6 temptations causing organisations to lose their way

Here are some of the common ways I've seen organisations get stuck in a rut. Often more than one of these are in effect at once.

Photo by Finding Dan | Dan Grinwis on Unsplash

For organisations, especially those that are less explicit about the outcomes they are seeking to achieve, there are lots of potential ways they can become stuck. Here are a few of the common ones I come across:

1. Adopting frameworks that seem to be doing great things at other (often larger or more sophisticated organisations)
   Organisations frequently adopt things such as frameworks or sophisticated software without considering whether their own context is the same or different as compared to where the framework appeared to be applied successfully. For instance, something that is suitable for Google’s scale may not be a solution for anything an early-stage startup is facing. In the worst situations, organisations will keep doing it. They will keep finding new things that seemed to work somewhere else and adopt them blindly into their own organisation. What’s worse than one bad solution in your organisation? Many bad solutions!
   

2. Assume making sure everyone is utilized will make them maximally productive.
   It seems like it would make sense that if everyone is busy all the time then the organisation must be the most productive it could possibly be. The reality is as soon as a capacity is exceeded, the flow of work being completed is affected. A small delay can cascade through an organisation compounding into larger and larger slow-down effects - not unlike how in heavy traffic a small delay at the front of the line can become much longer delays the further back in the line you go. The less they get done, the busier they must be! Start more stuff! We need it all yesterday!
   

3. Don’t have time to do the things that they know are good for them in the long run.
   Like with kids eating their vegetables or with most adults and their exercise, it’s easy to rationalise away time spent on things which have a pay-off over a longer timeframe. Making this bad trade-off repeatedly has a compounding effect which can feel inescapable. Often it will show up across many qualitative dimensions because these are often the areas where sustained effort is required for good results over the longer term. The things that yield short-term sugar highs like releasing features crowd out time for all else. Soon this becomes what seems like the only lever to positively affect your customers. Whilst the customers leave frustrated with defects, performance issues, incomprehensible user experiences and other unfathomable user experience issues. Oh, they are leaving us? Let’s make them more trinkets!
   

4. Fail to make trade-offs between multiple things that need to be true for them to succeed.
   For instance, delivering lots of features but failing to provide the performance needed for a good user experience. This may seem like number 4 but it’s failing in the same way but for different reasons. Don’t worry, both can be true in a single organisation. You need to adjust for both reasons or risk not correcting sufficiently to improve.
   

5. Assume that projects and gates are the best way to ensure quality and can mitigate mistakes.
   The feeling of control in managing tasks and projects provides can provide a feeling of safety. If we add rigidity every step of the way, there’s no chance anything could go wrong, right? There are lots more ways to influence quality than these two options. You might even know that the organisations that have the best quality barely use projects or gates to achieve that quality. But that would never work here, right?
   

6. Reward highly visible work
   When something is launched it makes sense to say congratulations, right? But what about the majority of work which is important to an organisation succeeding but is not naturally highly visible? There can be an imbalance created in the incentives which can influence people to do more of certain types of work and less of other, equally important work, resulting in some things happening to the detriment of others. Again, often its features are at the expense of quality. But we can’t not say well done, can we?

In what ways have you seen organisations lose their way and end up investing in ways which are self-destructive? Share your experiences in the comments.