A metaphor for life
Not long ago I was visiting my girlfriend at work, she is a defectologist and works in special education with children with learning delays. In one of the intermediate breaks between classes I was able to observe the children playing and I was struck by the fact that several of them tied another who should do the horse function while the others guided her with their ropes, but it turned out that only The others limited themselves to running after their invented horse because, since their ropes were longer than that of the true driver, they could not guide him at will. In other words, the "horse" of this game advanced only as far as the child with the shortest rope allowed it.All this innocent game that did not last more than fifteen minutes made me remember that organizations suffer equally and constantly from Short Rope Syndrome.
The short rope and organizational performance
The growth of an organization's Goal will be determined by the shortest rope. The area that has such a connection becomes a Window of Opportunity for Improvement.
The Goal is the ultimate reason for and for which the organization exists, it is that so transcendental objective that it does not admit postponements as they are temporary due to extraordinarily complex conjunctural situations and its most significant attributes are to be measurable and always increasing.
As different as the Goal can be for different types of organizations, it would be advisable to use some kind of classification that would allow us to distinguish between them. Since it constitutes an essential classification, the author agrees to distinguish two types of organizations:
1. For profit or autonomous.
2. Nonprofit or assisted. (This may include for-profit organizations that deliberately lose due to their social function and should be kept subsidized.)
The Goal for the former is necessarily associated with the final result, that is, with the favorable - always increasing - relationship established between your income and your expenses, which guarantees their gradual and continuous development. This is so because there is no result after that, henceforth there is only distribution, destinations and restart of the process.
For the latter, the Goal must be expressed in terms of satisfaction of needs, and not of the process of organization or part of it, since its development does not depend on the remuneration of the client for the product or service provided, but on the budgetary allocations that the instances, in which it is inserted, allocate to it. Beyond customer satisfaction there is no further result for these organizations.
In the first type of organization, customer satisfaction is a means of achieving the Goal, in the second it is the Goal itself.
In order to demonstrate their effectiveness, the systems must be able to stay in a constant process of improvement, but it is not possible to concentrate efforts simultaneously on all aspects of the system. Any improvement favors the organization to a greater or lesser extent, but the effect will never be the same if you work on the system's SHORT ROPE, which prevents its progress in order to achieve its Goal.
Once the limiting connection has been detected, exploited and raised, taking advantage of the opportunity it provides to determine the Goal directly and unquestionably, another window of opportunity must be detected again, that is, the next short rope that prevents the growth of the Goal.
If we want the Goal to go further we need to work on the Short Rope because this is the restriction of the system, but would it be worth replacing it with an extremely long rope? Obviously not, because once the length of the next short rope has been exceeded, money will have been invested unnecessarily since another will limit the system and the extra piece will be underused.
Buying all the ropes of the same length is crazy because then all the ropes would be the Short Rope in this case it would be almost impossible to administer.
The best solution is to lengthen the length of the string only to the point where the adjective of Corta objectively changes place.
Every system is invariant of Restriction, that is, it has a single Short Rope that limits its performance. In a system all its parts do not have the same importance or significance at any given time, there is always a Short Rope that defines its existence and opposes the increase of the Goal. There is always something or someone who is below the average level of others.
The very fact that the Goal is dynamic allows the appearance of the Short Rope in the most dissimilar places. And it is this Short Rope that has the greatest influence in the entire system and is, therefore, decisive in terms of the improvement or otherwise of the set, according to the results achieved.
The importance of the Short Rope is evident when the connection with the Goal is discovered, being, then, very easy to prove the need for improvement. It is the multiplying factor of the work on the Short Rope that makes us perceive the power of change in the behavior of the organization in favor of its Goal.
The so-called Butterfly Effect allows us to argue that an infinitesimal change in the length of the Short Rope leads firstly to changes in the total system due to the relationship between its elements and, secondly, to different paths in evolution of the system. The system will always react globally to any stimulus produced in the Short Rope that limits it. This is also known in Systems Theory as the property of Globalism or Totality of the system.
But discovering this relationship of opposites starts from deep knowledge of the entire system, always recognizing that the Short Rope is not permanent, but depends on the conditions to which the system is exposed at a given moment in its development.
This principle of management by elimination of the Short Rope allows to focus clearly on the adverse performance highlighting the relative discrepancies on the performance of a given subsystem and unleash the creativity of the members of the organization towards results that have to do with the objective of total system.
No matter to which area the Short Rope is connected, it is almost always possible to apply transformation actions to "lengthen" it.
There are no short-term solutions for the Short Rope. To mitigate or eliminate its impact, it must be faced. What is commonly done is to attack the symptoms, really until the Short Rope is attacked all efforts will be unproductive.
However, solutions are seldom effective when they are generated spontaneously, it is helpful to have a coherent and simple method that guides the administrative process and makes it easier to find the Short Rope and indicate how and when to lengthen it.
Business Improvement not only "perfects" relationships and functions, it must also perfect the organization in its process, leading it to continuous improvement, an aspiration that cannot be renounced if it is about accessing the common good.
Bibliography
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