In the previous chapters we looked inside the building blocks of economical, lovable and reliable products. We also spoke about the design chain, where we discussed that applying the intelligent design approach to every internal product generated as part of the manufacturing process, particularly through efficient communication within the business, is vital for the success of the product being created.

In this article we are going to dive a little deeper into the question of interaction between roles that are parts of the design chain, and speak of one simple but fundamental change that can make the quality of that interaction better.

A typical work environment that involves more than a single human being is built of a multitude of activities that can roughly be split in two large categories: doing work and delegating work. Depending on your role, you may do slightly more or slightly less of each, but, ultimately, you either do something you were told to do by someone else, or request someone else to do something for you.

This implies that whatever the employees are doing for the business, it is almost always something they were told to do by someone else. Even if they are very skilled at what they do, if they were told to do a wrong thing, they would do the wrong thing.

But think about this: being told to do a wrong thing is no different to being told to do the right thing, but in the way that distorts, misrepresents, or obscures the original idea. If a person is told to do a vague something, then the only scenario where that something gets done right is where the person responsible figures out the missing bits on their own. The right person, in the right place may possess just the qualities to figure that something out right – but will you bet your product’s success on that person being there for you every time you need them?

Undoubtedly, many people around us are incredibly skilful and can get the idea of what is expected from them without having it communicated to them clearly. On many occasions a competent, vigilant, and proactive employee can spot that what they were told to do is incomplete, controversial, or wrong, and if they care enough, they may seek help, take charge to correct the problem, or raise an alarm. However, there are also others – perhaps, less experienced, less attentive, insecure, overly secure, introvertial, or simply tired or distracted – that will choose to fill the missing bits to their own beliefs or ignore them and go ahead with whatever they end up with.

The Communication principle of SEQUENCE focuses not only on the self-communication qualities of the actual deliverable, but also on the communication qualities within its manufacturing process. It helps reduce and eliminate the obscurity in the information flows within the organisation by suggesting changes to its culture and work processes. This helps lower the plank for such volatile personal virtues as competence, vigilance, proactivity, level of confidence and sense of ownership, and allows more wrong things to be spotted and eliminated with built-in safeguards rather than extraordinary personal capabilities.

Really impressive is the speed with which the communication error accumulates as the assignment makes its way through the delegation chain. If there is just one level of delegation (manager / performer), the 95% of accuracy of assignment communication can be tolerable, as even the 75% can be. What if we add another level of delegation (manager / line manager / performer)? The 95% accuracy on each level would still give us tolerable 90% of total accuracy, but reduce that to 75%, and you’ll end up with the hands-on worker receiving their assignment with just 56% of cumulative accuracy! If we extend the chain to three levels by, say, adding a trainee, 75% on each level would produce a mere 42% of total accuracy.

That’s why every organisation must focus on making the quality of communication between co-workers its priority. A company that doesn’t pay attention to the way the product assignments filter through its hierarchy down to those doing the hands-on work is risking losing control of the shape of the value it is creating. A team of stellar performers will fail to create anything meaningful if they apply their superb skills to making something that was communicated to them wrongly.

Unfortunately, many companies still practise controversial 20^th century management practices. Strong subordination hierarchies, army-style reporting environments, strict personal accountability for failures, and expendability of labour rarely breed efficient communication culture. It is difficult to focus on communication if your primary preoccupations are covering your behind, safeguarding your job, or earning virtual points to build rapport with your authoritarian boss. In fact, the effect is just the opposite: those distorted “career goals” encourage employees to make their communication intentionally vague to leave the back door open for shrugging off responsibility.

As for those companies that are genuinely looking to make their internal communications better, there is one interesting trick that may help improve their efficiency without rebuilding all the processes from scratch. This is called the Customer and Service Provider model (CaSP).

In a nutshell, whatever the organisational structure of the business is – hierarchical, functional, or product-based – co-operation between pairs of individual roles within this structure can be viewed as a generic Customer / Service Provider relationship:

• Manager and Subordinate: the manager (the customer) orders a member of his team to produce a work package for him. The team member (the service provider) fulfils the order by generating a certain scope of work.
• Engineering lead and Procurement lead: the engineer (the customer) places an order for a tool with the procurement department (the service provider). The procurement department fulfils the order.
• Senior developer and Junior developer: the junior developer (the service provider) provides routine legwork service to the senior developer (the customer) by gathering stats, building prototypes, and trying out various hypothesis. In turn, the senior developer (now the service provider) provides regular mentorship service for the junior (now the customer).

The entire business machine can thus be imagined as a multitude of mini-products, being ordered and delivered by the employees and departments of the business to each other, over and over, day to day. From this perspective, each department is a little business of its own, as are individual employees. The trick is to realise the presence of that perspective and accept it consciously as part of your organisation’s work culture.

What’s the deal here? Thinking of a work transaction as a business transaction changes a lot in how you communicate it – last but not least by introducing the arm’s length principle:

• The “customer” puts more thought into defining their objectives clearly and setting up verifiable acceptance criteria.
• The “service provider” pays more attention to the set objectives when performing the work and packaging the completed deliverable.
• Everybody is clear on their role in the relationship.
• The business nature of the relationship removes the personal component from the scene (any criticism is now about the “business”, not personality). This makes it easier to report issues or push harder on the objectives.
• Standards of doing business are well-instilled in all of us (everyone can feel the difference between a reputable service and a monkey business). This influences how we think of the service we request and the service we provide – we know, consciously or subconsciously, what good quality looks like.

Some companies, like Amazon, are known to have taken this product model to the next level, by formally separating business units into self-contained, startup-like mini-businesses that co-operate with each other in the ‘sandbox market’. This certainly vouches towards the efficiency of this model.

Viewing the company as a web of service providers is a good first step in introducing the well-built design chain, as it helps bring clarity to the inter-company relationships. The tricky matters of accountability and responsibility boundaries, but even more so of self-responsibility and self-imposed quality standards, become much more tangible simply because the collaborators put the Customer and Service Provider hats on. The Customer realises that they can demand quality, and the Service Provider realises they must provide it – and both know what it should look like. The CaSP model also brings in another crucial capability. It helps bridge the competence gap. We will speak about it in the next chapter.