How Toxic Is Complexity? It Was A Sabotage Tactic In WWII
by Lisa Bodell for ForbesWomen
In 1944, the United States’ Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.) — forerunner to the C.I.A. — wrote a field manual for agents tasked with sabotaging enemy organizations in the name of American national security. Among its recommended strategies? Complication. The O.S.S. encouraged saboteurs to “insist on doing everything through channels”; and “never permit shortcuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions”; and “see that three people have to approve everything where one would do.”
What was a wartime maneuver 78 years ago is now just a typical weekday for most of us. And after interviewing thousands of employees and leaders across the world for my book Why Simple Wins, I’ve come to understand how even the most nimble companies devolve into tangled webs of complexity.
Here’s a two-sentence explanation: As an organization grows, teams proliferate and layers accumulate, increasing the distance between leadership and the frontline. Ideas and decisions slow and stall in every direction, decreasing productivity and innovation. According to Harvard Business Review, adding a manager creates about 1.5 full-time-equivalent employees’ worth of new work. In other words, the work of your newly hired manager plus 50% of another employee’s work responsibility.
A proven antidote to complexity is de-layering — as Bain & Company refers to it — which flattens your org structure to reduce complexity and improve efficiency. While de-layering may seem daunting, you don’t need expensive consultants to identify areas of opportunity. For reference, truly agile companies typically have only three management layers and even the largest ones shouldn’t have more than six. Look at each org within your existing reporting structure and honestly answer the following questions:
· Are there any redundancies? If so, where?