Strategies and Tactics: Slowing Down, Long-Term Thinking, and Removing Defensive Processes
A New Tactic, Career Advice, and Strategies to Improve the Industry
New Tactic: Slow Down
We're always rushing to get to the next thing. "I need to get this done so I can get that done." Hurry up. Push push push. "Get on to the next thing."
However, there's a lot of new advice that runs contrary to how most of us were trained. If we slow down and do what’s actually important, can increase our output. A number of books talk about how to do this: 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, and How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between.
Slowing down helps us realize that sometimes, tasks like planning take the time that they take, and deserve our undivided attention.
Career Advice: Think Long-Term
Focus on the long term - 5 to 10 years from now. As a senior leader in the industry once told me, “to be a leader is to think long-term.”
Think about where your business or quality program needs to be in 5 years, and what you should be doing now to get it there.
Improvement Idea: Remove Defensive Processes
I recently picked up Claire's Hughes Johnson’s book, Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building. (I highly recommend it for anyone in a quality or business leadership role. I’m sure you’ll see more highlights from it in my own writing as I read it over the next few months.) Given we talk a lot about quality processes and systems here at Deconstrategy, her thoughts on process on page 107 I felt were important to share:
“Process has become something of a pariah in modern business environments. It’s known as the thing that slows people down and sucks their souls. […]. Bad processes cause bloat, but good processes help provide clarity, which leads to faster execution.”
She goes on further, saying:
“In environments without clear owners and decision-makers, something starts to happen that I call defensive - or, more bluntly, cover-your-ass - process. These types of processes tend to crop up when something has gone wrong and, instead of coming up with a clear owner to avoid the mistake in the future, someone creates a process.”
Does your quality process suck out the souls of your team members?
Does your quality program lead to faster execution? Can you measure it?
How many steps in your quality program exist because something went wrong?
I posit that most quality processes are defensive processes, bloated with every incident - quality, safety, or otherwise - that went wrong at the company. This is our problem with inspections also - they are repositories for wrong; too much for any one person to keep track of.
In our high-risk industry, I would argue that we do need defensive processes, however we’ve gone too far in many cases. If we put the right people in the right positions and provide opportunities to exchange their ideas and learn from one another, this would eliminate the need for defensive processes that cover everything that ever went wrong.
What I’m Writing Next
I’ll post the last installment of the How To Build a Business Case for Quality series on Wednesday evening.
In December, I’m starting a paid subscription series, taking ideas from books I’ve read and applying them to design and construction quality and business. I’ll post one book per month, starting with Deming’s Out of the Crisis.
This Weekly Tactics series will remain free to everyone.