Scaling up: The Art of the Impossible - Part II

In Part I of this post, I had set the context for understanding uncertainty and its impact. Part II looks specifically at uncertainty and scale-up.

Generally we give a lot of attention to business uncertainty, but seldom do we give sufficient attention to operational uncertainty that is faced by the team members on their day work. Managing such operational uncertainty therefore is a very critical factor when we attempt to scale up any operation or any business.

Normally the core team that set up any operation or business successfully will consist of highly motivated, highly skilled, high performance individuals who are comfortable in decision making under uncertainty. Once the operations are on steam and ready to scale up we need to work with a different set of people. We cannot afford to have the same calibre people when the operation is scaled-up. It is not just a question of financial affordability; such people will not survive long in a regular operational environment. They are normally impatient lot and in constant search for new dreams.

Therefore we have to have processes to get work with ordinary, risk averse, simple people who want to be led. As Lee Iacocca pointed out “if you are a brilliant person you may be able to do the work of 30 people; but if you are a brilliant leader who can get work out of 1000 ordinary people and then you achieve much more”

One of the major weaknesses of normal people is their inability or discomfort to take decision under uncertainty. They need clear algorithm on how to address each eventuality. In the absence of such clear standard operating procedures (SOP), many people avoid taking decisions or become inefficient in taking decisions. In this case they are almost like computer software that hangs in the absence of sub routines to handle all cases. As in the case of elegant computer programs, the SOPs should have dependable error handling, clear exception reporting and escalation rules in place for un-programmed cases. Otherwise system hangs or misbehaves. Only then we can scale –up with “Intel people” like Google scale up with “Intel boxes”

We have to accept the reality that the vast majority of people need clear delineation of tasks to help them achieve maximum productivity. As Chris Argyris observes in the article ‘Empowerment: The Emperor’s New Clothes’ published in Harvard Business Review “Both research and practice indicate that the best results of reengineering occur when the jobs are rigorously specified and not when individuals are left to define them”

The first thing we need to do in our endeavour to reduce uncertainty is to map organizational goals to group deliverables and break down group deliverables preferably up to the individual level. Once the deliverables are broken down, then we should try to develop standard operating procedure or business rules for as many cases as possible. This has to be a continuous process and there should be process in place to continuously identify cases where SOPs or business rules are developed.

One of the risks when we have processes that depend on SOPs heavily is that the people get to be process oriented instead of result oriented. This is one of the major weaknesses of bureaucracy. It is here that we need to teach human beings to also use his human intelligence and not to behave like computer programs. We should clearly teach each person and team to appreciate what the SOPs are trying to achieve as results. We should empower the process owners to innovate and improvise on the SOPs when there are exceptions. Here again we should try to provide boundary conditions within which they have to flexibility. This will reduce uncertainty even with flexibility.

On the other hand we should also work towards helping people to learn the art of being comfortable under uncertainty because human beings who can make sensible judgement under uncertainty are key assets in any team. Although genetic trait influences this skill quite a lot, this is still a skill that can be strengthened by training and support.

We should also have a way to identify and encourage people who are adept at this skill. Most importantly we should ensure that people who rise up to leadership are the people who can handle uncertainty and also who can reduce uncertainty for their team. It is here that many organisations fail. They get impressed by people who have delivered excellent results based on their skill and knowledge in situations or functions where ambient uncertainty is low. Then we promote them to levels where they have to mange uncertainty which are outside their domain of expertise. This happens very often with respect to technical people. Then these poor souls (smart engineers, doctors, lawyers, accountants) like fish out of water fail and the whole team suffers.

When we develop our scale-up strategies this is one dimension we forget and we focus on everything else like process, technology, people, finance and so on. We have to include operational uncertainty management as a key dimension with which we qualify our scale-up strategies. Else the best of strategies will fail on account of minds that freeze under uncertain outcomes.

Beyond all this theory lie commitment, conviction and faith that is beautifully described in alchemist “If you believe in something the whole world will conspire to make it happen for you”.

“Nothing great has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstances.” Bruce Barton