Dear CEO: Moore's law just killed you!

In the age of manufacturing, precision and efficiency created the margins that made competitiveness for companies. The faster and more precise someone could produce, the higher the value. Six Sigma in the 90s served this mission very well. Today efficiency does not deliver the benefits it previously did. There is a new game in town called Ashby's law.

Mass production followed Moore's law. Today's service and experience industry run on Ashby's law.

Where Six Sigma's mission was to reduce variants, progressive businesses today need to increase variants to create more value. The reason for this is that Ahsby's law outperforms Moore's law. Six Sigma is excellent at fundamental product development. The essential features of a car or email software are commodities. They do not contribute to any margins anymore. Moore's law says that more value is created when things get faster. I am being simplistic here, but people have believed that if tech gets faster, the weight increases similarly for decades.

This is not true. A simple question is all it takes to debunk this myth. When was the last time you thought your laptop was experientially faster than the one you had before? I can't remember that to be true for the previous 15 years.?

In 2022 I was part of a large IT business service deployment. The strategic approach was the classic approach of reducing variants and gaining efficiencies for the business. The business and its network of companies did run many instances ineffectively. However, one can run multiple companies on a single example of an app, which might not represent the company's unique process.

For my TeamOps, service design and design thinking background, the first thing to do is the discovery phase. I generally found it to be the most revealing and highest-value phase of any project. It usually evidences if a problem is real or not. It tends to allow pivoting towards a higher value target.

Unlike any other project, it showed many flaws in the business cases of programmes. It was sometimes uncomfortable to look at the linear or tame efforts, which had not considered how human beings would react to the tools and the new processes. The tool solutions that a few people in a room had thought up did not align with what was required in the companies they would be deployed to. It sounds like an obvious miss, but trust me, I have seen this in some variation in 5 out of 5 of my last projects over the previous years.?

Unlike most projects, there was zero effort made to ask or talk to the companies who would have to adopt new processes towards their existing processes and how they would transition. The problem context was not made part of the initial programme investment. A few months later, it was evident that the programmes did not know what they needed to produce to fit into what the companies needed. The whole deployment effort failed. Millions were lost. The company did not provide the variants that the companies required. Six Sigma told them to have a cookie-cutter approach to the way forward. The companies rejected the engagement and responded in non-adapting any new toolings or process changes.

The problem is that businesses still invest and base their transformation efforts on Moore's law and Six Sigma, not Ashby's law.?

Companies keep thinking that software and people processes can be replicated and performed identically like a mass-produced product in every location they apply it to. Oddly the last time I asked senior leadership about that being realistic, they replied that it is not. So how do we solve that paradox that companies understand that cookie-cutter does not cut it, but transformation programmes apply this philosophy regardless?

Why do we set ourselves up for failure? Why do we embrace flying blind? Is this the Dunning-Kruger effect in action yet again?

Ashby's law tells us that the system will run us over if we do not create more variants. In reality, this means our solutions and investments will fail. We have the tools to create variants. Let's do it. Let's enable our teams to go for it. Spending 4-6 weeks looking at reality is worth exponentially more down the line of any project. Peter Drucker knew this. Project cost dynamics have shown this.

Love the problem, not the solution. Experiment like there is a tomorrow!

Does your company still chase Moore's law or embraces Ashby's law?

Exciting times ahead!

#wickedproblems #teamops #thewickedcompany