15: Grease is the word…

I hope the system design features presented in recent emails have had a similar impact on you as they did on me. Because after seeing them in action, my entire outlook on how we improve performance changed.

But we’re not done yet. And today I want to talk about how these features solve another insidious problem that wreaks havoc inside organisations: degradation. 

In the last email, I shared the concept of cyclical workflows. These are workflows that appear on a recurring basis. Helpful for things we do on a recurring basis, like my quarterly tax return. 

But cyclical workflows are also powerful for maintaining high standards.

Let me give you an example.

My friend noticed his team’s intranet page was out of date. It still listed people who had left the company, was missing several new starters and showed old job titles for others.

Nothing had gone seriously wrong. But people were using this page to work out who to contact, so the errors were creating confusion and wasting time.

So, let’s consider the root cause. The intranet page isn’t connected to the HR platform. Which means changes to the team aren’t automatically updated. Without maintenance, the information becomes less accurate over time - the data being used to make business decisions has degraded.

Solution? An automation that updates the intranet whenever data in the HR platform changes.
Problem? It’s unlikely we’ll have the time or mandate for that.

So, what else could work?

Well, imagine a task that surfaced once a month via the leader’s task dashboard, reminding them to cross-check the intranet page against the HR platform. And not only does it remind them, it also provides links to both platforms and guidance on how to update the page.

It’s right there in the flow of work. 

See it, do it, wave goodbye till autumn…

This is the perfect example of a self-maintaining system. Without this mechanism, the leader is reliant on heroic effort. They need to remember. They need their own to-do list.

But of course, things like this will fall through the cracks - this wouldn’t be a priority for a busy leader. 

Now, this task is pretty simple - and one could argue a separate task is overkill. And I would tend to agree - imagine if we had a task for every single thing we had to remember? The overhead would outweigh the benefit.  

So, instead of a workflow for each item, how about grouping these housekeeping-type tasks by the frequency with which they’re needed? 

And let’s also consider the different cadences with which they might be grouped. Should they be daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually? The answer will differ depending on the task in question. Updating the intranet address book every day would be overkill. But if I have several new starters per month, once per year won’t be enough.

And I’m going to use this word again - but the impact of this is profound.

I’ve never been disorganised. But after using cyclical workflows for several weeks, I realised things had stopped slipping through the cracks. Things I would once only do either when I remembered, or when they caught fire, were now being done ahead of schedule. 

I was in control. I was enabled.

It’s the digital equivalent of changing the oil on your car, rather than waiting till it breaks down.

The point here is not how anally retentive I am - if that was ever in doubt, it’s now abundantly clear. The point is that a system built on workflows can be very powerful. Does it really matter if someone wastes ten minutes emailing an ex-employee by mistake? Probably not. 

But multiply these inefficiencies across each person's work. And then multiply them across the work of everyone within the business. And then consider the added overhead when these workflows involve more than one person - every message we get asking “where’s the latest version of that file?” or “what was the final decision on that thing?” or “can you resend that document you shared last week?”.

Just imagine if all that busywork disappeared? With the correct system architecture, it all gets embedded into the work.

But we’re only scratching the surface of how transformative a system built on cyclical workflows can be.

Back soon,
- Ant