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The effective business
"To lead people, walk beside them. When the best leaders' work is done, the people say, 'We did it ourselves!'"
Lao Tse
All organisations engaged in developing and delivering products and services need leadership and organisation, an ability to solve problems and a design and development capacity ("engineering").
However, if we consider the traditional company structure, these four essential strands might be represented as separate linked sections of the organisation (fig. 1)
The interactions between the different activities, and the loss of communication that occurs, are the root cause of much of the waste and loss of effectiveness that we find in the system. The more hand-offs of knowledge and information there are, the greater the risk of failure. It becomes a game of chinese whispers with each individual interpreting and re-interpreting the value the organisation is seeking to deliver.
Machine intelligence excels at processing lots of information very quickly. People excel at extrapolating information, turning it into knowledge and creating something new.
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Lean Management Principles
A rigid heirarchical management structure was good enough when the bulk of the workforce were employed to do repetitive, routine or production-line type work. As such tasks become more and more automated, organisations increasingly need to exploit the knowledge and creativity of their human resources.
Managing such a creative workforce requires a different way of thinking and a different way of doing business.
In an organisation run on Lean management principles, the four essential organisational strands might be represented more like strands of DNA; interdependent, able to replicate, and all supporting the delivery of value. (fig 2)
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Lean systems thinking
The principles of Lean systems thinking which inform the interaction of the four key ingredients of Rightshifting are:
- Value: understanding value from the customer's, user's and stakeholders perspectives
- Process: an in-depth understanding of the end-to-end network of processes required to design, develop, produce and maintain the product, whether such processes add value or not
- Pull: enabling customer/stakeholder demand to pull value through the steps of the value stream
- Flow: enable value to flow continuously, piece-by-piece. Value is always delivered "just-in-time" without excessive stock-piling.
- Perfection: continuous striving to reduce waste, build-in quality to avoid failure demand; respond to demand for value as it changes; and improve flow
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"A modest shift up the performance scale means a 75% reduction in whole-life costs..."
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Fig.1: Representation of traditional organisational structure
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Fig 2. Representation of effective organisational structure
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