It is a valid question, whenever a new concept is proposed for transforming your organization. Every new concept comes with a promise of dramatically improving performance. Concepts like Automation, TQM, BPR, Lean, Six Sigma, TOC, QbD, etc, were discovered and developed in one industry and found successful implementations in other industries also. At the same time, there is no dearth of catastrophic failures of transformational projects, even when new concepts were proven in the same industry. Of course, organizations within the same industry would differ in certain ways, but there are more similarities than differences. Never the less, we must accept that the question has validity when somebody comes to you with a proposal, “your competitor is implementing one of the latest breakthrough concepts, the internet of things, IoT. It is time you also had a look at it.”
So, what goes into the right applicability of a new concept?
Let’s look back to the short story we read earlier, ‘We do not have enough capacity!’. The lady in the story finds that the capacity of the house is over stretched with too many people and things to accommodate. This situation is in fact, applicable to any context, and capacity need not be related to just a physical capacity (occupancy). People talk about capacity of a warehouse, a software development team, an R&D centre, a hospital, a restaurant, a factory etc. ‘We do not have enough capacity!’ is the exclamatory cry emerging louder, every time an organization (irrespective of which industry it is from) is stretched to increase its performance.
While there are options to buy out or build capacities, there are often unacceptable risks in terms of cost, time and effort. The lady could have rented, built or bought new house. But she chooses to follow the wise counsel of the Mullah. The story reveals at the end that there indeed is a huge space in the lady’s home.
The underlying belief of Mullah’s counsel is that any given situation has substantial un-noticed scope of improvement. And, this is true for an organization too, and indeed, is found built into the DNA of high performing organizations. Now, in order to get a similar level of benefit, organizations need to avoid copy pasting not only the solution but also the method. And, that is where the difference between success and failure occurs in adopting a new concept in an organization.
In this case, first the word Capacity must be internalized in one’s own context. So, in a med diagnostic centre it is the capacity to carry out tests, in a restaurant it is the capacity to serve incoming guests, in a BPO it is to process transactions, in a software centre it is the number of projects (or lines of codes), in a factory it is the throughput etc.
Second, it may not be necessary to drive the whole organization crazy by pushing everybody to the wall as Mullah took the lady through. For the lady, it was just a couple of days of experimentation, but in an organization, if you try to squeeze people or resources to the extremes, it would be catastrophic. Hence, you need to figure out how to make your team quickly visualize the hidden capacity. This means that an organization must find its own way of improving things. You may need to device a different experiment or do a restricted proof of concept or if your employees belong to an elite group then perhaps, just a short training or counselling would do. The idea behind the program, ‘revealing hidden capacity’ is exactly that. It takes 2 days to demonstrate that there is hidden capacity and puts the team into action to improve the situation.
The key to internalizing or contextualizing a concept is not to run through a whole roster of its tools or techniques or those steps implemented elsewhere, but to be able to identify the underlying principles and translate those principles into one’s organizational context. In fact, in any discipline, you would not generally need to understand more than just the few principles to get best out of it. Have a look at the financial system; you need only 3 financial statements to understand, implement and improve financial health of an organization. An experienced doctor needs just 3 symptoms to find the root cause of what is ailing you. And, there are just 3 laws of motion that are the basis of static and dynamic design of every structure on this earth. And of course, there are just 3 colors in our traffic system.
And so, if there is a well established concept of hidden capacity, how many fundamental principles an organization needs to understand and internalize in order to dramatically improve its performance? Just a few! All other (sub)principles are then included or derivable from these few principles. Would not it be good if your team is equipped to identify just the few principles and implement them in your context than being lost in trying to get a handle on each and every tool and technique?
Let’s have a look at the concept of just a few principles in a following post. Of course, such principles would be applicable to all sorts of organizations, otherwise why would they be called Principles?