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After decades of work with small businesses, I have observed a disturbing style: hard business people try to maximize performance, they become less efficient. This performance paradox affects the business of all sizes, but it is disastrous for smaller companies where every resource is counted.
Mac Cancity Research Shown These small and medium -sized businesses work at 50 % of the productivity of large companies. This space created by misleading performance efforts. Understanding and solving this paradox can change your way to work.
Two types of performance
There is a concept from here Lean thin procedure It changed how I think about business operations. There are two perspectives for performance: resource performance and flow performance.
Resources performance is focused on maximizing the use of your resources. You make work queues to ensure your resources are busy. It is like the author with articles to write, ensuring that he is fruitful for eight hours of his work day.
Flow performance improves speed through your system. Instead of making rows, you focus on moving the work faster through your process. Using a written example, you will interview someone, make an article to the author, review and publish it – no wait, no queue.
The healthcare system provides an excellent example of this. In Canada, we improve resources performance. Experts are fully booked, CT machines run maximum capacity and wait for months to diagnose patients. I have seen that the cancer treatment systems run differently – where patients can see, get scans and get diagnosed in one day. Their CT machines are sometimes useless, but patients get answers immediately.
Here is a contradiction: By trying to maximize the use of resources, we create defects that reduce our operation. You think you are getting effective by keeping all busy, but your users are waiting for months to do what can be done in the days. Side effects can be disastrous: lost consumers, poor relationships, lost opportunities and consequences that are unacceptable.
Related: 6 ways to make your business more efficient
The invisible cost of switching to the context
This performance contradicts not just at the system level – it shows how we create our work. When we try to maximize the use of resources, we call it “Performance Theater” – look busy while becoming less productive.
Consider the invisible cost of switching context. According to ResearchThe change in context, the production capacity is reduced by up to 40 %. Every time you switch between tasks, there is a mental tax. If you make 50 context switches a day, you have paid this tax 50 times. But if you can organize your day to change only five times, you have reduced this waste.
It is directly connected to these two types of performance, which shows contradictions. Resources performance minimizes context – you sell similar work and live in your zone. When a person takes several steps in the process, the flow performance increases the context.
Despite the fines that change the context, the flow performance provides better results by eliminating other waste: delays, rows and work sitting. The purpose is not choosing between resources or flow performance. It is identifying and eliminating everything that hurts your business the most. Sometimes it is switching to context. Sometimes these are the hours of waiting for the customer. Art knows what is important.
This Paul Graham is associated with what he wrote in his Article Makers vs. Manager’s system schedule. When you are in the maker, you need a long, uninterrupted time. In manager mode, you are changing the constant context. Most small business owners try to do both at the same time, causing massive incompetence.
I have learned this difficult way. When I try to write the code in the morning, handle customer calls at lunch, review the financial reports in the afternoon and then go back to coding, I work less than if I dedicated the whole day to specific types of work.
To indicate waste in your system
Understanding this contradiction helps you to waste your system. Ask yourself: Why is it taking such a long time? What unnecessary steps we have included?
I found a major disqualification in the process of our software development around the branching. We had been using long -running branches, working on it for weeks, then trying to integrate everything together. The longer these branches run, the more we have to suffer. We were trying to be effective by allowing the developers to work uninterrupted, but we were creating waste.
The solution was simple: small branches with extraordinary features printed by feature flags. Now, if a branch needs to be run longer, we need daily exemption. The change in this policy eliminated the integration headaches and reduced our bug count. It turned our development into effective flow from resources to effective flow.
Related: Don’t waste money on unnecessary expenses – how is it here.
Balance in improvement with stability
Some business owners resist the change, “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.” This mentality can make you competing. The key is adopting the mentality of permanent improvement – not because something is broken, but to stay ahead.
Think about computer processors. Intel does not wait for his chips to fail before being prepared. They know that competitors are innovating, so they too are essential. When Intel failed to maintain harmony with this philosophy-followed by rivals like Apple’s M-Series chips-we are seeing the struggle of the dominant company once for compatibility. The same applies to your business process.
However, you need the right people. Some members of the team develop on improvement and change, while others prefer stability. Both have their place, but in competitive industries, you need comfortable people with evolution.
The cost of partial work
Another source of waste is incomplete work. Starting something and not completing it before going into the next shiny item creates a partial work waste. Unless you are experimenting or researching, incomplete work represents time in which no return is invested.
Performance paradox teaches us much, it’s not always better. The most effective path involves letting to sit in the resources to maintain the flow. Sometimes this means not to say new steps to complete the current individuals. This means deliberately about how you work.
Start checking your works. Where are you correcting for a busy Nice instead of thropped? Where has a hidden tax of change in context on your productivity become? Improve the flow. How can you sell similar work?
Performance is not about keeping everyone busy – it’s about the delivery of value. Once you understand this contradiction, you can develop a system that serve your business and customers.