Interactions: what your customers don't care about, but you should care about…
As the famous quote by Russell Ackoff, pioneer of system thinking, goes…
A system's performance is not the sum of its parts but the result of its interactions.
Organizations are "systems", by definition. In fact, largely because of being composed of people, they are inherently complex in nature; thus a better metaphor is to call them "ecosystems".
Yet too often we see an emphasis on how a part of an organization, like a team, or a department work and not so much how the “system”, the organization, and their parts interact.
Complexity often requires simplicity, although not in the sense of easy to do. In my latest issue of The Conceptual Leader I have explored this a bit further, along with a simple example of what could be seen as the simplest of the mechanisms for feedback and nudging: visualization. If every part of the "system" could only see the same thing, then a lot of ambiguity could be sorted out. And perhaps fairly simple enabling rules can also emerge over time, smoothing out some interactions.
Look at the simple example, which I've shared in that previous issue, below. If all involved parts of that flow are seeing the same thing, and a quite simple decision filter, to always prioritize work that refers to items that are closer to the end (more to the right), is established as an enabling rule, quite sensibly some ambiguity is left out, and it is not subject to possibly emotionally-driven interactions (like being strong-armed by a higher paid person opinion).
And there can be more to it in terms of, practically speaking, focusing on the interactions. Things like:
Do we have the right cadences that bring the right people together at the right time so that the right information is available to those who need it?
Can we reduce dependencies by simplifying? This can take the form of a change to the organization, to the architecture, enabling automation, etc.
Do we invest time early on so that there’s sufficient shared understanding of needs to happen?
Are there enabling constraints that help the entire system have a sufficient sense of common direction? E.g., clarity on what you are optimizing for from a business point of view (like a business KPI) as well as from a product delivery angle (like a North Star metric).
Are the policies for interacting in the system and the underlying flow of work explicit and well-known?
The outcome of that, on an individual level, is reduced cognitive load by turning default operations into habits and with cadence (rhythm). Add to that the element of learning and adapting, and you are really onto something from a "system" performance as well as continuous improvement perspective.
What makes or breaks an organization, in terms of being set up for success and performing from an execution standpoint, very rarely has to do with how the specific parts perform. And more importantly: the opportunities to improve that would tend to have a bigger impact on customer satisfaction will rarely depend upon how a specific part (locally) performs, rather need to be tackled systematically (globally).
As the maxim goes…
Your customers couldn't care less about how you work, and your company is organized.
It may sound harsh, but it is just one of those brutal honesties that we need to hear every now and then.
By Rodrigo Sperb, feel free to connect (I only refuse invites from people clearly with an agenda to ‘coldly’ sell something to me), happy to engage and interact