- Many organizational leaders think of their business
processes as trade secrets.
They're convinced that their organization does things
so uniquely it creates a competitive advantage for them.
I'll let you in on a little secret,
most processes aren't quite so special.
In fact, many processes are actually a tax on innovation.
Just because you've been following a set of processes
for a long time doesn't mean they're assets
of the organization.
They may actually be limiting your strategic agility.
Here's one way to think about processes.
The atomic building blocks of work,
what we do in our day to day jobs are as follows.
We use our skills to perform tasks
to solve problems and generate results.
Sounds pretty simple.
Where things get a little complicated
is that most of us actually perform
a range of tasks in our work.
And in most organizations sets of tasks
are organized into processes.
For example, how does your organization process requests
for money to be paid to an outside contractor?
There's probably a long set of paperwork to be completed.
Even if some of it is online
there may be an entire series of approvals needed
to pay even small amounts.
Now sure, large organizations need internal controls
to manage money and move around resources.
But have you ever given anyone in the organization
the charge to figure out the leanest set of processes
possible to onboard temp workers
and consulting organizations?
If it's a long process it's a tax on innovation.
Extended processing means you can't identify
a problem to be solved and rapidly find
an outside capability to solve it.
That's just one example of a limitation
on strategic agility.
I think of the organization's processes
kind of like our legal system,
lots of new processes get added
but we rarely sunset old processes.
Instead we tend to simply layer on more and more
without going back to the most basic analysis
to determine the leanest set of steps necessary
to solve a problem or to generate a result.
If you want to increase strategic agility
at the core of the organization,
at the center of the mothership where most of the decisions
get made, then you need to empower workers to streamline
processes wherever possible.
How?
Here are three ideas.
You can create process bounty hunters.
Offer prizes and other incentives to encourage workers
to identify processes that can be streamlined.
Also conduct process hackathons.
A regular hackathon brings together a variety
of programmers and other software development professions
to solve a problem over a weekend.
You can set up process hackathons
where workers are given the time to break down
key organizational processes and take them
to the barest minimum that still meets organizational needs.
And rotate the responsibility
for process innovation around the organization.
Give a specific department a month to streamline
its own processes and then celebrate their accomplishments
to the entire organization.
Then rotate the responsibility to another department
the following month.
Organizations live by their processes
and they can die by them as well.
The leaner you can make the organization's processes
the more strategically agile the organization can become.