Direction Before Discipline

Virtual cooking taught me about improvement.

As my wife guided her avatar to assemble cake ingredients - in a burning kitchen on an airship - her avatar slipped and fell to its doom. We’d failed at Overcooked for the 17th time.

“Seriously!?”, I bellowed, throwing down my game controller.

“It was an easy mistake!”, my wife retorted.

“Can you try sucking less?”, I quipped.

“Can you try sucking less in the real kitchen?”, my wife smirked.

As my jaw dropped, something in my head clicked.

In organisations, the goal of improvement is often to reduce deficiencies: software bugs, security vulnerabilities, toil, costs, mistakes.

However, Ackoff suggests “getting rid of what you don't want is not equivalent to getting what you do want; improvement has to be directed towards what you want, not away from what you don't want.

“When I change a TV channel to remove a distasteful program, I seldom get one that is satisfactory. Health is more than the absence of disease, even though many doctors act as though they are equivalent.”

Firing all staff would reduce costs, but would it get us more of what we want?

Doing nothing would help avoid mistakes, but would it get us more of what we want?

Even if we were to reduce our software bugs and vulnerabilities down to zero, would it get us more of what we want?

First, we need to know what we want. If we want to create software that our customers need, and no customers currently need our software, then reducing bugs and vulnerabilities will make no difference - customers still won’t need our software.

“You may reduce defects to zero and [still] go out of business”, reminds Deming.

Drucker explains: “We spend all our time on trying to do things right [efficiency], but […] we ought to be worried about doing the right things [effectiveness].”

The takeaway? Direction before discipline. Trying to suck less at the wrong goal, only means getting better at doing the wrong thing.

Ackoff puts it more eloquently: “The more efficient you are at doing the wrong thing, the wronger you become. It is much better to do the right thing wronger than the wrong thing righter. If you do the right thing wrong and correct it, you get better.”

This article was inspired by a chat between Deming and Ackoff.

Image credit: Overcooked.