Essential Dynamics with Derek Hudson

The cost of systems dysfunction is high. Let me count the ways...

Derek Hudson and Dave Kane are at Unconstrained.

Full show notes are on the Essential Dynamics Wiki.

What is Essential Dynamics with Derek Hudson?

Join Derek Hudson as he explores Essential Dynamics, a framework for approaching the challenges facing people and organizations. Consider your Quest!

Derek Hudson:

Welcome to Essential Dynamics. I'm your host, Eric Hudson. Essential Dynamics is a framework we've been developing to help us think through tricky situations, and Essential Dynamics Podcasts as a way to explore those ideas using deep conversations with interesting people. I'm joined today with my colleague, both at Unconstrained and on the podcast, Dave Kane. Dave, welcome back.

Dave Kane:

Hello there.

Derek Hudson:

How are you doing?

Dave Kane:

I'm doing, I'm doing well. It, you know, it's been a good week, and I'm kind of looking forward to continuing the conversation that we started. I think we opened a few doors there, and, there's a few pieces I'd like to explore a little bit more before we get too far along here. So

Derek Hudson:

So, do you have that encapsulated in a kickoff question or something?

Dave Kane:

Yeah. Because I I mean, last time we we sort of introduced this, you you coined the systems dysfunction. We started talking about why systems were were sort of everywhere within, you know, organizations as well as nature and and machines and stuff, But they're not always running as well as they could and so you sort of got into the the systems dysfunction piece. I think the other piece we sort of popped across was, you know, this is common, like, it's, it's not always our fault that we have this because systems, they just sort of organically exist within organizations if they're not intentionally addressed. But it's just the way we're taught and the way we're brought up in the workforce and the way we're in our silos in education and those types of things.

Dave Kane:

And it's hard. It's like everything is sort of structured to discourage the conversations around systems. So I like the idea of, of sort of exploring a little bit more and I'd I'd really like to get into, you know, what are the consequences of not looking at it as a system and and always being in a silo. So I know you've had a lot of experience sort of on on the planning and the leadership side. So, and I I think you've been in organizations that have had systems dysfunction, and I think you've also found the flow.

Dave Kane:

So, I kinda wanted to sort of quiz you on a little bit of what happened because you didn't have it, and then how did that get fixed?

Derek Hudson:

Is that the con you hear that? Yeah. The consequences of, systems dysfunction. Well, you know, one comes to mind, which isn't, you know, our organization or anything other than an ex experience that, well, because it was important and intense, you just remember to notice a little bit more. About 13 years ago, my wife and I were in Hawaii and, we'd been there one day, we were exploring a really cool, little cove and following an established path, that wasn't a good path, and she slipped and fell, And bounced about 15 feet down to the rocky beach, and broke her ankle and, a couple of vertebrae and blocked her head and, and had a bit of a concussion and lacerations and bruises and Yeah, it was, it was pretty awful.

Derek Hudson:

And so she ended up being in the Hawaii healthcare system, for 10 days before making it back to Alberta. And you know, we have a public system and they have a private system, and we watch the private system operate, and then we watched the interface with the public system, and then we watched the public system operate when she came back. And, there was just, it was just an example of, as users of the system, we were having an experience, when particularly my wife was having an experience, that wasn't flowing all that well, and it was nobody's fault. And in this case, it was, you know, 2 jurisdictions colliding, but here's the one situation I wanna talk about. In the US, even though it's a private system, you can't refuse somebody care, and you can't discharge someone who still needs care unless they're going to someplace that has care.

Derek Hudson:

So my wife's in the hospital, she's got a back brace, she's got a soft cast on her ankle. She needs surgery because her foot's not connected to her leg anymore. And she needs surgery, and they decided it would be better to do that in Alberta so she could get the post op care and stuff like that. But the problem is they can't move you to a hospital, unless that hospital has a bed for you. And in the US, they would book ahead, and they would do a transfer, and they'd figure it out, and the insurance would follow, and everything would be fine.

Derek Hudson:

But changing jurisdictions, you don't book a bed in an Alberta hospital most of the time, and especially if it's sort of a trauma situation. And so we were able to, you know, was we were talking to some friends of ours in the system, find an orthopedic surgeon who, who basically said, I will tell the Maui hospital that we have a bed for you. Yeah. Come to emergency and, tell us your name and you will be triaged and eventually you will be admitted. And there will be a bed for you, but there's no bed for you until you show up.

Derek Hudson:

And, so that that's how the system worked, and our insurance actually covered an attendant. So a paramedic flew from Toronto to Maui and sat with my wife and, accompanied her, on the on the trip, in 1st class. Not me, but the 2 of them, on the way back and right up to the hospital until she was admitted and then and then went on her way. And so, she had great care and the surgery was awesome, and she just made a great recovery. But the system was not functional in the sense that there was a handoff that, you know, was pretty obvious how it could happen, and it took us 3 days or something to figure out how to explain that, to both sides so that it would actually work.

Dave Kane:

Right. So this the system, you know, worked well, except for, yes, this this information gap or information flow blockage that sort of held the whole process up for you.

Derek Hudson:

Yeah. And and, you know, we typically talk about a single organization, but how many times have we seen, as a customer or as an employee in an organization, see those things break down where, yeah, the information or the approval or the materials aren't where they need to be, and the process stops. And also, a lot of times, the accountability stops. And so

Dave Kane:

And that's that's a good point. Like, when we're talking systems, it's not always contained within the organization itself because, you know, when you when you're looking at, you know, your oversimplification last time of, you know, input process output, not always single organizations are doing that. You have to be working with others in order to get the output you need. Yeah. So systems go beyond the boundaries of of your organization.

Derek Hudson:

A really good example of that was when, an oil tanker went aground in in the Suez Canal, in the Gulf, wherever it was. And, all of the flow of cargo ships in the Middle East stopped. And, that affected all kinds of organizations who could think of themselves as a system, but they have inputs coming from all over the place. So, yeah, there's a there's a great interdependency, but for our purposes, we also see that within the boundaries of an organization. Right.

Derek Hudson:

And there's maybe less of an excuse for allowing that to happen. You talked in your sort of opening question about silos get in the way, and the silos affect things like visibility and, attention or accountability. So if you're, if you're the sales part of the organization, your job is to make promises and write them down. If you make vague promises, or over, ambitious promises and then feed that into the system, someone down the line is not gonna perform. And the question is, does the salesperson see that?

Derek Hudson:

Do they know? Do they care? But that's a, that's a very, very, very common problem that you'd have. There would be an indication of systems dysfunction is you make promises that you can't meet and then push that off to the next level in the organization to deal with.

Dave Kane:

So so circling back to the the question of, you know, the consequences of system dysfunction, whether it's in that sales one or, you know, in, in the hospital side of things. In that example, the, the consequences of that were both, financial Mhmm. To the system, as well as sort of that, the customer experience, if we wanna go marketing and or hospital side of, of these types of things. So the, they're probably not seen as, as you know, these large blockages when somebody was looking at the whole thing, they They just sort of figured, oh, we just have to make sure there's a bed to go to for for a whole lot of safety reasons, that kind of thing. But when the system is sort of put into motion and you realize there's that blockage there, that one little thing is going to result in financial consequences, customer relations consequences, like, it sort of it has its impacts on your performance as well as your future.

Derek Hudson:

Yeah. And and so there's like pain and suffering or unrealized, expectations that customers have. There also tends to be a lot of work, that seems necessary, but that wouldn't be necessary if there was flow in the system. What do you

Dave Kane:

mean by that?

Derek Hudson:

So things like, sort of an expediting function, or, customer complaints department, things like that, where there's a system, a subsystem that's been developed just because the system isn't flowing.

Dave Kane:

Right.

Derek Hudson:

That's what I'm saying.

Dave Kane:

And so you could That's what I'm saying.

Derek Hudson:

You could invest the effort into getting the system to flow, and instead, you are trying to patch up and remediate because it didn't flow. You and I were in a conversation yesterday with a client, where they talked about the difference between having the customer open a box and find a defect, having an inspection team at the end of the line find a defect, and designing a system that would never allow a defect to

Dave Kane:

get that removed. Reach those guys. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Derek Hudson:

There's a there's there's a also a cost in time. And, you know, in the health system, where this is kinda how we measure it, because we don't pay in the public system, You know? You know? You don't pay per transaction. Obviously, our tax is funded, and so the the the measurement is a wait list.

Dave Kane:

Yep. And and how you know, the time probably makes things more difficult or more expensive to fix. You know, the other example is is so so much of the work that you do, at least that I did in in sort of the corporate services areas, if I just had, you know, the information flow better, I would have got to the result a lot faster rather than, you know, going through all these processes and learning E pieces later on or not being integrated with those providing the service, those generating the value, I didn't have the information, and we're operating separately trying to achieve the same cause because there was no flow. And so my time, you know, ends up getting done on things that either aren't needed or could have been done in half the time. So there's cost to that as well.

Derek Hudson:

So so let's talk about that, in terms of consequences of systems dysfunction as an employee. It's demoralizing, to be given a task, and maybe even in the context of it's explained to you why it's really important. And then within the organization, not be able to get to the information that you need to complete the task, to complete the task and then not be able to report it to your customer because they're too busy, or to be able to, you know, sort of hand your work in and then see nothing change in the system. That's at some point, you approach your new tasks with less enthusiasm.

Dave Kane:

You impact your energy flow.

Derek Hudson:

That's right.

Dave Kane:

You have this drain on it. Yeah.

Derek Hudson:

And so to kind of, be you know, just work from your own, sense of, you know, your own moral compass and your, your sense of, being responsible and, putting in the effort for the, for the salary you get, that can only compensate so much for contributing to, you know, the the the natural addition of value that you could place on the system as it as things move down the line. Like, the feeling a part of it is, I don't know whether the times when that's happened, that's so motivating. And when you feel like it's there's futility, it's very, very, demoralizing and demotivating. And and so the the cost of, of a bad system isn't just felt by the customers, it's felt by the participants as well.

Dave Kane:

Yeah. And and your ability to get the most out of the people working for you. The resources you have, if you wanna look at it in a terrible way like that.

Derek Hudson:

Well, yeah. Yeah. So on one hand, it's there's a more efficient use of resources. And on the other hand, if you if you think of people as people and not as resources, they're they have a way better experience when they know that they're contributing, and they and they and they see that value move through the organization. Mhmm.

Derek Hudson:

The other thing that gets lost with systems dysfunction, I think, is, any kind of visibility to where the real problems are.

Dave Kane:

Because I I know we've said before that, you know, the value of a high functioning system is it it sort of identifies the areas that need attention, and it's sort of this self reinforcing loop. You're sort of saying the reverse of that.

Derek Hudson:

Yeah. Yeah. If, if there's so much noise in the system and so much chaos, then when something really, really bad goes wrong, you can't find it. You don't know what happened. Yeah.

Derek Hudson:

But when, but when you, when you have flow, and there's a disruption, you know it, and and you can pinpoint.

Dave Kane:

And you can react to it quickly.

Derek Hudson:

You can react quickly.

Dave Kane:

And mitigate the challenges. Yeah. Yeah.

Derek Hudson:

I see. So then another thing that, systems dysfunction, and this is a, I don't know if it's a cause or an effect, but we always talk about purpose as the starting point. If you're not clear on your purpose, then it's easy to allow system dysfunction to accumulate, which is gonna further obscure your purpose. And you and I have worked in the public sector, we've worked at with not for profits as clients. They are more a little bit more susceptible to, dilution of purpose because they don't ever have a profit motive, which is at least some kind of centralizing, force.

Derek Hudson:

And so the more dysfunction there is in the system, the harder it is to figure out what you're even trying to do. And so from time to time, you have to have this purge of, you know, purpose programs, value streams, trying to figure out why are we here and what are we doing. Mhmm. And that's

Dave Kane:

The the consequences of that that I've seen is then you just get into a position of doing stuff for the purpose of of being seen as doing stuff. Yeah. You know, you're not exactly sure whether it's, you know, improving the system, but it's I'm I'm I'm active, I'm doing this piece, and I can demonstrate an outcome from it.

Derek Hudson:

I I was in, this is back in the business process reengineering days in the nineties, but I was in a meeting that I'm sure I was, yeah, facilitating and organizing, and we were mapping out the strategic planning process of this organization. And I was very naive. I was learning a lot, but I wasn't didn't know a lot. And so we had this flowchart and about 10 or 12 people, and we said, let's figure out which of these steps you're at value. Without very much context from a system point of view, but let's figure out what ones add value.

Derek Hudson:

And, and I'm gonna be kind of facetious and exaggerate, but one person's job was, to print the reports and put them in the blue binders. And the next person's job was to take the blue binders apart and put them into file folders and pass them on. I'm being very ridiculous. But the blue binder person, you know, we said, well, you know, what about that step? And, and the the answer was, well, I, you know, I'm adding value because the next step requires blue binders.

Derek Hudson:

And I'm like, oh, that's what I finally learned. Like, of course, everyone does something because they have a downstream customer that's, you know, looking for it.

Dave Kane:

Demanding it. Yep.

Derek Hudson:

But, woah, like, we gotta go way back and say, what are we trying to accomplish here? And how do we turn our input into output? Like, how do we actually, you know, change it, change data to information, to a decision, to an action? How do we, you know, put sub assemblies on it in a in a, final a finished component or finished product? You know, we lose that perspective.

Derek Hudson:

And so if you have systems dysfunction, and you're in the middle of it, you have no way of actually functionally being able to improve the system. You don't know if you should just walk away from your desk and it would be better.

Dave Kane:

Yeah. And and and you're right, and when there's this, you know, it's almost like a chaos when the system isn't strong or there's dysfunction. As you're talking about it, my mind keeps going back to the silos, which seem to be the nemesis of a system, and it's those types of environments that that sort of reinforce the silo thinking. And and I I've seen, you know, attempts to try and get past that where, when you come to say your your business planning for the year or your strategic planning and the organization comes up with the 4 or 5 common themes or initiatives everybody wants to go for, We're gonna work on these four things as a company, and then they take it down into the silos, and everybody builds their own initiative that's gonna use those words and and come back to it, but they're never interlinked. And it just it it reinforces that piece to the point at which everybody working on it feels, oh, I have a cause and a reason for doing it.

Dave Kane:

They don't get the chance to step back and see that big picture and or they don't have the tools to say, well, how is this touching the value stream? Or how is this implementing the system? It just it it drove me crazy of the language was there and everybody thought we were sort of working on it as a system, but as soon as things go back towards the silos, as soon as you're sort of working on a piece in isolation, you're you're increasing the chances of this dysfunction.

Derek Hudson:

So we're gonna pick this up and talk about the opposite. We're gonna talk about system flow. I'm Just for a minute here, I'm gonna try and try and bridge the 2 a little bit. And that is, to our listeners, if you're in a leadership position in an organization, ask yourself the question, to what degree are we experiencing system dysfunction and why do we put up with it? And if you're in any other position, like sort of below that and or a consumer of a of a systems output or whatever, and you're not happy, ask the same question.

Derek Hudson:

Or, you know, am I experiencing am I part of systems dysfunction? And, why do I put up with it? And the answer is like and if you're not gonna put up with it, the answers are different if you're a leader than they are if you're, you know, a cog in the wheel. But the cost of systems dysfunction is so high, both in productivity, which we've talked about before, and in feeling good about yourself as a person that I don't think we should

Dave Kane:

And as a customer. Yeah.

Derek Hudson:

Yeah. As a customer. Yeah. I don't think we should accept it. And so, I mean, I guess, my t shirt, man, my vote for the t shirt from last time is it's the stupid system, and we we don't have to put up with it.

Dave Kane:

Yep. And asking those questions to the different viewpoints of the leadership or those within the system, you know, perception is not always reality, and and people don't always identify and and notice the system's dysfunction unless you're either stepping back or feeling the frustration.

Derek Hudson:

That's right. You might feel there's something amiss and you can't put your finger on it, stepping back is a good one, getting in touch with the customer, understanding what the customer is experiencing is another good one, or even just your downstream customer if you can't manage to see to the end of the process. But there's no end of dysfunctional systems out there. But most of them haven't been tagged like that, and most of them don't have, an advocate that's trying to move to flow.

Dave Kane:

Okay. Well, I know you have your views on on flow and how that helps these things, but let's leave it here, put this out there, and then, you know, talk to a few more people, get a few more stories that that we aren't a part of and haven't heard of, and and see if we can come back with a bit more of a solution on, okay, how do I how do I identify that dysfunction, and how do I achieve the flow to get past it?

Derek Hudson:

Well, well, thanks very much, Dave. And so to our listeners again, if you have stories of systems dysfunction that you wanna share, even on a on a confidential or no name basis, please do because we're we're students of, systems dysfunction and systems flow.

Dave Kane:

And you we have our hypothesis, but it's good to test them. The the the more times you test them and refine them, I think, then we come back and share them, and then everybody can sort of take a little piece away from it. So

Derek Hudson:

Yeah. It's it's all about the learning journey. That's for sure for us. Well, thanks very much, Dave. Brynn Griffiths, thanks very much for, pushing the record button and making it sound good.

Derek Hudson:

And everyone thanks for, as always for listening and, and sharing your ideas. I'm Derek Hudson and until next time, consider your quest.