Everything is Connected

One Saturday morning in 1997 a postcard landed on my doormat. It showed a photograph, by contemporary artist Gillian Wearing, of a man holding a handwritten sign that read

Everything is connected in life the point is to know it and to understand it.

Somehow, that sign seemed to speak to me in my workplace situation. As a member of a management team in a contact centre seeking to improve customer service I was following received wisdom by working on the performance of individuals. Seeing this postcard provoked a realization, of the organization as a system and of behaviour as determined by that system.

W.Edwards Deming defined a (man-made) system as “a network of interdependent components that work together to try to accomplish the aim of the system.” and the role of management as “to work on the system, to improve it, with the help of those who work in the system” (the equivalent of… “to know it and to understand it”).

In the contact centre, we had been acting as if our purpose was to answer customer calls within an average of 5 seconds, with a maximum wait time of 20 seconds. Seeing the organization as a system meant first of all redefining our purpose and then finding measures that served it , instead of the other way around.

Everything was indeed connected to everything else but in really unhelpful ways. Individual performance was measured using average handling time, wrap time, idle time etc. When we started to study the work flow we found that customer calls were often being passed from one team to another, which could go on for a very long time and often without a satisfactory resolution at the end. This would never show up in our measures, because they were taken at the individual level and aggregated. In fact, we were congratulating ourselves on our excellent customer service (based on our measures), only to find that customers were having a terrible time, and at high cost to them and to us.

Our response was to be clear about purpose and then to focus on the workflow rather than on individual productivity. I remember the day we took away the traditional measures and targets. it was like a weight had been lifted from our shoulders. The feeling, not just of relief, but of joy, was amazing.

Now we could work on the system and its interconnectedness, massively improving customer service, employee morale and cost at the same time (everything is connected).