Zen And The Art Of Business Management: First Of A Series

Zen And Business Processes:  Part I

 

“Before I had studied Ch'an (Zen) for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and rivers as rivers. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and rivers are not rivers. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it's just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and rivers once again as rivers.”

(Qingyuan Weixin, as translated by D. T. Suzuki, Essays on Zen Buddhism.)

This is one of the most famous of all Zen Buddhist quotes. 

But what does it have to do with business process management—and, for that matter, management in general?

A very great deal.

A word or two by way of preface.  There are many ways in which to talk about Zen—as a religious discipline, a form of Buddhism; as a philosophical discipline; as a cultural phenomenon.  Most of the commentary on Zen and management seems to be of the last type--seeing how Zen concepts influence Japanese management, and what ideas we might draw from that.  I take a different approach.  Buddhism as a religion and philosophical system (it is impossible to separate the two) focuses on right action coming from right thought.  It is intensely practical, as well as deeply ethical.  Zen’s particular approach—using the unexpected to trigger deep insight—helps us shake off old habits of thought, and see things in a new perspective.  It is with that spirit that I use its ideas—which are universal, and not specifically Japanese or Chinese.

I am not a Zen master, and so I will not attempt a Zen commentary.  But the three stages in this quote—mountains are mountains, mountains are not mountains, mountains are mountains (again)—correspond to three distinct stages of consciousness—one of which we often fail to reach.  And consciousness—understood as the ability to see and understand things as they are—is the bedrock of the fundamental of management--making good decisions.

At the beginning, when mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers, we accept things as they are, without questions or analysis.  The manager who says, “This is the way we do things”, “It’s company policy”, or “That’s not my job” lives in this stage of consciousness.  At this stage of consciousness, we ask no questions.

When we begin to question things—when we look at how to improve and transform what we do—we begin to analyze.  We break things down into their component parts.  Mountains are no longer mountains, nor rivers rivers—they are assemblages of parts, images on a map, a composition of igneous or sedimentary rock or so many cubic meters of flow after the spring melt along a stretch of so many kilometers.  We begin to say “Perhaps I can streamline what we do here”, or “We should change this policy”, or “That affects the way I do my job”.  This is the stage of consciousness in which most of us live most of the time.  We can get a great deal done with this framework—but not everything.  At this stage of consciousness, we ask the engineering questions—first “how”, and then “who, what, when, and where.”

The transition between the first and second stages of consciousness is a very natural one.  Conventional training and education facilitate it.  Even so, it is a difficult transition for many.  The transition from the second stage to the third—where mountains are mountains again—is less easy, and less natural.  It is discontinuous in a way that the earlier transition is not.  Zen and other forms of Buddhism call it satori or enlightenment.  Conventionally, we often call its results thinking out of the box, or insight, or creativity.  Analysis dominates the second stage; we seek and achieve synthesis in the third.

When the mountain is a mountain again, we see the whole—at the same time, we understand the parts.  We ask a question more significant than all the other questions—“why”?  We say, “Why should I do this at all?”, “Why do we structure policies we way in which we do?”, or “Have we organized our work around what we really have to do”?

Unfortunately, we rarely get to this stage.  And in this stage is where we can create real value of any sort.

Let us apply this thinking to business process management.  In the remainder of this post, I will outline a general framework.  I will then follow that with a pair of case studies in a later post.

If I am looking at a business process, I can do five things:

·        Do nothing;

·        Automate it without changing it;

·        Automate it using canned best practices;

·        Rethink the process with best practice philosophy and then automate it;

·        Take two steps rather than one: ask, why am I am doing this at all—and then reshape it and automate it around what is really essential.

(I am excluding an option that is a non-starter—simply cut resources arbitrarily.)

What are the consequences?

Doing nothing (except in the vanishingly rare case where the process is perfect) is, without thought, accepting that the mountain is a mountain, and leaving it at that.  We all know better, or should know better, than that—but how many times do we see something that can be made better, or simply doesn’t work, and fail to do anything about it?  We can liken different types of bad decisions to the Seven Deadly Sins (a topic we will explore in a future post) and this is a fine example of Sloth.

Let’s move on to doing something.  We’ve all seen examples of the next three options in practice.  The mountain is no longer a mountain—we seek to understand the pieces and the relationship between the pieces, and think to improve them.

The first option is to take a process without change and automate it, in search of greater efficiency.  That’s certainly a more evolved way of looking at the problem that simply doing nothing—but it just doesn’t work.  There are numerous examples of failure in automating processes as is—but they all come down to a principle neatly articulated by Peter Drucker:  “There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.”  Haven’t we all seen examples of this?

The next course of action—automate with canned best practice—is what vendors of ERP software would have us do.  It is probably the more common course of action--without question, a more evolved way of looking at the problem than simply automating as is.  There is, however, a flaw here as well.  So-called best practices—canned best practices-- are just that—canned.  They represent what a vendor sees as the most common practices in the marketplace—not necessarily the best for a given organization or industry.  They represent conventional wisdom—not necessarily the best solution.  Low risk—but often low reward as well. Value?  Better than doing nothing, and automating a process without change—but not the best than can be done.

The third course of action—rethink the process with best practice philosophy and then automate it—is a significant advance.  In my experience of over 20 years of business process reengineering, this approach invariably gives the best results.  What is best practice philosophy?  Very simply this:

·        Define the required level of control and quality.

·        Within those limits, minimize cost and maximize efficiency.

·        Balance the value of custom approaches with the cost.

Canned best practices often serve as a starting point—but in this approach, you will always get a more precise fit with the business.

Yet this is not the end.  We have broken down the mountain into its component parts—but we still do not understand the mountain.  In order to do that, we need to jump over a discontinuity—and see the mountain as a mountain again.

In more concrete terms:  up to this point, we have taken the process itself as a given.  Any process, however, is part of a larger business activity—and optimizing a piece of an activity does not necessarily optimize the whole.

When we gain the insight to look at a process at part of something large—to ask why we have a process at all—we leap into a wider understanding.  And in that understanding lies the possibility for genuine transformation. 

The fashion, now, is to call this disruption.  That is inadequate—since it ignores the psychology of what needs to happen—insight, creativity, satori.  The psychology is non-linear.  It is discontinuous.

Peter Drucker touches on these ideas when he says “Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.”  He echoes this, more wisely, in saying “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”

In the next post, I will discuss two short case studies.