One of the phrases I smile at when I hear them in the workplace is the famous “we’re going to streamline processes“.
Normally, this should sound like sweet music to my ears, as I swear by simplification and fluidity (The future of work: complex by nature, simple by obligation and The organizational complication: the #1 irritant of the employee experience).
Yes, but experience shows that when we hear “we’re going to streamline processes”, we should understand “we’re going to add even more bureaucracy”.
In reality, we often end up with a bureaucratic labyrinth that would make Kafka look like an amateur.
When “rationalize” becomes “weigh down”.
Let’s take a common example. A business decides to streamline its purchase requisitions. The aim is to make the process more fluid. In the past, all you had to do was fill in a paper form, have it signed by the person in charge, and you were done. Simple, right?
No, that would be too obvious. With streamlining, we’re introducing an online platform. An intuitive solution, or so they promise.
What we end up with is
– A long form, with incomprehensible mandatory fields (what does “analytical budget” mean?, “imputation” for people in the field who don’t understand the intricacies of project accounting management because it’s not their responsibility).
– Three additional levels of validation, involving managers who have never seen the project up close and personal, and finance who know even less.
– IT support tickets for bugs that turn an urgent order into an administrative obstacle course.
The result? Employees spend more time understanding the process than they do working on their project, and organizational debt grows at breakneck speed (How to Tackle the Biggest Threat to Your Team’s Growth).
The magic of the “simplification” word
The art of streamlining relies on one key tool: the creation of committees. Everything must go through a working group, then a steering group, before being presented to an arbitration committee. Each committee has its own rules, its own egos, and above all its own agendas.
Let’s take the example of a business that wants to rationalize vacations. Months of meetings are chained together to listen to everyone, take into account all requests and draw up a procedure.
What does the end result look like?
– A 10-tab Excel spreadsheet containing all the rules and special cases, which will be virtually impossible to transcribe into the HRIS.
– Validation by a minimum of three people (including an HR person who is unaware of the employee’s existence).
– An online tool with an interface dating back to 2005.
To take three days’ leave, please allow a full day’s work.
The art of rationalized chaos
Under the pretext of doing better than yesterday, businesses follow a well-honed recipe, which is the same one that got them into the quagmire from which they want to extricate themselves.
First of all, an analysis of current processes through an interminable study that mobilizes all departments, except those who know the terrain.
Alternatively, outsource the solution to an overpriced consultancy who will present a buzzword-filled PowerPoint that will be a copy-paste of the one produced for a business with the same request, but not the same constraints or context. Hopefully, the original is less than 5 years old.
Then implement a single platform, which will most often be complex, rigid and, above all, incapable of adapting to the diversity of realities in the field.
And finally multiply training sessions where everyone pretends to understand, before going back to the office and sending SOS to colleagues and multiplying support tickets.
Chronicle of a failure foretold
The same causes always produce the same results, and streamlining efforts are no exception to the rule.
Streamlining is often thought out in silos, far removed from the realities on the ground, in a top-down fashion and without listening to the real specialists in the business’s problems: those who experience them on a daily basis.
Decision-makers aim for a global result, without understanding that each added layer makes the system more complicated (How to Manage Complexity without Getting Complicated).
Malicious critics will even say that, in some cases, complication becomes a way of avoiding responsibility: if everything is blurred, no one is guilty. But we all know that the more energy you have to put into in-flight change, the more it means that you’ve made design errors upstream (Change and transformation need a new approach).
How to avoid the rationalization trap?
Fortunately, there are simple ways that many businesses have understood and are applying. And as strange as it may seem, when you do things the simple, and I’d even say obvious, way, you get a result that works and is adopted simply.
1°) Involve the people in the field. As I was saying, the real specialists in problems are those who live them, not those who pursue their own agenda through others. Ask users what they need, and forget about what you think they want, or about trying to solve your own problems in spite of others.
2°) Simplify for real: A simple solution is one that everyone can understand without a 50-page manual, or any manual at all. Above all, think in terms of affordance: the ability of an object or system to evoke its use or function without further explanation. Ever read an iPhone manual?
3°) Test before deploying. A pilot project avoids large-scale disasters. You do it well for your customers, so why not for your employees? Some businesses have even tried A/B testing on their employees (One Company A/B Tested Hybrid Work. Here’s What They Found).
4°) Accept that not everything can be standardized. “When all you have is a hammer, you want all your problems to look like nails”, but the real world doesn’t work like that. Streamlining means avoiding friction and inconsistency, not creating inefficiency.
Bottom line
Streamlining is another word for rationalisation which derives from the word “rational”, which refers to the use of reason and logic to make decisions or organize things.
Logically, this should not lead to results that we can only objectively tell ourselves are irrational, unreasonable or even stupid. And yet…
In the managerial vocabulary, rationalize has lost its original meaning to become “add control under the guise of simplification”. But when you put two almost antinomic words in the same sentence, you end up with a hybrid result that doesn’t work.
The problem is when it starts to affect large-scale operations.
Image: Franzi streamlining via Shutterstock.
