Imagine a report arriving at the board meeting on time. Before it got there, an analyst reconciled conflicting files, called the colleague who knew which figures to trust, and stayed late to correct an error that had appeared the previous month.
The report was on time. The process still needed rescuing.
At the meeting, which of those facts would receive more attention?
A committed employee can make a difficult day look ordinary. The customer gets an answer. The report is submitted. The calls, corrections, and extra hours may never reach the management discussion.
That is how a recurring problem can disappear from management’s view without disappearing from the work.
For leaders, the responsibility is to understand what good results require.
When the solution leaves the problem intact
Researchers Anita Tucker and Amy Edmondson observed this distinction in hospital nursing. Nurses could find missing supplies and continue caring for patients without addressing why the supplies were missing. Time pressure and organizational expectations helped keep attention on the immediate task.
A patient cannot wait for a process redesign. The nurse’s intervention is necessary. But someone must return to the problem after the patient’s need has been met.
The same question is worth asking when an employee corrects conflicting records, expedites a delayed order, or finds someone to cover a staffing gap. What happened after the rescue? Who knew about it? What changed?
Incentives may help explain the answer. Bengt Holmström, who shared the 2016 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for contributions to contract theory, developed influential research with Paul Milgrom on work involving multiple tasks. Their theory explains how strong incentives for easily measured activities can draw effort away from important activities that are harder to measure.
Apply that theory to the analyst. In an organization that rewards timely submission, meeting the deadline earns immediate recognition. Investigating why the systems disagree requires time, cooperation, and perhaps a difficult conversation. If only the deadline counts, the employee has a reason to fix the report and move on.
Leadership can get the behavior it rewards, while remaining dissatisfied with the problems that behavior leaves behind.
What repeated rescues cost
MIT researchers Nelson Repenning and John Sterman describe the capability trap: pressure to produce can crowd out improvement; declining capability then creates more pressure to produce. People work harder to sustain results and have less time to address what makes the work difficult. Their research discusses the pattern in financial services and construction as well as manufacturing.
An organization caught in this pattern may describe itself as busy. The more useful question is how much of that busyness it keeps creating for itself.
Improvement has economic value. In a randomized experiment involving large Indian textile firms, Nicholas Bloom and colleagues found that a package of management practices increased productivity by 17 percent in the first year, through improved quality and efficiency and reduced inventory.
That finding is specific to the study. It does not tell us what another organization will save by removing workarounds. It does give leaders a reason to take everyday management practices seriously.
Start with the effort already being spent: duplicate entry, repeat approvals, corrections, expediting, and overtime. Removing unnecessary work can release capacity. Cash savings and additional revenue depend on how that capacity is used.
Look closely at a good day
Baldrige connects a systems perspective, valuing people, organizational learning, and management by fact. One practical way to apply those principles is to examine a process that appears to be working.
Ask the people doing it what they repeatedly correct. Ask whose knowledge makes delivery possible. Find out which obstacle they have solved more than once.
Then follow one problem through the departments involved. Give someone the authority and time to address it. Check whether it stops recurring and whether quality holds.
This is also a resilience question: would the process hold if the person who repeatedly rescues it were unavailable?
Employees should not have to choose between serving the customer today and being heard about a problem that will affect the customer tomorrow.
A successful result deserves two questions: did we deliver, and what did delivery require?
Thank the person who saved the day. Then ask why the day needed saving again.
References
- Tucker, A. L., & Edmondson, A. C. (2003). Why Hospitals Don’t Learn from Failures: Organizational and Psychological Dynamics That Inhibit System Change. California Management Review, 45(2), 55–72. The research supports the distinction between immediate fixes and preventing recurrence.
- Holmström, B. (2016). Pay for Performance and Beyond. Nobel Prize lecture. Discusses multitask incentives, including research with Paul Milgrom; the reporting example above applies that theory.
- Repenning, N. P., & Sterman, J. D. (2001). Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Problems That Never Happened: Creating and Sustaining Process Improvement. California Management Review, 43(4), 64–88. Explains the capability trap and discusses observations beyond manufacturing.
- Bloom, N., Eifert, B., Mahajan, A., McKenzie, D., & Roberts, J. (2013). Does Management Matter? Evidence from India. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 128(1), 1–51. The published study reports the 17 percent first-year productivity increase.
- National Institute of Standards and Technology. Core Values and Concepts. Baldrige Performance Excellence Program. The exercise proposed above is an application of these principles.