By David Brewster October 2005
It’s hard rubbish (a.k.a. ‘heavy trash’) time in our neighbourhood. Our streets are strewn with the jetsam of the times. High on this year’s list of Suburbia’s Most Unwanted are TVs and computers – many still working. It’s been fascinating to watch the savvy Steptoes of the area step in to give these discards a second life.
What can managers learn from this festival of the throwaway society?
For a start, we need to recognise that our propensity to prematurely dispose of perfectly usable household items has overflowed into the business world. On the streets it is electronics which are wasted with barely a nanosecond of thought. In business it is initiatives and ideas.
Cast your eye around your own workplace. Think of what has happened in the last year or so. What improvement initiatives have been introduced?
More importantly, which previous initiatives were thrown out to make way for the new ones? Of those, how many were given a proper go before being banished?
Unfortunately, our organizations can’t disgorge themselves of initiatives as easily as a household turfs out yesterday’s stereo. Rather, old initiatives tend to fade slowly into the background. Only a dusty folder or two, a handful of promotional coffee mugs and the faint whiff of untapped potential survive them.
When this happens, people lose clarity and focus. Complexity builds as the remnants of discarded initiatives get muddled up with the new ones. Then, perhaps as a defence against further wasted effort and even greater complexity, people lose the zest for change. Future initiatives become even harder to implement.
As for ideas, how many of them already exist in your organization but are yet to see the light of day? How many ideas are ignored because their proponents, like that old computer on the footpath, have been around too long? Too old, too slow.
New ideas from outside can seem more appealing than the ones you already have. But, like that widescreen plasma television I’ve got my eyes on, they can be a lot more expensive. Yes, you’ll eventually have to upgrade. But in practice, as I keep reminding myself, the ‘want to’ always comes well before the ‘need to’.
Making improvements doesn’t need to be difficult or expensive. If the budget is tight, take a leaf out of the yellowing books of your parents or grandparents. Those who lived through the wars. There was a generation who extracted full value from everything they owned.
You’ll need a degree of self-discipline. You need to give each initiative a decent chance of success before replacing it with a newer model. You’ll also need an environment in which ideas can be readily flushed out and tried out.
I’ve worked with both the thrower-outers and the user-uppers of business initiatives and ideas. If it’s a simpler and lower cost way forward you’re after, I think you’ll have more success as one of the latter.
©October 2005 Business Simplification