I recently had a document passed along to me from my business partner. The piece from the Boston Consulting Group, titled “The Seduction of Reductionist Thinking”, opens up by mentioning how every company is grappling with change and few are finding success. As I read through I kept nodding my head agreeing to every point made. I thought to myself, it’s about time someone exposed the functional silo structure and linear “resolution” process as the primary handcuffs to successful change. If large organizations would take this to heart we wouldn’t be in the economic mess we find ourselves in… Then the big shock. The paper was published in 1992!
Having worked in a big corporation myself I saw first-hand the everyday failings of silo structures and linear processes. Departments are actually incentivized NOT to share knowledge with each other, let alone even talk to one another. As projects move through a “gate” process, small subsets of issues are resolved without any consideration for the impact those decisions make further along in the process. Design groups, marketing groups and sometimes engineering groups wind up “polishing turds” as it’s known. No matter how talented they may be, they were handed an unsuccessful project from the start.
I believe the functional silo/linear process is residue from the industrial revolution. It allowed us to make the same thing over and over with fewer and fewer failures. In today’s world this is simply an execution operation and in my opinion a commodity. To be successful, organizations better figure out how to create “new” and solve challenges never encountered before again and again. Call it an innovation operation, a change operation, an operation with design thinking/process injected… the terminology isn’t so important.
The path toward a “better way” is discussed in the article. It really comes down to multidisciplinary teams working together, processing all salient considerations and features at once to deliver holistic solutions. Off the top of my head, Apple comes to mind. They conceive the entire experience from brand, to product, so service, to marketing communications, retail, and packaging concurrently. Each outward touch point of the organization depends on and supports the others in a coordinated fashion.
If you have an interest in revolutionizing business operations, or innovation I strongly suggest reading the piece… it’s only 2 pages: