A System of Two

My wife and I split household responsibilities. She handles the family’s food preparation, and I handle all of the cleanup.

So after she cooks a great meal, I swoop in and scrub, wipe, and wash everything.  

In essence, we’ve created a system with a division of labor, and it works well for us.

But consider the cheese grater. (A strong candidate for sentence-of-the-day.)

Our kids love cheesy foods, so Jes grates a lot of cheese in her cooking. And because she uses it so often, she requests that the grater always be cleaned and ready for action.

This means a lot of hand-scrubbing of the cheese grater, which I find a very tedious, time-consuming task. (You might even say it grates on me.)

I prefer to clean it in the dishwasher, but this causes delays that interfere with her food prep.

She wants grated cheese. I want easier-to-clean alternatives.

Even our little system of just two people is experiencing friction.

On the occasions when I prepare meals for the kids, I prefer to simply cube or dice the cheese with a knife and cutting board, as this makes for a very easy cleanup.

If Jes were in charge of cleaning the cheese grater a few week, I think she’d come around to my viewpoint and start dicing/cubing instead of grating.

But since we divide the responsibilities, it’s difficult for us to have these shared perspectives without purposeful communication and discussion.

Business Application

So we see friction even in a simple, two-person system where everyone is working for the grater good (okay, that was the last one).

Now consider a bank’s commercial lending department with its byzantine processes and protocols. The work quality of people on the front-end directly impacts the work quality of the people on the back-end, and vice versa.

And everyone has an opinion on how everyone else can do their job better and improve the overall system.

The underwriters are driven nuts by the bankers. The due diligence staff thinks that the loan coordinators are out of their minds. And on and on.

And it’s no different in other industries, from health care to running a restaurant.

With so many people filling so many disparate roles in a very complicated process, friction is inevitable.

Just as with me and Jes, the key is to provide productive feedback loops that allow for shared perspectives and understanding, as this will ultimately improve the overall system and mitigate future build-ups of friction.

If communication channels are not built into the system, those working within the system are sure to experience frustration, tension, and inefficiencies.

(Or I suppose we could just start buying grated cheese.)

Comments

[Jessica]

Blog as marriage counselor, I like it.

Up next, "Over or Under: A Tale of Two Rolls (And Its Implications for Customer Service)"

:-)