Jumping the ravine

In my recent postcards, I have been looking at what is essentially the same problem, but viewed in a variety of different ways.

We would all like to see our big corporate processes moving ahead in a smooth and seamless way: like a vehicle on a flat, well-maintained roadway, for example. Yet what we often find is that the roadway has gaps in it, forcing you to jump over them and crash-land on the other side. If you can’t take the jump in your stride then you could fall to the bottom of the ravine or at least have a nasty bump as you land on the other side.

It’s pretty certain that you will waste time and energy every time you come to one of these gaps in the process path. Yet most of us are now used to it. Like steeplechasers, we accept that there are water-jumps and hurdles along the way and we take the obstacles for granted. But it doesn’t have to be like that.

The root cause
Any activity requires agreement between all those taking part as to who is accountable for the outcome. You also need to know who is responsible for carrying out different actions and who needs to be consulted or informed about what is going on. The trouble with programmes and activities that jump across from one silo to another is that more than one person will be accountable, at least for some part of the outcome, and that is where it becomes complicated.

Unintended consequences
Take a hypothetical case where one person is accountable for meeting a sales target and another is accountable for reducing fixed costs by outsourcing back office functions. The first person may set up a sales campaign in which administration of an incentive scheme is to be carried out by a back office team… At the exactly the same moment as the second person is planning to offshore the very same back office team.

The two actions are in direct conflict and the unintended consequence could be that the sales campaign has to be postponed and its financial basis recalculated while substitutes are found to manage the incentive scheme. No-one wants this kind of thing to happen but they do, all the time.

Unwanted outcomes
Problems such as the example given here become more troublesome as complexity rises. If there is an external partner involved, for example, you have to cope with all the unintended consequences coming from their end, as well. The same is true when different country organisations are involved.

But let’s be clear about the issue: it’s not complexity alone that causes difficulties but the competing areas of accountability. And this all comes to a head at the points of connection, those gaps, between different stages of a process.

> part 2