Organizations struggle and fail when they focus on productivity and efficiency at the expense of effectiveness and meaning

making organizations more effective

Why organizations struggle and fail

Organizations struggle and fail when they focus on productivity and efficiency at the expense of effectiveness and meaning.

Consider the following:

On August 14, 2003, an estimated 50 million people in parts of the United States and Canada experienced an electric power blackout. The official task force which investigated the blackout reported that FE (FirstEnergy Corporation) failed to manage adequately tree growth in its transmission rights-of-way. This failure was the common cause of the outage of three FE 345-kV transmission lines.*

But was that the real cause or merely a symptom of facing the wrong problem? What reason could there be that the trees were not cut back according to the regulations, which require transmission lines to have a ‘designed clearance area'? We believe it was a focus on efficiency and productivity at the expense of why the energy utility exists in the first place.

Management at the energy utility surely had no intention to disrupt power. Nevertheless, we are left wondering what the electricity linesmen in Ohio would have done if they were expected to think in terms of effectiveness, and not productivity and efficiency, when they saw trees growing too close to power lines.

A focus on productivity and efficiency at the expense of effectiveness and meaning is often the root cause of why management struggles to motivate employees. Current business practices demand that employees think and act in terms of productivity and efficiency. Yet, it is more natural for us to want meaning in our lives and to think in terms of making a contribution. Invariably, the conflict we experience, even if only at a subliminal level, results in a personal energy blackout.

[* U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force Interim Report: Causes of the August 14th Blackout in the United States and Canada. Dated November 2003; p 21 & p 34.]

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