Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Problems that Never Happened
Importance: 9 | # | productivity, mental-model
The authors provide a clean mental-model for performance optimization and maximizing work throughput over years while consistently increasing performance. The fundamental idea is to distinguish between capability increase (work/time) and doing actual work.
Although work and capability increase often go hand in hand, it's immensely useful to think of these as separate. Work leads to capability increase in the areas where the work currently demands. True capability increase requires great thought and feel about the future. This must be done deliberately to a large extent.
Nelson P. Repenning and John D. Sterman:
The most important implication of our analysis is that our experiences often teach us exactly the wrong lessons about how to maintain and improve the long-term health of the systems in which we work and live. Successful improvement must include a significant shift in the mental models of those both leading and participating in an improvement effort.
The interaction between the balancing Shortcuts loop and the reinforcing reinvestment loop creates a phenomenon we call the Capability Trap and helps explain why organizations often find themselves stuck in a vicious cycle of declining capability. Managers and workers in need of an immediate performance boost can get it by skimping on improvement and maintenance. However, capability eventually declines, causing the Reinvestment loop to work as a vicious cycle. Managers who rely on working harder and shortcuts to meet immediate throughput needs soon find the process falling short of its objectives, requiring a further shift towards working harder and away from improvement.
Although written for managing an organization (manufacturing), the model lends itself nicely on a personal level for knowledge work as well. Certainly among the top five most important things I have read in the past year.
Part of the issue is that we live in a society where it's considered more virtuous to work hard (blindly) and inefficiently on a task rather than to be smarter and more efficient. This might not be obvious, but it really is the case and is easily observed in software-organizations. You will fare better deliberately adding bugs in your code and fixing them under made-up time constraints than being careful and avoiding future problems. There is a huge upside to making things seem more difficult than they are.
We also have fostered a culture where pain is fetishised just for the sake of it. Consider a scenario - Bob and Alice work at generic-software-company at the same position. Bob spends 11 hours a day at the office everyday. Bob carefully follows the management's directions and tries to figure out solutions within the constraints set by the management. Bob is a genuinely well-meaning hardworking engineer. When there's a time crunch, or there's a risk of not meeting delivery date, Bob himself offers to stay overnight and work on putting off the fire. Alice on the other hand spends 6 hours at the office, is rarely seen to be under stress. She listens to the management and understands the requirements, but she goes a step further. Rather than following the instructions to the T she tries to understand the motivations for the instructions to see if there's some dimensions that were missed. This frees Alice from a lot of the constraints that Bob faces. Promotion cycle comes up, and you are in charge of providing the promotion to one of Bob or Alice, who is more deserving of it?
I exaggerate, but you get the idea. Picking what you work on is vastly more important than optimizing for a few extra hours to work on the wrong thing.