Organisations need 'things' that work

If your organisation needs a ‘thing’ building - call an ops person.

What do I mean by a ‘thing’? I mean something that people in the organisation use. Something boring, basic, and everyday. A tool, system, process, procedure, etc etc.

In its simplest form-factor, it’s a document or a spreadsheet. (And, honestly, don’t knock spreadsheets as a way of throwing together a quick prototype - and don’t understimate the longevity of quick prototypes either, great performance can be achieved one small, hack-y, low—cost, incremental step at a time).

Although there’s often debate about what ‘operations’ is, I think a key part of it is “building ‘things’ for organisations”.

Ops people like making things work better. We like it when other people’s lives get easier as a result of our work. We cannot bear watching people struggle with the same problem over and over. We leave notes for our future selves when we come back to problems, and make checklists so that we can run repeated activities without using unnecessary brain power and can save our energy for high value problems — and we lead other parts of the business to follow our example. Nothing brings us greater satisfaction than reversing entropy, and creating an island of increased order in the midst of a chaotic world.

This might sound a bit “ABC”, a bit of a basic way of describing what ops is, but this is often the one that I think most knocks CEO-types sideways. If you are the visionary leader type — attracted to starting things and to the opportunity-rich world of unstructured chaos — then it can be a big surprise to know that the integrator type of leader exists. But we do. We are the people ready to pick up just when things become boring for you, and to find a way to make them sustainable in the long term.

The really interesting bit is how you go about building these things. More on that next week.