One was about choke points – “It’s rarely a good idea to pass everything through a single chokepoint or to store all the ammunition in one place”
And the other concerned efficiency – “So the goal should not be greater efficiency, but rather efficiency where it makes sense”.
But the comment that brought things together was that – “Companies have begun to change their thinking about resilience, accepting the need for a slight reduction in efficiency as a necessary form of insurance that can help them weather a crisis”.
I can recall many years some advice that has proved invaluable and that was never to generate a procedure/process which could not cope with an emergency. For example, a gas leak is found and the approved contractor list contractor is not available…. So you bring in another to cope with the emergency BUT immediately after the new company has to go through the approval process to be placed on the list….. if they want to.
Since then I’ve seen the advantage of empowering staff and of very clear process flows to help people understand what they have to do but most of all I’ve seen times when preparing for the “unexpected” has actually improved efficiency.
Choke Points mean Inefficiency and Ineffectiveness – so EMPOWER
