- "We need to be more efficient!"

Imagine that you are told by your boss one day that your teams need to become ”more efficient”. ”Oh, interesting!” you answer. And then you ask: ”So what do you mean by more efficient?”

Now it gets interesting, because chances are that your boss will respond with ”More efficient means that we deliver more stuff, of course!”. Then you go on asking ”Deliver more things, you mean by focusing on flow and reducing cycle time?” - ”No”, your boss answers, ”I meant that we need to be making more stuff, so we need to make sure nobody is idling!”

And this is where you get the urge to exclaim ”Ah, so management decided at their last meeting that the organization’s optimization goal shall be busy-ness?!”

So many managers are overly focused on resource allocation. They want to make sure that everyone is working as much as they possibly can and that idle time is kept to a minimum. Instead, what managers should focus on is value flow. It’s like in a game of soccer; Watch the ball, not the players! In soccer you optimize for the flow of the ball, in order to make goals (= create value), You don’t optimize for the individual players. (If you did, everyone would behave like Zlatan, and the game would be immediately lost.) Optimizing for the individual players is a local optimization. Optimizing for resource allocation of your team is also a local optimization. Lean teaches us to Optimize the whole. In an analogy with soccer, we need to optimize for the delivery of value. One great way to do this is by limiting your work in progress and implementing continuous delivery. Delivering continuously will make sure that you get a continuous feedback loop that tells you if what you have delivered is actually of value. Delivering continuously will make sure less time is spent on non-value adding activities, which is waste. Limiting your work in progress (WIP) will make delivering continuously much easier. Limiting your WIP will also lower your lead time - that is the implication Little's law. So WIP is key in transitioning from optimizing for busy-ness to optimizing for delivering value!

There are other possible optimization goals, one of which is to optimize for agility - to be able to ”turn on a dime” and constantly adapt to the market's demands. I plan on returning to this and how optimizing for agility might differ from optimizing for delivering value.

An organization can also be optimized for secrecy. I think that may be the case for the CIA.

So as an organization, it is absolutely crucial that you know your optimization goal. Without that knowledge, how will you know how to organize? And if you can't organize optimally, how could you ever win?