Order is Easier to Create Than Keep

One of the most challenging lessons I've ever learned is that order is easier to create than keep.

Not understanding this leads to some of the biggest problems and chaos in organizations I've seen in my 40-plus-year career as a CEO. It's such a big topic that I devoted a whole chapter to it in my book, Built to Beat Chaos.

When we were a young married couple, my wife and I dreamed about building a house out in the woods and finally found a place to do so. We saved and began building our home. We pushed hard and dreamed about what this would all look like.

We finally got it built. But little did we realize that building it was just the beginning.

Now that we built it, we had to heat it. We had to landscape. Eventually, we had to put a new roof on it and paint it. You realize you'll spend more time and energy maintaining something you've built over your lifetime than building it.

Practical Business Examples About Keeping Order

When I was in startup mode with some other friends, we built a whole accounting system fairly quickly, with four people doing the design and engineering. As a new CEO starting up a business and as an engineer, you think most of the work is about building a product. 

As the years went by, those three or four people turned into a hundred doing maintenance on that same piece of software and hundreds more doing support, customer service, and marketing. In the end, we ended up with at least four to five times as many people working on supporting the thing that we had built in the first place

What are the consequences of getting this wrong?

We frequently see larger organizations initiate some kind of project to change something, fix something, build a new product line, or begin a change initiative. They put energy into making the change but must realize that once they've created this thing, it will take energy to maintain it without realizing the amount of energy it takes to maintain.

It means that they start something else. What it feels like down in the organization's bowels is chaos because something has been launched and handed off to them to begin to learn, use, and apply. Then something else new is being created right on top of it. Leaders frequently attempt to start too many things and don't allocate the resources to finish, sustain, and integrate them into the organization and its culture.

What Can You Do About Creating and Keeping Order? 

1. The biblical wisdom is that when you undertake something, count the cost. Figure out why it is that you're doing it.
2. Don’t just figure out the costs of doing it; involve the people who know what it will take to maintain it. Make that thing you have just built well-maintained and successful.

It could be a building, a new plant, or a new product. Get people involved who understand the downstream impact of the thing you created. If you don't do that, you'll start other ventures and overlay them on top of the first, destroying both of them. Neither one of them will get executed.

Watch for the Symptoms

The symptoms are: too much is going on, nothing is getting executed, and everybody's in firefighting mode.

When you see these kinds of symptoms, the root cause is often the failure to understand the cost of maintaining and sustaining change. It leads to putting too many things into the pipeline, and none are finished well.