Watching the Carillion executives being grilled by the Commons select committee was a particularly depressing sight. They clearly showed no remorse for extracting huge bonuses and pay whilst hundreds of people lost money and their own jobs. One correspondents who was bemoaning their selfishness still felt it necessary to suggest that ‘these executives were talented individuals’. Surely not that talented because the company went belly up. In fact they were just benefiting from sitting on top of an organization held up by ‘process’ – kept afloat by the inefficient protections of previous managements.
Process is an interesting concept. It’s great for inanimate objects, but when it is applied to humans it is hugely inefficient. These processes are set up to cater for the lowest common denominator in the work force, trying to eradicate the rascals. Much better to embrace the unique strengths in individuals and build the team around that.
Process in large organizations is used to control masses of people so the man at the top can pay himself huge sums and pat himself on the back for being a talented ‘leader’. But it’s in the inefficiencies in the processes that money is lost or ‘redistributed’. Richard Pryor’s character in Superman 3 is told that his monthly wage is actually a thousand dollars and a half a cent. “What happened to the half cents?” he asks a colleague. “Oh, it sort of just floats around in the system”.
SUPERMAN III, Richard Pryor, 1983, (c) Warner Bros…Pryor, being an IT genius, burrows into the system, finds all the spare half cents ‘just floating around’ and sweeps them into his account, making him an instant millionaire.
Everyone from the shop floor, forced to work with clanky rules, to the boardroom, who have made a career out of not rocking the boat, knows the processes are inefficient. The hierarchy goes ‘all goggle eyed’ when ‘someone else’ – contractors and consultants – promises to make the whole system more efficient. The irony is that those ‘leaders’ who employ the contractors are effectively admitting that they’re no good at their own job: presumably they’re there to make the organization run as effectively as possible. They won’t admit it, of course, because that’s exactly what they’re rewarded handsomely for.
The British military is a classic example. It ‘prides itself’ on its effectiveness in any situation yet is so enamoured with contractorisation it has moved onto son of contractorisation: the flying training system has been given over whole sale to contractors. Einstein is reputed to have said that “madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result”. Presumably time will tell.
Of course any contractor worth his salt wouldn’t actually change much. The first thing he does is locate SMEs – subject matter experts – to set the system up. Often those SMEs have been in the system so long any imagination they might have employed has long since been boiled away. If they’re recognized as SMEs there’s the chance they didn’t have the imagination in the first place to question ‘the system’. The contractor therefore does it the same way as the employing bureaucracy but now has to extract a profit (to pay dividends to its shareholders and big bonuses to the bosses). ‘Savings’ can be made is in sucking out the last vestiges of flexibility in the system: often the extra work done through people’s general good will to keep the system afloat.
It’s as if the contractor is employed to take over a ferry service. The original ferry was a rubber dinghy purchased because rubber rings float much better than sheets of metal and are therefore guaranteed to keep the captain dry. It’s not terribly fast, but, my, isn’t it safe…and cheap. Over time the captain adds more rubber and air bags to make the boat even safer – safety is one measure we can all agree about – this makes the boat heavier, slower and more top heavy. The contractor comes in. The only savings he can make is to remove any luxuries in the boat and make the crew row faster.
Process is like litter. It might briefly have a use but when it’s no longer useful it should be discarded responsibly. Take packaging. Supermarkets can ensure that its apples are sold in measurable units (even coconuts in sets of one), or shops can present their shirts in the best light; the items can even be stacked much more easily in the warehouse. But shoppers are forced to dance to the shops’ tune and ‘the packaging’ once discarded clogs up the system.
Every worker, and particularly the hierarchy, has a duty to examine an organization’s process. When I’m out with the dog a chiding voice in my head says: “what you walk by is what you accept”. I don’t accept living in a littered village so I stop and pick litter up and put it in the bin. If we all did that we’d all benefit. It’s the same with process. If it has no use don’t just walk by. Pick it up and put it in the bin, or, like the Wombles, recycle it. If we all did that we might not need to contractorize.
If you’ve found this article thought provoking, or you’d like me to come and ask difficult questions about where you might ditch processes to make your life or company more effective, please drop me a line at the Inflow Performance Facebook page, the Breaking Free group page or the Inflow Performance website.