The usual answers and what they lack

When the limit becomes noticeable, organisations react in a surprisingly similar way, and unfortunately often in a way that makes things worse rather than better. The most common reflex is to prescribe more order. People reorganise and introduce further methods, assuming that this will solve the problem. But because the load-bearing basic structure was never there, this only creates more instability. The diligent and self-sacrificing take on even more; others withdraw further. There are more and more coordinators and fewer and fewer doers. And in the worst case, the resulting disruptions are flanked with even more controls and regulations, which further increases the imbalance. In the end the result is measurable: output falls, quality falls, and lead times rise.

Beneath the surface, something is added that makes matters worse. Those involved do not only disagree about what needs to be done. They already disagree about what is actually going on. Everyone sees their own section, focuses on their own topics, and hardly anyone looks beyond their own patch at the whole.

Looking more closely, four typical counter-measures can be identified, and each has its own weakness.

People talk to each other more. Additional appointments make up in conversation for what is lacking in shared order. The tricky part is that these meetings themselves become the problem. Anyone interrupted during demanding work needs on average around twenty-three minutes to return to full depth of concentration, as the researcher Gloria Mark has shown in widely noted studies. Highly loaded people are interrupted roughly every two minutes in their working day. Just a few interruptions eat up an entire productive hour.

And an uncomfortable observation comes on top: interrupted people sometimes even complete their task faster, but only because they rush and cut corners on quality. The speed comes from shortcuts, not from efficiency.

A new tool is supposed to bring order. But a tool only depicts what is already ordered. Where there is no shared way of working, the tool does not create one; it only creates a more expensive version of the same muddle. The call for a tool is the classic response to every new challenge, and sometimes a tool really does solve a problem. Often, however, it merely manages the problem in a nicer form. And because every tool again connects people who have to coordinate, the same effect comes into play as with meetings: more participants mean disproportionately more coordination effort.

Someone is hired to take care of it. That can be right, but it shifts the problem if the new person enters the same disordered situation. There is even an unexpected side effect that experienced observers describe: when people are simply added to a stalling undertaking, those involved so far sometimes understand this as a signal that they are not trusted with the task, and their commitment drops. Additional people can therefore not only dilute implementation but, under certain circumstances, even make it worse.

The most personal and, in the end, most dangerous reaction. You take over yourself and become the point where everything comes together. That works as long as you are there and have the strength. It makes you the bottleneck, the organisation dependent on you, and it ensures that nothing of your knowledge ever becomes shared knowledge. It is the reaction that looks most like responsibility and creates the least of it.

All four remedies have the same thing in common. The energy flows into coordination and into fixing disruptions instead of into the actual implementation. More and more people are kept busy compensating for the missing structure by hand. That is the core of the imbalance: more is administered and less is achieved.

Let us change perspective for a moment. The bottleneck looks like a problem of execution, that is, like something that should be solved further down in the organisation. On closer inspection, it often arises further up, where fundamentals would need to be clarified.

It would, however, be too simple to claim that there is always only a single cause behind it. Reality has many layers. Undertakings sometimes simply compete for too few people. Decision logic, changing priorities and constant switching between too many tasks all have an effect. That is real and cannot be defined away.

But – and this is the decisive and encouraging point – much of this becomes solvable as soon as the new is made visible and the fundamentals are clarified. When things are clearly visible, clear decisions can be made. When undertakings have clear goals and recognisably contribute to the strategy, sensible prioritisation becomes possible. Such issues are solvable; they are not an unchangeable fate. Chapter 5 shows which fundamentals these are.