Do More with Less (Noise) - Part 3 of 3
The Nervous System of an Organization
I keep thinking about how the negative impact of noise on an organization is similar to the negative impact of stress on our nervous systems.
The nervous system is a highly complex part of an animal that coordinates its actions and sensory information by transmitting signals, through a network of nerves, to and from different parts of its body. Organizations are like a complex organism composed of people. An organization’s nervous system then would be comprised of the communication paths coordinating activity between those people. Think of all the sending and receiving of signals by all the different people - the face-to-face conversations, reports, meetings, emails, texts, Slacks, phone calls, and (more and more these days) video conferences.
Organisms experience a myriad of health disorders caused by overload or damage of their nervous system and I believe that organizations experience similar and equally damaging symptoms.
Organisms experience:
Lack of coordination
Organizations experience:
Loss of the ability to coordinate activity and outcomes effectively
Impaired mental ability
Difficulty in concentrating individually and as teams
Memory Loss
Inability to remember where we left off with each priority
Persistent or sudden onset of a headache
Context switching that is exhausting mentally and physically
Weakness or loss of feeling
Becoming numb to our colleagues and our daily work life
Loss of sight or double vision
Loss of sight of our goals, our colleagues, our mental health
We’ve all experienced these symptoms at work. It is more and more rare to be able to avoid them.
The network of communication paths that make up our organizational nervous system increases according to the number of people in the network as n(n-1)/2. So a team of 5 people has 10 possible paths, a team of 12 has 66 paths and so on. While each of those paths represents a potential source of value, they can just as easily create noise. If the paths are not directly related to our current focus, each path introduces context switching and noisy communication.
Negative feedback, resulting in exponential decay of network performance, occurs with the increase in number of communication paths. It is similar to what happens when there is a decrease in efficiency (bandwidth) of a WiFi network as more people use it. Or when a computer processor is ‘pinned’ … the system grinds to a halt, it’s value goes to zero … but it is VERY busy with tasks! We human beings are no different.
The overload of our organizational nervous system (unintentional or not) is the fundamental cause of the degradation of our potential capacity both as people and organizations. Perhaps most importantly, the real costs of this overload are borne at the expense of the mental health of the people who are, after all, the most valuable asset of any organization. Addressing this problem can unlock untold possibilities for organizations AND it also significantly improves the work lives of individuals.
In my experience, there are several reliable ‘vaccines’ for this neurological disorder. They can be used individually or in concert with each other but, like vaccines, they have increasing efficacy the more people use them within an organization.
Value Slicing, not Time Slicing
What I’ve seen over the last 25 years are leaders who want to do more with less but aren’t prepared to change their organizational structure or culture to accommodate that desire. Consequently, it’s PEOPLE (and their families) who suffer the physical and psychological burden of constant context switching and noisy communication.
Many leaders are stuck, erroneously, focusing on reducing costs by slicing peoples’ time. They assume there is zero cost to time slicing. As we have discussed in this series, the real costs are usually absorbed and masked through negative impacts on the individual. Longer hours at the desk, more evenings and weekends consumed with work, and eventually, inevitably, burnout. Instead, leaders would do well to focus on reducing the cost to deliver value. That is done, by allowing people and teams to focus, learn, and deliver regularly on a slice of value.
In our increasingly complex world, agile teams use the approach of prioritizing and slicing by value to learn quickly and provide value quickly. They organize themselves and their work by optimizing their process to minimize the time to learn. They iteratively and incrementally build upon those slices of value. They do not split themselves (usually) across multiple teams with multiple priorities - that would introduce NOISE! They behave as a single organism, simply focused on regularly solving the most valuable problems at hand in order to reach the desired business value.
What can Individuals Do?
Regardless of your team/org structure, it is important to look after yourself. This will require courage in an organization that isn’t supporting you appropriately. Even if you feel powerless to change anything for the organization, gaining insight into your own real capacity (not aspirational capacity) and your healthy limits will change your internal conversation. Make your priorities visible to those around you. Routinely ask yourself, and those you work with about how your latest tasks fit into your priorities. Establish and communicate your own true capacity by accounting for the time you need to prepare, execute and followup. Your time is valuable; decline (with explanation) meetings that you don’t see as furthering progress on your priorities. Depending on your organization’s culture, these behaviours will allow you to engage in better conversations with your colleagues about priorities, value, and capacity. Remember, priorities aren’t static or binary, but your time is finite. Instead of saying “yes,“ or “no,” try responding to new requests for your time and attention with “where does this fit into our priorities?” You may be surprised by the results.
What can Teams Do?
Regardless of their structure (project, functional, component, or product-based) getting visibility into priorities, capacity, and dependencies can make a huge improvement to the flow of team outcomes. Simply discussing working agreements can make an improvement inside most organizations. You may not be able to control how people outside your team try to interact with you, but you’ll reduce the noise inside your team. The more people outside your team see how you operate inside your team, the more likely they are to respect those agreements and apply them elsewhere.
What can Leaders of Organizations Do?
For organizations, an iterative/incremental transition to stable, customer focused, multi-disciplined product/service teams will significantly decrease time-to-value, provide more flow through the system, AND decrease the noise experienced by most people. It’s important that leadership protect their people from noise, in order to empower them to deliver value. In order to do more with less, leaders need to let their people focus on less to achieve more.
The specific approaches discussed here and in the first 2 parts of this series are just some that I’ve been using to help people, teams, and organizations reduce the noise and increase their flow. Starting and following through on any of the suggestions above is not easy. If you’re looking to figure out how to do more with less, contact me for workshops and coaching to show you how to accomplish more with less noise.
