One of my old friend Sanjiv Bhamre, who is also the author of Bestselling book "Five Great Mysths of Career Building" had published this interesting article on his blog http://systemic-thinking-for-corporates.blogspot.com/ Thought it would be a valuable read for you...
According to principle of non-linear thinking, it is far more effective to manage something as a whole.
But how does one manage a huge organization as a whole? Earlier, man devised a fragmentation approach.
He broke the organizational 'whole' into components, calling them
functions and departments, 'strengthen' each of these components, and
hope that together they will produce the whole. We have seen many
‘unintended’ but ‘logical’ consequences of this approach in our
organizations. One of them was that the departments conflicted with
each other to such an extent that ‘politics’ was discovered.
Another
was the constant pushing required for each department ( often called as
motivation in the management language), because no department could see
what it was contributing to the whole. The worst was that the ‘quality’
parameters were determined not by the real customer, but by internal
department rules. Unintended consequences of this approach have been so
many, that many management theories were invented to ‘contain’ them.
Later, man also discovered another alternative to this ‘fragmentation’ approach. Let us call this ‘wholistic’ approach.
In
this approach, different ‘components’ are linked together to form one
link – raw material to finished goods (and even to customer in some
cases). Instead of having ‘inventory’ buffers to take care of the
‘stoppages’ in the manufacturing process, these inventory buffers are
removed so that when the manufacturing process stops, everyone in the
link knows that the ‘whole’ has stopped. Different components
(including quality) come together to solve the ‘problem’ so that the
flow in the link is ‘reestablished’. Each component
(department/function) can now see the whole and therefore knew what is
required to ‘maintain the flow in the whole’.
As soon as the
manufacturing process ‘stabilises’ in a new flow, the inventory buffers
and other buffers are further removed. The newly created instability in
the flow ‘pulls’ different functions to come together and ‘solve’
another problem. No external push or motivation is required to
‘energise’ them. The flab/slack is removed from the manufacturing
process in this manner until the entire process becomes ‘lean’, with
all waste removed. All the support functions – quality, HR, finance,
purchase – know their roles clearly in this flow. The objectives of
customer satisfaction, productivity, cost and safety can be traded off
dynamically, not sequentially. The organization is now managed as a
whole.
If you have already heard of this approach, you are right. This is called lean approach.
All the tools and techniques have been devised for you to implement
this lean approach. Earlier they were devised for manufacturing
process. Now they are well documented for service processes in banks or
order taking. They have been tested and implemented in many
organizations across the world.
Despite this knowledge, what
stops an organization to implement this approach of managing their
organization as a whole? Is it ignorance of the management theories? Or
is it man’s desire to ‘control’ all the time because of which
managements cannot relinquish control to the front line staff?
I wonder what are the causes. Do you know any?
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