May 26 2011
Are you destroying enough?
Kevin and I had lunch a few weeks ago. I always enjoy getting together with Kevin because he thinks about things most people don’t think about and he thinks about them differently. So it’s always interesting. This time the creative juices started flowing about what conference workshop we’d most like to attend but have never seen offered.
I’m not sure what we’d call it. Maybe something like: creative destruction; eliminating the extra; decommissioning the dumb; stopping the silliness; terminating the terrible; out damn spot!
Organizations are enamoured with initiating, starting, beginning, installing: new projects, practices, or processes. The issue isn’t that something new is starting – the problem is continuously starting something new without clearing out the old to make room for it. Neither people nor organizations have infinite capacity. Sooner or later you need to clear out the old, outdated policies, practices and perspectives that are no longer fitting, to make room for the new.
All things natural have some kind of elimination function: trees drop leaves, dogs shed their coat, dead grass composts. You wouldn’t last long if your body didn’t keep eliminating what no longer served you well. Organizations don’t have an equivalent elimination function. They become bloated and constipated and the whole system becomes sluggish.
I think there’s a new C-suite job here; the CCEO (Chief Crap Elimination Officer). The key measure for the job is to keep the ratio of Initiation/Elimination close to 1. When initiation gets too far ahead of elimination the system bogs down. On the other hand, too much elimination and insufficient initiation renders an organization degenerating into chaos and stuck in the past.
Do you have a CCEO? Do you need one?
Do you know what a high I/E is costing you?
Comments
Malcolm
5-27-2011
5:02 am
A procedural garbage man.
This is very similar to Lean Thinking’s “remove the Muda” or the old NVA task hunters
I think the challenge might be “what’s crap”?
I say this because something as simple as horizon change change how one views “a buying opportunity versus lazy capital”. Even within the same organization: ops works overtime to slot a stuffed warehouse full of poorly packaged product, while sales drools at strong availability of below market cost inventory. And this yarn spins the same for all the classic tradeoffs: volume:variety, risk:reward, fixed:variable…
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” – Shakespeare
So choose your goal first, and then the lens becomes clearer… and you can define crap.
Sharon Wood
6-7-2011
3:53 pm
I like it! I talk about this in my Everest presentations sometimes in a couple of different contexts. One is experience is all well and fine until we try to apply old success formulas to solve new problems. This is when experience hinders solutions. We use all the old criteria to support that success formula that may not be valid anymore. I find I have to begin by identifying the purpose of solving the problem.
The other example I use is when I was stuck in this mind set that I needed more strength, more help, more something to get through a tricky bit. But really, the solution was to eliminate the obstacles, primarily my perspective – that I needed the ‘perfect set-up to accomplish this. Does that make sense? It sure does to me.