Purposeful Decluttering To Overcome The Strong Magnetism Of Inertia In Business And Beyond
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2024 has arrived with a flurry of new resolutions, the turning over of a new leaf, and all the best intentions in the world. Decluttering our home, after nearly two years of enduring cancer treatments and recovery, has been the first priority. As a result, my husband Paul and I have been hard at work Fung Shui'ing our home into a new status quo, removing the accumulation so that my home office desktop and our family wall can regain prominence within their respective spaces.
Our grandson also visited us two weeks ago and helped continue the decluttering process outside of our home. We worked together to remove two years of leaves built up in our backyard, off the deck, then out from the plant and flower garden. It was exhausting, so we were glad to have the energetic assistance.
Beyond the physical labor, it was daunting to declutter both inside and outside because of my ADHD. I get bored easily, and visually overwhelmed when facing so much all at once. But that's not the worst part: because after the brief moment of joy, when everything seems perfectly in place, what follows is a disappointing, disheartening, drawn out decline to "re-clutter." Our big initial effort to achieve the desired state is gradually worn away by each day's incremental impact.
Organizations also need to be decluttered. Business processes may be replete with inefficiencies and other types of nonconformities that gum up the works of the organizational machine. What worked 5 or 10 years ago may be slowly degrading because of small, non-obvious shifts. Your company might remain lucky for awhile. But without a strong quality culture in place, eventually costly problems will arise.
Consider the recent news about aircraft door plugs, which grounded all 737 Max 9 planes around the world as Boeing works to figure out the root cause of the failure, and determines how to eliminate this frightening nonconformity. Clearly there is a quality issue of some kind. It might be a vendor sourcing issue. Or maybe a material issue, where the plug's metal is slightly lower quality for cost savings. There are over a thousand speculations about the cause. What if it ends up highlighting a continuous improvement regression? Once the root cause is found, the company will have to rectify the problem to the likely tune of millions of dollars so it brings the full 737 max inventory into conformity. Solving for the long term will take strong leadership to properly identify and address any underlying issues, because they may be deeply embedded in the culture.
Making a new year's resolution is far easier than sustaining that change, because of the two, five, 10 years (or even more) in which things have been a certain way. It's true for us as individuals, and even more so for businesses, that the energy behind an existing behavior (often longstanding), actively works to thwart efforts at change.
I have a friend who worked at a large non-profit hospital for quite some time, ironically, in the area of cancer oncology. During their time in the group, they said that very few standard operating procedures (SOPs) were actually used (or even documented), and that the customer service was hit-or-miss. It was astonishing to hear how repeatedly expressed concerns about the systemic issue had no impact, seemingly falling on deaf ears. As I've talked with other friends in the healthcare arena, I've found out this is not unusual because of how hospitals generally operate. This revelation makes me doubly thankful for my own experience with a hospital like MD Anderson Houston, where everything apparently has an SOP and customer service is central to the mission (and obvious to me as a patient, in my many interactions with various departments there).
Whether it's in building aircraft, taking care of hospital patients, or just keeping a household running like a top, consider the following stages for decluttering into success:
- Identify your most challenged area(s) or department(s) to pilot the process.
- Execute a needs assessment to find out where the problems lie, then follow it up with a needs analysis.
- Break down processes into their component parts with a Turtle Diagram that shows how things flow visually.
- Create two sets of cross-functional flowcharts; one showing how things are CURRENTLY, and the second showing how they SHOULD BE
- By following these steps, you should see where the procedural gaps are: Is it people? Lack of an interim process? Mistakes that are made? Materials, machinery, tools, or documentation that aren't correctly aligned?
Longstanding behaviors are like deep ruts. The deeper the issue is that you face, the greater the need for a steely leadership team that is willing to take some hits, stay the course, and endure growing pains. Decluttering may take several years, especially for a large organization. But if you apply Commitment and Necessary Effort (CANE) motivation principles, then it's more likely your changes will last. That's because you have exercised sufficient effort over time to overcome the inertia caused by longstanding, and now undesireable behaviors, which may have been instituted over decades.
Your hardest factor to address is your people. When they get a whiff of what changes are coming, some may actively work to subvert the effort. They might fear for their jobs, and rightly so. So from the very beginning of this effort, it's critical you have a change management plan in place, providing information, as well as reassuring communications where possible. Create role charters to help enable constructive collaboration. These tools enable everyone to see what an individual's role and purpose is, within the terms of RACI. Offer a forum where people can speak their minds without fear of reprisal. You want to fix issues before they become rampant. Finally, implement a periodic evaluation practice so that system deviance is quickly visible.
I hope that 2024 is a decluttering success story for you and your organization, with improvements that will persist for many years from now. Change will certainly come, because it always does. But instead of your efforts and investment suddenly being blown away like an airplane door, or business operations slowly bogging down into a morass or mediocrity, you'll enjoy peak performance and profitability.
Joyfully yours,
Sue
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