American view: No, I Don’t Want to Join Your Miraculous Management Crusade

Management

Of all the stock characters that routinely appear in the modern workplace, I believe the most exhausting is the relgiuous fanatic. To be clear, I don’t mean someone holding strong faith in a religious deity; I mean the secular version of “faith.” A dogma of living taken to irrational extremes. The “true believer” in a powerful, magical, incontrovertible business improvement doctrine. Doesn’t matter if the acolyte’s faith of choice is Total Quality Management, Six-Sigma, Management by Walking Around, or whatever new “secret” programme is making the rounds for £500/hour. Leadership Lessons from the Barbie Movie, maybe. Whatever. [1]

I’m not opposed to employing disciplined tactics, techniques, and processes to identify the root causes of inefficiency issues. I enjoyed doing Continuous Process Improvement work when I was a consultant during first Dot Com Bubble. It felt great to help a befuddled client sort out their issues and get back on track. It was personally and professionally rewarding to assist decent folks, especially when our (far too expensive) assistance made it possible to help those folks stay employed.

I believe it isn’t the trendy methodologies themselves that turn modern office life into a living hell; it’s the methodologies’ bloody insufferable zealots. The bright-eyed crusaders so besotted with their creed that they can’t perceive the real world anymore. Those consultants who’ve transcended evangelism for extremism and can no longer convinced by evidence or logic that their infallible holy text might be … wrong. [2]

My mate Konrad had a run-in with one of these True Believers earlier this week. Poor fella was so drained he could barely enjoy his pint while we chatted. As Konrad told the tale, his site has been getting clobbered on their productivity metrics ever since it opened. Every year, some executive or consultant or expert parachutes in to try and “fix” his site. It’s become a joke around the office, since each Außenseiter kicks off their “visit” with preconceived (and preposterously inaccurate) beliefs as to what might be going wrong, fails to twist their inappropriate model into a solution, then leaves confused. The sequence never changes.

The problem is so bad, Konrad griped, that his previous director had drafted a comprehensive analysis of the site’s issues for upper management, complete with the data required to validate his findings. Konrad and his team know exactly why their productivity numbers have been invariably awful. They’re just powerless to do anything about it.

As hard as it is to accept, most workers want to be productive; they want to take pride in their labour. That motivation fades as upper management makes it impossible for line workers to do their job effectively.

That in mind, when this year’s high-dollar Wunderkind hit the ground, Konrad respectfully explained their site’s known problem and equally known solution to the visitor straightaway. The faster they could skip over the unnecessary steps, Konrad said, the faster they could get on to doing something useful to fix it.
The consultant listened politely, then ignored everything Konrad and his staff had to say.

In his defence, Konrad admitted, the consultant was a genuinely nice fellow. Polite, professional, and eager to help. Unfortunately, he was also a True Believer – a captive of orthodoxy – and insisted on following his Process™ rather than listen to the people doing the work. What could they know about the Hallowed Writ of Saint Dodd Starbird? [4]

Being a Lean Manufacturing devotee, the consultant insisted on completing a Value Stream Map to identify all the potential “pain points” in the site’s existing processes. The locals wasted hours sitting around a conference room table, answering the consultant’s questions, while the room’s white board slowly filled up with post-it notes that represented process steps. That in and of itself wasn’t terrible; mapping out a process helps ensure everyone (especially the outsider) shares a common and accurate understanding of the workflow.

The VSM exercise became a slog when the consultant paused the explore every identified “pain point” to brainstorm no fewer than five possible reasons for the problem. When the locals pointed to one specific “pain point” and declared that it was the essential root cause for their problems, the consultant chided them for interrupting The Holy Process.TM The penitents must proceed as directed by the all-knowing high priest! Theirs is not to question but to obey and be awed by The Divine Methodology!TM I can practically hear the consultant preaching in sing-song:

“Three shalt thou not list, neither list thou four, excepting that thou then proceed to five. Six is right out. Once bullet number five, being the fifth bullet point, be reached, then vote on the most likely root cause, which, being naughty in my sight, shall be re-engineered somehow according to Lean Principles, Amen.”

Maybe it’s different on y’all’s side of the pond. Here in the USA, I’ve been to management methodology seminars that were nearly indistinguishable from a tent revival.

Konrad wasn’t in the mood for inventing fake causes to known issues. He insisted that they already knew exactly what their site’s core problem was. They had it in writing. They had historical records. They’d even made executive-compatible charts. Their problem was systemic thanks to a critical disconnect between headquarters and their site: In short, their site couldn’t plan or manage their workload because their daily workload always came as an unmanageable surprise.

I’m going to use fake numbers here to keep the organisation anonymous. In essence, their HQ would send Konrad’s site £1 million worth of orders every day. If all they made was one product, that would be fine; £1 million of Honda sedans is a predictable amount with limited variability. £1 million of random consumer goods for Wal-Mart, however, could constitute a near-infinite range of pallet spaces. £1 million worth of marmalade jars takes up significantly different weight and cubage as £1 million worth of aircon units.

Konrad’s site was designed to handle – again, this is a made-up number – 1,000 standard ground shipping pallets of goods per day. That number of full pallets required 100 workers to pick, palletize, wrap, and load onto lorries. If their delta was plus or minus ten pallets a day, they could surge when needed to cover the extra load without breaking the personnel budget.

Instead, their actual assigned workload varied each day from 50 to 250 pallets. Worse, they wouldn’t know what each day’s production goals would be until the start of the day when new orders dropped in their ERP system. That meant they couldn’t adjust personnel or equipment to handle big swings. Some days they might be able to get by with only 50 workers; most days required 400 or more. They never had the “right” staffing in place to do the random work they were given.

The glaringly obvious solution to this predicament was to change how work was assigned to their site. Cap the amount of work assigned by the functional capacity of the site and then maintain staffing to reliably handle that volume. Easy-peasy … except that change could only come from HQ. And HQ couldn’t believe that assigning work by sales value wasn’t the most efficient method.

“LA LA LA LA! TALK SENSE ALL YOU WANT BUT YOU CAN’T MAKE ME LISTEN, UNDERLING!”

In short, nothing that the new Wunderkind consultant could suggest to the site staff would make a meaningful difference. The lovely zealot in the shiny suit was unintentionally wasting everyone’s time. And yet, that didn’t matter. True value for a Disciple of Lean came from converting the ignorant heathens to his faith, not from accomplishing anything meaningful. His doctrine espoused exposure to The Holy MethodologyTM since witnessing the transformational power of Lean would surely capture the hearts of the unbelievers. So that’s what they did … for a week. Wasting time, accomplishing nothing, and becoming increasingly jaded with the Wunderkind’s preaching.

No wonder Konrad stared through me like I wasn’t there as he told his tale. I paid for our drinks and let him vent.

Once he finished, I explained to Konrad why find the True Believers of the business miracle cults to be insufferable and exhausting. It doesn’t’ matter how nice they are as people or how genuine their desire to help may be; their conviction won’t allow them to truly listen to those of us who they deign to advise … let alone to acknowledge that their precious “solutions” might be ineffective in our environment. The one that we live in … the real world, not the Realm of Perfect Workflow Diagrams that they aspire to manifest on earth.

We don’t need a new office religion; we just need practical solutions and assistance. To slightly misquote New Model Army’s 1987 song The Charge, “no one needs theology when there isn’t enough to eat.” If the £500/hour consultants aren’t capable of delivering that, we don’t need’em. Thanks for nothing.

[1] That’s real. I didn’t make it up.
[2] I asked my editor if we could end this paragraph with the .gif of Donald Sutherland pointing and screeching from the end of the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Lovely block that he is, he suggested we save that effect for when this column gets made into a TikTok video.
[3] Can any of you teach me how to make a TikTok video that doesn’t stink? I’m out of my depth here.
[4] That’s also real. I swear I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.

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