Unrewarded Complexity in Value Streams
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the Liberating Teams podcast. I'm Holly Breeding team psychology practitioner and org effectiveness consultant. Every week around here, we dismantle the outdated hierarchical leadership systems that keeps leaders like you stuck in the weeds and break down how to build a self-managed team that thrives without you at the center.
Because when your team has the clarity systems and ownership, they need to lead themselves. You finally get to lead strategically. It's time to liberate the way you lead.
Hello. Welcome back to the podcast. We are kicking off episode three in the strategy gap series, which is where we're the most common tensions I see when it comes to executing on your strategy. In today's corporate culture. And so if you've missed the past two episodes, I highly recommend you stop this one.
Go listen there, and [00:01:00] then we are going to be continuing on today talking about the next gap, which is that even the most simplest work feels like it takes. Forever. Things taking way longer than they should. Being constantly busy, but feeling like at the end of the day, like when you really look at it, it doesn't feel like you're moving the things that matter the most forward.
Another good symptom is of this is our work is super complex and I, I think this one's always really interesting 'cause I feel like we say it as. Almost like a humble brag, you know? It's like our work is so complex, it's really hard to understand. I mean, I heard this a lot as a consultant.
It's like, you just don't understand. It takes people forever to get up to speed, like, you know, our new hire process, it's like a year before they're actually capable of doing their job. And it's like, that's, that's not a good sign.
[00:02:00] Like that, no complexity is actually the opposite of mastery. Complexity means we've made it way harder than it needs to be. Even the most complicated subject matter, we can make it simple. That's the true sign of mastery. And any who, that's a whole nother podcast.
But this is what we're talking about. So, or feeling super complex. And this is a really big issue because if we're trying to execute on our strategy, the more complex the longer work takes, well the harder it's going to be to execute on that. So let's dive into exactly why this is happening. So every team, every function creates value through what we call a value stream.
So just imagine like a, a typical process where there's an input that comes in and an output that goes out that provides value to your end [00:03:00] customer. So for example, let's say your product team. Your customer is the end user. So a requirement or maybe a feature request comes in, and I'm gonna boil this down to like three steps, y'all, because this could obviously be much more in depth.
But it idea or requirement comes in. We build out the feature, we ship it to the users that provides value to them, or a sales team, a lead comes in, we qualify it, we send out a proposal, the deal closes. We're providing value to that customer by providing them the product or the service. Maybe we are a fp and a team, financial planning and analysis.
So this is my internal customer department. So the department you serve comes to you with a business need you. Do the financial analysis, and then you provide financial advisement that is the output, the value to the customer.
So every single [00:04:00] one of you guys has a value stream, this high level process as to how you provide value to your customer. And now typically, when our functions were first built, this value stream was very simple. It was just like what I told you about. It was very straightforward. X comes in, we do something with it, and then value comes out.
But the longer functions are around, the more the company scales, the more new people we bring into the team, then that value stream becomes more and more complex. Instead of, you know, A plus B equals C, suddenly it's like a plus, B one or B two or B three equals C.
And then it's like A, but first you gotta get this sign off and then you can pass, go onto B, and then you have to decide one, two, or three, which [00:05:00] path you're on, and then you can create C. We keep on adding this complexity and suddenly our value stream, is now working against itself. So now our team is having to fight our value stream in order to deliver value because of all this built up process, these added SOPs, these templates, these hodgepodge tape together tools, these, customizations, these workarounds, these handoffs, these required meetings.
And this is what we called unrewarded complexity. It's we're adding things, we're adding layers and processes and customizations that increase operational difficulty or cost without generating the corresponding business value, meaning improved customer experience. Improved competitive [00:06:00] advantage, improved, sales.
We're not seeing the correlation there. So the cost is more time, more cognitive load, more frustration, more capacity, more coordination, but we're not seeing the value in return. And the really crappy part about unrewarded complexity. Is it's something that, builds up slowly over time, over many, many years. Oftentimes, you know, you probably inherited a lot of unrewarded complexity from past leaders. You oftentimes don't even know it's getting created. You don't, your team is just generating these, these workarounds, these new.
Ways of working and you, you can't even see it. And so it's super, super dangerous because at first it's just like, we added a, a weight to our team's bag. And so they're walking through the value stream with a little extra weight and [00:07:00] then the next thing you know. We added more and more, and then we started adding, you know, obstacle courses for them to work through.
And, we started putting on a torrential downpour of rain on them and like it's just all these different things to now suddenly it's become almost impossible for them to deliver the value they were hired to do. It sneaks up on us. And a big piece of this is the fact that in corporate culture, we are conditioned to add and not subtract.
I can't tell you how many times I ran a start, stop, continue exercise with functions early in my career, and the start and continue section was always overflowing. And the stop section had like maybe a sticky note in it. Because there's more inherent risk with stopping things, right? One it it's the natural tension in our bodies of like letting something [00:08:00] go.
I always equate it to, cleaning out your closet. It's a lot harder to let go of something than it is to go buy something new because you start playing it out in your head, well, what if we need this? What about this one edge case? You start coming up with all of these opportunities for when you might use it.
And so we keep it without understanding the cost. Remember, the more time, the more coordination, the more cognitive load, the more capacity required to executing that value. So why is this so critical to you executing your strategies?
Because the more unrewarded complexity, built up in your value stream, the harder it's going to be for your team to deliver on that strategy. The more you know capacity it's going to require, the more cognitive load, the more coordination, the more frustration.
The more you being in it to have [00:09:00] to guide them through all the chaos, the more you're gonna start watering down your strategy and saying, we just don't have time for something like that, when in reality that's not true.
It's that we need to start simplifying our process for delivering value.
So let's talk about the three major culprits when it comes to unrewarded complexity that I see. So the first one is going to be process blow. So this is where, we added steps, layers, SOPs required templates, workarounds that became permanent. And with so much love, my high performing type A leaders are the biggest culprits of this.
Because what happens is we're like, we have this value stream, this process for delivering [00:10:00] value. And we're like, how can we optimize it? How can we bring more structure to it? How can we bring more rigor to it? And so we start. Adding, we start adding tools, we start adding trackers. We start adding these SOPs, we start adding these standardized templates.
We start adding new things that we could be delivering, new deliverables, new services. We just continue to add and add and add until the process becomes unmanageable. And I really struggled with this early on whenever . There was only, you know, two or three of us. And at that point it's really easy. We all kind of know the process. If we need to align on something, it's a quick huddle. We don't really have to document a lot, A lot lives within our heads. We trust each other. We understand it.
But then there's this really, really hard period where you go from this small niche group of individuals [00:11:00] to starting to add and expand your, function and your team, and it's really, really hard to take what you've built for the last like year or so with these, this small group of people, and translate that and get this, these new people up to speed because they haven't been with you, right?
They didn't spend the past year in the trenches. They don't understand how we got here. They don't understand how it all works. And so what do we do is we start to try and put structure around it. And because now we have all of these people and it's not so easy to, to keep them all on the same page and to keep everyone moving in the right direction.
Well, then we start adding, the, the SOPs and, and the trackers and then the alignment meetings because we feel things getting out of control. Right. And so we're like, how do we bring control? Well, will we add more structure, we add more rigor. And I remember we were, adding [00:12:00] all of these, like, here's the standard intake questions you need to ask, and here's the standard client intake form that you need to go over.
We just continued to add and add and add, and we didn't stop and ask, is the added friction for both us and our customers truly adding value? , The customer feels it right. So, for example, I was working with a call center and it took two years. For a new agent to get fully up to speed, , to be fully independent at answering calls and handling issues because of how complex their processes were, because of how, hodgepodge together, their systems were, it wasn't like a.
A one stop shop. It was like 17 different systems that you had to go to, and you had to know exactly where you went to what, and [00:13:00] the processes were super cumbersome. There was really poor knowledge sharing. And so of course, the customer felt that, right? Because even when they're fully up to speed, we've invested two years into somebody in a.
Function where, the typical lifecycle for an employee is relatively shorter. So the ROI is just not there, but even when they're fully up to speed. It doesn't matter how good they are, because the system's working against them. They have to go through all those steps. They have to go into all those different systems.
They have to copy and paste the same information in multiple different places. So even if there are best, most genius, you know, agent, it's still gonna take them 15 minutes to process that request. And the customer feels that that's the cost of process bloat. Not only is it impacting your team, but it's directly impacting your customer, and that doesn't just mean your end user [00:14:00] customer.
I see this a lot with internal services teams as well. I just talked a little bit about my team and and org effectiveness and how we were making the process more cumbersome. I see this a lot with project management or communications teams where it's like they have this really rigorous process because by the book, this is how you should do it. , This is best in class, and it's like, great. But is that really what the customer needs or desires to get the value that they're after? Because a lot of times, yes, you value, the PMP project management process, and there's probably scenarios where that's very valid, but the average person just wants to deliver their project on time, on budget.
On scope. So like what's the simplest way we can do that? They don't care about the PMP process. They care about doing that in the simplest way [00:15:00] possible, and we lose sight of that. We start adding because this is best in class because this is gonna bring more structure, because this is gonna look cleaner.
But what's the cost to our ability to add that core value? We deliver the project on time, on budget, on scope. We deliver the good financial insights that allow them to make a a solid business decision. Does it actually help us achieve that? And is that cost worth it? Because even if it's helpful, it does add value.
We have to weigh it against the cost, the friction, the capacity load, the cognitive load, the coordination required. Okay? So the first thing that we're thinking through is before ever adding anything. What is the cost of this [00:16:00] compared to the impact on the end value we exist to deliver for our customer, and then as we're going through our processes on a day-to-day basis, we're questioning.
That's one of our core principles at liberating teams is question everything, especially the way we've always done it. We're questioning. Is this adding value and is it worth the cost? Not is it adding value? That's where we get in trouble. Is it allowing us to deliver on that core value that we exist to deliver for our customers?
'cause tons of things add value, but it's not necessarily the value that we exist to deliver that, that one thing that is most critical to our customers. Okay. The second biggest culprit of, unrewarded complexity is going to be governance creep. So this is any time we replace judgment with rules or sign offs or approvals or CC [00:17:00] me on that, or I wanna get my eyes on that.
Anything like that. And almost always does this come from the fact that somebody at some point made a mistake or an error happened, and so we added in this step as a precaution. We now need a sign off. We now have to go through this process. We're now locking the supply closet and you have to go get somebody else to go get a new pen.
We're adding controls, and this is another one that greatly accelerates as functions grow because again, when we're in a smaller environment. Typically we have, those two to three people that we brought on early, that they were experts in what we do. We really trusted them.
And then [00:18:00] as we suddenly scale, we're having to bring into a lot more people, a lot more talent quickly. We start not being as picky, right? Because we're just desperate.
We are desperate for bodies at this point because suddenly demand has gone through the roof and we are just a, three person team, and we are struggling, and so we just add in whoever we can train 'em, we can figure it out. And this is happening typically on that company wide level, right? So this is happening in all of our different functions as the company suddenly scales.
So our talent, our level of talent is actually going down. We're also expanding talent rapidly. We're adding more people. So again, lack of control. What do we do? We need to add control back in. We're gonna add rules, we're gonna add sign-offs. And we do it to the lowest level. So if we have these new people who were probably not the best [00:19:00] hires, but we just needed, bodies and seats to kind of spread the workload, well, we're creating rules for them.
And the more that they make a mistake, the more that they, swipe the company card for a thousand dollars expense. That probably wasn't the best use of the money Th. We layer on those rules to bring back control, but the cost of that directly affects those high level, the, the high PO talent that we did bring in.
Because now this high PO talent who's completely capable, is having to go through, jump through all of these hoops. Just to do their job because now they're having to fill out forms and forms and forms on top of forms to make any sort of move. They're having to wait on somebody else to sign off on something, to give approval on something. They're having to [00:20:00] spend time developing decks to, explain things to people just so they can give their opinion on it.
And so what do they do? They get frustrated with the fact that the accountability that we're holding them to them is really high, but we've put a lot of rules and sign-offs and hoops they have to jump through in order to achieve the standard that we're holding them to.
And so they say, I'm outta here. Or they start saying, you gotta pay me more for this. And I always find this really interesting because that's one of the biggest things that leaders come to me with, is like, oh, we gotta pay my people more. We're gonna lose talent. And there are scenarios where the company as a whole isn't doing a good job of matching the market, but there are a lot of scenarios where it's like actually your people are like on average, well paid. The problem is that you have to pay them more to put up with this [00:21:00] bullshit. They can go get the same amount of money over there and they treat them like adults and they allow them to have autonomy and ownership and purpose.
Okay. And so if we want to put them in an environment where it's a bunch of controls and we treat them like children, you're gonna have to pay them more. There is literally a financial cost that comes with governance creep. It's not just the cost in the ability to execute on our strategy.
And it's not just that, it's the time wasted. I use the example of a government team. And these high, high, highly paid engineers we're having to spend hours. Of their day whenever they traveled somewhere looking up, like literally routing out [00:22:00] the different modes of transportation from the airport to their hotel, like via taxi, via Uber, via rental car to submit for approval.
We're talking about the difference of like 50 bucks and you just spent. 60 bucks an hour times how many engineers times, how many times a year they travel. On doing that analysis, the cost benefit doesn't add up, and that's an extreme example. But there are so many of those moments where your team is spending time building decks, waiting for somebody to give them approval, sitting in meetings, reporting things out to get opinions or sign off on things where we are just burning through cash and not adding value.
Unrewarded complexity.
So I want [00:23:00] you to go through every approval, every sign off, every, cc me on this, and ruthlessly look at it with a fine tuned comb and say, what is the value of this compared to the cost of the team as a whole? And not just that, but are we addressing the root here or the symptom .
Sure we can go ahead and put like a blanket, , sign off or a governance or control mechanism on the whole team and therefore cap the potential of everyone on the team. Or we can acknowledge that we desire to treat our team like adults and therefore we need to hire adults. And if people aren't living up to that standard, then we need to have some tough conversations because otherwise we're bringing the talent level as a whole down to the lowest level.
Because we have to put these controls on instead of somebody made an error once, and so we're going to put this, sign off on something. [00:24:00] Why don't we figure out why they made the mistake? This is one of our other core principles at liberating teams blame the system, not the people.
Oftentimes it had to do with our system. Something was overly complex. There wasn't clarity. They didn't have the information they needed. You know, it was the fact that they had to, you know, utilize 17 different tools and so you're bound to make a mistake somewhere.
We're human. Address the root cause instead of adding governance to the process. So now it's like a double whammy hindering your ability to execute on your strategy because not only did we not solve the root cause, we have talent who's not operating at the level that we need them to. We didn't fix the reason why mistakes are happening.
So the mistakes, the errors are continuing to happen. And now we added. Extra layers of governance and sign-offs and approvals to make them even slower. So oftentimes, governance is one of those [00:25:00] scenarios where we add a quote unquote solution that actually makes everything worse. So ask yourself, why did we add this?
Why did we add this control? Why did we add this sign off? Why am I CC'd on this? Why do we have this meeting where we have to go over, go over everything before things move forward? And are we addressing the symptom or the root cause?
The third one's going to be collaboration friction every single time where work within our value stream crosses a boundary and we lose momentum or we need alignment or we need to coordinate. And this is becoming a, a much huger issue as the world of work becomes more complex.
So we saw a few decades ago, this big push for matrix organizations cross-functional work became [00:26:00] much more popular. And this is where this started to become a big issue, is we had all of these teams. Who had, different leaders and different people they reported to and different priorities and things like that.
And we try to put 'em together to achieve a shared outcome. And I mean, go back to high school when we had group projects, everyone hated them. Why? Because it's really freaking hard to get a bunch of people with different opinions and different motivators to work together towards a common goal, because people are complex.
We're unpredictable, we're hard to control, we're not machines. And so the more people you add into delivering on your value stream , the more complex it gets. The more time we spend talking about work, meeting, about work, coordinating work versus actually driving value [00:27:00] forward
And some of this is necessary, work is becoming more complex. We need different, groups and, functions and roles in order to execute it. Gone are the days where it's like we're the finance department. We can just focus and work within our boundaries. That's not gonna happen anymore because work is becoming more and more cross-functional.
However, this is amplified by the fact that we in corporate culture do a very bad job of. Creating defined boundaries and ownership around work to begin with, one of the exercises that I do with teams is we'd map out their value stream and then we'd assign everyone a color on the team.
And I go from person to person and say like, you are pink. I want you to highlight every part in this value stream you have a role in. And then I would take a new, value stream printout that was blank. Go to the next person, highlight every part you're in. Then I would pull up handy dandy PowerPoint.
I [00:28:00] don't hate PowerPoint all the time. And I'd combine all of them. I'd create one master value stream with all the different colors layered on. It was a freaking mess, a hodgepodge of colors. Like half the value stream was brown because of all of the colors layered on. And that's a problem because when you have that many people involved in every little step of the value stream, like let's just say step one, it's , developing requirements for a new product, and you have six people involved in that. That stuff's gonna take freaking forever because that's a bunch of coordination, a bunch of alignment. We are probably not very clear about whose role everyone owns in that step, who has what? Decision rights, and then.
You're moving from, requirement gathering to actually, building out the feature, which like there's another 12 people involved in that. And so now you have a step with six people [00:29:00] handing off to a step with 12 people. That's just like telephone level 5,000. That's not gonna go well.
And that's just two steps within our value stream. Not to mention, that's asking for errors to happen.
So we're not very good about what I call designing around the work and cutting clear boundaries of ownership and decision rights along the value stream. Not everyone has to be in everything. Collaboration is good until a point, and then you get into what I call over collaboration, and now it's constantly actually subtracting value.
There's literally a study that looked into this where you can add people and and create better value, but there is a point of diminishing return where every single person you add after that your ability to add value plummets. This is exactly that. It's like if you have two people trying to move a couch, it's pretty simple, straightforward.
You grab that side, [00:30:00] I grab that side, 1, 2, 3, up, we're out the door. Put six people trying to move one couch in a room, and suddenly everyone have a, has opinions. Everyone feels like they need to have their hand on the couch to be, quote unquote productive. I love that my husband sent me this reel.
It's like the guy who's trying to look productive in the team, and he is just like getting in everyone's way. He looks really productive. He's constantly moving, but he's adding. He's not only, not only is he not adding value, he's actively getting in the way that is what we're doing day in and day out. So I want you to look at every single part, those critical parts of your value treatment ask.
Is collaboration necessary? Does everyone who's involved in this truly need to be involved? How can we get it to the least amount of people and does every single person that is involved in that step. Actually no ownership and decision rights. Do we have an understanding about how we, execute on this shared outcome?
That's a [00:31:00] big thing that we talk about in Liberated Leader around what we call contract around the work. So this is when we have a shared outcome with multiple people involved in it, how do we actually have a process where people are able to quickly come together and understand how to achieve that shared outcome instead of just like sitting in reoccurring meetings, pointing fingers, and trying to decide who gets to decide.
So the goal of this episode, y'all, is not to go map out your value stream, not to go. Do you know a huge lean process improvement initiative? No. It's just to start really taking a critical look at how your team drives value and saying where. Where are we feeling this, this tension, this friction come up?
Where is our ways of working actually getting in , our way of delivering value? Where are we having to fight the system in order to deliver our strategy? And when [00:32:00] you pinpoint that, that's when we go in, ask the three questions that we talked about today. Come up with an experiment, a shift, a change that you can make to how you work and put it into practice over the next eight weeks.
And if you wanna go all in and really optimize your team, not just what we talked about today around like complexity and your value stream, but every single part about how your team operates, how you know they're, they do teaming together. How you think about ownership, how you think about, ways of working and workflows, how you think about strategy and strategic planning and execution.
You need to be inside Liberated Leader. We are currently enrolling for our next cohort, , where we build out what we call your Strategics Doing System. We optimize every single part about how your team works to execute on your strategy to deliver value. So. Not only are you able to deliver your current strategy with ease, but you're also setting up that foundation so you can [00:33:00] deliver bigger, bolder, , more innovative strategies, building that capability within your team.
I'm gonna drop the link below, but as always, if you have any questions, shoot me a DM over on Instagram and I'd love to chat.
Okay, you guys, take something you learned today and go put it to practice. Thank you for listening to the Liberating Teams podcast. If this episode hit home for you, don't forget to share it with another leader. Or if you've got 10 seconds, drop a five star review and it would mean the world to me so we can liberate more teams together. And if you try something for today's episode, come tell me how it went.
DM me on Instagram over at Liberating Teams, and I'd love to chat more about it. Now. Let's go change the world of work. One liberated team at a time.
