Over the years I’ve talked with
hundreds of managers about the reasons for complexity in their organizations –
and in almost all cases they cite “technology” as one of the main
culprits. But in the next breath, they
also acknowledge that technology has revolutionized the way they work,
increased personal productivity, and given them a whole new world of
capabilities. It’s an odd dichotomy: the
notion that technology is a blessing and curse, a driver of improvement, and a
source of frustration. This often leaves
managers wondering what they can do to increase the benefits and minimize the
pain, both for themselves and their organizations.
To tackle this question, we first need
to understand what’s behind this perception of technology as a paradoxical phenomenon. In my experience, there seem to be two main
issues: the accelerating rate of technological change and the often-unrealistic
expectations that technology creates.
The exponential increase in the speed
of technological introduction and commercialization was first described by
Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book Future Shock. Although primarily considered as a harbinger
of the virtual society, one of Toffler’s key insights was that the cycle time
between technological discovery and widespread commercialization was
continually shrinking, which would force people to deal with continuous, rather
than episodic, change.
For example, after the invention of the
telephone, it took more than 80 years for much of the world to be connected
(and even more in rural and economically depressed areas). In contrast, the cell
phone was invented in 1973, became commercially available within a decade –
and now, only 40 years later, there are more than five billion such phones
being used around the world. Moreover,
mobile phones these days are not just used for making calls, but for a host of
other applications – with new ideas and technology being introduced almost
daily.
The pace of these changes presents
challenges across industries. Not long ago, I was facilitating a customer
advisory board meeting for one of my technology clients, and the main
recommendation was to slow down the introduction of new features because their
organizations could not absorb them fast enough. In other words, from their perspective, the
continual onslaught of new technology was making things more complex and harder
to manage.
On the other side is an increasingly
unrealistic set of expectations about what people can accomplish with
technology. Yes, we have the capacity for instantaneous, global communication,
search, and transaction processing. But does that mean that all business should
be conducted at warp speed? Many managers seem to report that this is what
their customers, partners, and senior executives seem to expect, which drives
them to work longer hours and continue business processes (e.g. emails and
texts) while traveling, being with family, or on vacation. This leads to a lack of time to think,
reflect, recharge, or step back, which not only creates more complexity but
also doesn’t allow managers to get control over their time.
Managers who want to minimize the
complexity caused by technology therefore may need to think about the following
two sets of questions:
- What
technological innovations should we actually adopt in our business, and what
could we defer or delay? And if we do
accept new technologies, how can we absorb them without creating confusion or
complexity?
The key here is to make sure that new technologies – or even new
features and functions of old technologies – actually produce business
value. All too often we adopt new stuff
because it is “cool” or sounds good, but we don’t examine whether it will
actually provide a return on the investment.
And sometimes we don’t stop to ask how well our existing structures can
support these innovations.
Unfortunately, if it doesn’t drive business value, then the only thing
it might produce is more complexity.
- How
can we create more realistic expectations with our customers, clients,
partners, and each other about the pace of work? Are there ground rules that we can institute
or ways that we can at least make the expectations more transparent and
understood? Questions like these can help make it
possible to be more explicit about the differences between handling high priority
work and everything else. One easy mistake to make in our world of
instantaneous communication is treating all activities as being of equal value.
If you are clear on what types of projects or questions warrant a quick
response, it will help the rest of your team prioritize.
Obviously answering these questions
won’t immediately reduce technologically-driven complexity. But they might be a good place to start.
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Ron Ashkenas' blog post on Harvard Business Review. Join the discussion.