I rarely write about personal issues because I am quite sure no one wants to hear about my daughter, my house sale or what happened to me today at the supermarket (actually it was pretty uneventful). But my frustration has been sparked by a real situation which I think has wider connotations so I will draw on my own life this once.
I am buying a new house. I am selling mine. In this market it is incredible that I have found a buyer who is keen to move and in a position to do so. I assume one or both of the new residents are key workers - teachers or the like - as they qualify for a government scheme which assists key workers to buy a house. I think this is just marvellous. They are excellent buyers, very committed to the house and up front, honest people.
But the government scheme is a joke! The department fell 3 weeks behind and therefore our sale has been delayed. One would think that the government would be doing what it could to help genuine buyers and sellers to move house as this is one way to improve confidence in the market. But the scheme has various waiting periods built in for who knows what reason. For instance, the scheme insists there are 11 working days (11. Why 11?) between exchange and completion. And once they process the documentation (three weeks late) there is also a 7 day cooling off period before exchange can occur.
Why, having waited an extra three weeks while they work through a backlog, would we need 7 days to cool off?
As I said, this event in my life made me think of wider connotations so I will end my specific rant about this scheme (although, I mean, REALLY!).
But what this has made me ponder is how completely inefficient many processes are because they are designed to avoid any human-being being allowed to make a judgment call. It is the same in many businesses. There are processes to be followed which are intended to lead to consistency, good practise, high standards and predictability but actually result in slow processes, bad outcomes, inefficiency and dissatisfied customers (or citizens).
Whilst small businesses like mine duck and dive the current economy, using our brainpower to predict trends, adapt to the new reality, delight customers despite the bigger picture and consequently make quite a good deal of a bad hand, big businesses and government lumber forward making ever slower and slower decisions and becoming tied up in the red tape that was created to protect us.
The root cause - lack of trust in human beings. Systems are largely there to by-pass humans who cannot be trusted to make good decisions on a case by case basis. Of course, this is rubbish, if you train people properly, if you give people reasons to make good decisions, if you develop their skill over time and create work environments that actually enable people to bring the best of themselves to the office and contribute that to the organisation.
It all sounds like wishful thinking doesn't it? I mean we can think of many examples where it seems that a human-being is the problem. But I maintain that the system is the problem not the human. That system begins when we start educating our children, slowly reducing their curiosity, their confidence and their delight in the world and continues throughout our lives so that by the time we become part of the workforce we need systems to save us from ourselves.
It does make me wonder what sort of world we could create if we could value and trust people more and allow them to say "Hey, you've already waited for 3 weeks while we sort out our backlog. Why don't we just fast-track the rest of the process and get you all in your lovely new home?"
Comments