This Focused Performance Weblog is a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective. TOC is noted for its applications in Project Management and Multi-Project Management (Critical Chain) and Operations Management (Drum-Buffer-Rope), as well as in Marketing, Strategic Planning and Change Management (TOC Thinking Processes). If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
Tuesday, May 10, 2005
Everyday Changes: Necessary But Not Sufficient -- At Working Smarter, Jeffrey Phillips ask the question...
"What changes have you made to the way you work, and the way the organization works, to make it and you more productive?"
...in his piece on the value of slow evolution via everyday changes. Please pay attention to the "and the way the organization works" in the quote. It's the piece that is most important and too often overlooked.
Most regular readers will realize I'm a fan of the big bang, "puncutated equilibrium" approach to evolution to get the big improvements from "periodic dis-equilibrium." It may be occasionally painful and disorienting to go through such shifts (although that's only the case if it's irrationally imposed without sufficient attention to change management. Who was it who said that while change is required, suffering is only optional?), but also necessary for addressing deep-rooted erroneous assumptions that get entrenched in the culture and its supporting processes and technology over time.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not knocking the "everyday change" approach...it is absolutely necessary for adjustments and tweaks and minor course corrections at the tactical and operational level between major cultural and technological dislocations. But care must be taken to assure that the small changes, typically addressing sub-system issues rather than global system needs, do not result in entrenching and enforcing the last big improvement when the larger organization really needs to shift directions. Smaller improvements, because they are, by nature, typically "local" improvements to parts of the system living in the environment created by the last big systemic change and define success (and improvement) in terms of the assumptions underlying the current environment.
They also run the risk of defining improvement in terms of local optimization in terms of what's good for me, my department, or my business unit, and as a possible result, sub-optimizing the results of the system that counts -- the larger global system or orgnization; the function or process rather than the individual, the company rather than the department, the supply chain rather than the company, etc. (It's not "what's good for General Motors is good for the nation," but rather the other way around.)
The issue about improvement is not big versus small, or revolutionary versus evolutionary, (or even necessarily local versus global, despite my harping on that dichotomy). The issue about improvement is how it is defined. Systemically (not necessarily hierarchically), a valid definition of improvement is driven top-down from the goals of the largest applicable definition of the system. Whatever helps to achieve more high level "goal stuff" without violating other necessary conditions of success is an improvement.
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