Is your organization optimized? At times I sense an out-of-sortness slowing down our company. It bubbles up in different departments or people; sometimes it originates with me. I’d love to defrag the inefficiencies in our corporate hard drive. 

There are many fragments that can weigh down a company: redundancies, inefficiencies, errors, unfinished work or hidden problems that people are too embarrassed to reveal. There are old computers, software, or equipment. Or unresolved interpersonal conflicts. Employees with little training and others who misunderstand the purpose of the business. Some in our own small 45-person office barely know each other. We execute monthly processes, conduct regular meetings, or run certain reports out of habit – not because they all need to be done that way. Fragmented knowledge litters our office.

So, you ask, why don’t we fix our fragments and move on? The simple answer is we’re too busy dealing with daily fires, new projects, meetings, and achieving results. Companies like ours typically deal with the symptoms of fragmentation, rather than remedying the root causes.

First Chronicles posits an interesting solution to this problem. A masterpiece on organization, the book details every aspect of Solomon’s new temple, requiring the tiniest measurements to be followed exactly. One deviation would render the holy temple unusable and imperfect. Even the position of all the artifacts is laid out in detail. Curtain colors are specified, as are furniture pieces and minute ornamentations. There is no room for subjective interpretation.

The divine blueprint even spells out how the surrounding Israelite society is to be structured, staffed and maintained. It describes the borders between Israelite family lands, delineates who does what jobs in the temple, provides job descriptions, inventories available resources, records the names of leaders and temple staff, clarifies military roles and assignments, reviews historical benchmarks and gives anecdotes about events and people. 

We get a picture of an organizational machine that has been built with exacting detail. Operationally, there is no wasted effort or confusion about job responsibilities. In a way, the big picture is ignored – for several chapters, the author is consumed with details.

Many executives are consumed with P&L detail. The problem is running a company from even the timeliest financial statements is like driving a car by looking only in the rearview mirror. By the time problems appear, the car is already in trouble.

You may be familiar with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), non-financial metrics like time-to-market, process measurements, and customer complaints. Though they contribute to a company’s health diagnosis, these factors still only measure past performance. When we discover the faint or indirect causes behind the KPIs, we can more effectively prevent poor performance with a proactive plan, rather than devising new reactive plans every time we see bad numbers. 

Consider the significance of the weak nuclear force. Though extremely low-energy, and only effective over tiny distances, it is the only force in the universe that produces radioactivity, which helps generate sunlight, enables advanced medical diagnosis and treatment, provides solar energy, and heats the earth. 

What low-energy, highly reactive forces are at work in your organization? Think beyond the production bottlenecks, antiquated processes, bad floor plans, buggy applications. Think bees. In Fruitless Fall, by Rowan Jacobsen (Bloomsbury, 2008), the true value of bees is revealed: without their pollination efforts, we would lose all apples, almonds, cherries, coffee, cucumbers and chocolate. Milk and ice cream would disappear, because cows eat bee-pollinated clover and alfalfa.
 
In other words, it’s important to isolate the causes of the minor defects throughout our organizations before we deal with the defects themselves.

How do we control the forces that don’t show up in P&Ls, KPI dashboards, customer surveys or strategic forecasting? One place to look is quality of management, measured by the perceptions of subordinates. Anonymous surveys about a supervisor’s effectiveness can reveal the causes of poor performance he otherwise hides well. If the manager can’t motivate, for example, she may blame her people’s sales skills for the division’s bad performance – a believable story until you read the management survey results.

Is it time to give your company or church a tune-up? Mining its details can lead to amazing discoveries. Significant breakthroughs await when we listen for weak signals in unusual places.

For discussion...
What details in your organization need to be examined?
Do you lead by P&L or other typical metrics, focusing on past performance?
Have you considered conducting a survey to discern management effectiveness?


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Tom Harper is the publisher of ChurchCentral.com and president of the Society for Church Consulting.
He wrote Career Crossover: Leaving the Marketplace for Ministry (B&H, 2007)
Follow him on Twitter:  @TomRHarper
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