Food for the Beast

Food for the BeastWe build organizations with boxes.

We add processes. Lots of processes.

We  are creating the beast.

And when we have processes, we hire people to make sure people don’t break the processes.

We add more boxes to the charts and hire more managers to watch those boxes.

Since we have more people, we need more people to manage different things. We have invoices, vacation approvals. We need to have people to accept things for the people in the boxes. Since we have so many people in the organization, we can have layers in acceptance. Two levels of acceptance or even three.

And it becomes standard that 15 dollars bill needs to be touched by four people.

We have lots of boxes that have dependencies. We create tensions that we won’t solve.

When something does not feel right, we will move place of the box. We rarely move people inside the box, since the box is a lot easier to move. It can be done in PowerPoint. Who is reporting to whom.

All our attention is on processes and boxes.

We build the system and forget why we are here, what was the main thing and what is the goal of the organization.

We don’t see the work, that is happening outside of all this. We are feeding the beast, so that the beast is happy. And if someone is against the beast, we force him back in order.

If something fails, we first check did he follow the processes, if not, it must have failed because of that. If he did follow, we do nothing.

..and at the same time we wish our people would have more entrepreneurial spirit.

We don’t notice that the best work usually happens outside all visible.

Outside the plans, organizations.  The best things are created by renegades who don’t surrender to the beast. The renegades who are more focused on good results than the beast.

You need to break the rules to bring the change. Otherwise you are just food for the beast.

 

Photo credit Flickr U.S Army

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