Over-learning lessons
The challenge of moving at pace
In a world where moving at pace can be a significant competitive advantage, actually doing so can be difficult. Often, nimble start-ups disrupt established industries – whether it’s Uber and Black cabs in London, or Airbnb and the traditional hotel business. In the ensuing soul-searching, references are often made to the lack of internal red tape and resulting agility as key factors in enabling those start-ups to beat the competition. This accusation is often levelled at technology-heavy organisations or IT departments, which can struggle to employ agile approaches on top of legacy infrastructure and applications.
Continual refinement can cause problems
So why is it that large incumbents get to be so slow and is there a way that they could move more quickly to respond to market forces?
A wealth of scholarly work has concluded that established companies must continually refine their operations to stay competitive. Methodologies have been created to address this – Six Sigma to name but one. In some cases, these attempts to refine processes and ways of working yield tremendous results – but in others, it has the opposite effect.
Organisations which continually apply lessons learned on top of other previously-learned lessons can suffer from an over-calcification of process, slowing their development in many cases and stopping it in some. Staff can lose sight of the original swiftness of a process or lack understanding of why the process was changed and what that change was trying to improve (or mitigate).
Operating model tune-up
So how can the danger of unintended consequences of process evolution be avoided? Carrying out lessons learned after significant change programmes and regular reviews of processes remain useful tools, but when you feel that your organisation (or team) is not as swift as it needs to be, or is not delivering the value that it should, it may be time to take a step back and to see if your departmental or corporate “operating model” needs a tune-up.
Looking at how your team works and how they interact with other parts of the organisation or your customers can be especially useful in re-examining earlier assumptions and ways of working as well as giving you a chance to consider how people, processes, and tools support each other as the team gets its work done.
Considering the operating model holistically gives a chance to:
Understand the goals and objectives of the organisation (or team)
Create a shared vision of “what good looks like”
Conduct a gap analysis from the as-is to the future desired state
Design a “Target Operating Model” which directly meets the stated goals and objectives
Test the Target Operating Model (as a paper-based exercise) with high-frequency or high-value tasks to check that this is an improvement on the previous state.
If you find yourself needing to improve your nimbleness, to remove the calcification of many lessons learned over time and to operate at pace, then get in touch.