The young engineer was sitting, legs dangling into the inspection chamber, looking disgruntled.
“What are you up to?” I asked him.
“Installing fibre-optic cabling.”
“Ooooh! Does that mean we’ll be able to get fibre to the home?”
“Yes, eventually. But I don’t know how long that will be. There are just so many blockages.”
“Well, it’s old wiring round here isn’t it.” I was thinking metaphorical blockages.
“It’s not that, it’s literally soil, blocking up the conduits. A pressure washer would clear it, or maybe they’ll have to dig. I just want to install it, and I can’t.”
Half an hour later, he and his mate have gone, leaving nothing changed apart from a few more spray marks on the ground.
This is at least the second time the installation engineers have been in our street this month. Each time they’ve been unable to achieve anything, because the process of upgrading the network has been divided up like Adam Smith’s pin factory. Only where the pin factory contained the whole process, each step involved in this one has been outsourced to a different specialist company, so nobody sees, let alone owns the whole process.
In the old days, you used to see a gang of workmen round a single hole, some of them idle. Now I know why. Some of them were there to deal with the unforseen complications that might turn up once the surface was broken. If a conduit needed clearing, they were there to do it. And because they all worked for the same company they knew they could do take that responsibility. That’s called slack, leeway, resilience. It’s how you keep a complex process on track.
But what we’ve replaced that with is far more wasteful. At least all the workmen got paid, even if they didn’t get the satisfaction of doing their job. I wouldn’t be surprised to find those two young men have earned nothing from their work this morning. They’ll be on piece-work, paid on completion.
Add to that the fact that each specialist company has to make a profit, and allocates its resources to maximise that, who knows when the next favourable conjunction of BT, Openreach and Instalcom will come around? Our street is still waiting for the gas upgrade that we were told to expect 2 years ago.
Divvying up a coherent process into independent chunks may be profitable for some, but its not efficient.
Why am I reminded of Jarndyce v Jarndyce?
When we think of ‘process’ we tend to think of production lines. Marvellous arrangements of machines, belts and equipment, where activities like baking a biscuit, or assembling a car, are broken down into the simplest possible steps, so that each step can be reliably repeated with the minimum of variation. At speed, and at volume.
Production lines are fascinating to watch on ‘Inside the Factory’, but are probably less rewarding to work at. Each step is in itself, meaningless, constant repetition makes it tedious.
A production line, whether it’s built in hardware or software, mechanises a complicated process. And once you’ve applied that technology spectacularly well to biscuits, or cars, or mobile phones, it’s tempting to try and apply it everywhere.
But most processes are not complicated, but complex. They involve multiple systems, which interact with each other in unpredictable ways to produce unforeseeable outcomes.
This happens even inside an automated factory. Often the few people you see are not there to perform any of the steps in the process. Their role is to respond to the emergent consequences of several interacting systems, which if left to the mechanicals, would bring the factory grinding to a halt.
All living things are complex systems. Which means that any process involving them is necessarily complex.
It is possible to de-complexify, of course, but only at the expense of de-animating the living. This is why we find factory farming, factory warehousing, factory customer support or even factory schooling disturbing. The only way to incorporate a living system into a production line is to remove its potential for emergent properties – in other words, to kill it.
No wonder people in service industries are wary of ‘process’. They are right to be.
There is a solution though. Which is to recognise the difference between the processes in your business that are complicated and those that are complex and treat them accordingly.
The complicated is amenable to mechanisation and automation. That means it makes sense to automate the complicated wherever you can. Free up your human capacity to deal with the complex, such as interaction with other humans.
The complex can’t and shouldn’t be mechanised or automated. But it is possible to inject some consistency, repeatability and therefore scalability into it, by adopting the analogy of a creative collaboration rather than a production line.
Music, construction, drama, dance, film-making are just some of the complex collaborative, creative endeavours that use a framework, expressed in a shared language, to be more productive, while still allowing scope for the emergent.
The shared language of this kind of process can be idiosyncratic, prompts and reminders rather than instruction, the score more or less sketchy, the film improvised around a premise rather than a script. It can leave room not just for interpretation, but for exploration and experimentation.
That’s the kind of ‘process’ I’m interested in generating. Process that helps us be more human, not less.
Why do I need process if I have good people?
Because making good people reinvent the wheel over and over again is a shocking waste of talent.
Talent that could be used to invent better wheels, or more interesting uses for them.
With teams suddenly dispersed, all that tacit knowledge of ‘what it is we’re trying to do, and how to do it’, is much harder to access. You can’t simply shout across the office “How do I do X again?”
It will be very tempting to start automating everything. But you need to think about what you’re automating first, else you can get trapped in the software manufacturer’s model of how your business should work.
So here ‘s a quick guide to capturing ‘What we do round here’ that will work over Zoom, Skype etc.
Key Principles:
How to go about it:
Follow the rapid improvement cycle:
Repeat until you have a work instruction/procedure/process that can be run reliably by anyone who needs to.
Automate the bits humans shouldn’t be doing. Then let the humans get on with the rest.
In times of crisis, everything goes out of whack. Work, home, society.
Things we thought were indispensable are jettisoned, things we thought were unthinkable become acceptable, things we believed were impossible become normal.
Some of these will be good things, others not so good, others downright bad.
The important thing will be to keep the changes we found were good after the crisis is over, and reverse those we didn’t.
Which means we need to think and talk about about them during it.
Life will never be the same again. At least let’s change it as far as possible on purpose, in a direction that’s better for everyone.
This week I’ve mostly been getting a marketing campaign together.
I have a great tool, which lets me create and assemble content for all the social media channels in one place, so that when it’s all ready, I can metaphorically press a button, and off it goes.
Oh, but its a long slog! I feel like I’m wading through treacle, learning the tool, finding images and coming up with the messages all at the same time. More than once I’ve thought of giving up, and just posting more often in my usual way.
But I haven’t, because I know that once I’ve mastered this process, I can repeat it, and it will get faster and better every time. Which means I will be able to do much more marketing for the same amount of effort – I will be able to scale my marketing and still have room to deliver my promises.
I’ll have a better business, even if it’s not bigger.
We like to blame disasters on the failure of equipment – the horseshoe nail, the cladding, the electrical wiring. Or we like to blame people – the farrier, the cladding manufacturer, the maintenance department.
But neither of those things are really to blame when things go disastrously wrong. It’s the processes that have failed, and often much further back than the site of the problem. The rider didn’t check his horse’s shoes (or maybe the farrier ran out?), the specifier chose inappropriate cladding (or maybe the budget was too low?), management reduced the capacity of the maintenance department (or maybe the maintenance team had caught coronavirus?).
It’s what we do – the processes we run – that delivers results, good or bad. If we want to minimise the bad and maximise the good, we all need to see them clearly and take responsibility for keeping the whole in good working order.
Like many large organisations, the NHS has a Director of Customer Experience.
As if Customer Experience is somehow separate from Service Delivery. As if they aren’t two sides of the same coin.
Now, I might be wrong, but this feels like a bit of a bolt-on. Like the customer might actually the last person to be thought of in the whole mechanism.
In any business, what the customer experiences is your Service Delivery. Design that intentionally around what will truly serve and delight your customer. Then make sure it happens consistently and you can’t go far wrong.
That way you won’t need an expensive Director to convince people you are doing it.
One reason why we can feel overwhelmed at work, is that we don’t use triage enough.
Simple triage for unexpected client phone calls and emails:
Every customer has top priority. That needs managing.
One key way to reduce the volume of interruptions you receive, is to consider before you interrupt others.
Following on from yesterday’s post, here is another simple triage:
Respecting other people’s time helps them to respect yours.