Stop improving
Craft Methodology
In the craft methodology discussion I’ve mentioned that I disagreed with one of the lean pillars. I was referring to continuous improvement.
On the surface, it seems to be a great thing. The idea being that we are always looking for a way to eliminate waste or ways to improve the efficiency of our corporation. We will then adjust the corporation to be more efficient and aligned in the end.
Let’s re-org!
A few companies I’ve been at had us reorganizing every 6 months to a year. Some of the reorgs were great and were done to make alignment with initiatives. This could be creating new initiatives, closing initiatives that were at end of life, or shifting some groups within leadership to reduce conflicting goals and reduce outside dependencies. However, most of the reorgs were chasing ways to improve ROI to no success. I’ve seen some companies reorg more often than they have shipped products.
I’ve witnessed companies and teams making changes to processes in hopes of correcting a reported issue. The problem is that those changes were done for all issues without really considering what is lost through change.
It is generally well understood that if you hire someone new it takes three to nine months for them to get to their full potential. Time is lost when a new employee is not working as they could when they are:
Getting their computer
Gaining access to all of the systems
Learning company processes
Learning how to work with the team
Gaining insight on how to effectively communicate in your company
Learning how work gets approved and validated long term
And so much more
I don’t know of anyone who thinks a new employee can start a new job and be as effective day one as they will be in a year.
If an employee changes what job they are doing they will also be less effective for some time. They can use knowledge from their old job to get up to speed quicker on their new job. They will still have a time where they are less efficient.
When we reorg, change processes, or change teams we disrupt at least the people affected and potentially the entire company.
Getting Experts
Getting all of this right has become such a priority, we will hire experts to explicitly tell us where and how to change our company. I’ve seen them create and grow entire departments in an organization around perceived inefficiencies in processes, communications, reporting or what have you.
This can extend even lower where entire methodologies are taught on how to conduct continuous improvement down to the individual.
So am I going to say improvement is bad? Not at all. Iteration is one of the most important things we do. If we don’t iterate our company we will die. The real question is:
What are you iterating for?
Good Reason
We have to make changes to our organizations with imperfect information even at high risk. Many times it could be compared to gambling. Leaders at the top are the best in the world at making those decisions. They know making a change is the right call with the information they have. Highly visible pain is shouting from the roof tops that something needs to shift.
Over in my post on Iteration, I talked about how long to wait before making a new change. I showed a game where making a small change to a rule set would create noise in a system for a long time before actually stabilizing into a new system. We had to wait long enough for the game’s entities from creating new patterns before then waiting to ensure what we see is the actual result from our changes. It can be a deceptively long time. If you make a change too soon all you are doing is changing based on noise instead of signal.
We will always need to make some changes with imperfect information. However, noise isn’t imperfect information. It’s noise. Changing a company will produce that noise and the noise will be louder and arrive quicker than the actual results. Turbulence can make success look like failure. Excitement can be false proof. A short term gain can hide an oncoming turn over. Even the best leaders with the best reasons for change can hear early results then move on before the noise has settled enough to truly tell.
Sometimes the solutions are the actual problems.
Why?
If your company has some sort of team with one of their primary pillars is efficiency, what are you evaluating their performance on? What if one of those team members said, “I don’t see any changes to make for this coming year.” or “I need to take a year to see how those changes work out.” Should they then be concerned about their job?
If they must show they made something in the company more efficient to be a performer, their KPI is now internal change rather than making your company do its purpose better. If you are paying people to make changes, everything will always be changing.
Once you make a change, you lose context, need to rebuild working relationships and wait for efficiency to hopefully grow higher than before. It can get crazy where we are changing every part of the org forever and simultaneously. At scale this is just an expensive waste engine.
I’ve seen this happen first hand. Program managers were hired to be a point of communication for the engineers. Now those managers needed to be explained everything, told everything, and would insist on being in most every meeting for visibility. Inadvertently they became just a giant drag to the system. Be careful not to get caught up in the excitement of the latest structure to try.
Keep in mind, if you keep repotting a tree, that tree will struggle and you will eventually kill the tree.
As I said, change is critical when needed. To know if you need change, look at what your product actually is. Internal procedures usually are not the point. Specific ways of working for employees are not the point.
We build products, ship them, and then when a new product makes sense to build, we do that. Our companies should be no different.
If our company is too inefficient to make the company’s actual products profitable we need to change.
If we need to make a different product we need to change.
If our company’s dependencies shift we need to change.
If we have a KPI that are burning out employees, we need to change.
I thought we were making changes so that our company would be great for our customers.
Changes are supposed to lead to a time of actual stability and performance.
The goal of changing is not to just find more changes.