Got a Swamp? Drain It!
By
Jim Strebler
Senior Consultant
Much earlier in my career, I had many conversations with a friend who
I’ll call “Fred” (I call him that because that’s his name) about
problems in organizations and what to do about them. Those conversations
often lasted well into the night. We didn’t solve world hunger, but we
did solve many organizational problems. Even though our discussions took
place almost
20 years ago, they are just as relevant to business today as they were
then.
Fred had a name for things that didn’t work the way they were supposed
to and which forced people to find ways around the problem. He called
them “swamps.” Swamps could be processes, computer systems, bottlenecks,
policies, or people. The common ingredient was that everyone had to find
ways to navigate past them.
A department that is too backlogged to get work done in a timely
manner—resulting in customer service calls and complaints—is a swamp. A
computer program that doesn’t handle a certain transaction correctly and
causes a workaround is a swamp. A procedure that requires the signature
of someone who isn’t always available or who sits on the paperwork is a
swamp. Most people have no problem identifying swamps; every
organization seems to have some hanging around. Many times,
organizations become so used to working around an issue that they accept
it as the norm, not a problem.
People just learn to deal with swamp problems unthinkingly. Here is a
shameless plug for the value of outsiders like Nolan consultants: they
can quickly identify the swamps and the impact they are having on
organizational performance. Also, outsiders can prescribe fixes that
might be too politically unpopular for others to suggest.
Fred and I believed that each time an organization created a workaround
or revised their activities in any way to accommodate an inefficiency,
they were building a bridge over the swamp. When they did something
different to avoid the swamp, they were building a path around it. The
real solution, we agreed, was to stop building those bridges over and
paths around the problems. Instead, drain the swamp—just fix the
problem.
It was surprising then—and is still surprising now—that the stroke of
the pen can almost entirely fix many swamps. Sometimes, it is as simple
as someone saying “Let’s stop requiring a second signature” or “Let’s
stop filing an extra copy of those documents.” Not all swamp issues have
stroke-of-the-pen resolutions, but many have solutions that are not that
difficult to implement.
Whether draining the swamp involves a little re-engineering or revising
an outdated policy, the results are worthwhile. People’s jobs become
easier, more work is accomplished, and the work is done faster. A side
benefit of swamp draining is a new operational tone that conveys ‘We’re
here to do things right—and we will!’
The steps to fix swamps are easy to follow:
- Identify the swamp issues.
- Document how the swamp is being bridged or worked around.
- Determine how often they occur (every transaction or only once
in a while?).
- Find the low-hanging fruit (things that can be fixed with
minimal activity or by just stopping something).
- Drain the swamps that are easy to fix, that really impede
accomplishment, and that impact a significant number of
transactions.
Draining the swamp is not that hard, and
it pays great dividends to the organization. It allows you to get
rid of those “muck boots” people have to wear to get things done.
And, you just do business better.
