Obstacles or Bottlenecks?

The Wall Street Journal carried an article today on Eli Lilly’s success at bringing a new diet drug Mounjaro, to market. One feature among several, of their success: The company eliminated multiple committees that vetted decisions about drug development. There are two reasons why a committee system can slow down decisions. In the first, a?committee is simply not value adding. For example, it certifies decisions taken elsewhere but exists to publicly affirm them, for example to ensure that particular people and their constituents feel included rather than excluded.?The committee is performative rather than substantive in nature. The practice of reengineering identifies such non-value adding steps and proposes that they be eliminated. We can describe such unnecessary steps as obstacles, much like an unnecessary barrier on a highway that creates traffic jams.?

The second reason a committee can slow down a decision is that while it is essential it is under-resourced, for example the committee is poorly staffed resulting in multiple meetings, or members, feeling squeezed by other priorities, fail to show up, thus delaying discussion or votes. This is a bottleneck. Decisions?must flow through the committee, but the committee cannot operate at full capacity. This is like an unmanned toll booth. Drivers must pass through and pay the toll, but the toll collector is absent. (At least in the days before electronic toll collecting!)?We use bottleneck analysis as developed by Eli Goldratt to identify such rate limiting steps.?

One reasonable question is why obstacles and bottlenecks persist. One hypothesis is that both politics and psychology play a role. In the case of the obstacle, a committee might be just performative, but it is one way to keep the peace and protect the standing of key executives. It is a compromise formation.?In the case of the bottleneck, committee members are focused on their parts of the system, the domain of their own responsibilities, without considering their relationship to the whole, that is, the role they play in integrative decisions that cut across divisions and apartments. They are ambitious for themselves and their units, but not for the whole organization. So they don’t treat the committee with the seriousness it deserves. Both reasons suggest that in constructing a committee system that is requisite to the task we can't simply think of it as a challenge in social engineering– just putting executives in the right places at the right times– but also a human issue linked to standing, status, and ambition.?

Larry Hirschhorn Director, Dynamics of Consulting. www.dynamicsofconsulting.net