WILO #9 – First principles: a plea from the workforce

The amount of complication in how businesses operate is often eye watering.

One of the privileges in guiding large groups of people through a process to redesign their business from the ground up is helping them see where effort is spent. Thankfully I’m not referring to a time and motion study. Often the simple approaches are the best: ask x50 people to write down the value creating work this business does as it operates today. Then watch and listen to how the group describe their perspectives of reality.

Last week I experienced a good provocation from an individual in a large group workshop:

“Chris, is it really all worth it? For 10 years in my career people just worked out the jobs that were needed, agreed the reporting lines to superiors, and got on with it”

After a little exchange to understand the context they were referencing, it prompted me to ask a question: 'within the context you describe, what are the first principles that the work and jobs are built on?' – a great debate continued about what first principles are and why they are so important in the context of redesigning the business… way beyond jobs, boxes, and reporting lines.

If you take contexts like a military operation or emergency healthcare, people are relentlessly trained on the first principles of their work. It doesn’t mean that how the work is done is any easier than other contexts, nor does it mean the operating model is optimal. But when the pressure is on, operating models in these contexts function in interesting ways to deliver outputs and outcomes.

Defining first principles

The idea of first principles is to strip back a task, problem or opportunity to its basic elements and then reassemble it from the ground up. It’s not an exercise reserved only for when something is ‘designed’ for the first time. And that tends to be the greatest mistake and biggest opportunity.

Operating from first principles is one of the best ways to learn to think for yourself. It helps to seriously challenge simple cause and effect thinking. Thinking and reasoning by first principles challenges often flawed assumptions in both written and unwritten rules on how a task, problem or opportunity is perceived.

Example from practice

A few years ago, whilst working as an internal practitioner, I was involved in the redesign of how an entire business manages risk. Safety and risk is not typically the first contender for experiments on rebuilding something from the ground up, through fear of getting something wrong and disturbing the status quo.

Our first principles in redesigning risk were:

1. Everyone is capable of thinking for themselves: we will operate safer if we coach people to assess the fundamentals of what they are doing and how to apply their own judgement to a situation
2. Providing minimum critical information is a necessity: encourages people to think and assess, not just ‘do’
3. People are capable of amazing results if we trust them to do the right thing

First principles and the status quo

Like many standard operating procedures, the business had taken great comfort in long and complicated rules that attempted to deal with every eventuality. And of course, there was a checklist and audit to confirm responsible persons knew all of the 400+ rules.

Our primary focus for the future solution: educate people to understand the context and principal intent of common chunks of work or decisions. People can then course-correct to different events using their own situational awareness and judgement. If they make an error of judgment, help them to learn from it, not punish them. In this specific case, the common chunks of work were the eight evidenced, common ways something goes wrong when working or selling in this environment.

The big so what here is the business sells tens of thousands of products, many of these potentially hazardous to handle and potentially harmful to customers when sold. If you try and write a rule for every product, the people doing the work quickly lose the plot and simplify things for themselves (with significant variation and risk in the process).

In this use case, the entire approach was redesigned by those that do the work every day, with six principles defined to cover the core tasks involved in safety and risk work (six principles are much easier to work with than 400+ complicated rules).

Results: accidents reduced by more than 25%. Costs arising from accidents fell by more than ￡3m per year. The workforce (not managers) were finding 50% more issues than the previous system and crucially, solved them in the moment.

Using first principles to reconstruct the work system, and educating people on those first principles, helped to drive personal responsibility through the roof. We learnt that when applied to business processes, first principles provide the right balance of expectation and freedom.

Returning to the question: “is it really all worth it, Chris?”

When I posed the question on first principles to the group last week (“within the context you describe, what are the first principles that the work and jobs are built on?”), their conclusion was that the basis of how the work gets done is by applying simple principles to respond to complexity. They gave 4 or 5 really strong examples. These principles are thoroughly trained and reinforced in practice. It is a matter of life and death.

My conclusion to this individual’s dilemma is: I disagree with just designing jobs, sticking an org chart in place, and getting on with it. It really is worth thinking more holistically about the design of work and the coherence with strategic intent. One explanation of why “it’s always worked” is because of the specific context and relentless focus on training first principles of the work and what to do in a high-pressure, life and death situation.

This is identical to the intent of the risk management example: applying simple principles to respond to complexity is better than complicated solutions.

Helping groups see how much complication exists in their current operating model is one of the biggest privileges in doing this work. Followed closely by helping them use their collective genius to redesign how they work in future to dramatically reduce complication, channel their effort into work that really adds value, and get on and implement it (action, not just words).

What about leadership, I hear you say?

Well, my 4-year-old son asks me 157 questions per day. After a few persistent questions I often don’t know the answer. Confronted with impatience and a little ignorance I usually get defensive. But telling a 4-year-old that we can “take this offline” to deflect the good questions simply doesn’t fly.

It is fundamentally about the environment that is created. You don’t get an “empowered”, “agile”, “responsible” workforce culture by putting words on a poster.

The plea from the workforce is to involve them. And to think through the lens of the people who will be doing the work every day. When you design what work the business will do and how it is done, build it from first principles with the workforce. When it comes to managing that work day-to-day, educate-educate-educate the first principles, and stay true to them.

Two of Albert Cherns’ principles of sociotechnical design have never been truer:

1. Minimal Critical Specifications. No more should be specified than is absolutely essential (which requires you to identify what is essential)
2. Design Compatibility. If the objective of design is a system capable of self-modification, of adapting to change, and of making the most use of the creative capacities of individuals, then a constructively participative organisation is needed.

If WILO #9 has piqued your interest:

1. What stands out for you? What is your experience with first principles?
2. Check out ‘Simple Rules by Donald Sull & Kathleen Eisenhardt’ – you can pick up a used copy for less than ￡5.