More Process, More Problems

After all of the time and effort we spend on process improvement, we still do not realize the outcomes we are trying to achieve.  

Once, not long ago, we just told people “what” to do. The boss told the manager, the manager told the worker, and the worker did the work. Things got done until they didn’t.  

Then, we realized that if we want to innovate, move faster, and continually improve over time, we must collaborate. The boss gave the manager a goal, the manager shared the goal with the team, and the team collaborated. Things got done until they didn’t.  

So, we then scaled the collaborative process; it worked before, so more must be better, but now we are experiencing a conflict – some parts of our org improve with more processes, some don’t, and some revert to how we did things not long ago. Now, we have a jumble of things going on, and our ability to deliver value is not as consistent as we would like.  

When we encourage people to follow a single process across the organization, we do so with the best intent – if everyone does the same thing, things should run smoothly. But, they don’t.   

Here are some issues that we commonly experience:  

• Deciding on getting things done often leads to a chain reaction of questions, meetings, and disagreements. 
• We never seem to have enough delivery capacity. 
• Our employee morale/engagement is slipping, and we are losing good people. 
• We are doing everything possible to build the best organization; however, we are still experiencing inconsistent time to market, the misalignment of teams, requests hat conflict, and general confusion.  

Have we been wrong? Has the process failed us? 

I have good news.

It’s not a lack of process; we have a leadership challenge, and that’s a problem that we can address.  

Managing Complex Organizations is Hard  

The challenge of delivering value to our business, shareholders, and customers creates a system of conflicts. We need to maintain what we have, and at the same time, we need new things that allow us to compete with fast-moving competition. We have built the capabilities that have made us successful.

Now, we need to understand how to be in the cloud and how to incorporate generative AI. We want to collaborate, to show that we value our people as thinking beings with diverse points of view and knowledge, and we need to get something done without a committee. We need to do all these things simultaneously, but when we try, less gets done, not more. So, we turn to yet another process, then another, then one more, and we still seem to face the same challenges. Something is not working.  

Most people agree that for much of our work, involving our people in decision-making increases satisfaction and leads to higher-quality outcomes.

However, with so many people involved from different parts of the organization competing for the same finite resources, we find ourselves in one of two places – someone doesn’t get what they want, at least for now, or we add everything to our backlog, overwhelming our teams, slowing down time to market and reducing quality. This situation causes us to add to, refine or change our process yet again. 

Guideposts and Guidance 

As a leader, you want a system that doesn’t require all your time and energy to keep on track. You would love it if teams could do what they need independently, but you wind up micromanaging the work and are back to command and control. How can you stop this from continuing repeatedly and still produce the outcomes you need to succeed? 

We must understand the gaps we need to fill, the gaps between and around how we work and communicate that process doesn’t cover.

The first gap is realizing that leading is not the same as commanding. Anyone can tell someone what to do. A leader needs to inspire people to do it without being told. To do this, we must agree on the outcomes we are trying to achieve and the purpose for choosing the work we do at any given time.   

Creating a consistent touchstone across the org sets us all on the same playing field. Next, we must set the rules of our system; in our case, the rules dictate why, how, and when a given thing will get done, and maybe more importantly, why something won’t get done – at least for now. Then, we need to be able to define the metrics we will use for determining both how efficiently we do our work (KPIs) and successful outcomes (OKRs).

These indicators provide guideposts and traceability for our people to work within, even without daily management interaction; this provides safety to do our work independently.  

Secondly, we need to ensure that everyone is heard and acknowledged. We need to be able to rely on our peers to support our choices even when it delays the benefit to their team. This means that as we focus on providing the guidance needed to succeed, we build trust with our peers. By demonstrating that we, as leaders, can work together to provide a stable system, we unlock the trapped capability to deliver what’s important at any given time. In most cases, this increases throughput by reducing wasted effort and overloading teams.  

None of this is easy, and building a self-sustaining system in an organization will take time.

You can see impact quickly by applying a focusing framework –a system designed to align the organization to outcomes and deliver those outcomes more consistently.

Remember that with the right focusing framework, each part of the organization or external vendor doesn’t need to follow the same process but needs to contribute what is necessary to keep the work flowing for maximum impact.  

Adaptivity provides services to clients needing greater capacity to adapt by developing change leaders and organizations that are lean, agile, and continuously improving. We customize our approach and expertise for maximum client impact in their digital and other transformations and focus on delivery success and client enablement.