In my experience, most people have the best of intentions at work. They see problems at work and want to solve them. They create strategies, work plans and activities to try to fix the problem within their specific context. While they get an A for effort, the reality is they may do more harm than good. Why?
- Organizations are systems. The problem is that most issues are connected to other parts of the mothership. When a process breaks down in one area, trying to fix that area on its own could be a short term solve, but it could break or slow things down in other areas. A classic example is optimization of a single task – say call centre. We want to decrease the time on call at help desk. We may try to fix that by passing them off to another group or by speeding up the solve on the phone. But if we try to fix the system, we create resources so the call doesn’t happen in the first place.
- People want to feel like they’re making a difference. They hear of an issue and set about trying to fix it without communicating or asking if other people are working on it. They forge ahead but often don’t know what they don’t know. This leads to …
- Many programs, one goal. The number of projects and programs spun up to tackle and organizational priority can be astounding. It’s so rampant in large companies there are often additional projects to gather the activities so they are aligned. If I had to guess, any one organization has a multitude of innovation, onboarding, data projects, new customer etc. underway trying to solve the same or similar problems.
The result is wasted effort and, more importantly, time that could have been spent driving a new product forward, or on other valuable company projects. So how do we get beyond the spin? Organizations need to:
- Declare – at the top of the house the strategy, workstreams and how is leading
- Define – the activities for each workstream and who is leading
- Drive – move with speed so people see results and don’t spin up more work
Purpose. Clarity. Speed. Seems easy, but we all know it’s not. With a leadership team open to exploring, talent that is keen, smart, creative and passionate and a dose of structure, you’re that much closer to solving the things that are important for your organization.
The Objective Co 