Do Your Controls Create Complexity?

Ron Ashkenas

Do Your Controls Create Complexity?

Ron Ashkenas responds to that question in an article written for the Harvard Business blog. Here is an excerpt.

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Have you ever noticed that organizations are great at creating controls and policies to prevent incidents that have already happened? Once the proverbial cow escapes the barn, they adeptly make sure it won’t happen again by, say, authorizing only certain people to man the exit and constructing barn-door status reports.

While this kind of organizational response does indeed prevent the recurrence of the exact same negative instance (they won’t lose the same cow in the same way again), the accumulation of these “reactive” controls often creates complexity, confusion, and unnecessary cost. Even worse, the new controls usually don’t prevent future incidents of a different kind from occurring.

To be better prepared, organizations should periodically step back and check their operations for these common problems arising from after-the-fact solutions:

[Note: Here is the first of three that Ashkenas discusses.]

1. Static controls for dynamic issues. Anyone who has flown lately — particularly on flights to the United States — has seen the continued accretion of security controls at the airports and on the planes. For example, upon returning to the U.S. from Canada recently, I went through three newly created screenings in three different staging areas. The TSA created these procedures — along with previous ones such as fortifying cockpit doors and not allowing carry-on liquids — to prevent repeats of past attacks, and so far they have worked. However, the continued accumulation of more and more security procedures is not sustainable — and does nothing to prevent new and different attacks. At some point the various security services, along with technology experts and the airlines, will need to come together to develop more preventative, proactive, and streamlined security controls. The only other alternative will be to have nobody fly.

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Every organization has control procedures and policies, many of them created after the fact with the perfectly logical intention of preventing problems from happening again. But unless you periodically step back and assess the cost and benefit of these procedures, you run the danger of creating more complexity than competitive advantage.

So take a look at your organization’s controls. Could they benefit from an update?

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To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.

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Ron Ashkenas is a managing partner of Robert H. Schaffer & Associates and a co-author of The GE Work-Out and The Boundaryless Organization. His latest book is Simply Effective.

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