Organizational Physics

Wow, a new year is here! Time, she is merciless in her forward motion.

As I've spent some time in a few different organizations over the last year a pet theory of mine dawned on me repeatedly, so I figured I'd put it out for consideration.

As with the bounding physics post, this is about organizational physics. This first came to me while golfing. Given that I slept through both high school and college physics I had an "ahhh" moment when I found that my frequent slices didn't travel nearly as far as my lucky straight shots. It occurred to me that the reason was that the vector of force was going straight, but the angle of the head was tilted. So while the engine in this equation (Me) was putting out the energy, but it was being squandered at the point of contact. It struck me that this same dynamic happens in virtually every organization - all day - every day.

Translating this example to an organization looks something like this. A golf swing is made of various components in a coordinated effort to move the ball. In an organization, business or otherwise, we would have different people responsible for those elements that all need to be coordinated. Golf has a number of advantages for understanding the dynamic,

* It's performed by a single person
* It takes a fraction of a second to swing
* We can repeat it 100 times for $10/bucket
* Nobody dies

If we look at our golf swing example we have a series of phases to "project swing",

* Stance
* Back swing
* Down stroke
* Rotation
* Follow through

Viewed in project management terms, each one of these phases has a deliverable to the next and the success of each is dependent on all of it's predecessors.

All of this made me think of how organizations too often work. Let me describe a project in highly abstract terms. It is made up of 5 phases, each requiring 100 units of work. So we can see that the organization should have a total cost of 500 units to accomplish the project. In the scoping phase we find that some critical details were left off the initial documents, and that the owner of the project was in a meeting and couldn't attend. What wouldn't be unthinkable in this scenario is for both more than 100 units of work to be expended, AND it not being done in a way that is satisfactory to serve as input for the next phases. Due to poor management this seems to be an epidemic in all organizations. If an effort for expedience, urgency or policy, folk seem to execute on projects, task, etc. with the moral equivalent of a slice.

The organization isn't controlling the aspects of the swing with enough diligence to be able to routinely get 100 units of work done with 100 units of labor. As is evident from past posts, I am a tech guy. On this side of the house these things become grossly obvious in incorrectly scoped development projects. Through an inadequate process the business owner never really adopts it as their own. You see folks blow through huge amounts of time and energy and not get anything valuable accomplished. So in the strange way my mind works, all of this was obvious in the slice of a golf ball...four!