Set Procedures As If For Cows

Some problems in the world of work are so pervasive that they turn up in conversation everywhere. In the UK, a personal aggravation of mine has become a widespread topic. I hear about it from executives, managers and the rank and file in business, from friends in social gatherings, and most recently from someone I had never met before at a birthday party.

It’s the tick-box and excessive-bureaucracy mentality.

Don’t get me wrong here. Sometimes exhaustive checklists or procedures are necessary. We always had them for Space Shuttle flights. We want them for the flight crew when we fly.

But having them for the sake of having them is counterproductive.

We took a wrong turn when the phrase “You can’t improve what you can’t measure” became popular. We exacerbated it when we fell in love with Big Data. Bosses and governments began wanting to measure everything and document everything. As a side effect, this often forces as much of life as possible into tick-box lists because that is the simplest way to document or assess something.

During research interviews, British infrastructure construction companies consistently put this high on the list of reasons that doing business costs them about 20% to 30% more in the UK than in continental Europe. It has nothing to do with EU bureaucracy. It’s entirely to satisfy demands by the UK government for detailed tracking of what workers do when they are being paid for by the public purse. These companies don’t object to it. The extra burden adds to their costs, but in their business model, they bid by totaling cost estimates and then adding a percentage for their profit margin. If costs are higher, so is their profit. The financial hit passes through to taxpayers.

For other businesses that cannot readily pass along the cost of this burden, it’s more troublesome. It eats into and sometimes overwhelms their profit margin, thus weakening them versus competitors elsewhere in a more efficient system.

The UK frets about leaving the EU while having one of the worst worker productivity rates among top tier countries. This is obviously detrimental to productivity and should be a target for reform.

But what would be a sensible approach to reform? On the other side of the Atlantic, the current government in the USA is simply sweeping huge swathes of regulations off the table. The world already knows what happens with insufficient rules: pollution, corruption, harmful monopolies, a long litany of bad behavior that causes a great deal of harm.

Is there any sensible way to decide when we need exhaustive procedures or tracking versus when we don’t? And when we don’t need to be exhaustively detailed, what should we do instead?

The best approach I’ve seen comes not from business experts, but from Dr. Temple Grandin. If you are unfamiliar with her, I suggest starting with her book Animals In Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior, or read anything about her work helping people manage farm animals in ways that are less distressing to the animals.

Notice how she evaluates whether a facility operates well. She talks about one that had an immensely long list of things to be tracked about daily operation, yet the facility was not performing well.

People couldn’t simultaneously get through the list and do their jobs well. As a result, they weren’t working effectively. They also didn’t have the time and attention to deal with the list thoroughly, so it wasn’t much use.

That sounds familiar, doesn’t it? It is what a former teacher complained about at a birthday party last weekend, saying it is why she retired early. I hear about it from people working in a wide range of the private and public sectors.

Grandin solved her client’s problem by asking what they could monitor that would be affected if something is wrong. That turned out to be a handful of items instead of the hundred-plus they had been trying to track. She set them up to monitor only the handful of items on a routine basis. This was a small enough burden to be done well without diverting too much attention from routine work. Whenever one of the crucial handful of indicators went awry, they would start to monitor a larger set of items (taken from the original list) that would help them pinpoint exactly what needed to be corrected.

Her solution worked, and it is appropriate for a wide range of other situations.

In essence:

• Where tracking or procedures can be automatic and not adversely affect performance, you can do the full spectrum without harming your business. If you love Big Data, this is the situation you want.
• Where tracking or procedures require human effort and there is no compelling reason for large amounts of detail all the time, use Grandin’s approach. On a routine basis, monitor only “red flag” things that will be affected when something is wrong and let them announce problems, or set up procedures that only specify critical steps while leaving latitude elsewhere. Only monitor a larger set of items or invoke a more detailed procedure when you need to pinpoint and correct a problem. The teacher would still be working in the profession she loves if her school did this.
• Where a situation is so complex that you cannot make a short “red flag” list, or where safety or regulatory requirements or quality control demand that everything is running well, you must find a way to grapple with all the details. Examples of areas that tend to fall into this rule include aerospace, certain types of manufacturing such as pharmaceuticals, and environmental protection where it’s so complicated and has so many unknowns that we cannot trust ourselves to know what the key indicators are. If this is your situation, whenever you are tempted to bend your rules, think of Challenger or Deepwater Horizon.

These guidelines seem like common sense, but actual use of them is not common at all. If you don’t need to micromanage absolutely everything, then don’t! Choose the level of granularity that really fits.