If in doubt...do nothing

There is a creeping cultural phenomenon happening within many companies that can best be described as 'an obligation to be busy'.

The behaviour has its foundations in an unchallenged obsession with measurement.

And one of the crudest measurements that is relentlessly pursued is productivity (the amount of work completed over a period of time).

Because of this, the quantitative mesurement of 'busy-ness' is almost univerally a blunt objective. But, because it's less tangible, the quality of that busy-ness is not taken into considertaion.

The paradigm is that long as people who are being paid to be at the company are busy doing something...then an acceptable return on investment is being achieved.

In the flurry of productive activity though, quality standards slide.

Work that should never have been shipped...gets shipped.

Inappropriate choices are made.

Sub-standard, slapdash, amateurish-stuff suddenly becomes good enough, and over time the standards of the whole system (the brand) deteriorate.

Sometimes this slide gets called euphemistically... 'a race to the bottom'.

For those who get called in to arrest the issue, the task of recovery feels like hauling a tumbling airplane out of an uncontrollable death spiral. Once a system has built-up enough momentum in its pursuit of deteriorating standards, it is difficult to course correct out of its predictable trajectory towards collapse.

The urge to deliver high-levels of busy-ness is one of the critical challenges of our time.

The prevailing mindset that is dominant demands increasing levels of productivity. But the systemic risks associated with uncontrolled busy-ness are also clear if the overall performance of the system is considered over a long enough time horizon.

What to do?

If there is a sense that the system archetype that is being created is one of deteriorating standards due to the speed and volume of output demanded...stop.

Rather than shipping something half-baked, do nothing.

If you can't afford to produce a high-quality promotional campaign to promote a new product, then question the validity of the project itself. Interrogate the reasons why the project was originally chosen.

Don't even start to accept that less than your best is good enough, because once standards start to slide, it's a slippery slope downwards.

When a lot of change happens around a business, the urge can be to automatically respond with speed, flexibility and an increasing amount of variety. If this approach is not possible (because of the cost), the alternative is to intentionally reduce the amount of noise and complexity coming into the business and to focus on clearly identified strategic opportunities so that the existing system is not overwhelmed by needing to respond to rapid change with high-levels of busy-ness.

In other words, either invest more to scale-up the system's agility, or enabling current resources to have more impact by concentrating efforts on less variables.

But demanding a scale-up, while at the same time investing less...is a recipe for disaster.

To put it another way...nobody is going to be challenging the market dominance of a clear category leader, while at the same time cutting costs.