I appreciate this may border on heretical but…

Now isn’t necessarily the time to be doing more with less.

Doing more with less sounds like a wonderful objective, and it’s something I hear often, especially amongst leaders in financially constrained sectors such as local government. It sounds like something we should all be able to get behind. But there are some very good reasons why doing more with less isn’t always a good idea, and I would argue that it’s a particularly bad idea for most organisations right now.

Our people are already tired

In its simplest form, ‘doing more with less’ is the idea that we just need to cut costs and work a little harder. The objective is to achieve a little more output with a little less input. But even a relatively modest 10% reduction in inputs and a 10% increase in outputs means that everyone needs to be doing 22% more.

Honestly, I don’t see where that 22% is going to come from right now. People are already feeling burnt out, and asking more of them might actually mean you end up getting substantially less. A report by the University of NSW suggests burnout already costs organisations between $5,000 and $30,000 per employee per year (depending on the role), and one of the core drivers is increasing workload.

Over the years, I’ve heard a number of leaders share a variation of the adage ‘you can’t cut your way to prosperity’. So if organisations shouldn’t be focused on cutting costs and driving efficiencies right now, what should they be focused on?

An elaborate analogy

I love analogies but normally avoid sports-based ones. There are two reasons for this. The first is that they can unintentionally exclude people who don’t have the same connection with sport, and the second is because the finite nature of a sporting competition tends to have little in common with the infinite games of business and life (hat tip to Dr Jason Fox and his enduring hat tips to the book Finite and Infinite Games).

But for this blog, I’m going to make an exception.

For a moment, imagine your organisation is an elite rowing eight team. Asking your team to do more with less is analogous to throwing one of the crew overboard and then asking the rest of the crew to get you to the finish line faster.

But hang on, perhaps this is possible?

Some of you might already be aware a rowing ‘eight’ actually has nine crew members. Eight of the crew have oars and do the rowing, and then sitting at the back is the coxswain (or cox) who steers the boat and offers words of encouragement to the people doing the work (I might be slightly underselling it here).

If it was the cox you threw over the side, then you could conceivably do more with less. The boat would be lighter and the rowers should be able to go faster without any additional effort (or burnout). But this relies on a number of things being true.

Are you even heading in the right direction?

The first thing to consider is whether the boat (or your organisation) is pointing in exactly the right direction. Although the course of a rowing race is dead straight, it’s also up to 2 km long. This means that even if you are slightly off course to start with, you could end up with a significant deviation by the end of the race*.

*And this is a great example of the limitations of a sports analogy. A 2 km race might seem long, but a strong crew can cover the ground in under 10 minutes. This is a very short amount of time compared to the years, decades or even centuries that organisations might operate for. If you can deviate a few degrees in 10 minutes, imagine what’s possible over a few years.

To apply this back to your organisation, how confident are you that you are currently pointing in the right direction? Are the products and services you offer and the ways you operate in perfect alignment with your customers’ and stakeholders’ expectations? If not, doing more with less might just mean you’re heading in the wrong direction faster, but potentially without the additional capacity you require to identify you are no longer on course.

Do you have complete coordination?

Just as important as external alignment with customers and stakeholders is internal alignment, or coordination. If the crew of the rowing eight aren’t balanced or rowing in unison, then at best the boat goes slower and at worst someone ends up over the side*.

*There is a term in rowing called an ‘ejector crab’, where a rower’s oar gets stuck in the water and the handle end then pushes the rower (often quite violently) over the side. Here is a video that demonstrates both poor coordination and an ejector crab for your amusement.

Once again, maintaining coordination inside an organisation takes time and effort. I recently spoke to a CEO who said:

“I seem to spend most of my time talking about the strategy and priorities, but when I see the employee feedback surveys, they always say that people don’t know what the strategy and priorities are.”

This is because coordination doesn’t just happen from the top; it needs to happen throughout the organisation. It requires mid-level leaders to have the strategic nous to understand both the what and the why of the high-level strategy and then translate them into meaningful actions for their people.

As my conversation with the CEO established, operational roles might only hear her speak for 10 minutes a month, but they engage with their mid-level leaders on a weekly basis. Without that level of coordination, you have people with misaligned priorities, giving variable effort and pulling in opposite directions.

Is your environment stable?

Another factor that can lead to a rowing eight heading off course is the environmental conditions. In ideal conditions, with little to no wind, waves and tides, you might expect a boat to continue in the direction it’s pointed. But conditions are rarely ideal, and boats tend to get buffeted by wind and waves, which in turn impacts their direction.

I think we can all agree that for most organisations, conditions are currently less than ideal and there is much buffeting going on. Without people at the helm constantly pre-empting and responding, it would be very easy for your organisation to be blown off course.

It’s where you’re going, not where you’ve been

A friend and mentor of mine, Col Fink, talks about how analogies can be used for both explanation and exploration, and the more I’ve used this one, the more I’ve learnt myself. Perhaps the thing that struck me the most about a rowing eight is that most of the people in the boat are looking backwards. They can see clearly where they’ve been but have almost no idea what is coming next.

This is similar to the obsession many organisations have with dashboards. These are created from accumulated historical data that feed into accumulating historical metrics, many of which have questionable alignment with an organisation’s current strategic direction. The traffic lights might suggest the organisation is on track but never encourage leaders to ask ‘on track to where?’

The trade-off between efficiency and alignment

Of course, there is a very good reason rowers face backwards: they can get far more power in a stroke by pulling on the oar than pushing on it. It’s much more efficient, but it comes at the expense of vision and manoeuvrability. This is fine if the environment you are navigating is long, flat and straight, but terrible in almost any other circumstances.

I would suggest that most organisations operate in a space that looks more like a canoe slalom course, in which case having the majority of your crew looking backwards on a long, thin boat with limited steering is a recipe for disaster*.

*This is another point where we bump up against the limitations of sports analogies. A canoe slalom course is obviously far more ‘wild’ than that of a rowing regatta but still pales in insignificance compared to the ‘wild’ that organisations have to deal with. Just like infinite games have no clear finish line, they also don’t have clear boundaries or rules. Everything is more complex.

Doing better with less

So if doing more with less isn’t a sound strategy, what should organisations be doing?

I would ask whether an alternative to doing more with less is aiming to do better with less. Is it possible that you could improve both external alignment and internal coordination and use your limited resources more effectively (rather than efficiently)?

Ironically, this may allow you to achieve more with less in the medium to long term, but may require you to divert resources towards building alignment in the short term.

It may require you to support your leaders (especially mid-level leaders) to build the capability so they can understand, interpret and apply the intent of the strategy in their corner of the organisation. It may require time spent both prioritising, and more importantly, deprioritising projects and activities. It may require the identification and development of various strategic options so that teams can respond if the conditions change. It may require time dedicated on a regular basis to see those changes coming.

Doing more with less sounds wonderful, but for most organisations, there is more to be gained from alignment than efficiency.

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