In a Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovch the author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes about the occasion that the camp commander of the Gulag instructed the bakery to mix sawdust from the sawmill into the flour to make it go further and fool hungry stomachs into thinking they were full. It was about a week later that Ivan came across a camp guard in the latrines crouching down with a pencil trying to workout his chronic constipation. The practice of putting sawdust in bread ceased.
Putting sawdust in the flour to make it look like there was more bread to go round has parallels with how some organisations today operate. I am of course not comparing a factory or office to a soviet prison camp . I am drawing a parallel between the obsession of those in charge with the appearance of efficiency and productivity and a disregard for the impact on individuals. Efficiency is producing more with less or doing more with the same. More loaves for the same amount of flour due to a change in the production process is an efficiency. But if the resulting bread is indigestible it’s not a real efficiency.
An efficiency initiative can have unintended consequences it could bung up the works and make production sluggish for example the ill thought out migration to a new computer system. The difficult of making it work means employee revert to using the old system resulting in two systems in operation and consequently an increase in inefficiency. Efforts to adapt the new system mean it never realises the potential efficiency originally claimed for it.
Efficiency initiatives frequently involve reductions in staffing and/or slimmer management structures. As a consequence of the resulting redundancies and early retirements the organisation can lose some of its most experienced employees and suffer a knowledge gap. In some organisation minimum staffing levels increases health and safety risks especially when accompanied by a reluctance to cover short term absences or use expensive agency staff.
The slimmer management structure and increased spans of responsibility mean managers are responsible for areas of service they have no previous background or knowledge of thus increasing the risk that they will not ask the right questions and spot problems early enough. And then there is the increased pressure and stress of feeling not in total command of your brief.
The practice of mixing sawdust in with flour to make more bread and trick hungry stomachs into feeling full, and the impact on those who eat it is a graphic way of illustrating of how organisations can get things wrong if they simply focus on efficiency.
