Before the industrial revolution, most of us were connected to the outputs of our labor. We were either farmers or craftsmen in cottage industries where we worked on something for some period of time, and then either harvested, used, or sold the output of all our hard work.
In the 21st century the link between what we toil on daily, and the output of that toil is much more illusive – particularly so in information based jobs and industries. We behave like some really minor cog, in some great big organizational wheel always feeling at least slightly nervous that if we got hit by a truck, it might take some time before anyone noticed.
As a result, we become focused on a series of tasks, rather than how those tasks contribute to some greater goal. Several years ago I did a job at a sawmill. This was before the forest sector in North America got completely spanked, and prior to Americans and Canadians sparring each other, and failing to recognize the much greater threat was coming from outside NAFTA.
Turning a raw log into a two-by-four is a much more complicated process than you might think. There are lots of moving parts and many people involved before you can go down to the Home Depot and buy some boards to build that eyesore treehouse for the kids in your backyard. As a result, you’ve got several groups of people that optimize their little part of much larger process without ever putting their head up to see if what they’re doing makes any sense.
Raw logs are scanned by laser on their way into the mill to optimize the use of fibre, and reduce the amount of waste (also known as chips). The problem is as the timber got smaller and smaller over the course of many years, optimizing the amount of fibre meant that sawmills were producing a whole bunch of lumber with a dimension of 1” X 1” – about the size of a garden stake.
So you can imagine my surprise walking into the lumberyard of a sawmill, and learning that 80% of the space was taken up by garden stakes and bean poles. Somewhere I had missed the bulletin about the fall of society, and our return to an agrarian economy. Apparently, the larger lumber dimensions (like the wood you use to actually build things) were no longer required.
This is what happens when people optimize their little part of the business without any regard for the larger organizational goals. This sawmill was indeed maximizing the amount of fibre recovered from each log – they just weren’t producing anything that anyone needed or wanted.
It would be easy to think this is an isolated case, but there are examples everywhere of people optimizing a piece of the business to the sub-optimization of the whole enterprise. Ironically, this is often encouraged by well-meaning business improvement people, or high-paid consultants.
The bottom line is to draw a clear path between what each person does every day, and the higher-level goals of the organization. If this path of vision is obstructed, you may end up with a yard full of garden stakes.