History

As I was finishing the first edition of Productive Workplaces in 1987, I was invited to give a seminar at Temple University. There I met Sandra Janoff who told me that her husband, Allan Kobernick, was producing scripted stories using photographic slides that might be adapted for changing workplaces. As an experiment, we wrote a production called "Supervisors." Photographed by Allan in one of my client’s factories in Florida, it followed two supervisors, one reluctant, the other open-minded, through an employee-centered redesign of their traditional workplace into a team-based system better suited to a new process the firm had acquired.

We liked the result, and in short order switched to video. Soon we were making live case studies of people creating new work systems. We called our company Blue Sky Productions, its mission to document themes of "dignity, meaning, and community" exemplified by the people and cases in my book. We taped stories in Europe, Canada, and the USA, and interviewed dozens of people—managers, academics, consultants—from half a dozen countries.

Eventually, we created a one-day video workshop enabling people to examine their own workplaces through the lens of the "Learning Curve" that formed the backbone of Productive Workplaces.

In the workshop, you observe and discuss what’s happening in your work, stopping periodically to watch a brief video on the history of expert and participative problem-solving to systems improving by experts and eventually "everybody." In the event we accumulated video interviews with many key figures in the quality of working life movement and in the evolution of NTL Institute for Applied Behavioral Science (to which I then belonged) and the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. These pioneer institutions had influenced tens of thousands of people world wide to embrace more open work systems.

We turned many tapes into finished productions. Dr. Lenna King used several in her Ph.D. dissertation on Kurt Lewin, the "practical theorist," a seminal figure in my work and that of those I had known and written about. Much else, however, including key interviews, had never been released. In 2008, Larry Starr, whose creative energy matched that of my subjects, offered to establish a permanent repository for this material. More, he arranged to have it digitized for posterity and made freely available. With the publication by Jossey-Bass/Wiley of Productive Workplaces 25th Anniversary Edition in 2012, this resource, using technologies that did not exist when this material was created, can now be used anywhere in the world.

If you care about the history of scientific and participative management, systems improving, organizational development and dynamics, applied social sciences, and the subtle relationships among economics, technology and people, you will find in this archive inspiring stories and remarkable people worth getting to know. Though many are long gone, their words, images, and ideas live in the archive, waiting to be rediscovered, studied, and reintegrated by and for a new generation.

— Marvin Weisbord, April 2011.