Abominations Part 3

I recently read Bob Chapman’s book, where he shared Barry-Wehmiller’s journey with LSS. The words I found most relevant were these: “Clear out clutter first to make room for new behaviour.” I can attest that as I tried to grow my food processing business years ago, I undoubtedly created a lot of clutter that took years to get rid of, long after I had called it a wrap. I can imagine that for other businesses that passed their survival test, there would be very little time to de-clutter, or there would often be an unshakeable attachment to the clutter itself as the secret sauce for their success. This would explain the data quality business improvement professionals often encounter with many of their clients. Non-value added tasks produce data clutter. Data clutter, in turn, overloads business owners and their people with too much information that puts a veil over the truths about their companies that they urgently need to see.

Information overload and blind spots are common, but I am not downplaying these issues. I would actually argue that each time a business tries to incorporate something “transformative” before these 2 issues are addressed, more often than not, it would end up becoming like “Frankenstein’s Monster” (an abomination). The observation with businesses irrationally clinging to things that look more like clutter, is the tendency to partially adopt only certain parts of complete solutions, ignoring the fact that they actually belong to a bigger basket of solutions that complement one another. This basket is typical of what my former fellows in the food processing industry would refer to as hurdle technologies.

What Scaleable Empowerment℠ does to help growing businesses prepare for expansion and diversification, involves a two-pronged approach. The 1st prong calls for a detailed dive into business processes with the aim of purging clutter so that employees would never have to needlessly suffer them any longer. The 2nd prong requires regular engagements with business owners to pursue what Richard Jolly of the London Business School sufficiently described as “A shift from relying on human capital, or one's own knowledge and expertise, towards social capital, which is getting things done through other people.” Having outlined what it involves, Scaleable Empowerment℠ will be most effective for organizations that would no longer need to regularly interface with our team, beyond a maximum engagement period of 6 months. In the best of cases, it could even be just 3 months. Deep dives into someone else’s secret sauce are never meant to go on indefinitely.

For construction of new buildings, designers/architects make provisions for electrical and telecommunications cabling, potable/waste water plumbing, piped-in gas, and fire protection, which have to be properly installed by qualified tradesmen.

Scaleable Empowerment℠ creates provisions for renovations, retrofits and upgrades, paving the way for other “tradesmen” to come in and do what they do best.

(End of Part 3)