Broke, Broker, Brokest

In response to my last post an old friend who is an organizational psychologist pointed out something that has been on my mind for a while: the tendency of many people to live the dictum "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

(By the way, the history of this phrase really surprised me: check it out on Wikipedia if you are so inclined.)

I can see why this dictum is useful in large organizations: endless thrashing and reorganization is often the bane of their existence and they need some way to make sure that "fixes" are actually needed. (They also need to follow up those fixes to make sure that they worked and continue to work: see an earlier post.)

But I am seeing many instances of throwing out the baby with the bathwater in this regard. I see simple-minded adherence to this principle which eliminates all of the constant small decisions and leaves only the rare big decisions.

In a nutshell, there is more to business decision evaluation than "broken" vs "not broken". Very few processes either work unacceptably badly or perfectly. Surely we can do better than just these two gradations?

The determination of whether or not an issue or set of issues is worth addressing involves some possibly subtle cost versus benefit analyses. I assert that the deciding test of "Is this process hopelessly broken?" is simply not good enough to produce an effective or efficient organization.

I hear from managers that there is an additional complication: their organizations have tightened the purse strings so much that the level of effort required to push through a small investment seems too great: better to save your strength and only push through large projects. Since the projects are large, the scrutiny is great, so the projects have to be "no-brainers" so better to wait until your department is on the verge of collapse and then propose a giant, sweeping solution.  I do not have a good answer to this logic: if the premises are true, if the organization is that badly out of balance with respect to its decision-making, then perhaps only doing the big, dire things is the way to go.


And yet.... Especially in these recessionary times, with staffing levels so far below idea, don't we need to be as efficient as possible? Mindlessly trying to avoid expenditure while assuming that fixed labor costs will produce greater output under the magic incantation "do more with less!" will produce nothing but burnout and turnover.

So the next time someone suggests incremental refinement and modest investment, try to imagine a future that gets slowly better and better with modest cost and reasonable return.