Experiments On Their Own Aren’t Enough
Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of production — W. Edwards Deming
So, today I’m doing some work around how to best carry out our next phase of research, tests and pilots.
The service design work we’ve been doing over the past 10 months on Bromford 2.0, has definitely broken down some organisational silos.
The challenge going forward is making sure the redrawn service areas don’t form back into their original ways of working. Better and more efficient, sure — but still siloed.
Silos are easy to build but difficult to break. Telling people to collaborate more doesn’t do any good if the management system drives them to a very different behaviour.
My current thinking is that framing work as series of rapid experiments is correct. However it’s not enough on its own as those experiments cannot be done in isolation.
Our challenge is to make sure we avoid reverting to silos — whilst boosting the interactive capacity of small networked teams.
That’s easier said than done — as it really means we need to change the nature of management itself.
