The case for making things harder

I heard an historian say that after the Second World War, you couldn’t screw up the American economy. Europe was in recovery mode with infrastructure needing to be rebuilt and the labour force needing to be rehabilitated and restored. As a result, there was a demand for American products. Growth was pretty phenomenal. It wasn’t necessarily because American products were cheaper or more innovative (and I’m sure some were) but that they were available.

Similar to America after the Second World War, some companies and industries thrive in spite of themselves because of demand, lack of alternatives and industry practices. As an operational excellence professional, it amazes me how many high performing companies are messy on the inside. Messy can mean dysfunctional teams or leadership, poor work culture, redundant or inefficient processes – I am sure you get the idea. It pains me to see – why work hard when you can work smarter for less time? Whole careers are made on understanding why companies do well despite all the internal “messiness”, but here is something I suggest we can benefit from mulling over: disfluency.

In “Smarter Faster Better” by Charles Duhigg, he puts out an idea that sometimes to be good, there has to be a certain amount of challenge or work involved. One example in the book tells about South Avondale School and its district in Cincinnati that was under performing, despite all the investment in teachers, technology and education theories. They had sophisticated software to track students’ performance and Teachers had access to a wonderful trove of information about their students. However, the teachers were not using the data. The transformation in the district came after forcing teachers to interact with the data until it influenced how they made decisions in the classroom. They did this by hand manipulating the information. (For all you excel gurus – can you imagine graphing by hand?) This made the information “disfluent”, meaning harder to process. However, over time, teachers were learning how to use the data they were collecting and turn it into information. Duhigg quotes the principal of the school, Yzvetta Macon, “With Google and the Internet and all the information we have now, you can find answers to almost anything in seconds. But South Avondale shows there’s a difference between finding an answer and understanding what it means.”

In one of my recent roles we had a very manual monthly process that took two people a full 30 days to do –and then they would start again as soon as they finished because each month the content changed. The process at a high level, they would download information from a website, put it in a readable format, figure out what was new, print the new information, physically collate it into a paper document, and then make multiple copies and put it into a binder to mail out to our operating units. After fully utilizing Adobe, changing the process and uploading the information onto a server, the process now takes one person about 2 weeks.

When I first saw this process I couldn’t believe that people would spend so much time doing this – there are better ways – it was 2013 people!! That being said, those two original people knew that content inside and out because they were forced to interact with it – it was disfluent. Anyone could call these people and ask questions and they would be able to get the information quickly, if not immediately. However, when we put in the new process, we saved a ton of trees, eliminated postage costs, re-trained one of the original employees to use the brains she had and do analysis to highlight where things were broken or could be better or what the impact of the change would be - ultimately adding more value to our team. By making the information digital, it was easily searchable rather than standing over a 200 page binder, turning pages. The information was more accessible and available to more people. Our operations had more control.

In these two examples we can see the impact of making processes sleek both for the better and worse. Maybe messy internal operations are good because it makes people have to interact more with the data or the process or colleagues so they can’t help being good. Let’s consider the role that disfluency can play when we think about making changes in our messy operations.