value through inefficiencies
in today’s popular literature, we speak about eliminating inefficiencies in processes and structures as an aim unto itself — a lot of the tools, especially SaaS tools, keep increased productivity and decreased inefficiency as their holy grails.
inefficiencies — any part of the process where it’s viable to tweak it to greatly reduce the resources it consumes (generally time or money)
there’s ample literature about why eliminating efficiencies is good. i want to explore the contra-case, those times when inefficiencies are desired.
a ground assumption — the benefit of these inefficiencies is indirect or ancillary in nature. what i mean by this, is that the value gets added to aspects that do not overlap with the main purpose of the task. for example, an inefficiency in a process whose sole aim is to reconcile accounts daily, will not add value in the sense of helping you reconcile your accounts faster. the same with loading raw materials, or meeting a particular target, and so on and so forth.
this results in an important qualifier — let’s consider only those cases where the inefficiency can add value to us in other avenues.
for example, as part of my daily and weekly meetings all my teams, i ask them to list out their weekly and daily targets individually.
with one of my sales teams, i kept getting asked to skip this step; a couple of them kept telling me that they can just upload the data to our trackers that I can go through leisurely instead of spending collective time in the meetings for it.
in one of these meetings (which happens every Monday), one of my team members, let’s call him A, had a slight discrepancy with his numbers. The number of walk-ins he had generated the previous Tuesday that he told me in the meeting vs the numbers he had submitted to the team leader for that particular cycle had a difference of 1.
it was tempting to gloss over such a minor difference (1 number out of dozens). but there really wasn’t any scope for a difference in these numbers, since everything was very well-documented with multiple redundancies.
digging deep into this difference with him, i discovered that the underlying process A had been following itself was wrong!
A was part of the pre-sales team whose job it is to qualify leads for the sales executives.
A was supposed to promptly let the sales team know as soon as he came across a qualified lead. instead, A had been following up with his leads to a point where they committed to an appointment, and then handed over this lead to the next team.
the issue was that I had not equipped A with the knowledge or the skill to do this — and the result of him doing this was as ineffective as you could imagine. he had not brought this up previously as he did not realise that this slight deviation (which in his mind was probably an upgrade from what i expected out of him) would have a very negative impact on his performance, instead thinking that it was probably just par course.
in the autonomous and ownership-driven culture in my team, this slight tweak would have taken a lot of time to unearth — probably by then our sales cycle itself would be over.
is one isolated insight enough to justify keeping a permanent (at least for now) inefficiency in the system?
the answer depends on how much value you’re able to generate for yourself through it. for me, these meetings become a way to have a feel of the throb of my teams, gauge the emotional state of each member, and so and so forth, in addition to just aligning on targets and goals.
at the least, it negates the litmus test of all inefficiencies being bad for all processes. a problem is not necessarily a problem when viewed through a different lens — sometimes the problem is an error-correcting mechanism or a solution unto itself.
