Today I want to talk about milk farmers and bureaucracy. I heard this story when I recently visited Denmark. I met with their big milk association. And heard the following story: They discovered that the Dutch farmers had higher quality milk, by whatever method they were measuring, compared to the Danish farmers. They decided they wanted the Dutch quality milk, too. As a starting point for milk industry, and they decided to incentivize Dutch milk farmers to come to Denmark and maybe figure out how they do it. So they did that. Some Dutch milk farmers moved to Denmark and guess what? Their milk quality went down.
They tried to understand what caused this. Eventually they learned that on the Dutch milk farms in the Netherlands, the cows are kept closer to the house. And in fact, you can open the kitchen window and look into the barn. So, imagine you’re cooking and so on, and you have this huge open window that looks into the barn. You’re very aware of how the cows are feeling. You see them in an ambient way, you don’t sit there and stare at them, but they are kind of part of the household. Now, in Denmark, there are rules. And one of the rules is that the barn must be set at least at a minimum distance from the house, and you can certainly not open a window and look into the barn. And they said that this is a huge challenge because when you go to work to the barn and you make things just about efficiency, you lose lots of information about the cows.
Now, of course, it has something specifically to do with bureaucracy, because once they understood it, they asked whether they could change the Danish law to allow that barns closer to a house. They concluded that it would be too difficult even though they thought it was important for the farmers to be more aware of the life of the cows in more nuanced way. But more generally, I think it’s an interesting lesson about looking at things from far away versus being truly integrated. So, we have this, I think, strategy of dividing different business functions. Bureaucrats are here, academics are here, IT is here and so on. And then we have to guess the needs of everybody else. What would happen if we understood that there was something about this informal learning, the same way that the farmers were learning about the cows, maybe the bureaucrats can learn about academics, maybe IT people can learn about how employees use systems. In HR, I think that this efficiency and separation is actually hurting us. At the end of the day, we have to understand how things work. Farmers have to understand how the cows are feeling, bureaucrats have to understand how the academics are functioning and working. People in HR have to understand how people really work and think about life, and maybe it’s not like formal learning. So here’s to less separation and more informal mingling so that we can gain high quality knowledge to move forward with.
