Fractional Interventions in SME - Left and Right Thinking

I have always worked in SME because there is nowhere to hide. I heard a story about someone in a big corporation who established a whole series of bogus Teams meetings across the week to show he was unavailable in the calendar. No one ever checked, and he was left to his own devices. When there is nowhere to hide, you have to carry your load, and the balance of work and efficiency of effort is critical.

In an SME, especially in the first few years, everyone has to put a shoulder to the wheel and push, even if it is not their wheel. This is how I discovered something that is not often understood in business, and is what I call Left and Right thinking.

All teams work at a pace; it might be defined, but more often it depends on experience, capability and motivation. Within a manufacturing workflow, Team A supplies Team B, and they supply Team C. If the pace is not defined, it creates a choke point, interrupting the pace. To operate efficiently, that pace needs to be defined through careful planning. This is often called “Takt”, the German word for rhythm. The outcome is a consistent pace where all teams feed in and deliver out at a rate that creates a consistent and predictable flow across the workflow. Working well, it is a thing of beauty.

Quite often this approach is exclusive to manufacturing or production systems and is rarely considered in administration, marketing, design or finance. It always struck me that manufacturing efficiency was never aligned with organisational efficiency. Could this be different?

One of the benefits of being a fractional within an organisation is that you can be objective. You are in a position to deliver an outcome and to deliver it at pace. This may be a transformation, and as always, change is a matter that should be delivered with care. This is where Left and Right Thinking comes in. Although it does not deal with the typical questions of change (i.e., “What’s in it for me”), it helps illustrate what the transformation brings. From that, I find a conversation relating to “what looks better to you” comes into play. 

 

How does Left and Right Thinking translate into non-manufacturing areas?

Any environment in a business will have some type of process - excuse me if it doesn’t right now, that will be a subject for another blog! Let’s assume it does. A series of sequential actions delivered by an individual or a team. This process will be part of a wider workflow. When the workflow was designed, was anyone considering processes running in parallel, because this is where things start to become off-balance? Every process should have a timescale to measure performance and productivity - if you can't measure, you can't manage it.  The aim is to ensure that all actions produce outcomes at the time they are needed, not faster or slower, feeding into the next process and the next. Those responsible for the outcomes must be mindful of their pace and their flow to ensure it is always operating smoothly. Most importantly, they are aware of what factors can influence this pace and have the authority or ability to balance the flow. This is the nub of efficiency. 

A simple workflow mapping exercise, similar to a value flow exercise, helps illustrate this and makes a really useful challenge for a team to build because, as ever, they are the ones who will be affected by transformation and, as process experts, often have far better insight.