Human Rube Goldberg Machines

How can every person in an organization be critical, yet the team as a whole is completely ineffective?

They are all working very hard, are very skilled, and are working together extremely well. You’ve looked at every single job and you really can’t remove anyone without the whole team collapsing. Yet costs are high, output is low, and the org as whole is stuck.

You’ve probably seen a Rube Goldberg machine before. It’s those things where a marble knocks over some dominoes that pushes a broom etc etc and long time later the TV is turned on or something. If you removed even a single domino the whole thing would stop working. I think the problem is that we form human Rube Goldberg machines.

Rube Goldberg machines show you can take an arbitrarily simple task and make it arbitrarily complex. And you can do so while every component of the machine remains critical. The CEO tells the director who tells the team lead who tells the procurement manager who tells the vendor who tells the project manager who tells the developer. It happens horizontally as well, the app team gives requirements to the backend team who puts requests to the infrastructure team who has to clear the security team who has to coordinate with the launch calendar. Working between teams is always necessary, but if you’re not careful it can quickly become degenerate.

I don’t think anyone sets out to build human Rube Goldberg machines. Ironically, I think they’re the result of optimization efforts at a geological scale. As organizations grow and shrink, any roles that aren’t on a critical path get cut while jobs attached to critical paths get kept. Overtime, this cycle of deposition and erosion leaves the organizations made up mostly of very long critical chains.

To fix this, you cannot look at things piece by piece. You will correctly conclude that everything is critical but incorrectly conclude that nothing can be done. You have to know what the objectives of the org are, what the actual efficient flows looks like, and do a larger scale restructuring to get there. Practically, I’ve found the most effective way to fix a critical chain is not to try and restructure it live, but instead to build a bypass flow and ramp that up while winding down the inefficient one.

At Open Government Products I try to let the product teams run as independently as possible specifically to minimize Rube Goldberg problems. To be clear, every org structure is going to make some things easy and other things hard. What structure you choose depends on what you’re trying to do as an organization. The trick is to make the common important things easy, and accept clunkiness on things which are uncommon and less important, but that’s something I’ll write more about another time.