You contact a company trying to get a problem solved and you find yourself passed between multiple departments. While people are sympathetic, their response is, “It’s not my job.” Despite multiple voice mails and e-mails, you get nowhere. Your issue has fallen into the company’s “white space,” the cracks between the boxes on the organization chart.
You’ve probably experienced white space issues inside your own organization, too. People perform departmental tasks smoothly, but there’s friction interacting with other groups. Processes don’t flow. Often things get “thrown over the wall,” there’s lots of finger-pointing, and it’s difficult to get things done.
Functional silo-ism first rears its ugly head when companies reach about 40 employees. At this threshold, companies must departmentalize to increase technical capabilities and bolster management’s span of control. But priorities slowly begin to shift. Soon pleasing the boss becomes more important than making customers happy. As the firm continues to grow, functional barriers get larger and more entrenched. Left unchecked, departmental relationships can become adversarial, paralyzing new product development, service delivery, customer acquisition, and customer care efforts.
Four tools that reduce silo-ism
Progressive companies deploy countermeasures to mitigate the effects of white space behavior. Top organizations combine the four management practices below to substantially diminish internal friction and dramatically increase performance.
1. Hoshin Kanri
What it is: Developed in the 1960’s at the Bridgestone Tire Company in Japan, hoshin kanri (literally translated “a bright, shiny needle”) is a rigorous, integrated system of planning, implementation, and review that points the way like a compass needle. Caterpillar, 3M, Toyota, Bosch and Danaher and many other leading companies use it.
How it works: Senior executives collaborate to prioritize common issues, and then decide on a single breakthrough. The objective is then decomposed into a smaller set of strategies, each featuring its own executive owner and performance measure. Leaders cascade the plan throughout the organization, finally defining implementation plans at lower levels. Formal hoshin reviews then roll up progress, allowing executives to eliminate barriers that crop up. The method’s closed-loop system promotes intense focus, relentless execution, and forward momentum.
Why it works: Unlike the common Management by Objectives (MBO) approach, hoshin aligns the organization around business, not functional, imperatives. Leaders pass these priorities down and reinforce them across the company. As a result, teams work towards enterprise-wide goals that transcend parochial concerns.
2. Process Mapping
What it is: A time-honored technique used to study workflows, process mapping reveals the “hidden factory” behind service work. Describing the process visually helps teams identify critical handoffs, gaps, rework loops, and queues. After pinpointing improvement areas, teams can then reduce errors, speed cycle times and reduce costs. Value Stream Mapping and Customer Journey Mapping are popular variations of the method.
How it works: Teams define process suppliers, inputs, outputs, customers, and requirements. Then they brainstorm tasks that must be completed to convert inputs into outputs, typically using Post-it® notes and butcher paper to record the workflow. Along the way, mapping participants identify improvement opportunities.
Why it works: Mapping allows people to see the systemic nature of business—everything is connected to everything else, and what happens in one area affects all others. People quickly realize that fast, efficient, customer-pleasing workflows trump choppy, disconnected vertical structures. Top organizations assign executives to lead cross-functional, key business processes, holding them accountable for optimizing teamwork across, rather than inside, department boundaries.
3. Enterprise Dashboards
What it is: The Japanese call an interlinked system of color-coded metrics nichijo kanri, or “daily control.” These displays help people at all levels manage the variables that lead to favorable business outcomes. Each manager’s dashboard typically monitors the key business process he or she oversees using 8-10 essential metrics that describe volume, time, cost, quality or other attributes.
How it works: Leaders define the critical few measures that really matter by analyzing company processes, economic models, and Value Propositions. They calibrate indicators by determining ranges of acceptable values based on stakeholder requirements, process capabilities and business goals. Managers then collect data act appropriately on the signal: “green” means everything is good, “yellow” means keep an eye on it, and “red” means take immediate action.
Why it works: With the right metrics, managers and teams focus on the most essential aspects of the job. They keep things under control and prevent downstream chaos. At top companies, executive dashboards reflect measures tied to cross-functional processes. When reward and recognition is tied to systemic improvement, managers and employees have greater incentives to work with other teams for mutual benefit.
4. Lean Six Sigma
What it is: Lean Six Sigma is the modern integration of two proven methods: lean production and six sigma quality. Lean (a technique pioneered by Toyota in the 1970s) emphasizes speed and helps identify and eliminate wasted time, motion, and raw materials. Six Sigma (a quality method named after an imperceptibly small error rate) aligns processes with customer needs and then reduces defects and excessive variation that causes dissatisfaction. Both have been used for years in manufacturing, and the combined approach is increasingly common in service environments.
How it works: Teams use formal methods to characterize process performance, estimate financial impact, uncover root causes of problems, design solutions, and implement changes. DMAIC (Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control) or RIE (Rapid Improvement Events) provide teams with structure and statistical tools to effectively manage projects. Since teams make systemic improvements, results tend to be more dramatic and sustainable.
Why it works: Teams are often made of up representatives from all functions involved in the workflow. By working together towards common business goals, team members learn to appreciate the challenges people face in other functional areas. Besides creating more effective and efficient processes, a broader “systems view” and stronger interpersonal bonds between people promotes greater cooperation long after the project is complete.
White space problems are a natural part of organizational development. All companies deal with it in one way or another. Fortunately, proven tools and techniques can help young companies arrest its impact and promote scalable growth.
Where do organizational “white space” problems come from? Our DNA. But we can also use our genetic predisposition to solve them.
Chances are you’ve experienced it. When you call a company for help, you get the proverbial runaround. After explaining the problem and hearing “That’s not my department” several times, you’re transferred endlessly, leaving voice mails that go unanswered. It’s totally frustrating. Nobody takes responsibility because your issue falls between the cracks--into the "white space."
You may work in an organization that behaves this way. Within your group, people perform tasks smoothly, but there’s friction with other groups. All too often, work doesn’t flow. Stuff gets “thrown over the wall,” there’s finger-pointing when things go wrong, and customers pay the price. The “white space” between the boxes on the organization chart is usually where the ball gets dropped.1
White space issues can paralyze. Legendary for silos, General Motors’ white space issues led to long, costly product development cycles and poor quality. Rather than cooperating, some departments wouldn’t even speak to each other. Flawed management philosophies such as Management by Objectives and pay-for-performance made the situation worse, causing sub-optimization—an insidious game of “I win, we lose” between functions. In a failed attempt to change, GM implemented a complex, matrix-management scheme that confused who was in charge, diluted accountability, and put the company in decline.2 And GM isn’t alone. So widespread are white space effects in industry that quality master W. Edwards Deming highlighted them in point nine of his famous Fourteen Points for Management: “Break down barriers between departments.”3
Experts cite the lack of a “systems view” as the cause for white space problems. Most managers perceive the organization’s work as vertical and functional rather than horizontal and cross-functional. Consultants Geary Rummler and Alan Brache observed, “(Managers) often don’t understand, at a sufficient level of detail, how their businesses get products developed, made, sold, and distributed.”4 Author Peter Senge observed the same, noting, "we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system, and wonder why our deepest problems never seem to get solved."5 Hence, lacking a broader understanding, managers concentate on activities within rather than between groups, and chasms slowly form.
But the root causes may go much deeper than a lack of perspective. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt believes moral judgment is based on automatic, not conscious reasoning.6 Buried within the human psyche is hardwired social behavior that influences our choices and actions. Haidt identified five behaviors:
- Caring/harm—deep fondness for people with whom we have biological or social attachments, and the violence we can do to those we don’t
- Fairness/reciprocity—our need for mutual exchange and even-handed application of punishment and reward
- In-group/loyalty—close association with our tribe’s identity and suspicion of other tribes
- Authority/respect—our tendency to obey those in positions of power
- Purity/sanctity—our desire for social order through conformance and control
Where did these innate responses come from? Evolution. Our survival as a species depended on our ability to live in groups and cooperate with one another. Imagine the outcome if we had never learned to hunt, share resources, or protect our kin through collaboration. These five moral threads made possible group cohesion, coordination, and harmony. During a millennia of natural selection, they became our operating system for creating ever larger and more successful organizations—first tribes and clans, and then nations and empires.
Our evolutionary success, however, has sown the seeds of our modern-day destruction in business. We create white space problems because it’s natural for us to do so. When firms get larger and competition for internal resources becomes intense, the organization splinters. Our survival instincts take over. We subconsciously revert to our evolutionary roots and protect our own tribe at the expense of the larger community.
It takes many generations to evolve even the smallest biological changes. But if our core behaviors are intrinsic and immutable, how can we solve the white space problems we create? One solution is to introduce new tribes within the organization to counter their effects.
Process management methods use cross-functional teams to traverse the white space. For example, leading manufacturers create new product introduction teams including representatives from R&D, manufacturing, product marketing, finance, and customer service. Often these groups are project-centric, small (7-9 people), co-located, headed by a strong leader, focused on transcendent goals, and adherent to disciplined processes. A senior executive carefully forms the team and supports their efforts through high-level reviews and behind-the-scenes functional diplomacy. Through deliberate process design, the five underlying social threads are present—bonding with fellow group members, fairness in equal representation, forming an in-group with its own identity, obedience to powerful leaders, and conformance to an orderly process. By following natural tendencies, individuals in the new tribe execute a smoother process across functions, suppressing the effects of white space between their tribes of origin.
We can’t change our DNA, but if we understand it, we can use it to our advantage. Capitalizing on our innate behaviors, we can mitigate white space issues by using new process management techniques. Doing so subverts silos and streamlines workflows for the better.
Sources:
- Rummler, G. and Brache, A. (1995) Improving Performance: How to Manage the White Space on the Organization Chart, Jossey-Bass Publishers. ISBN 0-7879-0090-7
- Whitacre, E. (2013) American Turnaround: Reinventing AT&T and GM and the Way to Do Business, Hachette Book Group. ISBN 978-1-4555-1300-0
- Deming, W. E. (1982) Out of the Crisis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Advanced Engineering Study. ISBN 0-911379-01-0
- Rummler, G. and Brache, A. (1995)
- Senge, P. M. (1990) The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization, Doubleday. ISBN 0-385-26094-6
- Haidt, J. (2012) The Righteous Mind: Why good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, Pantheon. ISBN 978-0307455772
