Let’s start with a kaizen story, that I heard a long time ago. A particular organization had rolled out kaizen (continuous improvement). An incentive scheme was also launched to reward the employees who make any such improvement in any part of work. So, one person successfully claimed a ‘kaizen’ for putting some flowerpots in the work area and thereby ‘improving the work environment’. After sometime, another person successfully claimed a kaizen for removing those flowerpots and thereby ‘improving the flow of people and materials in the work area’. So, we were back to square one though it counted as two kaizens (making the organization appear ‘continuously improving’) and both the employees received their incentive payout!
While the above story might come across as a caricature (and not a portrait) of what actually happens in business organizations, it has more than a grain of truth. The biggest source of waste in many business organizations, that so deftly escapes even lean six sigma and productivity improvement efforts, is that results from frequent changes in direction and the tendency to equate ‘change’ with ‘progress’. Yes, rapid changes in direction, including fast U-turns, helps in creating some sort of illusion (or even a convenient collective delusion of) progress and of taking 'decisive action'. The point here is not that one shouldn’t change the direction when it is required or that one shouldn’t correct one’s mistakes. It is just that one should have some accountability for one’s decisions and the organization and human costs associated with them.
This works well in Human Resource Management (HR) also. One of the great ‘advantages’ of being in HR is that one can get credit for both hiring and firing the same person, that too in rapid succession. Similarly, we can get credit for adding a reporting layer to ‘integrate’ and also for removing that layer to ‘increase efficiency’. Yes, this leads to the HF2 model of HR, where HR is reduced to Hire (sourcing), Feed (payroll) and Fire (exit). Of course, one can have other (more ‘fashionable’) functions in HR. But they are more of ‘show horses’ than ‘plough horses’!
Postscript : This post, especially the 'kaizen story' at the beginning of this post, generated quite a bit of discussion on social media. It left me wondering why such an old story could connect so well. Now, I realize that it is because the story almost perfectly matches the definition of a 'myth'. A myth is a story that keeps on happening again and again in various forms, because it contains a deep truth (a deep truth about the nature of reality in organizations, in this case)!
Any comments/ideas?
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