Anyone who has read ‘The Goal’ by Eli Goldratt, the original brain behind the theory of constraints, will remember the story in the book about Herbie, the slowest walker in a scout group in a cross-country walk. Herbie was the bottleneck, in that he set the pace of the others, as the group did not want to leave Herbie behind in the woods.
One solution would have been to just get Herbie to walk faster, but that would have moved the ‘bottleneck’ position previously held by Herbie to the next slowest walker.
Whatever they did, the line of walking scouts would spread out, particularly going uphill, and then squeeze back in, going downhill. A walking accordion.
How do you prevent such a hard to manage outcome?
You get everybody to walk at the same cadence, with the same step length.
Standardisation of all aspects of the stride of each scout and the distance between each, would ensure that they stayed exactly together, in unison.
Armies call it ‘marching’.
I call it ‘Standardisation’ when applied to any context other than ‘walking’.
Marching enables groups of soldiers to arrive at a destination at the same time, in unison, that both gives the soldiers a sense of ‘belonging’ and looks intimidating to any opposition who might turn up to fight. Remember the opening scenes of the movie ‘Gladiator’? The Romans were in their ‘Centuria’ operating as one, but in coordination with the Centuria around them. The ‘barbarians’ who substantially outnumbered the Romans fought as individuals. You know who won. (I know it was a movie, but the lesson remains)
Standardisation to a cadence is the best way to finish the most work in any given time, as the variation and resulting shortages and backlogs are eliminated. ‘Flow’ through the system is optimised.
When you want to evaluate something new, you have a standardised system to test it on, and can therefore see the results of the change of one variable to the outcome. If favourable, you can then apply the single change to the entire system to improve it.
Going back to marching. The US army marching cadence is a standardised 30 inches for each step. Every soldier steps 30 inches every time. If the standard step was 31 inches, and the cadence of the march remained unchanged, it would represent a 3.3% increase in the distance marched in any given time.
Standardisation and continuous improvement, an essential element in optimising the performance of your business.
PS. 24 hours after publishing, I stumbled across this article by Brian Potter which goes into a heap of detail on exactly the topic of this post. For those who want a deep dive, I recommend it.
