With the UK Chancellor's heroic claims of a return to post war trend growth, the importance of productivity improvements have once again hit the headlines. Whilst the plans for better transport links and free ports might help at the margin in the long term (and, more importantly, provide a reason to vote for the Government in the next election), real improvements in productivity can only really come with doing better things with the inputs (labour, capital) to achieve higher outputs. Of course, education comes in here and that is an area where the government of the day could make a difference. Let's hope.
Supl has always argued that we can improve how we manage information, offering huge productivity gains. As we've argued before in these articles, making best use of cloud software (without expensive IT departments), surfacing and making comprehensible all of a company's information inside easily accessible portals would dramatically shorten response times whilst taking out layers of cost, as people would no longer need to ask someone to find out something.
Indeed, it has often seemed baffling to me that this simple formula has not caught on more widely. Not only would businesses be more efficient, it would be less expensive. Of course, change is always resisted and, as the IT departments are typically responsible for IT strategy, they are hardly going to recommend their own demise. But there are also deeper forces at work.
First, we have become much more risk averse in our wider society. Where before the word "daring" was the ultimate compliment, it is barely used today, and if it is, it is often used to describe someone emotionally illiterate and a little bit dangerous. It's way beyond my pay grade to understand why this has happened, but it has: gone are national symbols of pride in stuff we build (empires, technology, companies), to be replaced with The National Health Service, where we take pride in how we are looked after. Of course, the NHS is wonderful, but its position at the top of our collective tree shows where our priorities lie. Even the film 1917, ostensibly about a conflict a century ago, has as its main theme the desperate organisational bid to save lives, obvious to a film goer in 2020 but incomprehensible to a soldier in the trenches in 1917. So what does this have to do with the productivity argument? As I stated above, given the freedom to find things out without having to ask around, the employee is free to make the decisions they need to make, equipped with the information at their fingertips. Brilliant. Except that exposes that employee to the consequences of that decision, and the process of asking around can usefully be combined with co-opting colleagues into any decisions that need to be made. Even better, decisions can be delayed, subject to further finding out.
Second, as businesses have become more "flat", they have become more centralised and (ironically) more hierarchical. As the US found in the Vietnam War, the fact that the President could speak directly to a young lieutenant on the ground through modern radios, didn't mean he should, as it caused havoc with established chains of command. Modern forms of communication have only made this could/should problem worse, and in practice has meant that little is done without the sayso from the very top, the opposite of efficient. With little in the way of staff, a senior bod will be a bottleneck, and will swither this way and that, rather like a drunken searchlight charging all over the place, providing others with brief unexpected moments of blinding attention followed by eons of darkness.
Where does that leave things? We need to be honest with ourselves about the cost of caution, and the dangers of risk aversion. It's all very well having the NHS as our shibboleth, but we need to earn the gazillions we spend on it, otherwise it will collapse. Furthermore, flat structures that were built around individual email inboxes need to be ripped out, to be replaced with clear divisions of responsibility, corridors of initiative and some incentive to execute with initiative. How ironic. With greater structure comes the ability to move more flexibly. This is not rocket science. For anybody interested, study the German Army's brilliant reforms in 1916/17 that were built around infiltration tactics founded on the idea of pushing initiative down to the lowest level.
Oh, and then you need to tool up with some modern systems.