In the last post I took up Eli Goldratt’s contention that most of us are focussed on efficiency (doing what we are currently doing but doing it better) because that is what we feel we have most control over.  I asked what was missing.  But another way of looking at this problem is not at what is missing – but at what should be!  Policies or practices that we have hung onto that are no longer serving us well in the new environment we are trying to instigate.   Let’s again turn to Goldratt who argues that

“Technology can be beneficial if, and only if, it diminishes a limitation.”

This may be a limitation that we are so used to we take it as the way that life is.  For example 200 years ago, travel was so slow that it was not feasible to work a full day AND also travel ten miles. This meant that if you got a job in another town you moved to that town.  Today many travel much further. Workers 200 years ago would likely not have seen travel time as a constraint, it was ‘just the way that life is’.  The iPhone and the Ipad were great innovations but many of us were not consciously aware of the limitations they diminished – until we got them!

The importance of limitations is that humans are intelligent. When we have a limitation we develop work arounds, rules that help us manage.  But if we do not change the rules (e.g. our work practices, our policies, our regulations) we cannot get the full benefits of the innovation.

Which leads him to ask 4 questions that might be useful for you.

1. What is the power of the new technology or innovation?
2. What limitation does it help alleviate?
3. What is the cost of the work around rule for that limitation?
4. What is the new rule? and its cost?

These questions are not easily answered, especially the last one, but the more I look at them, the more critical they seem to be.

Thoughts?

The reason why we focus on efficiency is because we can.   Doing what we are currently doing – only doing it better, cheaper, faster – is not only within our capabilities it is also within our responsibility levels.  Effectiveness requires going beyond, looking at how what we are doing interrelates with what others are doing.   Doing our thing better will fail to achieve real benefits unless we do. So while efficiency is desirable, it is not enough.  Here is a case in point.

The asset management team proposed that the government build an asset register that would provide information to enable the transfer of property from departments that no longer had need for the resources to those that did.  This, they argued, would enable great savings in both capital and maintenance funds.  So the asset register was built.  It took a number of years and cost many millions of dollars and when completed it did exactly what it was intended to do –  it showed where property was underutilised and where capacity was under strain.

The  expected benefits, however – the transfer of surplus property saving both capital and maintenance funds – did not arise.  Why not?   Because information by itself is not enough.  We also need people and processes that want to and can make use of the information.

In this case no department with surplus property was willing to admit it and hand it back to the Treasury. It knew that if their demands should increase in future, getting expansionary funds would be very difficult, so there was an incentive to disguise and minimise the true extent of under-utilisation.

There was no organisational mechanism. Departments needing to expand would make the case to their Minister, usually done by proposing a specially designed facility.  On approval, these departments had no incentive to settle for hand-me-down space and there was no organisational means to make it happen.

QUESTION:  What project benefits have failed to materialise not because of what you did, but because of what others didn’t?

“We can’t let politicians make decisions, they are so irresponsible!” This was the reaction by a group of academics to the suggestion that politicians should be free to allocate their own weights to various criteria (cf last post on multiple criteria decision making)

I was first introduced to multiple criteria analysis when a UK researcher presented his work on the third Heathrow runway to a university staff seminar. The presentation was enlightening – and so was the reaction of those present.  The senior public servants, who needed to get elected members focussed on the issues, were enthusiastic about the potential to present clear information not artificially constrained by dollar equivalents. But the academics  were truly horrified when the presenter argued that elected members should allocate their own weights. As the people’s representatives – it was their objectives that were key.

In the last post, I asked who should be deciding on the weights.   This is not a trick question but it is a difficult one.  It bedevils serious public servants everywhere, staffers who desire to produce good quality ‘finished staff work’, to be able to anticipate all the problems, all the issues, all the questions, that decision makers could ask, and ensure that they have been addressed.

But this can then slip into believing that, having done all the analysis,  the staffer now knows best what option should be selected and so we get the three card trick –  presenting the decision makers with only three options, two of which are obviously out of consideration for cost or other reasons, so that effectively the decision makers are forced to choose what the staffer has determined.

Multiple criteria analysis, presented honestly without weights, allows decision makers to seriously and knowledgeably to consider the issue. The final decision may not be so predictable but it is likely to have their greater long term support.

On 9 September I wrote a post “Are Politician the real decision makers?” which attracted more comment than most other posts and the commentary was good.  Have a look.

Also see Kim Geedrick’s comment   on the last post

QUESTION TODAY IS GENERAL – YOUR THOUGHTS?

In our post on May 29 we introduced the problem of finding the best solution to the problem of a high number of road accidents on a certain stretch of road in the Adelaide Hills. The Government had decided to address the problem but what was most important to them – reducing the number of accidents, maintaining speed of traffic without congestion, aesthetics (or the ‘general look’ of the solution), minimising social disruption, or containing the cost?

Multiple Criteria Analysis

In this case a multiple criteria solution was adopted.  Each option was analysed by specialists in the particular criteria who estimated the expected outcomes for their criteria, e.g. likely number of accidents reduced, or likely impact on aesthetics, so that each option ended up with five scores, one for each of the criteria examined. No option clearly dominated all others on the five criteria.

To weight or not to weight

At this stage there was a staff debate.  Some thought that each criteria should be allocated a weight which would enable them to reduce each solution option to just one score and thus they would be able to rank the options, as is often recommended in the textbooks on the subject.

Others thought that they, the staff, were not the right group to assign weights but rather that this was the right and responsibility of the decision makers themselves (i.e. the government decision group).  They pointed out that in previous circumstances where staff had assigned their own weights and ranked the options accordingly, the decision makers frequently ignored their ranking recommendations.  Moreover they argued, since the decision makers were unable to see the analysis that had been done on each criteria, it was not taken into consideration and so was wasted.  This group argued that the decision makers should be presented with the results and allowed to decide what weights to assign.

Question for today.  

Which group has the right of it, and why?

The last post observed that every objective has multiple dimensions or elements. Before moving (as promised) to consider how we could deal with this, it is worth considering that while the main element or ‘what’ is likely to remain constant (although not always, see example below) the other elements, the ‘what else’ can change as a result of external events and other projects being carried out or planned.  In addition to the problem of ‘staying on track’,  we also face the challenge that some aspects of importance to decisionmakers may be deliberately hidden from us.

Consider the following

Staying on track

A section of road in the council was subject to major flooding with heavy rainfall and repairing the damage threw the road budget into the red.  It was suggested that creating a wetlands would enable the water to be drained away removing the repair problems and would also provide an attractive tourist feature and provide a number of other benefits.  The council got more and more enthusiatic. However, in the process of considering all the ‘extra’ benefits, they completely lost sight of the original purpose of reducing the costly damage that the regular flooding of the road presented.  They decided they would go ahead with the wetlands – but not in the originally suggested location where it would ameliorate the flooding damage, but somewhere else!

Discovering what is really important. 

The Police department insisted that they needed to own their own regional housing.  There was a ready supply of rental housing in all areas so it was hard to understand why this was important to them.   They argued that with their own housing. it could serve as a de-facto second police station.  Why was this important?  They didn’t want to say. It turned out that police officers are difficult to manage and the ability to send an unruly officer out to a remote regional location at a minute’s notice was a valuable and key deterrent to bad behaviour – but not something that the department was keen to admit to.

Question:

What other elements of understanding objectives have you had experience with?

First, let us get back to basics.  We know that

You are being effective, if your activities achieve the objective or desired outcome. You are efficient when you achieve that objective or desired outcome at minimal cost or effort.

So both effectiveness and efficiency require us to be clear on our objective or‘desired outcome’.  And that is where our first problem arises, for an objective never has just one desired outcome.

Consider the following example:

A particularly tricky stretch of road in the Adelaide hills was causing serious safety concerns.  The government decided to tackle it.  But what was the objective?  Reducing the number of accidents was obviously a front-runner because it had been what initiated the action, but it wasn’t the only concern.  Traffic speed was also important because a growing number of city workers had been moving to attractive locations in the hills so that anything that slowed down traffic could result in major morning and evening traffic congestion.  It tended to be the richer and more influential who could afford a hills location and decision makers were quick to realise that inconveniencing them could  provoke an undesirable reaction.

The hills were a major catchment area, which presented environmental considerations.  They were also a key tourist destination as well as a main entry point for interstate visitors from the east, which meant that aesthetics, or the general look of the solution, was of concern.  Of social consideration was the number of businesses along the route that could become nonviable if the solution required extensive deviations or lengthy road closures.  Finally, there was cost.

This is true of any objective.  It is a composite of features – things we wish to have (in this case safety, traffic speed) and things we wish to avoid (detrimental effects on the environment, on aesthetics, and on the livelihood of businesses along the route)  And all must be accomplished within an available budget.

All members of the government’s decision making group agreed that it was important to reduce accidents, but they had different priorities when it came to the other features.

If you have ever proposed what you considered to be the ‘optimal’ solution only to have it turned down by the board or council, this may well have been the cause – your bundle of features and the importance you gave to each was different from theirs.

How do we deal with this problem?