Synchronised Steps, Shared Success

Lock picking taught me about jammed teams.

“Hurry, I’m cold!” yelled my wife through the locked bathroom door.

“Well maybe you shouldn’t have broken the lock.” I retorted as I repositioned the pick.

“What’s taking so long!?”

“Well, I need to align every pin before the lock will release”.

As my wife shrieked, something in my head clicked.

Organisations exist to help us achieve something greater than any one person can in isolation. This requires cooperation - across people, and often across teams.

However, we often give interdependent teams different priorities. This means each team works on different things at the same time, and partially-complete work gets stuck between teams.

This leads to higher work in process, longer lead times, and more time spent coordinating work than time spent doing the work. More concerning: since results only come from completed work, we have busy teams but no results.

In order unlock results, we must either remove interdependencies, or prioritise the same work at the same time - so we can stop starting and start finishing work.

Suggests Kristen Cox:

“Success doesn’t just depend on people doing the right work - it depends on them doing it at the same time.

You can have the best people, the right tools, and the clearest goals. But if everyone moves on a different clock, the outcome never comes together.

It’s not about agreeing on what to do - it’s about agreeing on when to do it.

That’s synchronisation. Shared timing that enables flow - and shared signals that set priority.

Without synchronisation, teams optimise their own timelines and priorities, but the system doesn’t move. A business requests an IT change, but developers are focused elsewhere. A child welfare team needs input from legal, but the attorneys are focused on other priorities. A hospital is ready to discharge, but no one’s available to coordinate next steps.”

The takeaway? Unlock results by either removing interdependencies or synchronising interdependent teams. Otherwise, as Cox suggests, “everyone moves - but not together.”

Note: This article was inspired by Kristen Cox. Quotes adapted for brevity.