The Next Organization

Seeing the big picture to be effective in complex environments

Complex environments present a very different situation, where causal relationship is often not clear. This environment however very different from the focused and simplified situations we are familiar with in classical academic, books and teachings. As the result, efforts to improve efficiency in the wrong place lead to reduction in effectiveness. Looking at the big picture and defer judgment can help.

In a previous post, I discussed the examples of when efficiency is the opposite of effectiveness. The most important reason why this happens is broken link between cause and effect. In teaching environments, books and talks, to be able to convey the method and tactics, the background settings are condensed into relevant facts. Frameworks and simulations make it worse by creating an impression that results can be directly identified and related to actions. Meanwhile, people are rarely taught of how to collect the most important facts and link them together in real life. As the result, there is a prevalent misconception that causes and outcomes are obvious and appear close to each other. People tend to fix somewhere close to where the problem becomes evident. When paying attention to short-term events, human is often concluded as the main problem. Many don't know how to find the right "button" distance in time or place in systems to solve the problem. This is also a reason why many MBAs are bad managers in increasingly complex market and corporation environments.

Systems thinking - effectiveness vs. efficiency

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.

Develop and Follow up Creative Ideas More Effectively (When Internet is All Around)

My main achievement this week is a discovery of a new plan for my creative idea development. Working with computer and Internet access for most of the day, having DSL at home and being alone made my laptop the center of my life for a quite some time. Meanwhile, from November last year, I stopped using my paper idea notebook and Lotus Organizer to switch over to MindManager. While the software seemed to be faster, it’s not a very natural way to note down idea very quickly. In stead, it made me focus more on the mechanics and structure than the idea itself. After testing a few personal note tools, I ended up using EverNote. I found EverNote quite fast to quickly capture and classify the information and notes.

However, all of a sudden, I spent most of my day on the computer. I kept reading new things and switching from one task to another. I lost my concentration and my productivity seriously dropped. I had no time to think more the ideas I had. Even worse, I wasn’t able to note down many ideas and they kept vanishing shortly after. I felt frustrated and stressful.