Do you ever get the impression that we're doing things for the wrong reasons?  By this, I don't mean, wrong as in you'll burn in hell for the reasons you've selected to act out.  I mean wrong in the sense we're just not grabbing the full scope of what we could.

I had a job once where I got in on the ground floor.  I had worked for the company for three years at this point.  I knew the policies inside and out.  Some of them even made sense.  Inventory control required systems.  Systems required logins.  Logins required knowledge of how the system worked.

That's not transferrable—in itself—anywhere except for that one company!

I knew the systems better than anyone in the region.  I got the job to teach everyone else to learn the systems.  It wasn't hard but it was just systems.  Nobody felt any passion about learning how to log inventory in the system.  Few felt any strong desire to maintain the inventory in the system.  So my job was to teach them how to use the system and then monitor their usage of the system.

Not a bad gig really.  You could be digging a ditch in 107 degree summers or driving around repeating yourself ad naseum.  They both take their toll on you in quite different ways really.  The ditch has a satisfaction all its own when the ditch is complete.  Ad naseum is never complete, but you're not in 107 degree temperatures digging a ditch!

When we added another element to the inventory system compliance employees got excited.  We would take care of customers by fixing their cell phones.  Employees (i.e. people) felt like their job started to mean something more than monitoring the system.  Most didn't want to talk with customers (i.e. people) but most did want to open up phones and fix them.  There was some kind of connection there between people. 

New found motivation may have had something to do with the system being boring as well.  Opening the phones was an escape from the system.  You can only look at a computer screen so many times before you have to have something else to do!

I showed these people how to open phones.  We developed metrics to track how these people fixed phones.  I showed them the numbers and explained how we could make numbers move in the direction we wanted.  The task was never complete.  I was chasing the numbers everyday.

I wasn't digging a ditch in 107 degree summers though!

The thing is: we focused on fixing a problem (i.e. perceptions of bad customer service) by focusing on something else entirely.  We focused on fixing phones.  Customer service perceptions got better as employees felt more engaged in their work.  More phones were opened. 

For a two-year period we were all focused on moving something in a particular direction.  Although we were exhausted, it felt good to have thirty to forty people moving in the same direction.

The leaders kept changing though.  The direction changed slightly with each new leader.  After the first three changes, the last three didn't make a difference.  With each change, we avowed we were chasing the metric.  The metrics stopped making sense.  We pulled back to the system.  We began to reinforce the system.  A fog was allowed to drift back in where employees and customers move in a mechanically routine world developed in a remote cubicle. 

People stopped being people!

The project was never ending and entirely too frustrating.  In the end, four years of work went down the drain.  In the end, we completely rolled back to where we started four years earlier still with the same problems we had when we started. 

The project was too frustrating indeed!

But, at least I wasn't digging a ditch in 107 degree summers!