Inspired by a discussion with John Beckford, I wrote this on the airplane to Palo Alto.
It's human natural psychology to improve the way we do things to achieve more. However, trying to work only where the symptoms are visible often times does not bring effectiveness, even when the efficiency is improved. Why? Because any object, being or process does not exist alone by itself, and thus the symptoms need to be analyzed in its relationship to related objects in the system.
Let's take a couple of examples of how efficiency means the opposite of effectiveness.
I have a couple of friends who felt that they didn't have time to do everything they wanted. Feeling time management issues, they tried to improve their productivity while getting more works in order to force themselves "to be more efficient". The problem however got worse and they felt even more under the pressure. What's happening here? My friends are good at getting more works, and actually spent more time to improve their skills of getting more works. As the result, they had no time to slow down and think about how they can improve their execution skills, their real bottleneck.
In another case, other friends and colleagues of mine had quality issues in their works. Failure in the past created cognitive dissonance, a psychological reaction to change the way they interpreted the past in order to reduce their uncomfortable tensions. Therefore, they fought with people they considered as obstacles, looked for the problem elsewhere, or invested more time as the general solution to the quality issue. Not only did they waste their time trying to solve the wrong problem, they also got better and faster to produce low-quality works.
In organizations, I observed situations where there is a coordination (process) issue. Management, instead tried to isolate the case and work on individuals. The more they tried, the more serious the process problem became, as people started to push back, stop to corporate, or even spread morale issues.
My final case is service organization's cost control problem. Facing increasing cost with profit pressure, management immediately cut cost and brought on cheaper resources. However, the problem more often lied in the control system, where resource utilization tracking and resource acquisition were not done properly. The reaction effectively made the situations more serious. Quality level went down. Productive people spent more time and effort on recruitment, training and coordinating new resources. These eventually hurts the organization's customer satisfaction, employees get burnt out, and cost is effectively increasing, not decreasing.
So how we can solve this seemingly simple puzzle? Here's some suggestions:
- Look at the issue in a big picture rather than immediately trying to improve where the symptoms appear. Use metaphors to get out of biases and find creative solutions.
- Acknowledge the problem and face the failure. Cognitive dissonance can send people and organizations down completely wrong track.
- In organizations, ensure strong enough cross-area taskforce to look into problem as a whole, rather than just look at silos.
- Do less to be able to do more. Spend time to think about the way we think.
Uploaded in Palo Alto.
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