STOP WORKING FROM OBSOLETE MAPS
Outdated maps hide wastes
Today's business models and communication systems are still built principally on the logic and language of manufacturing — notably inputs, processing, and outputs. They don't match what is happening as we produce value (and waste). As a consequence they fail miserably as they attempt to help us to pay attention to what happens as we are coordinating services.
When services don't work
Impeccable, efficient, and reliable coordination of services happens through requests and offers made and completed to the satisfaction of customers on all sides of every transaction. Mistrust and actions that damage trust are usually the largest contributors to miscoordinations and dissatisfaction. Businesses operate as networks of coordinated services. Broken service coordination cycles and failed accountabilities generate crippling wastes, especially mistrust and bad moods, for everyone involved. Customers suffer; the company’s identity and its revenues and profits suffer.
Thinking from obsolete model
Today's businesses are organized around boundaries defined in terms of assets and liabilities, laws, roles, charts of accounts for sources and uses of funds, and physical geographies. Trust, mistrust, morale, and the costs of poor coordination are all hidden in siloed accounts and ambiguous line items. The machinery for directing and tracking the actions of a company’s people as they interact with clients and potential clients are poorly connected to the machinery for collecting and reporting on transactions. Only in the informed intuitions of overworked executives and managers do all of the pieces come together, when they do. Implementations of top of the line CRM, ERP, BPM or other collaboration systems largely fail to produce promised results, while email inboxes explode with direct and indirect results of the miscoordinations that underpin the day's business difficulties.
Unrelenting pressure on costs
The pressure to continuously lower costs and increase performance and cash flow is unrelenting. C-level executives and boards struggle with cost reductions, streamlining workflows, reducing working capital and reducing time to market. Employees are laid off, processes reengineered and automated. The yields of a myriad of clever techniques reveal that there is only so much fat that can be trimmed within the current interpretations of the business without threatening the vital anatomy of the organization.
Meanwhile, unrelenting miscoordinations and mishandled breakdowns make the work more difficult. The central missing ingredients are not more reports, data access or opportunities.
What are you doing with your people?
Your company is very likely filled with amazing human beings, but the current way of managing work is not working. To deal with today's unpredictable competitive environments and demanding customers, leaders need to learn new ways to effectively manage coordination of services at all levels of the company.
