Ten Pounds of Sh*t in a Five Pound Bag
In the great organizational strategic ocean, is it better to tread water, or swim toward shore?
I recently missed my self-imposed goal to publish an article weekly, as I was a bit distracted last weekend. Apparently, there was something more interesting that captured my attention (and most everyone else’s attention too) going down in Vlad’s little slice of imperial paradise. About a year and a half ago I wrote an article for the Small Wars Journal (re-published on Substack here) where I predicted that Russian defeat in Ukraine was inevitable from the get-go. I hope that I will be able to author a companion piece one day soon celebrating the hard fought victory for Ukraine, but in the meantime, as I stated in February 2022 “[c]ourage is not what is missing from the Russian population, conviction however is another story. That conviction is why macrovictimization is so important.” I think we have yet another example of Russian’s systemic lack of conviction issues. While it serves as a useful and interesting case study, I also think it illustrates another lesson we should heed.
After the Russian “Coup/Revolution/Civil War/Worker’s Strike/Protest with Guns/Wagner’s 2LT Navigator Had His or Her Map Upside Down/Whatever The Heck That Was” I read an article in Russian Dissent by Anatoly Nesmiyan that inspired this week’s Good Idea Fairy. You can read his entire article here (and I highly recommend you do). While combat is the organizational activity under review here, there are commonalities and systematic applications for both government and private organizations. Specifically, organizational or systematic throughput. How much “stuff” can get done in a specific time period by your organization? Do you know, should you know? How does one fit the proverbial ten pounds of crap into a five pound bag? TL;DR (or BLUF for the military types): You absolutely need to know your throughput, and you can’t overproduce your capacity for very long.
As Anatoly Nesmiyan wrote regarding the Russian quandary highlighted by the march of The Wagner Group unopposed from Ukraine to Rostov-on-Don and onto the outskirts of Moscow (and our first Monday Musing):
"In order to engage in self-reform, the system must have resources sufficient both to carry out reforms and to maintain stability in their implementation. But that's the problem, that for a long time there are no resources for anything - only for the imitation of stability. If you take out at least a pebble now, everything will fall. Therefore, the main motive for the actions and decisions of the authorities now is the well-known principle: 'If something works, don’t touch it!'
A system in a state of catastrophe is unreformable from within, even theoretically - it does not have any resources for this. Changes to the system are only possible from the outside through external management. The only other option is its collapse and the assembly of a new system by other managers from the wreckage and remnants of the previous one. There are no other scenarios, and now there cannot be."
I think this is an excellent point, if Ford Motor Company decided to start remanufacturing the 1968 Mustang GT today for sale after the 4th of July weekend, would you expect to be able to go into a dealer and pick one up on Wednesday the 5th of July? If management stopped everything else Ford is doing, and ordered this initiative right now, did the workers fail to complete their assigned tasks, or did management actually fail to account for reality? What if they said “money is no object” and actually meant it? Is there any amount of money and resource allocation that could achieve this objective? In Project Management terms, we call that “crashing the schedule”, IE choosing speed and quality over budget constraints. Crashing the schedule alone cannot achieve the impossible however; at the risk analogy fatigue we often describe this as the “baby problem”. If one woman can produce a baby in nine months, how long would it take nine women to do it? If you guessed nine months, your junior high biology teacher would be proud of you. At a certain point, additional resources cannot overcome nature, but up to that point, most efforts are resource constrained.
Systems (in this example the Russian government) cannot reform (swim toward shore) if they don't have the throughput remaining after stasis (treading water). Every organization can think of itself as a swimmer in the middle of a strategy ocean. The goal is to reach the desired strategy execution shoreline, but it’s not as simple as it might seem. If all your system can do is tread water, you will never reach shore and eventually, you will drown because if 100% of your efforts are on daily operations, you cannot improve and eventually your competition will outpace you. Treading water keeps you alive in the short term, but guarantees you will eventually run out of energy. If you only try to swim to shore and you cannot or do not tread water, you will also drown. Existing operations are important because today’s revenue is tomorrow’s investment in improvement.
Eventually, entropy will win without proactive systematic reforms. An “if it works leave it be” approach is short sighted, because entropy will still eventually get you, and your organization will have nothing in reserve and no hope of future improvement. I spend far too much time each day chasing red dots on my phone and computers (I’m the OCD type who cannot stand unread notifications), even though I know that isn’t an effective way to manage my personal day-to-day activities. But that is an example of where I’m doing too much treading water and not enough strategic work towards reducing the amount of red dots I get instead. In essence, I am defaulting to management by emergency. The time and effort I SHOULD take to improve my behavior often gets absorbed by the “quick fix” of simply reading and dismissing them. The busier I am, the less likely I am to do anything more than deleting them. Ironically, the closer you get to maximum capacity, the less likely you will be able to fix anything. Excess capacity needs to be protected from operational activities to the degree necessary for systemic improvement.
Every organization has a maximum capacity in almost everything. Ford can only make so many cars a month with their existing plants and employees, and any Organizational Change Management (OCM) specialist worth a paycheck will tell you that organizations can also only absorb so much change in a given time box before it becomes undone by systemic chaos. Throughput is not exactly the same as “work”. It has to be measured against the business needs and value. It’s productivity, but not necessarily in a way that can be measured as “more X with the same Y”.
In one project I worked on, we called our software development throughput’s unit of measure “Netflix’s”. While we did it mostly because we thought it was funny (yeah I know, I’m a nerd) it also illustrated that throughput in the software development area isn’t measured in hours, lines of code or the like, because those metrics don’t tell you what is being completed. The more esoteric unit of measures like “effort”, “business value” or the like speaks to organizational throughput because it doesn’t matter what “it” is. If I tell you our team would produce about 15 Netflix’s of stuff per 2 week sprint, and you want a 30 Netflix feature, you’re gonna have to wait a month to get it. The 10 pounds of crap in a 5 pound bag analogy usually indicates you do not actually know what your organizational throughput is, and leaders think simply speaking their desire into the air equates to it being done. Obviously, this isn’t realistic, but I still see it almost daily in every industry I’ve worked in to include government and academia. While I normally enjoy picking on management, I think this problem stems less from managements’ desire for “everything I ever wanted at no additional cost right now” and more from their inability to see capacity in a meaningful way that speaks to the business.
In the case of Russia, they have underinvested in their swimming abilities in favor of a treading strategy, which will likely lead to organizational collapse unless they are able to make some drastic changes, changes Anatoly Nesmiyan thinks they couldn’t resource now even if they tried. I’m nowhere near an expert on Russia’s internal systems, so I will have to wait and see if Anatoly is right. But conceptually, he is on to something that I agree with. Systems need both a treading and a swimming capacity to survive in the long run.
As always, please share, comment, or like if you’re enjoying the Good Idea Fairy, it helps motivate me to write more and I appreciate it ever so much. Thank you.
Bonus Monday Musing Quote:
“In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless, we have a tyranny without a tyrant.” ― Hannah Arendt, On Violence
Another element to consider, if accountability in your organization isn’t clearly established and tied to your organizational goals, you will most likely end up with rule by Nobody. Nobody will show up to guard your city when some Russian mercenaries decide to turn East instead of West (oopsie). Nobody will bring problems or opportunities to the attention of management, Nobody will answer the phone when you call the IRS for help with your taxes, Nobody will be upset when your property is improperly seized by an armed government agency, and Nobody is going to return it.