Why Are Most Organizations so Slow?

Culture; org structure & processes; people are too slow

A lot of people I know complain that the organizations they work for move too slowly. I’m often frustrated by the same thing, so I decided to jot down some thoughts on possible root causes.

Culture

Culture is an obvious and much-discussed culprit; here’s my £0.03 on it.

First, many people seem to think that setting high standards is sufficient to ensure a fast pace. But a lot of leaders who boast of a high-standards, fast-paced culture are merely paying lip service to the notion. ‘Culture’ means more than inscribing things like ‘we get things done’ or ‘we deliver at pace’ in corporate manifestos. Though such things are useful artefacts, they are meaningless if they are not evident in how everyone in the company conducts themselves, with leaders setting the tone. A company with a fast-paced culture is one where, when someone says a task will take two days, they are asked what’s stopping them from getting it done in one. One where people are not afraid to hold their colleagues accountable and are encouraged to demand more.

Second, though a culture that demands a fast pace is not enough to ensure it, a culture that does not set high expectations will almost definitely result in complacency.

Third, it’s often thought that speed equals sloppiness. There is a goodwill argument here, that to do things properly you need to consider a lot of things and iron out many details, and doing this requires time — I’ll revisit this argument later on. But too often, there isn’t goodwill, and this line of reasoning is used lazily by people who don’t want to be pushed outside their comfort zone.

Consider these two paragraphs from the FT piece on Liz Truss’s premiership:

What’s evident here is an instinctive aversion to speed. This isn’t healthy.

Org structure & processes

The less obvious impediment to fast execution is organizational structure and processes. I’ve joked in the past that tech companies in particular are overly fond of ‘embracing’ chaos; this is in fact pretty close to reality: people in many companies think that bureaucracy is an evil that stifles innovation.

In my experience, it’s the opposite that’s true: organizations with poor org structures and processes become slower than their more rigid-on-paper peers.

A good org structure is one that devolves authority and responsibility to allow for responsiveness at a local level (for instance, that permits a particular brand within a conglomerate to respond to user sentiment in a given market, or to make hires, without having to have its decisions vetted by global HQ), without sacrificing economies of scale or consistency (for instance, by permitting a fashion brand to produce entirely different ranges by market, or McDonald's to have radically different menus across the world). This is obviously a hard balance to reach, but some companies do not even attempt it, preferring some utopian ‘flat hierarchy’, which in practice requires every point of contention to be escalated to the CEO personally.

Good processes are also important: they ensure there are established ways and forums for making decisions. This not only ensures things actually get done faster but also minimizes the risk of politics. Politics is what happens when, in the absence of process, managers have to become adept at influencing their peers and superiors outside of established channels.

(A more formal (pretentious) way of putting this is that companies are a fiction we use to improve coordination. A company is better than a group of non-affiliated collaborators when it reduces transaction costs. But such a reduction in transaction costs does not happen magically; it requires mechanisms that result in it.)

Poor communication

Quite often, people take too long to deliver a piece of work because they have conflicting priorities. This is normal — most of us are working on multiple things at once, and we have to make decisions on what we tackle first.

It becomes a problem though when people are not transparent about the reasons they can’t do something. If teams have a list of things they are working on, they should be able to share it with whomever is asking them to do something extra; then there can be a discussion on whether something on the existing list can be deprioritised.

Sometimes, people are afraid to make their priorities explicit, because they do not want others to challenge their ranking of them. This is, again, unhealthy; a company with a culture of trust and respect is not only comfortable with discussions on how to order different priorities, but actively encourages such discussions.

People are slow

Finally, people themselves are often too slow at getting things done. There are a few reasons for this (besides, of course, different levels of intelligence).

First, some people are perfectionists. We all laugh at people who claim that perfectionism is their greatest weakness at interview because we perceive it to be an attempt to pass off a good thing as a weakness. But it is a weakness.

Suppose doing a perfect piece of work takes a given amount of time. Per the 80/20 rule, it’s often the case that getting 80% of the work done takes 20% of the total time; and fine-tuning it to reach 100% takes the remaining 80% of the time. If the 100% version is not substantively different to the 80% version, in that it does not lead to different conclusions and actions, then a non-perfectionist will do four times as many pieces of work as a perfectionist; and though the perfectionist’s work will be better than the non- perfectionist’s, the business outcome of both persons’ work will be the same.

(Practical illustration of this point: the perfectionists among you will notice that the maths above are wrong. The non-perfectionist will actually do five times as many analyses as the perfectionist. But the conclusion doesn’t change!)

All this said, there is some nuance. There is a difference between deliberate loss of precision, and sloppiness. The former should be encouraged (when it’s worth re-iterating, additional precision is unlikely to lead to different conclusions). The latter justifiably result in mistrust: if small details are wrong, not because the person doing the work consciously decided that getting them right was not worth the effort, but because of carelessness, how can one trust that the important details, the things that are worth getting right, were in fact right?

A second reason (hat tip to my wife for suggesting it) is lack of confidence. Some people move fast because they don’t second-guess their intuition, judgment, and ability to get things right the first time around. A confident person writes maths equations, or Excel formulas, or SQL queries, or code, emails, or proposals, without much deliberation and proofreading. A less confident person will take more time before they put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) to plan their work and more time after they’re done to review their work.

A third reason is simply experience — people who’ve encountered the same problem many times in the past will naturally come up with a solution faster than those exposed to it for the first time.

These explain a certain percentage of the difference between super-effective people and the rest, but I don’t think they account for all (or even most) of it. Frankly, I don’t know what explains the remainder; it is truly baffling to me that some people just seem to get things done, while others struggle to even begin.

Early in my career, I had a boss who’d been asking a different department in the company to do some work for him. That department kept pushing back, saying the work would take months. My boss said it could be done in hours; and he actually placed a bet with that department’s head that he himself could do it in two hours. He won that bet. Consider: this wasn’t a matter of confidence; it wasn’t a case of the department’s analysts being perfectionist— they themselves evaluated the work for quality and deemed it good enough; and it certainly wasn’t a case of experience, since my boss did a piece of work that the other department were more experienced in doing.

So what was it? I honestly don’t know. I have since experienced many similar situations as my boss, though not to such an extreme: I’ve seen people struggle to get started on a piece of work that others can get done in less than an hour, or tell me that a seemingly simple piece of work will take weeks, or pull all-nighters in jobs that barely require a 9-to-5. This cannot be explained away by any of the above.

If anyone wants to share their theories with me, please do!

(I was planning to conclude this piece with a list of suggestions for how to increase the pace of delivery in an organization, but my giving advice is presumptuous: I have never run a large organization. If (when?) I do, and if I do a good job at it, I can revisit this piece and add a section!)