Excellent reading from Seth Godin. If we're a lean organization, we don't want a bunch of “Sheepwalkers” hanging around.
Seth defines it as:
I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a braindead job and enough fear to keep them in line.
Yesterday, I was talking to managers about implementing standard work and how that shouldn't make robots out of people. There's a strange balance between having to 1) follow standard work and also 2) giving ideas to improve standard work. Sheepwalkers won't do this. Sheepwalkers will just “go along” with things, to the detriment of the organization.
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An interesting post with which I mostly agree. I think his comments about education, though, are off the mark:
“Teaching to the test, ensuring compliant behavior and using fear as a motivator are the easiest and fastest ways to get a kid through school. So why does it surprise us that we graduate so many sheep?”
This has little to do with the real issues in K-12 education today. The problem isn’t “compliant behavior”; in many schools, it’s such complete lack of behavioral standards that learning is impossible for everybody. The problem isn’t “teaching to the test”; it’s been such a complete lack of disinterest in the transmission of knowledge that basics like reading and arithmetic are not being learned.