It is a general adage: Managers walk from one meeting to another and no longer make time for longer-term thinking. In addition, pressure is sometimes seen as a status symbol! This leads to the inevitable vicious circle that you no longer have time to make time.
What has changed?
The organisations have been slimmed down while the stability and calm repetitive nature of the business has disappeared. The people who could be delegated have sometimes been optimised away with the result that their employees delegate more and more ‘upwards’. But that is not the only cause, the daily problems are also of a different nature and sometimes require direct decisions with major consequences.
Is there a way out?
Perhaps there is when we dare to ask ourselves why it seems inevitable that more and more ‘upwards’ delegates are being delegated. And the answer, which is usually given, is: because employees have insufficient insight into a number of implications outside their own domain… and there we go again! Because in order to respond to this, meetings are held that take up a lot of time, so…etc…back to square one!
There are 2 ways out of the vicious circle.
Way 1
Apply the technique of intelligent lean to get the entire organisation out of the vicious circles. These techniques support day-to-day local decisions with a view to their impact on the whole....Which eliminates 'delegating upwards'. Our experience shows that this technique removes stress from the organisation after just a few months and, even for complex companies, makes the whole thing easy to manage and exposes opportunities. By using the plug-in for permanent process diagnosis, the signals that reveal the structural limitations become available, which are then further used to drive long-term improvements.
Way 2
First work out the long-term vision by minimising the management time that is so scarce. This can be done in a short period of time if it is carried out by an experienced TOC expert, who uses the adapted models and logical tools. The advantage of this approach is that the managers can quickly translate their intuition into a global strategic model without having to spend a lot of time on this themselves. In this way, the coveted and highly praised 'helicopter view' is created in which everyone finds a piece of their own domain. Thanks to the technique of the 'market-constraints', the grossest levers for marketing and sales become visible and a clear picture emerges, also among operational managers, of what is expected of them in order to respond to what the market demands and will demand. This model makes it possible to simulate the various valid scenarios because it is linked to the previsional balance sheet and profit and loss accounts, including investments in the strategic projects.