Assigning proper people to manage a priority is also critical. After all, you don’t want to vote if surgery is needed, or not. You use a very limited group of professionals to advise on it – doctors.
Priority is sometimes confused with projects. Quality
operations can allow many projects to be executed per person/team, but typically
execution on each of them happens consequently on one-by-one basis.
Priorities are much trickier, no matter how perfect a
product is there are parallel priorities as this product goes to operations.
The main characteristic of priority in well oiled company is how quickly you
handle a bottleneck when one arises.
Bottleneck could be a supply issue, customer question, making
sure systems are up, whether it is payroll, project management, one of many API
systems etc. When it happens, it means something went different on this day.
Someone needs to assess, contain and adjust operations based on the assessment.
Each priority typically means some set of bottlenecks which
your company experiences: or due to growth, or due to amortization. The theory
of constraints clearly indicates that each bottleneck addressed opens another
one somewhere down the stream.
That’s where decentralization comes into the game. When it
comes to time and quality. If you have a “player” on your “business field” who
knows what needs to be done to handle issues actively as they happen and further
proactively - before they happen, your business saves time and constantly
improves quality. In contrast, if everyone must go up to a single person
who constantly tells how to handle this and that instead of figuring out (at
least key) “bases”, there is obvious design flaw here – that person becomes a
bottleneck. Independently handling issues and crisis creates better throughput
especially when multiple priorities are triggered in the same time.
Ken Blanchard calls this training a team of eagles vs. team
of (lame) ducks.
At some point, they need to start, or re-start again to get
a better understanding of what the current process is. Decision making for
important questions, including which questions are important, which questions
need more discussions, and which discussions need decisions is a seniority
characteristic. This characteristic is always relative, and always recursive,
and always needs time and priority at every level.
- organization is setting up metrics and expectations for that operating block of a company
- there is somebody else who asserts clarity on this part of a company process
- with even 30-50% of decisions delegated to a team one creates healthy learning environment
To zoom out into a wider picture. Josiah Ober has a
fantastic linguistic analysis in his paper [1] where he shows how meaning of
democracy comes into capacity to do things, not simple voting tool when things
are non-binary.
Especially true for specialized knowledge, whether it is
surgery or refinement of an operating block. Think, about this… if you come to
an office floor and there is person in a jacket with a sharp object stuck out
of a pocket – you don’t need to wait for everyone to vote on it.
Teams are specialized to handle such “sharp objects” and
need to have enough autonomy to act even before it is not clear how sharp they
are for everyone else.
In the end of the day, that’s why we ask doctors for advice and diagnosis. That’s why you hire people who tell you what to do, no other way around. Then you work on keeping in synch. Then you apply “checks and balances” to what is expected from each function.
[1] - The Original
Meaning of 'Democracy': Capacity to Do Things, Not Majority Rule
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