Improving Process in Troubled Times (Part Three)

This four-part series considers some tactics for making your improvement initiative bulletproof in budget-slashing times.

The first installment introduced the idea that perceived value contributes most to bolstering improvement initiatives. When the economy sours, organizations become more aware of the cost of everything, and their acknowledgment of the value of anything goes myopic. The second installment examined how organizations value improvements and suggested how you might align your initiative with your organization's dominant values as a strategy for surviving troubled times. This installment continues the investigation.

Regulator Value

Organizations embracing regulator values believe that procedures, methodologies, and formal process routines are the route to economic salvation. They might mistake the development of the rules for playing the game, but many organizations succeed by spawning the description of the path to improving. These values encourage routinization as the essential key to improving.

When budgets dry up in regulator-valuing organizations, white-lab-coated efficiency experts appear in the place of laid-off line workers to uncover how to accomplish more with less. The work smarter, not harder initiatives often materialize under this label. One government laboratory initiated a maturity assessment, which disrupted orderly operations for months as improvement directives rained shoulds down on a hunkering scientific community.

Regulator organizations seem to value knowing what to do above actually doing anything. If you work within one of these, you are more than familiar with the need to assert before acting and with the importance of associating with noted authorities in the field. Regulator organizations want to see credentials before they invest, track record before they will believe. Associating with an acknowledged winning solution, even if the present context is very different from the original one, can nearly guarantee support. Regulator organizations will rarely support creating new solutions over adopting well-worn ones, even if the creative alternatives offer greater promise. When tough times visit regulator-valuing organizations, everyone seems to become either an expert or the expert's essential partner.

Target Value

Organizations embracing target value focus on meeting some specific, measurable state as their primary economic emancipator. These organizations are often uninterested in improving their means of production - they are instead obsessed with achieving the objective, often at whatever the cost.

High-technology companies that have bet the farm on the market introduction of a leapfrog innovation fall into this category. These organizations most explicitly do not highly value process improvements; they are seen as encumbrances rather than as means to success. Target-valuing organizations are interested in shortcuts, end runs, and long-shot innovations, because missing their target could mean missing the payroll. They often compromise longer-term benefits, to the endless frustration of those focusing on cost/benefit calculations.

The most commonly endangered improvement efforts are those that attempt to reform target-valuing organizations. An common example of this occurs when the organization views improving its means of production as a possible future opportunity, while their quality practitioner sees the present value in slowing down now to speed up later. The pleading improvement voice usually loses this battle because they cannot be heard by ears listening for some future target state. Improvement in this context means a phase or paradigm shift: find a short cut, co opt the usual requirements, or declare some encomberance unnecessary. If your initiative isn't focused on pulling rabbits out of hats, it's an endangered species in a target organization's troubled times.

The next installment of this series consider one final way in which organizations value improvements and how you might align your efforts with it, and it will summarize the strategies for surviving in troubling times.
 

David A. Schmaltz is the founder and a principled consultant with True North pgs (project guidance strategies), Inc., a strategic consultancy that helps people work well together. His book, The Blind Men and the Elephant: Mastering Project Work, will be published by Berrett-Koehler in March. His Web site is www.projectcommunity.com, and his email address is david@projectcommunity.com.

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The following links will take you to the other pieces in this series:
Part One Introduces the concept of aligning with perceived value as a key contributor to improvement success.
Part Two Aligning with Aspiration and Constraint-valuing Organizations.
Part Three Aligning with Regulator and Target-valuing Organizations.
Part Four Aligning with Legacy-valuing organizations and summary of advice.

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