Productivity for Productivity’s Sake

The obsession

We love to make things more productive. We strive to be cheaper, more efficient, higher yielding. It is the holy grail, taking up most of our working hours.

More for less in itself isn’t a bad goal, but who decides if we are being productive?

Myopic measurement

Imagine you flip burgers for a living and you are on a productivity drive.

First you need to create a baseline productivity measure. Perhaps burgers flipped per paid hour. Then you start to improve things:

You buy an automatic burger flipper
You invest in burger flipping training
You set you an incentive based on your burger flipping prowess
You capture the “one best way“
You write burger flipping standard operating procedures
You set up quality circles to foster continuous improvement

Before you know it you will have doubled burger flips. Your stats will look outstanding. You will christen yourself the burger flipping centre of excellence.

There is only one small problem…

Nobody wants to buy the burgers.

You have just created a pile of them that are going cold. And when they have gone cold they are going in the bin.

It would have been cheaper and more productive for the burger flipper to sit on his hands. At least that way you’d have saved on the cost of the steak.

The lesson in all this is that only your customer can determine if you are being productive.

If they don’t want what you are producing then — despite your claims to the contrary — increasing productivity is costing you money.

Stating the obvious

My example is easy to dismiss. Nobody would be so foolish that they flipped burgers that their customers don’t need. Would they?

Oddly though, to make sure that they aren’t that foolish the prize burger flippers — McDonald’s — have put in a system, a burger rack, to ensure they only make what they need.

And if you don’t make burgers?

Now take yourself out of a simple fast-food joint and put yourself somewhere far more complex. Perhaps a general hospital, a large legal practice or a chain of supermarkets.

In our complicated world we divide to conquer. We create divisions and departments to manage the scope and scale of our organisations. It is easy to focus on internal productivity gains. Incentivising people to go faster and harder within their own specialism.

And lose site of what it means for the customer.