Have you seen the show Andor? I’ll bet you didn’t know there’s a lesson in there about organisational structure!
The show is part of the Star Wars pantheon, but it’s different. Deeper, and goes right into the effects of colonisation, imperialism and how that can turn individuals.
And…we get to see what’s called the Imperial Security Bureau in action, which we can picture as an Executive Team of an organisation. Here they are:
The scene I go through is a meeting of the ‘Supervisors’, who are the equivalent to Executives, with the boss being Major Partagaz who we might say is the CEO.
The super-short summary is that by lining them up and focusing on finishing instead of starting, you get benefits earlier which lowers stress and interruption, while also reducing switching cost. It’s one of the key aspects of the method I call The Project Factory.™
Here’s a picture of the principle:
I finished by saying: “I know what you’re thinking – ‘great, but that’s not how the real world works’.
I know – I live in it too. Which is why there’s a Part II to this article coming soon…”
There’s so many projects on, it’s overwhelming. Yet, when we look at the total work and the total salary budget…we should be able to get it all done! We get the seemingly absurd situation of not being able to spend that very capital or project funding we worked so hard to get!
What’s going on here? Luckily…it’s something quite natural…and quite simple. And it’s also one of the key aspects of the method I call The Project Factory ™
Goes like this:
Line ‘em Up!
We’ve got three projects, Blue, Red and Green. All equal value. All due the same time. All break down into four parts, each part takes one month. This isn’t a trick, they’re all equal.
In office work the queue doesn’t snake out the door. Its piles up emotionally in the form of the ever-expanding Inbox, and the increasing rates of friendly-but-scary “where’s my thing?” It feels like there’s no way out….but it turns out just a spoonful of capacity goes a long way.
(Prefer to watch rather than read? Click here, 5 mins, with captions.)
“We need a retention strategy”. A common cry.
The thing is…you don’t. What you need is to set things up so talented people want to stay. And the good news is…they are the same things that make your organisation productive.
What’s the standard response to “how’s work going?” It’s the deep sigh.
It seems that a lot of modern work just sucks. I’ve got some good news – there are reasons for it, and there are also some things we can do.
A quick warning though – this is NOT the solution. Anyone peddling that is a charlatan. Instead, it’s a few ideas to help. Because that’s all anyone can ever give you.
“System-thinking”. It’s been around for decades and gets increasingly more popular as complexity ratchets up. But what does it mean?
Broccoli
I recently had 24 hours off life (I have three kids) and took the chance to read “In Defense of Food” by Michael Pollan, great writer from the New York Times. One piece stood out to me as a great way to explain systems thinking.
Pollan talks about “nutritionism”, the idea that we can work out what’s good in food by breaking it down to its component parts. Take broccoli – we generally consider that to be healthy, and you might know about anti-oxidants, those things that fight baddies inside us.
Here’s what’s interesting – when certain anti-oxidants are isolated, removed from the food and administered, they don’t always have the same healthy effect as when they are consumed as part of eating the vegetable. This means there’s something going on in the way the whole thing works together to create the healthy effect…broccoli is more than just a delivery system for anti-oxidants.
I often help growing organisations that have been successful, yet are starting to feel like they are overwhelmed as well as grinding to a halt. This often comes with a feeling of failure in the CEO and perhaps the Exec team, with good old imposter syndrome usually raising its head.
The good news is…. the situation is not a failure at all. It’s completely normal.
And to explain this as well as to know what to do, I often lean on the brilliant work of Dr. Ichak Adizes, in particular his Business Lifecycle.
