Treat Your Company Like a Neural Network
I was recently reading The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies and he was trying to make the case that companies themselves were our first artificial intelligences and it made me ask a simple question:
"If our companies were treated as neural networks, how would we improve their outputs?"
And when I abstracted companies in this manner, I realized something very interesting. You really only have three separate paths to do this:
Improve the nodes (i.e., get better employees or train your employees)
Improve how the nodes are organized (i.e., better systems, processes, org structures etc.)
Improve how the nodes move information to each other (i.e., communication)
Now, the really interesting thing about this thought exercise is that the first two paths cost a lot of money and effort while the third path is free and actually has the largest potential impact. The reason for this is that information speed among the nodes has a multiplier effect where one node being ineffective at communication dramatically reduces the productivity of all the other nodes. So let's talk about how you can improve this path:
Improving Your Company's Neural Network
The two primary pathways to improving the speed at which the nodes within your organization interact are to improve communication and meetings and the below is going to be pretty contrarian:
Inbox Zero:
If you think of your company as a neural network, any information slowly passed between any two nodes dramatically reduces the overall productivity of the network and the effect of even one node performing poorly in this regard can have double digit reductions for the whole network in productivity. Therefore, any employee who has more than a few dozen emails in their inbox should be placed on a performance improvement plan immediately. This sounds severe, but a single slow/poor communicator within your organization is costing you millions of dollars per year.
All emails within your organization should be responded to within 24 hours even if the response is "I saw your email and will respond within five days." One of the most damaging things to a business is a leaky communication web where a single email being "lost" or slowly responded to can create a cascade where a dozen plus dependent processes are slowed down. To achieve inbox zero, employees should treat email like they are working in the 1800's and receiving physical mail - they do not move an email out of their inbox until it is acted upon (i.e., responded to or added to their To Do list as an action item) and they do not let emails pile up or they will be physically consumed by letters. Anything other than an inbox zero policy within your company is having a material negative impact on your bottom line.
Communication Rules:
Define one primary means of communication for your organization which should be email and a secondary form of communication (only one) for only rapid/limited communication (seldom used) which can be text, teams or another channel. The irony today is that all of our communication (e.g., teams, email, slack, texts, etc.) go to the exact same place, (i.e., our phones) and thus adding multiple means of communication does not speed up communication or collaboration but tends to be distracting. Another major cultural problem which this overcomes is that there are signficiant generational differences in how people use technology wherein it is very distracting if three different archetypes of generations within your organization have different preferences for communication (i.e., getting a text to call to discuss a topic which should have been an email).
Meetings:
Parkinson's law dictates that people have a tendency to fill the time required to do a task with the time provided to complete the task. During COVID, businesses were forced overnight to become a lot more productive and efficient due to all sorts of external constraints and businesses rose to the occasion. However, for most organizations, instead of realizing efficiencies (i.e., becoming more productive and profitable), they found ways to fill in the time. One of the most common sinks for this productivity has been meetings and the use of video meetings where today employees spend ~13% more time in meetings than they did in 2019. In other words, your typical SG&A employee has become at the very least ~13% more unproductive in six years.
Simultaneously, during this period of time there was a rise in productivity tools (Teams messaging, Slack etc.) aimed at making teams more productive. However, the irony of these platforms is that much like the entire EdTech space, there is no empirical data showing that these communication platforms make employees more productive. Conversely, there are already multiple equivalent means of communication (i.e., email, text, phone) where at best these approaches add marginal benefit and at worst they lead to continual distractions and negative effects.
You need to work under the assumption that the organization has undergone meeting bloat over the last five years and quantify the current average number of meeting hours per week per employee, Make a target to cut it down 15% in 2 months and 25% in 6 months. The rationale is that if used properly tools like Teams and Zoom should make your team more efficient at meetings and thus you should require much fewer/shorter meetings than you used pre-2019.
To do this, an organization should establish several meeting rules:
Never make a meeting 30 or 60 minutes: Meetings should always be scheduled for abnormal times (10 minutes, 20 minutes, 35 minutes etc.). The reason is that people will have a tendency to fill time when durations are arbitrarily set wherein the time should be deliberate.
No meeting overrun policy: A meeting should end at its designated end time even if the meeting is not finished and poor planning should not affect subsequent meetings.
No brainstorm meetings: No one should ever setup a brainstorming meeting as these tend to be multiple people showing up to a meeting with zero forethought. Instead, the lead for a brainstorming meeting should send along a fully planned idea to the group for review and consideration before the meeting. Organizations tend to be far too concerned with consensus building and collaboration than productivity where there is a thought (an incorrect one) that ideas will emerge through a group out of the ether. While the individual's plan might be 80% wrong, it provides a frame of reference for the whole group to react to instead of having a completely unstructured conversation where none of the fundamental constraints, timelines or background are fully appreciated.
Don’t waste my time rule: You need to have a culture where employees send an email after a meeting to the organizer if they feel it was a waste of their time or if the meeting could have been replaced by an email.
Meeting last philosophy: Meetings today tend to be an excuse for not wanting to independently think or to be bold. Meetings should be a last resort for decision making and discussion within an organization wherein asynchronous email as a form of communication tends to be far more productive. There should be zero meetings to discuss a topic without the leader of the meeting sending along a brief which states: "here is my proposed plan, let me know what you think."
Cost Accountability: When a meeting invite is sent, in the title of the meeting should be the cost of the meeting. If for example, your company's expenses are $200,000 per employee per year, then your one hour meeting invite with eight people should look like this "Discuss XXXXX, Cost >$1,000." This solidifies for your team the connection between meetings and cost which is lost on many employees.
