Hug your way to profits

I will not play at tug o' war.  
I'd rather play at hug o' war,  
Where everyone hugs  
Instead of tugs,  
Where everyone (…) grins,  

(…),  
And everyone wins.

  

Sheldon Allan Silverstein (Hug o'War, Where the Sidewalk Ends) 

Zero-sum games, where a winner wrests victory from a loser, are widely believed to be at the core of capitalism. This is reflected in its language: companies "compete" to "conquer market share" measured in percentages, and "only the best survive". Inside companies, particularly large companies, the same notion applies: I must defend my turf for fear of having my budget reduced or my authority questioned. 

The erroneous notion that only one person can have a given piece of the pie at any given time causes antagonistic behavior that leads to waste, particularly if the pie is not growing. Genuine collaboration and shared success can seem incompatible with competitive capitalism. In fact, they are fundamental prerequisites of corporate success. A company beset by internal strife wastes time and energy in futile battles that take away from its ultimate purpose (and its bottom line).  

A large IT department had been under massive budget pressure for over 5 years and, barely able to meet its maintenance obligations, it had failed to meet the expanding needs of business users. The IT staff was disheartened and disregarded inside the organization, so much so that business users preferred outside suppliers to IT, further depleting IT's financial and morale coffers. In this tug of war, the business users appeared to be winning, when in fact they were no closer to getting what they truly needed: innovative IT solutions to their specific business problems.  

To resolve this sterile situation, management decided to replace the unpopular head of IT and reform the IT department. Wisely, they decided to couch this reform as a win-win proposition (hug o'war) wherein both the IT and business rank and file would come out ahead. Old wounds were lanced and patched in cathartic seminars, and a bright future envisioned with a positive, shared vocabulary. 

A few months in, the IT staff has a renewed sense of energy and purpose, and they are being treated like partners by business users. The newfound goodwill will need to be stoked regularly to ensure that the group hug can last, but "everybody wins" is now a distinct possibility.

Are your customers an alibi for what you don’t do?

In a recent meeting between the operations and IT departments of a large company, the operations department asked for a software solution to compare the competing offers of electricity suppliers. In response, IT's 'agile development' team asked for a fully documented requirements document - knowing full-well that it was a nearly impossible request. The operations people are busy running the company and have little experience writing software specs, and their original request was formulated as "let's work together to identify the options that are available to us". The meeting did not end well.

In theory, support departments serve and enable business users - their customers. In reality, long seen as cost-centers operating under ever-shrinking budgets, the support departments of some companies have developed an endogenous culture and a "can't do" attitude. Instead of seeking survival through innovation and service quality, a siege mentality has set in, where the walls are so many impregnable processes that stymie the barbarians at the gates (the business users).

  The endogenous culture results from the low status of support functions (cost-center) and the misguided belief that their function is indispensable independently of the level of service (i.e.: everyone needs a paycheck, so HR is irreplaceable). This monopoly situation breeds contempt for business users who, in turn, complain bitterly about the quality of service and lack of innovation. Without positive external feedback, the support function justifies its existence internally. 

The can't do attitude is a way to preserve power: who needs a border guard if the border is always open? Business users who propose new or innovative services are systematically turned away at the fortress' gates and derided for their insolence, naiveté, or lack of expertise. 

This opposition between "business" and "support" results in significant waste of time, goodwill, and energy, particularly as organizations grow in size. Instead of being the oil that greases the proverbial wheels, support departments become so many grains of sand that slow and frustrate the entire system. This is particularly true of formerly heroic IT departments. Their  relevance has diminished as their roles have been downgraded from developing mission-critical applications to maintaining the once-innovative in-house applications deployed in their glory days.   

Instead of looking for ways to improve and of reaching out in a constructive manner to business users, these support departments tend enter a spiral that justifies their self-image as victims of their customers rather than as sources of innovation. In this way, the customers become the very excuse for not improving, for not doing. The business users are blamed for :  

• not being able to spell out their needs in a complete (and irrationally exhaustive) manner   
• when they can surmount the obstacles of the requirements phase, having unrealistic expectations of what can be achieved, and how quickly it can be done 
  
• wanting unattainable ROIs (or even having the gall to try to calculate one)    
• when new services or products are delivered - sometimes very late - not being happy with them and not using them 'properly' or to their 'full potential'  

. 

Breaking the siege can be difficult, since it threatens the survival of those who control the processes. Sounding the trumpets to bring down the walls (unilaterally decreeing change) cannot yield results because the besieged are most often a necessary part of the organization, if not in their current state. A Trojan horse (political maneuvers) can break a stalemate, but it must be followed by quick and decisive transformation towards a desirable new state. The best solution, often long in the making, is a negotiated surrender with a guarantee of safe passage to this desirable target state.

In other words, once the siege is broken, the besieged must be given a shot at redemption, not massacred. This redemption takes the form of a transformation towards a bright and mutually beneficial future, one in which the incentives of the support functions are aligned with those of the business units. Mutual trust and understanding are key elements of this shared future:   

• trust that business requests will be considered seriously and quickly  
• trust that business units will stop trying to asphyxiate, denigrate, or circumvent support departments  
• understanding of the legitimate legal/technical concerns raised by support experts 
  
• understanding of the daily reality of business users and the services they effectively need  

Overcoming the endogenous culture and the "can't do" attitude are the first but necessary steps in a long reconciliation process towards the revival of the support services an organization deserves, and whose conclusion is more efficiency for all. 

Innovation or Waste?

Eventually our generation - the"Y", the "millenials"- will take over after our elders, with a strong challenge: to be more cooperative, intelligent and less wasteful.
Easy to say, but ultimately where do we start?

We have been brought up with an early awareness of saving water, electricity and all kinds of energy savings. This way of life should help us understanding and reducing other large wastes of our time: resources, motivation and also innovation.
And the question that I am asking myself today is whether modern tools reduce or rather  amplify our daily waste.

Motivation. How did you buy your Christmas gifts ? Have you used one of the many websites to save time and preserve your motivation, avoiding exhausting walkabouts ?
But using  these "one-click" online shopping platforms, did you succomb to impulse buying, unnecessary consumption and waste?

Resources. Many mobile applications allow you to avoid traffic jams, to find available parking places or bicycles (i.e the "Velib" renting stations in Paris). These applications are saving considerable time and energy for those who know how to use them.  But how many people find themselves stuck by ergonomics and interface issues,  connectivity problems or functionality limitations?

Innovation. I often wonder if innovation is not a main source of waste.  A new release every year which suddenly renders obsolete the previous version, still working perfectly, isn't it  a waste of resources? At the same time, a new dishwasher, using half of the water consumed by the previous model is a real innovation.
Including elimination of waste "by design" seems a good starting point. In this perspective, here is an initiative to fight the smartphones' accelerating obsolence cycle, by associating  wisely innovation and waste reduction: Phonebloks