The Case for Potential

Photo by Anoir Chafik on Unsplash

Every organization has two types of work, planned and unplanned. Planned work is the stuff that must happen like time sheets, reports to accounting, weekly updates on your team/project, and most meetings. It also includes the current project loads, case loads or other tasks already assigned.

The unplanned stuff is truly unforeseen. An example would be a last-minute notification for a big opportunity with a new customer, or a political protest that disrupts your supply chain.

There are two types of work, planned and unplanned.

Every organization has a finite output level to accomplish all of the planned tasks, and probably a little reserve to handle unplanned ones also. If we need our output to exceed this maximum level, we risk performance and quality issues of all types. We may also miss opportunities to grow, or even lose existing customers.

Because planned tasks, by definition, are known we can figure out the current level of output (calculated in man hours, number of clients, etc.). The difference between our current output and our maximum is the potential energy remaining in the organization to do more things.

Potential energy is good.

It means we can do more stuff if needed but, in the meantime, it means we have resources only partially utilized, and those untapped resources might begin to be absorbed by team leaders and managers, or back office support (human resources, accounting, etc.) , or even an ambitious new addition to the C-Suite.

None if this is to say that some new tasks are, in fact, the correct thing to do for our businesses so I don’t mean to diminish the contribution of all members of our team, or the need to track relevant metrics to our businesses.

Potential energy is good.

I searched "millennial" on Unsplash and got this guy.

But if we notice problems in output, recalculating our current output could tell us whether we have lost some our potential energy in the system. We may notice slightly lower quality output because “we can fix it later,” or perhaps there are several new data points that are simply “critical” for tracking the business, or even a series of meetings in which leaders discuss training and managing our latest generation of humans because they are just so different from our current group of humans.

Just as unused space in a house gets filled with stuff unused potential gets used for stuff. And usually equally as important.

Initially these new individual tasks may appear to have no impact on the organization because the potential energy is consumed first. The various value streams in the business will informally begin using the pool of potential energy to assist with new initiatives or reporting requirements and maintain the current output level.

...our latest generation of humans...are just so different from our current group of humans.

Over time the organization may begin to lose the ability to ramp up for a new project or customer, or lose agility responding to changing market conditions.

Whether we like it or not, or if we’re even aware of it or not, we are in a never-ending struggle to balance the needs of the organization against the value that our employees provide to our customers (and for which we are paid). Which tasks are actually critical, and which are just extra things that someone wants?

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In the Army we referred to the phenomenon of when an oversize staff was generating ever more tasks with dubious value as a self-licking ice-cream cone. After a staff officer, with good intentions I'm sure, decided they needed information about a new thing, the new thing had to be measured, generated in a report, which means it had to be tracked, sent to headquarters in the proper format, put on a slide, and passed around to the entire staff as a metric for safety, or winning, or not losing, or whatever.

No offense intended to people who work in safety, or winning, or not losing.

In these situations, the teams felt like toy soldiers for the staff to move around on the map board until the commander would finally intervene. No reason to fight the war, just report on progress. And obviously please confirm and verify with a visual inspection that all redheaded, left-handed orphans on your team have the proper sized winter coat.

And again, no offense to redheads, blah blah blah.

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This tension needs to be managed; there is no winning or completing this work. It’s a tension that exists in every organization, similar to the tension that exists between parts of the organization that are funded at different levels based on our strategic vision. It’s ok to have tension. Most important decisions will not make everyone happy.

Making everyone happy is an unworthy goal for a leader anyway.

A solution is to dig-in and understand what our organization absolutely "needs" to know versus what someone "wants" to know. Information you need will speak directly to decisions that either increase good things or minimize bad things for the organization, or perhaps both.

Information we want is just another colorful slide. With just the right shade of green for excellent and yellow for just ok. Then we publish a chart that graphically depicts a trend that may, or may not, indicate something about something that seems like it could be bad, or perhaps inconsequential. No decision necessary, you may now roll your eyes to the back of your head.

As the pool of potential energy is inevitably drained, we may decide to hire new employees to add to our maximum potential output as a way to regain some potential energy. Unfortunately, the previous inefficiencies would then be cemented into the current output. It becomes the new “how we do business.”

The result is bloated costs and additional pressure on profits while only temporarily solving the desire for potential.

But if hiring new employees can be bad, doing nothing can be even worse. We may eventually reach a point where the current output and the maximum output are in dangerous proximity to each other.

When our teams are running at full capacity there exists a simmering state of low-level emergency at all times. This condition results in all sorts of new and even less efficient work-a-rounds for our employees who are just trying to “make it happen.” Pilots sometimes refer to this as being “one mistake high.” Flying like this means if the pilot makes one mistake, he won't have time to correct it before he loses his eternal struggle with gravity.

Short-termism becomes the standard approach.

Our managers become smoke jumpers trying to contain, if not extinguish, the worst of the fires erupting every day. We careen from one crisis into another. Never able to get ahead and plan, never able to forecast resources.

Quality suffers, the workplace becomes difficult, and profits decrease as we are forced to find, overnight, custom build, pull another all-nighter, have-to-have-it-today-no-matter-the-cost solutions.

It results in higher stress, increased employee turnover, and less profit. Plus, it’s exhausting working in an environment that is in a constant state of crisis.

…it’s exhausting working in an environment that is in a constant state of crisis.

In this mode the potential energy we can apply to an actual emergency is zero. The opportunity to win new customers or to react to unforeseen events becomes the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

Toxic culture is more than just a bad boss who lacks emotional intelligence.

It’s a bad boss who is a bad leader because of an inability to develop a process to review and maintain a balance between the desire of the organization to use employees to generate data, and the need to maintain potential energy in the system that allows us to remain (or become) agile.

Don’t let the desire for a perfect system, or perfect information, with no reserve capacity for work be the enemy of a system that provides the information needed and maintains a healthy amount of potential that can be directed toward new opportunities, new customers, new products, new locations, or true innovation for your market. 100% utilization is horse malarkey.

Potential is good. It means we have potential. We just aren’t there yet.