often unthought activity.

Since the 1970s a distinction between prescribed and real has been highlighted (Leplat 2000[1]). When you observe an operational at his workstation, you will find that he is not executing the prescription as given. In order for an operational to correctly execute a task in his work context, he must (consciously or not, visibly or not) transform the prescription to fit. To perform the task he is responsible for in the actual production situation, he must do something different from what the methods office prescribes: add a step, eliminate one....

This work of re-prescription has a double function: It allows him to make adjustments of the prescription to the reality of his action at the same time as it allows him to confront this prescription to internalize it, and to appropriate it. But generally he does it in an intuitive way, hiding with the impression of not doing what he is asked. Thus his part in producing the prescription is not visible and valued both in his eyes and in the eyes of the company.

The classic response of the methods office to what it sees as a drift is generally to prescribe tasks more and more finely and to try to control the activity as closely as possible.

But it turns out that the work of transforming the prescription is, most of the time, not a drift or a transgression, but a necessity in order to appropriate the task at hand. It is there that the operator puts his intelligence of the situation and that he has his reason to be. As Yves Clot points out, the suffering of operators often boils down to a feeling of unfulfillment, an impeded work[2], an activity that by its organization prohibits the operator from being actively present in the realization of the work processes that he or she uses.

The question this raises is who should be the repository of knowledge? Should the entire system be the only legitimate one to possess the knowledge and to legitimize it? i had the opportunity to supervise field managers in the nuclear industry who told me about their difficulty in managing this Taylorian way of producing process: each incident was the subject of a Rex (Feedback) which gave rise to a data sheet that proposed a modification and entered into a kind of process bible. this institutional collection of usage prescriptions in the form of operating prescriptions then led to an inflation of perfectly unusable writings. "if I or my collaborators have to read all this, we're going to spend all our working time on it" he would tell me.

In reality, such a performative perception of these approaches, which undoubtedly makes sense, considerably reduces the benefit that can be expected from them, because it leads to a knowledge accumulation approach that is far less efficient than an approach guided by the intention to develop conscious attention[3]

For shared presciption management

Supporting operational teams in implementing learning enterprise approaches, Lean management or Fest (work-based training) approaches is often done with the help of tools like TWI[4].

The use of this type of tool makes it possible to put operational people or teams in a process of co-construction of work processes in the case where for one reason or another something does not work.

They are used in different circumstances:

• Either there are inaccuracies in the original prescription: "holes in the rack".
  
  
• Either it is necessary to train a novice and help him/her to integrate the prescription.
  
  
• Either the rotation of personnel (retirement, turn over causes a loss of know-how and company expertise and its active memory.
  
  
• Or there are drifts in the use of the machines and this tool is used to bring the teams to rebuild an adapted prescription.
  
  
• Or it is possible to improve the prescription and the collective of the operational people use this tool to build together a new task prescription and a new production process. To do this, we will model the excellence of the one who is the most efficient, by proposing to describe his way of proceeding to model it and share it.

The tool thus makes it possible to structure the collective approach, as soon as there is a need to rework a prescription either to adapt it or to allow its integration.

The result is ultimately that the "operator" level produces its own prescription or transforms the prescription to adapt it to the real activity. The tools thus allow this work of confronting the prescription with the real, which in any case takes place in an intuitive and clumsy and hidden way when it is not instituted and structured through tools, to take place in an organized and structured way.

Thus, one can see these tools as a means of formalizing the distinction between the prescribed and the real of the activity. The tool makes it possible to structure the confrontation between the prescription produced by the methods office and the re-prescription that the operator makes for his own benefit in order to carry out the task.

The re-prescription that the operator carries out is generally the result of a work of confrontation that he conducts between the official prescription and the reality of the work environment.

Two prescriptions?

Are not the work performed most of the time the result of a confrontation between two prescriptions?

Implicitly the use of these tools allows us to understand that, in a general way for a production to exist, there must be two prescriptions:

• The operating prescription: the one produced by the methods office that regulates the general functioning of the machine "whatever the product or the work environment". In a way, an "epistemic" prescription.
  
  
• The prescription of use : That produced by the execution that allows to operate in the precise context of the production. This context, which is often different from the design context of the machine or the process, can lead to quite significant variations in the prescription.

The interest of the tool-based approaches of the learning enterprise lies in the fact that it allows the authority to produce fine prescriptions adapted to the context to be transferred to the operational people who have experience with machines and who are therefore legitimate for this level of granularity of the process.

This puts the operational people in a situation to become aware of what is at stake in this relationship between the prescribed and the real and then allows the elaboration of a prescription adapted to the person and to the real situation. It is, in a way, a way of explicitly elaborating the re-prescription that any operator performing a task does intuitively and unconsciously, for lack of a tool.

Prescriptions of use are different from design prescriptions in that use is determined by the production environment. The prescribed/actual distinction is embodied here in the distinction between design process and use process. This is the difference between "in theory" and "in real life" It is because the use process is different from the design process that operators have the obligation to reconstruct the prescription to make it operational.

Thinking about one's work, a skill and a professional activity

When the production context is very close to the process design context, there is sufficiently little difference between the operating prescription and the usage prescription that the adjustment is made intuitively and the "re-prescription" remains "silent" and unthought of. But in the case of diverse and complex productions, especially in R&D departments or centers of excellence producing new or specific products, the transition from the operating prescription to the usage prescription cannot be done intuitively and remain unthought. It must be done in an explicit way and therefore be managed institutionally.

The interest of the tool-based approaches of the learning enterprise lies precisely in the fact that they allow the operational staff to manage in an efficient way this passage from the operating prescription to the usage prescription leaving to the operator, the only legitimate one to conceive the usage prescription, the possibility to elaborate it and thus to appropriate it.

This work of re-prescribing becomes in itself a professional activity and must be recognized as such with identified competences and institutional time provided for this work.

In fact, the very "Taylorian" choice of reserving this right to transform the prescription to the methods office poses two problems:

• The methods office is not legitimate to produce this usage prescription since it does not have the experience of the specificity of the context.
  
  
• The fact of dispossessing the legitimate operator of this responsibility has all the chances to demobilize him. At best One can think that he will integrate less easily this re-prescription for which he has not been recognized as the legitimate owner, at worst he will tend to sabotage the production as the only means at his disposal to claim legitimacy to produce the prescription of use.

Thus one can understand that if there are "non-quality", it is not because the operator does not apply the prescription. It is most often because he does not have the institutional possibility, the legitimacy, to question the operating prescription and to reconstruct and formalize the prescription of use, in a confrontation with his real of the action: the machine, the work context and his peers.

The accompanying prescriber

If we accept this distinction between operating prescription and usage prescription, then we can understand that the work of prescribers goes beyond the elaboration of production processes i.e. operating prescription.

In such a process, the function of the prescriber is not to carry out the prescription of use in place of the operational, but to assist the operational (or the teams) in the co-construction of this re-prescription. Thus, in a learning enterprise approach[5] or a lean approach, the prescribers of the activity must develop skills to accompany and formalize the activity conducted by the operational

The mechanical application of the standard is only possible by the machine. The human being does not know how to do otherwise than to put his or her own spin on it.

The operating prescription is then, like the score for the musician, an invitation to think about his or her action in a concerted manner.

One can try to evacuate the actor's share of re-prescription, as the proponents of a harsh (and no doubt misunderstood) Taylorism think. But we can also try to use the operator's ability to put in the work to obtain a result that is both standardized, adjusted and at the same time a source of motivation and commitment on the part of this operator.