Flow and routine
Flow and routine are two desirable properties of productive teams, when your operations are described this way even the toughest problems can be solved. A reason for this being that when the day to day work is routine a team can spend effort and brains on other things, and flow implies that something is actually produced.
Even though highly desirable they can be surprisingly hard to attain, mainly because they have powerful enemies in the human mind and in many organisations. People as well as organisations have a tendency to reduce risk, this makes sense for any activity that is only executed once at a high cost of error. But for any activity executed either multiple times or at low cost of error the usual actions to reduce risk have much lower value.
Typically in any changing organisation there is a first time for everything and hence a tendency to make a plan and in a complex environment together with that plan add various types of coordinators. While it seems like a good initial idea this will hinder responsible team to get to a state of flow and routine simply by adding layers of friction and delaying learning. While it is admirable to have the ambition that all execution should be perfect (even the first time) it makes much more sense to target having the best long term execution possible without the need for planning and coordination of activities.
The opposite of flow is focus on batches, in reality very few things happen in batches unless there is a human created process behind it. This is the core reason to eliminate batches because anyway observed batches introduce waiting times or upfront work that in some for is waste. If you want high productivity the focus must shift from having bigger batches to executing smaller batches more frequently.
Execution frequency has an intimate relationship to routine as well, any attempt at routine is bound to fail if the lessons learned from last executions are all but forgotten. Note that documents of previous failure or success will not help you much, the knowledge must be embedded in the majority of the individual minds. If your team should operate on routine actions should be done weekly or at least twice a month, or people will forget or the team risk losing knowledge simply because individuals leaving/entering the team. Very few things can be mastered once and remembered a lifetime.
Save time by planning less and get the learning cycle going as fast as possible, look up from the crystal ball and dive into reality.
Even though highly desirable they can be surprisingly hard to attain, mainly because they have powerful enemies in the human mind and in many organisations. People as well as organisations have a tendency to reduce risk, this makes sense for any activity that is only executed once at a high cost of error. But for any activity executed either multiple times or at low cost of error the usual actions to reduce risk have much lower value.
Typically in any changing organisation there is a first time for everything and hence a tendency to make a plan and in a complex environment together with that plan add various types of coordinators. While it seems like a good initial idea this will hinder responsible team to get to a state of flow and routine simply by adding layers of friction and delaying learning. While it is admirable to have the ambition that all execution should be perfect (even the first time) it makes much more sense to target having the best long term execution possible without the need for planning and coordination of activities.
The opposite of flow is focus on batches, in reality very few things happen in batches unless there is a human created process behind it. This is the core reason to eliminate batches because anyway observed batches introduce waiting times or upfront work that in some for is waste. If you want high productivity the focus must shift from having bigger batches to executing smaller batches more frequently.
Execution frequency has an intimate relationship to routine as well, any attempt at routine is bound to fail if the lessons learned from last executions are all but forgotten. Note that documents of previous failure or success will not help you much, the knowledge must be embedded in the majority of the individual minds. If your team should operate on routine actions should be done weekly or at least twice a month, or people will forget or the team risk losing knowledge simply because individuals leaving/entering the team. Very few things can be mastered once and remembered a lifetime.
Save time by planning less and get the learning cycle going as fast as possible, look up from the crystal ball and dive into reality.
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