Speed, Simplicity, and Results – an equation that often doesn’t balance
Blog: Brian's Blog - Enterprise Strategy, Architecture and Management
How often have you heard in the context of entertainment, he or she was an overnight success? Only to find out later it only took x numbers of years to become such. In an Internet age everything, everything appears to be instant including out coffee.
The Internet brings us everything instantly, or so we think. How long did it take you to get that book from Amazon Prime? Two days, not fast enough! Get a Kindle and get it immediately! However, what are you missing with all that speed? What are the trade-offs? And yes there are tradeoffs.
Like old lessons in engineering, nothing is free, one always has tradeoffs to balance the physical equations. You may not see these or be conscious of these, but these are still there in the background being made. Which is the main point of this article.
It may seem from the start that some old guy is about to pour his heart out about how good times past were. -And yes, they were good. However, what Millennium isn’t already reminiscing about that great time they had at the club last night or even brings it up several weeks later as their friends roll their eyes having heard the story for the fourteenth time already. Good and bad times cement lessons in our memories. But I digress.
Years ago, before PMI existed, project managers latched onto the concept of the Project Management Triangle: Time, Cost, Quality -picking any two dictated the other. Heuristic Functions like this are applicable today as much as we’d wish the Internet would change these.
I’ve working on several projects over the past few years –well decades—each a part in a much larger equation. My previous article, The Virtual Situation Room, hints at such. One fragment of that equation involves Business Intelligence as it’s called today. That is having not only data but information for decision makers to make effective investment decisions within the business. I consider N. Dean Meyer’s Internal Market Economics as a data point in the growing digitization of business.
As such any resource decision –Capital, Intellectual Property, Human, Equipment, etc.—is a statement of internal investment priority to address what Milton Friedman stated as business’s primary if not sole justification: maximizing shareholder value. [While I disagree with the total adherence to economics of selfishness, it is the current trend in business, but I see the pendulum swinging in other direction, hopefully to some middle ground.]
Current Internal Economics aside slightly, I come back to the engineering premise that tradeoffs are made in any decision to balance an equation, often unstated. A brilliant colleague of mine Dr. David Ullman, out of the Oregon academic society, attempted to explicate much of those tradeoffs using an application of Bayesian Analysis. Only to end in frustration. The Business World was not ready for such ideas 10+ years ago, nor the work involved to get those “simple answers”.
Speed is a relative term in Business. What is fast one day, is tortuously slow the next.
Simplicity is also relative and is based upon context. What I see readily apparent, maybe intricate and complex to you.
Thus we’re left with Results as the great common ground, or so one would think. However, results are based upon expectations, experience, and context. I order a meal at a restaurant. They serve me my food within a ten minutes, I eat it and don’t get food poisoning. Is that the result I was looking for? Was it satisfactory? Before you answer consider these two scenarios both fit the facts above. First I was at a Fast Food place, the second I was at a 5 Star restaurant.
If all my expectation was to get a quick meal and move on, then a Fast Food experience was adequate. If, however, I was with others and make this also a social experience the above maybe lacking.
So what does this have to do with internal business projects you’re asking now?
Consider the nature of questions leadership has to address. These are often boiled down to quick decisions: Go, no-Go, and Redirect to consider later. They are often looking for simplicity to enable speed in decision making. However; first simplicity often hides important information, and second I’ve always found it takes time to create simplicity. Boiling data and information down to its essence means understanding the truth nature of the decisions to be made and the interactions of variables in that decision.
This morning I am on the 10th iteration of a Portfolio Management initiative I came up with in ’95. I am using writing this article to reflect and document lessons learned for these activities for an upcoming paper for a June Business Architecture conference in DC.
A few insights I’ve come up with this morning as I look back on the various version of this initiative are:
- Decision-Makers appear to have less and less time to assimilate the information
- Simplicity is good for speed but often hides the icebergs ahead; so these captains of industry need someone in the crow’s-nest to look ahead
- Decisions are often made by gut feel, even though analytics has proven to be more accurate
- Follow-up on results while desired is often not accomplished: Many organizations are professing a learning culture, however the current state of being is most reviews are still flagellation inquiries [management is still a political game]
Filed under: Business Intelligence, Decision Science, Portfolio Management, Systems Thinking 
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