OT - What is a good exercise/game to teach about why to attach to procedures

[ar81]

At work, some people are not attaching to procedures.
They might be a bit overconfident, or lazy or who knows what.
It is a cultural problem, so if people had to be fired, you would end up with almost no people.
So the goal is to make people to understand that following procedures is not optional, and they need to understand
why the effect of that is critical.

Do you think that there is any way to do this?
I would like something that helps people to be under some deal of pressure while following a procedure.
To me, being an Air Traffic Control in a computer game simulation could be a good one.

But I need to make sure the game does not let people to detach from procedures.
Do you have any ideas?
Is there any way people can cheat while playing an ATC and not to follow the procedure?
If it such is the case, what other exercise do you recommend?

[Colonel Sanders1]

well i think you should beat these people with a stick to knock the cents into them

[James.Denholm]

"sence", not "cents"! Unless programmers drop money when you bash them.

[Simonpro]

Actually it's "sense"

[ar81]

Culture here is not to follow procedures.  People are overconfident and they do not understand that not attaching to
procedures causes lots of problems.  Quality and high standards is not part of the culture here.

[Colonel Sanders1]

if it were super mario they would drop it

[James.Denholm]

Nasty... in that case, the best thing I think is education. As in, schools should rebel against the culture and teach kids
that "hey, order is important, cause you won't stuff up" and so on. Exactly what is the status of the schools and so on
in your country, ar81?

[ar81]

At school, kids can't do math because they read spanish, but they do not understand spanish.  They understand
words, not instructions.  I discovered that after asking questions to teachers.  Education sucks here.  If there are
bright minds here it is because they self educated, not because the system raised them.

If you are brilliant you are called "nerd".  In Japan kids suicide if they do not get an A+.  Here you have people who
feel just fine if they pass with minimum grades.  Anyone going towards an A (not an A+) is a nerd.  And being a nerd
causes some social rejection among teens.

Education is poor because of government, government has people from political parties.  30 years ago the 2 parties that are the statu quo here, implemented national exams and said that it would "improve quality of education".  Ministery of education (MEP) set the standards and it also provided the services.  According to ISO, quality is to meet customer specs, so basically MEP was its own customer for 30 years.  No wonder why they said "we are doing a magnificent job".

Truth is that "computer sciences for kids" at schools is some lessons typewriting and some basic lessons of MS Office...  there are a few cases where it does not happen, but that's a minority.

The result today is that you have workers who do not understand the importance of following instructions, and even if they do, they do not understand the instructions.  I think now you may understand my concern about educational projects here.



Post Edited ( 02-21-08 23:11 )

[James.Denholm]

It seems that the problem must be fixed by the goverment, because I would say they are the only ones who can fix it.
More money towards education would be a solution, but then where would that money come out of?

[ar81]

Education is quite messy. During the last administration teachers went on strike, because the payroll system created
by GBM (the local representation of IBM) did not work well.  Also, last year some frauds were spotted, since system
does not seem to keep a log, and there were some non-employees getting salaries as if they were teachers.

To me it tells me that the company needs to pay attention to the development practices of the local representation.  A
whole country went on strike, because of a poor development.

This was the most critical issue this administration faced (and keeps facing).  Bringing some order to the payroll...

Also, as companies start to expand operations here, there is huge gap in supply of english speaking workers.
This is the current concern.
But you can't have people speaking english, if they do not speak even spanish.
Our current educational system is based on memory. "When did independence take place?"  "Who was the first
president?" are questions that requires you to memorize, not to use your thinking.

Kids hate math.  It is because they never learned to play with it, like computertex here.  When I used Orbiter to teach
kids in my workshop, I saw that "if you want to play, you need to learn", so at the beginning when I had to teach
them about how to use Orbit MFD, they felt somehow bored, even if the class was filled with images depicting things
like Apoapsis and Periapsis, Normal, Antinormal, etc, but as they played and used it, they understood it was useful
and enjoyable.

Math can be enjoyed.  And that was the reason to create Surface Base Wizard in a way that you still require math.  I
wanted a tool that was not easy enough to make math not to be used.  The calculator takes care of the complex
math, but you need to understand the problem graphically, before yu use it.