Efficiency a risk?

Efficiency is a word that has appeared in this blog several times. Most recently as something that is not enough to save us from the Asian onslaught. Something occurred to me just now and I had to write it down to get my mind around it.

We have made efficiency one of our top priorities in recent years. It started from a competitive advantage PoV and has now been reduced to cost cutting, which is just a subset of competitive advantage. The results are that we have very efficient business processes, very efficient sales processes, very efficient economic processes, et cetera. What we have less and less of is slack in these processes. You know, the room to maneuver if things don’t fit pre-ordained specs. We have become so efficient at what we do that any disturbance of our regular paths leaves us vulnerable.

In short, the more we increase efficiency, the more vulnerable we seem to become and the higher the risks are if something goes wrong. We just don’t see it that way. Why? Because it is hard to let go of Dogma’s and I believe efficiency has become a modern day dogma.

A case in point. To increase customer service at lower costs, we have divided customer requests into categories, automated/scripted the replies, increased efficiency and reduced the number of representatives. Still a large percentage of people do not fit into one of the categories or are not satisfied by the scripted answer. This percentage is making more and more noise and is ruining many established reputations. The people designing and running the customer care centers look at the figures and are wondering what is happening. According to the figures, they are being very efficient and successful. They are not facing up to their vulnerability and to the fact that even small numbers can ruin big reputations. There is a contradiction here that needs to be solved; how do I keep my customers happy without solving all their problems?

I like to make a case here for collaborative networking, people from different backgrounds, working together to solve apparent contradictions. Making a car lighter and more fuel efficient is not a contradiction, it is optimization. Making an engine more powerful and making it lighter is a contradiction. To make it more powerful, it needs to be stronger, in order for it to be stronger it needs thicker walls, with more material it becomes heavier. Only if you bring together people with different understanding of the subsystems and the systems they impact on, can you solve this. It’s a non-linear and relatively unpredictable process until you come up with a solution. The only thing you can do is look at how people have tackled these kinds of problems in the past and use their way of thinking in your approach as a multi-disciplinary team.

That is the dream our network members and I are striving for. The fact that it brings back some humanity in an over regulated system is an added bonus.