It's all in the wiring
17 Jun 2024
Ruins of Pompeii, Italy, April 2023. @babafemio
As a leader, I often find myself in a position where it appears the most essential part of my job is to “expedite.” As soon as an escalation is spotted somewhere, I get involved and request that the issue be resolved ‘ASAP.’ Then, I stumbled upon the book Wiring The Winning Organisation. The word ‘stumble’ may not be a good representation because the book would have flown into my orbit anyway. One of the authors is Gene Kim, and I have read most of his work, notably The Phoenix Project and The Unicorn Project.
Book review
“Wiring the Winning Organization” is a book by Gene Kim and Dr. Steven J. Spear that offers a comprehensive guide to transforming organizations into high-performance entities. The book focuses on using new principles such as slowification, simplification, and amplification to “liberate an organization’s collective greatness”. Slowification emphasizes making problem-solving easier by moving more work to a planning or practice phase. Simplification highlights the need to streamline processes and reduce complexity, making problem-solving more efficient. Amplification is the act of calling out problems loudly and consistently to trigger help. The authors provide practical insights and real-world examples, offering strategies for leaders to enhance agility, foster innovation, and achieve lasting competitive advantage.
The book suggests that if you find yourself expediting, firefighting, or rerouting workflow, it may provide immediate gratification, but in reality, it makes matters worse. If managers have to step in to get basic requests fulfilled, we need to be better organized (or better wired). I was motivated to finish the book quickly so I could get answers on how to solve this challenge.
Key takeaways
There was a lot to learn from the book, but these are the three most valuable and easily implementable ideas I discovered:
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Make data relevant to the job to be done globally available. Most workflows in our teams or organizations pass information or data back and forth. These flows would not be necessary if everyone could access the same information and make the same decisions. Democratized access to data is why data-driven organizations are more efficient and outperform their peers.
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Reorganise for more autonomy. The most time-consuming workflows are those that cross team or unit boundaries. If there are opportunities to deliver units of work within the same team, optimize for this to limit delays due to hand-offs.
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Encourage the team to call out problems early and often. It ensures help is triggered for the right people to swarm the problem and solve it, hopefully before it becomes a real problem or, even worse, a customer escalation.
All these might sound simple enough, but they are crucial. Expect good results, but also be realistic about the outcomes. After many months of practicing all these, I still find myself expediting from time to time. But anytime I get an escalation, I treat it as a golden opportunity to understand what has gone wrong with the wiring or what’s not working well.
Happy rewiring!