Simplification is a lot tougher than it seems. AG Lafley summed it up best when he said:
“I think there is something about bureaucracies that turn inward, especially successful bureaucracies. They… get a lot more fascinated by the operation of the bureaucracy than what’s going on in the world around them” (AG Lafely, interview with E.H. Edersheim in “The Essential Drucker”) 
I was reading a “Put a name on it” post from Seth Godin earlier this week and he suggests one reason bureaucracies build such silly/complex processes is because of the anonymity of the policy author once the policy is in place. His suggestion is to provide an owner to each policy/process so our customers can go find the right person to complain to when the policy turns out to be garbage.
I admit, I have been a part of the problem. When I was SAP validation in our pharmaceuticals division, I approved some pretty complex procedures that were logical on paper, but when we put the procedures in place, the process was darn near impossible to jump through all the hoops in one try (rework = waste). When I started receiving the frantic / frustrated phone calls from my internal customers, my first instinct was to defend the process (see the Ikea Effect) but after about the second or third phone call, AGs quote from above rang in my head.
Linking this back to Seth’s posting, my new learning is that ideally the customer should know how / who to contact to get the process changed when the practitioner finds the process is wasteful or unworkable. At the very least, the enforcer of the process should have a clue as to why the process is in place and who to contact with when it becomes unworkable.
While this might be an urban legend, the extreme case is the banana-monkey-ladder case my brother reminded me of earlier this week.
Shawn Grubb
