Tell the lie louder, but that don’t make it true

Systems thinkers look at the whole, not just the parts.

They judge the worth of a system based on its end to end effectiveness, rather than on how efficiently individual parts operate.

Ackoff, the organizational theorist, consultant and professor, was one of the pioneers it the field of systems thinking. One of his notable rants was about the fallacy of efficiency.

He said the righter we do the wrong thing, the wronger we become. But when we make a mistake doing the wrong thing and correct it, we become wronger. When we make a mistake doing the right thing and correct it, we become righter.

Therefore, it is better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right.

Have you ever worked at a company that made this mistake? Fighting the wrong war in better ways?

It’s quite common, particularly in professional services firms. Business development teams will offer their prospects a free audit of their business. It’s an opportunity to treat them like clients before they become one, see if their business is a good fit, and get more leads into their pipeline while cutting short the qualification process.

At one of my old jobs, our pitch team spent twenty percent of their time preparing and presenting these audits. And it worked quite well. They won the trust of many skeptical brands who ultimately hired us, thus expanding our client portfolio significantly.

The only problem was, the team was exasperated. Because in addition to their day jobs of servicing existing clients, they were also staying at the office late most nights to prepare the audits.

And originally, we started looking for efficiencies to streamline the process with templates, best practices and guides. Thought that might make our audits more efficient.

But then something occurred to us. Are we just trying to do the wrong thing righter and faster? Are we trying to do something better, without venturing to question whether it’s worth doing in the first place?

It’s great that we’re winning all this new business, but will we even have the resources to service these new accounts once they sign on with us?

Perhaps the question is not about how to do something better, but whether it should be done at all.

That’s the crux of all systems thinking. Toeing the line between efficiency and effectiveness.

We need to make fundamental changes in the system, not just improvements in one mechanism. Otherwise the ripple effect will become too costly.

Is your organization only getting better at the wrong kind of things?

Trust me, you’re not alone in this mistake.

But remember, companies can speed something up as much as they want, but it’s still the wrong thing. Telling the lie louder doesn’t make it true.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
When was the last time doing more of something that wasn’t working yielded better results?