Large organizations are comfortable at optimizing existing ways of working or layering new processes onto old ones, but they have a hard time doing away with what already exists. As a result, change initiatives often get sucked into optimizing existing bad habits rather than fixing the underlying system.
But tweaking existing processes or adding band-aids isn’t an effective strategy for making significant improvements. Real improvement requires stepping back from the noise of day-to-day work and looking past what people are doing or what they’re telling you. It requires looking at things differently.
One way to look at work differently is through the lens of waste, and a big source of waste is communication and coordination costs.
What Kind of Communication?
Lots of the communication that happens in corporations isn’t real collaboration; it’s a coordination tax that everyone pays to keep systems running.
In large corporations, “communication” has a lot of interpretations. When people talk about communication problems, it can be helpful to identify what kind of communication is actually happening.
- Updates to management?
- Coordination between teams?
- Giving teams instructions?
- Getting approvals or sign-offs?
Once you know what kind of communication is happening, you can figure out why it’s happening. It’s dangerous to try to solve a system problem by relying on only one perspective; you need a fuller picture before you can start considering interventions.
Three Categories of Waste
To escape the trap of optimizing symptoms, start looking at communication activities through the lens of one of these three types of waste.
Failure Demand (Rework)
Work created by earlier failures, costing capacity that could have been used for something else instead. Failure demand can come from poor quality, defects, shifting priorities, or miscommunication.
Coordination Examples of Failure Demand:
- Clarification meetings to update requirements.
- Incident calls to problem-solve production issues.
- Meetings to redo project plans.
Address failure demand through prevention. Trace it back to its source and determine how it could have been avoided. Consider solutions that build quality into the process.
Necessary Non-Value-Adding Work
Necessary Non-Value-Adding Work is not value-adding for the customer but is still required. The work is inherently wasteful, but you have to do it, so the strategy is to optimize it.
Coordination Examples of Necessary Non-Value-Adding Work:
- Cross-team planning meetings.
- Quarterly planning for team alignment and dependencies.
The work needs to get done, but the longer it takes, the more waste is created. To handle Necessary Non-Value-Adding Work, shrink batch sizes, tighten feedback loops, and improve lead times through automation and streamlining processes. Your goal is to minimize these activities and get back to the value-adding work as quickly as possible.
Pure Waste
Pure waste is work that adds zero value to the product or the end user. It makes things take longer and cost more money.
Coordination Examples of Pure Waste:
- Management status reports
- Approval and sign-off gates.
- “Just-in-case” updates between teams
There’s always a reason why pure waste exists, but corporate explanations tend to hide the real reasons (such as organizational fear, low trust, or risk avoidance). Your goal is to minimize or eliminate these activities.
Investigate the real purpose of these activities and address the root causes. Avoid falling into the trap of optimizing pure waste activities. Instead of trying to make status reports prettier or promoting useless workflows, find ways to remove them entirely.
Reduce the Need for Communication and Coordination
Instead of enhancing current systems by improving communication or promoting more coordination, redesign the system in ways that improve flow:
- Shift Authority: Give teams the local authority and tools to take action themselves.
- Shrink Batch Sizes: Reduce batch sizes to lower coordination complexity.
- Build Information Radiators: Create information systems that enable stakeholders to self-serve.
- Restructure Teams: Build cross-functional, stream-aligned teams with end-to-end ownership. Keep communication local and reduce the need for top-down or inter-team coordination.
Conclusion
Avoid taking stated problems at face value. Look past the day-to-day noise of what people are doing and saying. Real, high-leverage change requires systems thinking and a focus on end-to-end value streams. Look out for sources of waste and avoid locally optimizing practices that should instead be either prevented or eliminated.
