Driving Operational Effectiveness within the Organization

Lisa Williams, Global Strategic Sourcing Director, Bulk Marine and Terminals/Pipe Valves and Fittings, Dow, Inc.

Operating Discipline. What does it really mean? Why is it so elusive? Why do we forget it is central to our living, breathing professional ecosystems and usually suffer when we ignore it?

As a continuous improvement practitioner for over two decades, I am still amazed at how much we ignore the very fundamental concept of organizing our work and resources, documenting our processes to ensure mass adoption, execution, and proper platform to foster further improvement, which ultimately allow our people to function at their highest levels and reduce stress. There... that is the whole article. Instead, I hope you chose to continue reading.

The beginnings of organizational design and development begin with consideration of people, process, and tools... best in that order. To start, you must take a robust assessment of where your organization rests today on these three pillars. To do this well you need a full end-to-end spectrum of the organization participating in this exercise. Next, you might consider conducting a SWOT (Strengths, Opportunities, Weaknesses, and Threats) exercise to foster brainstorming and healthy discussion and idea generation. However, we are not ready to jump into answers yet... we do not even have the right questions to ask. Because next, we need to delve a bit deeper into the pillars.

Your PEOPLE are the human, driving, lifeblood of your organization. Whether you make products, provide services, or generate ideas in your business model, the people are at the core. They are the first pillar because they have the experience of what has, and has not, worked in the past and often in frustration developed very good ideas about how things could improve and need to change. They have likely led or supported numerous projects to fix the same problems repeatedly, and saw their solutions fade into an abyss that is not rooted in good governance. They likely already have many of the skills and competencies needed to take the team to the next level, but are clouded in disconnected activities and misaligned tools that never provide a strong enough support system to allow them to generate great ideas atop it.

 ​Whether you make products, provide services, or generate ideas in your business model, the people are at the core 

Your people are likely complaining about a disconnected and inefficient process whose intended purpose was to effectively educate, train, and enable navigation in their roles and teams. The process should help answer questions and provide one source of truth for the answer. It should show connectivity to other processes and stakeholders it likely takes them months or years to realize on their own. Again, provide a foundation that removes much of the doubt we hold in simply trying to do our everyday jobs and have some energy left for ourselves at the end of the day. The process is not just a map on paper, or set of reference documents and desk notes. It is a clearly mapped, cataloged reference of decisions, policies, improvements and best practices learned from the past. The process should be our library of reference that helps us build the next story, and ultimately write the next novel of organizational excellence.

Finally, we consider the TOOLS. In our digitally enabled, instant gratification, "I need it in 3 clicks or less" society we often want to jump to the tools that promised to make us "best in class". The tools are simply enablers of the process we have established by years of great work done by the people. When the tools are designed by first considering the people and how people use the process, the tools are much more likely to be successful in realizing their original intent for organization effectiveness. When these things are misaligned, you end up spending millions on a tool that only enables part of your process and frustrates your people to no end.   Now, people are spending more time at work, exhausted, frustrated, and not being their best for the organization.

This is not quantum physics dancing on a razor thin edge of differential equations. It CAN be quite simple to accomplish if we let it. These fundamentals are very achievable, and I believe the last frontier to a conflicted existence many organizations have fought for decades. We always believe other topics and projects are more important and more profitable than focusing on improving our operating discipline. When instead, OD is the one thing that would solve many of the recurring problems we have seen for the last 20 years. And one of our most fundamental allies in overcoming a world riddled with pandemic challenges for the last 18 months desperate to create a new, more productive normal. All the while preserving the mental health and promoting productivity and reinforced recognition in our most valuable asset… you guessed it, our PEOPLE.

We just need to have a vision, be brave, a stellar implementation plan, a dedicated team, and START.

So… what are you waiting for?

GO START!