Thinking in 5T

I’ve offered examples of what I’m calling Thinking in 5T™ in various past posts. You may have seen the evolution from four to five Ts (thank you Cohort 2019 of SCU’s Leavey School of Business Executive MBA students). Here, I’ll do my best to lay out the 5 Ts for general use. I’ll define, rally for, and share the origin story of this critical modern skill. I’ll close with the claim that you need to share these ideas with as many colleagues and young people as possible.

What are the 5Ts?

• Target: Goal, a strategy that you’re trying to achieve

• Talent: The available knowledge, skills, abilities, and psychology (things that would be covered in a management or organizational psychology course) of the people involved

• Technology: The available capabilities of everything from a shovel, to how a room is furnished, to artificial intelligence

• Technique: How talent and technology are brought to bear in particular processes

• Times: The context - times of our lives - that set the stage for how these dimensions come together — this, the fifth T, came from me trying to find a way to add context to the model. The EMBA’s came to my rescue. (Someday I’ll do a post on why researchers need to be in the classroom — it won’t be all about getting our results into the world, but rather the opportunity for reality checks and extensions offered by the students.)

Why do We Need to Think in 5T?

Top-down, organizationally-led technology and practice implementations provide foundations for digital transformation. You are likely seeing this in your own organization as the application of tools like Salesforce or shared calendars—tools where an organization needs everyone on the same system. These may be tools with network effects, such that the more people use them, the more value there is for all.

To fully appreciate and gain value from our talent, technology, and technique, we need to enable bottom-up approaches to fill in the “white space” created by the formal structure of corporate-level tools. Research shows that people who make individual adjustments to their work (job or work crafting) have higher performance. Other research shows that this crafting needs education and design support to be effective. For example, without training, 97% of people asked to redesign a task focus on functional approaches that simplify the work – and make it more robotic. In today’s world more robotic work is the most likely to be replaced by robots (for better or for worse). Only three percent make changes that would be considered enriching for people’s work. I believe, and will be doing research to test, that technology used to augment our work (allowing us to do things we couldn’t have done), and support our work by technology assistants (taking away the work we don’t want to do) are the key to avoiding the doom and gloom versions of forecasts regarding people losing their jobs to automation….

Where do the 5Ts Come From?

Over sixty years of research (e.g., Trist and Bamforth, 1951) shows us that most change is done with a unidimensional approach. This has been called a silver bullet approach and we know it doesn’t work (only about 26% of organizational changes are considered successful given their initial goals — a number that holds steady across decades and different authors). The research noted above, however, shows that triggering the multidimensional approach is difficult, so I guess the limited outcomes shouldn’t be a surprise. People tend to focus on simple versions of change and thinking about how to get work done. No single person (“if we could just hire this person”, new technology (“if we just used Slack,”) or organizational practice (“if we just applied agile throughout the organization”) will independently get you the outcomes you could attain by creating a well-mixed combination of talent, technology, and technique, all aligned for your times and pointed toward your target.

McKinsey, with its 7S model, and Galbraith, with his Star model, made good inroads—if they seem familiar to you, that’s a big first step. However, both of these and the multitudes of other models were designed in days when technology was akin to plumbing; it is not something to consider strategically. 

Why Coin a Phrase?

I use the phrase Thinking in 5T™ for two reasons. The first is as a simple way to remember five key dimensions of work design: Target, Talent, Technology, Technique, Times. If you look at the 7S or Galbraith Star, or any quality organizational design model, you can tease out these dimensions. The trick is to make them as commonplace as the 3 Rs… reading, ‘riting, and ‘rthmatic. 

The second reason is to create a trope: “We see in 3D. We need to think in 5T.” The value of a trope is that it is easily remembered. As noted above, we have decades of research and teaching around these concepts, yet they are not part of the common vernacular. 

There is great power in broad knowledge of an organizational idea. You have likely at least heard of Six Sigma quality management techniques. Six Sigma is another area of research and teaching that was undervalued until it was more effectively “branded.” There are now entire institutes offering courses leading to certifications, including the highest, Six Sigma Blackbelt. The more people who understand the concept, the easier it is to implement it in a particular setting.

Share Broadly

In my last book, The Plugged-In Manager: Getting In Tune With Your People, Technology, and Organization To Thrive, I highlight the value of sharing. The more you share, the more ideas trickle across the organization, the more others understand what you are trying to do, and the more aligned the practices can become in the organization. 

Consider how much technology and new organizational ideas have come into work in the last ten years: Alexa, Siri, Google, robots, ride-sharing, home-sharing, mobile-first, kids with smartphones. This last brings me to why you must share these ideas with young people. Common Sense Media reports that the majority of US 11 year-olds have a phone. That means that eleven-year-olds need to be Thinking in 5T: When do they carry their phone or leave it at home, when do they have it turned on, do they answer when their parents call on the phone, how do they behave on social media…. I’m sure your list is even longer than mine. I’m thinking about how it could be turned into a game between parents and kids, kids amongst themselves. Happy to work on that with any of you.

We see in 3D. We need to Think in 5T™. Value for Us All.

The image below is my first attempt to highlight the value to us all when more people are involved with using technology. Without broad access to PCs, we wouldn’t get mass contributions in building out the internet (acknowledging the documented issues around the narrow demographic diversity of Wikipedia editors — help me find another dataset to use in this example, please). The more of us who find ways to Think in 5T regarding the design of our work, the more options all of us will have. Future posts will describe research I’m beginning, looking at how bottom-up applications of Thinking in 5T serve to strengthen our value vis a vis robots and other automation (race with the machine, not against it). I hope you’ll share your own examples in the comment section below.

[Edited May 22, 2024. Thank you, Janis.]

PC Data from US Census Bureau. (August 8, 2018). Percentage of households in the United States with a computer at home from 1984 to 2016 [Graph]. In Statista. Retrieved October 20, 2019, from https://www-statista-com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/statistics/214641/household-adoption-rate-of-computer-in-the-us-since-1997/ Wikipedia data from https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediansEditsGt5.htm