Improving Process in Troubled Times (Part Four)

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 supporting improvement initiatives. When the economy sours, organizations tend become more aware of the cost of everything, and their acknowledgment of the value of anything goes myopic. The second and third installments looked at 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 completes the investigation.
 

Legacy Value

The curious thing about legacy-valuing organizations is how their attention to the long-distant future colors their present behavior. Their cost/benefit calculations define their values, but these calculations are so riddled with assumptions that they project more fantasy than hard-boiled reality. However, such organizations treat these fantasies as hard-boiled reality. They manage improvement-project "portfolios" with an investment banker's dispassion, even though the real return on the investment will almost never be calculated. Improvements are evaluated according to their assumed future value.

In legacy-valuing organizations, it's more important to look good than it is to do well, because the valued well-doing, the benefits so focused upon, will only exist in the distant future. Successful improvements cast an alluring shadow into the future. The degree to which their shadows are judged alluring defines their longevity. One project manager for an improvement effort in a legacy-valuing organization made the mistake of offending a marketing manager. In the next quarter, new market-potential projections killed his project. Legacy-valuing organizations worship milestones because meeting milestones suggests that future returns are secure, while missing them, as when a stock misses its expected quarterly return, can panic the investing community.

If your initiative exists within a legacy-valuing organization, be sure to invest the time and effort needed to make it look good relative to competing efforts. Understand that these efforts are competition, and compete. No one wants to have to carry your sorry carcass off the playing field. Understand your position in the portfolio's pecking order and either strive to climb higher or move yourself to one of the most highly valued efforts. Because the real value of these efforts doesn't yet exist, political positioning replaces most tangible forms of value.
 

Values in the Real World

Aspiration-valuing organizations count the quality of experience along the way to quality. Constraint-valuing organizations count the boundaries alongside. Regulator valuing organizations count the rules guiding the effort. Target-valuing organizations count the score. Legacy-valuing organizations count the quality of the projected story.

None of these values are wrong; none are in need of reforming. Quality can flourish within any of these value systems, provided that the value orientation of the quality practitioners matches the value orientation of the organization. If you are focused on legacy return within a target organization, expect to have a weird and difficult time when the markets sour. As in a marriage, broad value differences between management and its improvement forces cannot weather long-term disconnects. Also as in a marriage, the partners can adapt their preferences to better interface with their counterpart's preferences without losing their identity or their soul. Wise practitioners can always discover ways to frame their initiatives in ways congruent with the values of their sponsoring organizations. Naive practitioners insist upon their one best way to pursue improvement, whether or not their funding authority can stomach it.

Whatever the focus within your company, helping it focus on the value you bring, congruent with the organization's primary value orientation, can ensure your initiative's long-term survival. Appreciating that each of these orientations can be successful will help you adapt and survive when the cost accountants start to hound your heels. If your organization can't appreciate the value your initiative adds, it might not be that it isn't adding value, but rather that you aren't focusing on the elements that your organization values most highly. Mirroring these values might be the best strategy for continuing improvement work in troubled 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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