Lately I've been reading John Seddon's Beyond Command and Control. Seddon is explicit about urging managers to think of their organizations as systems, so I thought this would follow logically on my reading Donella Meadows, as I discussed here. But I was also a bit worried. Meadows, after all, was a systems scientist trained at MIT; while her book is written engagingly for nonspecialists, she casually discusses problems of immense complexity in ecology or economics. If Seddon encourages us to take a systems approach to our businesses, how many formulas will we have to use? Will I have to remember how to solve partial differential equations? That was a long, long time ago ....
The point is this: as long as you think of the business broken up into a bunch of departments, the next natural step is to think about how each department can optimize their work, on the assumption that if you can optimize each department you have optimized the whole business. But Seddon points out that your customer doesn't see all the internal departments, and certainly doesn't care about them. What your customer cares about is getting his needs met: finding the right product or arranging for the right service, and doing it all simply and easily and at a fair price.
You'd think that should be the same thing, but too often you'd be wrong. Seddon says that his first step when working with a new client* is to send top management out to the front office to watch a single order come in, and then to track that order through its whole life-cycle. Invariably, he writes, that order winds its way through a dozen departments. Each department is furiously busy, and finishes their work very efficiently so they can pass on the order to the next department in line—among other things, this means that each department's metrics are always green. But the whole path is so complicated that it takes way longer than you could ever imagine possible, and with every additional step there's one more chance for error. At the micro level, the work is efficient and expeditious; but at the macro level, the whole life-cycle of an order looks to have been designed by a madman.
That's what Seddon means by taking a systems view: he's not asking us to become population biologists or experts in computer modeling, but simply to see things whole. And his point is that once you can see things this way, once the blinders of departmental structure have fallen from your eyes, then it usually becomes obvious how to improve. Stop asking twenty people in different departments to do the work that could be done by one—done faster, done with fewer errors (because of all the information lost in hand-offs), and therefore (in case you are keeping track) done a whole lot cheaper. Usually this also means not micromanaging your employees by requiring them to follow scripts or by planning out their every move; for that reason Seddon urges managers to stop monitoring or regulating employee activities, and to start monitoring their results as seen by the external customer. This isn't just about "trusting your people," although there's surely some of that; more importantly, it's about measuring the right things, and not just the things that it's easy to measure.
Seddon is famous as an opponent of the ISO 9001 standard, but I see nothing in his approach that is actually incompatible with ISO 9001. Much of what he says is incompatible with the way some folks choose to implement ISO 9001, but that's a different matter. That just shows that many people don't understand what the standard really means, and therefore implement it in foolish ways. But that last point is hardly news. I've written about it before.
Meanwhile I'll let you know what else I learn from this book.
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* He heads Vanguard Consulting, who offer as a service to work with you to improve your business.
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